Josh Waitzkin: The Art of Learning & Living Life

26:20Cut that out. Like, I was their protégé. So they did. They did, but they also, you know, did not wear thick gloves and the gloves were thinning out all the time. And I was getting better fast. Then we go to war. They were my teachers. They were my friends. I'm super grateful for like, they, and then, and then what's interesting is that my first classical chess teacher, Bruce Pendelfini, saw me playing in the park and asked my father if I could work with him. And then we started training together. And one of the things that I feel really badly about is the way he was portrayed in the film, searching for Bobby Fisher, because Bruce is still a dear friend of mine.

26:56He's Ben Kingsley played him as a much more severe person than he was. He was a beautiful teacher. And he really, he wanted me to express myself as to the guys in the park, but he was also filling in the holes and teaching me a classical chess foundation. And we were studying chess from the end game. First, principles, studying positions of reduced complexity to touch high level principles and then learning to apply them to more and more complex positions. So my early chest education had both the classical study with Bruce and it had the street smart game with the hustlers at the park. And to answer your question right away, when I was six years old, like my opponents would would mess with my mind and trap me and trick me and make me think here and then they go there and then I would learn to do that.

27:38And then I remember when it was I mean, it was like that obvious, right? It's like the worst. Like, and then it gets increasingly subtle, right? But like, as my opponent said, oh, he's unhappy, take the pond then you, and then you're a pwn and see it, and then you learn, you know, those things just keep on, the circles get smaller and smaller and tighter and tighter and more and more refined. This is the opposite of Asperger's or Autism, by the way. What you're describing is a hypertrophy set of circuits for theory of mind in a very young kid. So to be able to understand what's happening around you.

28:13And I think for many people, the joys of childhood are really about not being aware of what's going on around you. The psychologist would refer to that, you know, this is like a lack of impingement. Impingement is when like a kid is playing and they're really enjoying something and then suddenly they decide they don't want to play anymore in the parent, doesn't want to be bothered. So they say, no, no, no, no, no, like keep playing. You know, they're like impinging on the kids, reflexive desire to do something or not do something. This isn't about keeping them safe. This is in the domain of safety.

28:43But at least within the channel of chess, it seems that you developed your entire understanding of the psychology of human beings, except for, of course, you had an experience at a home of family and friends, but chess certainly cut a wide trough through your development. Well, I'm really grateful for my early chess life, and I also would never choose to put that on my children. I mean, it worked out really well for me. I mean, I have my wounds, right? I mean, there's lots of things that I've had to grapple with. But I think if you put a lot of children through the pressures that I went through, it wouldn't work out well.

29:23And I watched a lot of my young, I mean, almost all my young rivals, or, I mean, like, very close to all of my young rivals. I ended up quitting and falling into crisis and, And then you have parents and coaches who are expressing their own egoic needs through the children and the children are children. And then that becomes very difficult to deal with. And then you're dealing with heartbreak and you're putting everything on the line and you're losing and you're dealing with your own self -doubts and the heartbreak of your mother and your father and your coach and your friends. I mean, there are so many, and then as the pressures get more and more intense in chess, like you really are putting your heart and soul in the line through that chess board.

30:03In casual games, let alone in national and world championships. And you're being shattered. When you lose, I was shattered many times over. I lost last rounds of national chess championships and world championships. Multiple times over. And those were the greatest moments of my life in retrospect. They taught me the most important lessons of my life. I would never take it back. It's been in that's a pattern in my chess life, my fight life, and everything I've gone through the most heartbreaking, devastating moments, ultimately, were the ones that catalyzed the most growth. And they were beautiful.

30:36And I really relate to them that way. But they also can be brutal for young minds, and they can destroy people. Yeah, what do you think it is about failure or missing the mark in some way that catalyzes change? I mean, I always say that, you know, your brain has no reason to change if you're just in trying to learn something in your inflow. You're getting, you know, most people associate being quote unquote in flow with getting everything correct, doing everything correctly. I don't think that was the original definition that cheeks am I intended, but the neuroscience of brain plasticity tells us that it's only under conditions in which there's some mismatch between what you're trying to do.

31:16Like even, you know, like this has been studying in terms of reaching for an object and there's a mirror displacement or a presumed displacement or something, you eventually can learn to error correct because the cup is actually over there as opposed to where you see it But it is the deployment of these chemicals inside of us adrenaline nor adrenaline and dopamine in particular those three their cousins the cataclysmines that tells the at a neurochemical level tells the synapses wait something needs to change I mean the brain doesn't have any reason to change unless there's frustration agitation or at least some neurochemical change associated with those things that we call frustration and agitation.

31:54So do you think these big what feel like cataclysmic fails set a sort of window of plasticity in which we can change? I often didn't think that. That it's only through like the devastation of a huge loss that the brain is now set up for a bunch of new learning. Certainly we wouldn't want to design the system that way, but as I always joke, you know, I wasn't consulted the the design phase and you either. We just have to work with what's there. Like big failure. Why do you think that sets a wave front of change? Yeah, it's a great question.

32:32Well, I think the study you sent me yesterday speaks to this. Yeah, maybe we should talk about that. Yeah, maybe I'll answer that question experientially. Maybe you could then talk about the study and we can riff on it a little bit. This is so much fun, by the way, because I've lived my life in the arena, just like pushing myself, I'm not a scientist, but I'm my own laboratory. You said to me yesterday at the game, like, you said, I'm not a scientist, but I'm looking forward to tomorrow. And I said, trust me, you're a scientist. Yeah. I do science through the lens of a certain understanding of mechanism and structure function and some processes.

33:04And you do science through the lens of experience and drawing core parallels and principles in different domains and at different levels from unskilled all the way up to virtuosity. I think the way that I think I think about the most painful losses of my life, the most devastating injuries of my life, I think about dying, drowning, I drown in the bottom of doing hypoxic breathwork in a pool. So on the bottom of the pool to four and a half minutes after that it was led to the arguably the best decision of my life to move into the jungle. I think about the losing the last round of the Under 18 World Chess Championship on the first board.

33:48That's a very interesting story I could describe a little bit. Or I think about my first national championship I lost when I was seven, eight first board last round just unobstructed learning until then. And then I lost the last round on the title, Felton opening trap. That's the lost that was the greatest thing that ever happened to me. You were how old? I think I'd just turn eight, or a man was late seven. And like that was, it was, because if I had won that game, I would, I easily could have associated winning with just no pain, no heart, just cruising up into then. That was the moment that like I got my ass kicked, I had to go back, you know, deal with these demons, come back, train for the next year, and then I won the next year, and then it was off to the races.

34:35My life might look very different if I had won that game. And actually the kid who beat me in that game. David Arnett became two years later, we became best friends. For all of our childhood, we were on the same chess team and best friends. I think he gave me the greatest gift of my competitive life by kicking my ass that game. The most devastating loss of my chess life was, so I was 17 years old. I was competing in the world under 18 in chess championship in Second Hungary. So every year there's under 12, 14, 16, 18, 21 world championship. And I was representing the US and those tournaments around the world.

35:14And I traveled to India or Brazil or Hungary or Germany or some were in compete in the world championship. And under 18 worlds, I played the tournament. I just was playing very inspired chess. I would just picked up on the road three weeks before Jack I had become, I was just on fire with Karoax Vision and I was just so like appreciating life with this freshness and intensity that I'd ever had, more than I'd ever had. I was like totally on fire, in chess, in life, in love, in everything. And I was paired against Peter Svidler who was the Russian. We were on the first board last round. We were playing for the World Championship.

35:58every country sends their national champion, so it's a long tournament to get there. Early in the game, I think it was moved 12 if he offered me a draw. So if I'd accepted the draw for, it would have gone to Tybrix. I didn't know exactly what was happening, but I thought that he was slightly favored in Tybrix. I wasn't sure, but basically the world championship would be determined, or the gold medal would be determined by how our opponents in previous rounds did in the last round. But I hadn't calculated it out before, but I had a feeling it it was like maybe it was like 40, 60 or 30, 70 against me.

36:32But it was my style. I never except the draw for. So that was in my style. I always wanted to fight. So I declined, pushed for a win. Now the beauty of his decision was also he offered me a draw in the critical position where I had to make a very specific decision, which is a trick that chess players play on one another, which is that like if you're we should talk about tension at one point. It's a really beautiful theme to explore in different sports. So one thing that happens in chess games is that you have this building tension between minds and often the tension on the chess board and the tension on the minds are mounting together.

37:04And the urge, the need to release psychological tension often leads to the decision to release chess tension in the chess pieces. And when you release chess tension, usually the person who releases the tension will be on the wrong side of tactics. So a lot of chess to the chess game is about putting mental pressure on the opponent to force them to break the tension on the chess board. So in that game, he offered me a draw. So you think about it. We're 17 years old. We're 10 days into a world championship battle. We even don't matter how much we love the battle, some piece of ourselves wants a way out.

37:38Like we want to release the tension. It's just elemental to who we are when we're living with that much pressure. So all I have to do then is like accept the draw, shake hands, and the tournament's over, and then it's out of our hands, what happens. So in that moment, I have to also make a critical chess position. So the urge to release the tension is subtly entering into my chess decision. And in that move, I declined the draw and I made a slightly overaggressive move, which turned and he ended up playing a beautiful game, big attack beating me.

38:14I close to like your dream. And you're shattered, right? I then went and hitchhiked across Eastern Europe to meet my girlfriend at the time in a little town in Slovenia and let me broke up and all that. And I ended up meeting again in a street corner in Brazil, the world under 21 championship three weeks later. Lots of drama, you know, being a 17 year old kid. I didn't study that chess loss for two and a half months. It was so painful to me. I always studied games immediately afterwards. And I always you might study a chess game for anywhere between three and 15 hours studying one chess game And that's that say 10 hours is focused on the two or three critical positions at the game And this is before chess computers were rampant into a chess engines that could always just tell you the answer to Then that's also something we just talk about later how chess engines and AI chess engines change the nature of who chess players are because you can have the answer right away versus having to sit and cognitive and emotional dissonance for sometimes weeks or months at a time without knowing the answer.

39:16We'll come back to that maybe. So I didn't study that loss for two and a half months because it was so painful to me. Then I was, my family spent a lot of time at C, which was an interesting part of my life and my chest life, living on a little boat, catching our own food, doing our own engine work. And I was at C after competing in both of those world championship and some other things. And I sat down to study that game and I spent, you know, dozen plus hours studying that one critical position of the game. And then I realized what the like the move I should have made was outside of my conceptual scheme in that critical position.

39:56I wasn't ready to make that move I had to make. And he was also I think a slightly stronger chess player than me. I was a great fighter. I loved the battle, but I think objectively he was a better, his name is Peter Sviddler. He ended up becoming a world class grandmaster in his and it's just an incredible chess player today. At the time, he was just amazingly brilliant, beautiful fluid mind, but I was confident going into the game. So I had to make this move that would essentially be his attack was on the king side, my expansion was on the queen side. I had to remove my final defensive piece from in front of my king away from my king side, which is super counterintuitive because you think you want to defend your king.

40:35What I didn't realize is that harnessing the power of empty space against aggression. His attack needed my defense like fire needs fuel to burn. Moving my last defensive piece his attack couldn't break through. But that principle was something I didn't understand at all. And so it's not like I would have found that move. But it was a real pop in my mind, right? So then, I was 17, 18 years old, and then a year later, I start studying Tai Chi. I started studying Taoist meditation, Taoist philosophy, the Tao Dijing, Chuan Zi Laozi, the Interchapters. And then I get into Tai Chi. I start moving meditation, and I start doing Tai Chi, Chuan Push Hands.

41:19Without making the connection, Push Hands is the martial art, which is the essence of push hands is learning to utilize empty space against aggression. But I hadn't connected it to that moment. And you fast forward to 2004 World Championship, which is what the art of learning ended with the final chapter of that, is the World Championship finals. I'm fighting this guy bigger than me, stronger than me, he's been training since childhood. Final fight in a big stadium, everyone wanting me to destroy the biggest fight of my life. And I won that fight by harnessing the power of empty space, by letting him feel my weakness, by leaning on him, by letting it, by letting it, and then I just end in disappearing.

41:58So it's very interesting how there was no mental process, there's no conscious processing of that connection. But the biggest loss of my chest life and then the principle, which I wasn't ready to understand yet, was how I won the World Championship in the martial arts so many years later. And it's a completely different discipline, right? So it's an example of, like, and of course that principle is manifested every part of my life today. But that's one of many stories in my life where like a loss burns an insight which might consciously or often unconsciously lead something incredible down the road.

42:31And I think that one of the biggest challenges that we have, but it's so interesting that the loss of a World Chess Championship final is leads to the win. The right lesson is the win of a World Championship in the fighting realm. and how common that is. And one of the things that I think about, like when you sit down with great competitors, again and again, when you hear their inner journey, the most heartbreaking loss has lead to the transformational change which leads to the biggest wins of their life. Whether it's in basketball, whether it's in fighting, whether it's in business, it's finance, it's in writing, love, and love, oh my God, love, yeah.

43:17Let me break up, so devastating, they're a death of sorts. Yeah. I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor, AG1. AG1 is a vitamin mineral probiotic drink that also includes prebiotics and adaptogens. AG1 is designed to cover all of your foundational nutritional needs and it tastes great. Now I've been drinking AG1 since 2012 and I started doing that at a time when my budget for supplements was really limited. In fact, I only had enough money back then to purchase one supplement and I'm so glad that I made that supplement AG1. The reason for that is even though I strive to eat most of my foods from whole foods and minimally processed foods, it's very difficult for me to get enough fruits, vegetables, vitamins and minerals, micronutrients, and adaptogens from food alone.

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45:51Personally, I use the Juve whole body panel about three to four times per week, typically in the morning, but sometimes in the afternoon, and I use the Juve handheld light both at home and when I travel. If you'd like to try Juve, you can go to Juve, spell j -o -o -v -v -e .com slash Huberman. Juve is offering an exclusive discount to all Huberman lab listeners with up to $400 off select Juve products. Again, that's Juve, j -o -o -v -v .com slash Huberman to get up to $400 off. I have a friend who's a trauma therapist, addiction expert, and occasionally you'll hear these tragedies of typically its young guys who the girlfriend breaks up with them and they commit suicide.

46:35And for years he would work with families of these people, these young guys. And he finally connected the dots. And he realized that in every case it was as if there was no future whatsoever because it was their first relationship. And when you hear it, you just go, it makes so much sense. But, you know, the 16 -year -old and 18 -year -old brain, however old these kids were, it's devastating. I want to make sure that I ask about devastation because you said that you were devastated. You experienced a tremendous amount of pain from these losses, and particularly the one that you just described.

47:12If you don't mind, I'd like to ask you about what that was like. I don't want to spin off into a discussion about the science of grief, but I did an episode about grief and it was really surprising to learn that most of what you hear about in pop culture, that you know, they're these very specific stages of grief and you progress through them. Linearly, none of that is true. All of modern research says that it's not disbelief anger acceptance. It's like a hodgepodge of different emotions depending on time of day and middle of the night. But the core feature, and I find this so interesting, is that grief, whether or not it's what I would consider a kind of trivial grief, like losing your favorite pen, or a watch that you really love, okay?

47:50An object versus somebody extremely close to you, a parent, a loved one, a child, got forbid, that the brain systems that map memory onto action are disrupted in grief, such that, you know, you wake up each day and you wanna go see the person or call them. And so it's a, what grief really represents is a remapping of your understanding about what you can do with your physical body to create action and interaction with this person that's now gone. And so that the remapping is one of the nervous system having to do all this no go, we talk in terms of the action systems and the basal ganglia of the brain.

48:29It's you have go programs and no go programs. There's some other stuff too, but it's mostly go or no go. And basically grief is this taking about, depending on how long and how deeply you knew the person, a tremendous amount of neural real estate and algorithms that were all go. You could text them, you could call them, you could hug them, you could kiss them, you could listen to them, you could smell them, and now it's all no -go. And that, we think, is what we experience as grief. Now, in terms of losing a very important chess match, when you talk about being in pain and in grief, what was Was that like?

49:08Was it, did that mean sleepless nights, disbelief? And at what point do you think you were able to say, okay, you know what, I'm going to start thinking about this constructively. I'm going to turn this into a go as opposed to just trying to, you know, getting your time machine and travel back in time, which of course is impossible. Well, what was, what was that early experience of devastation like and how did it transmute into growth? Yeah. Well, I even think, even sitting with you now, thinking about it, it seems ridiculous list for a chess game to be losing a chess game to be anywhere near like the absolute heartbreak of losing a loved one.

49:44And yet we can make things very large in our minds and in our beings, right? I think that human, I mean one thing I think about is how hard we fight to maintain our conceptual schemes, our identities, even if they're torturing us. And loss isn't relative. You know, I mean, the fact that we're sitting right now not far from hundreds, if not thousands of homes that have been wiped away, doesn't change other losses. We sometimes will say, well, at least I have a lot of friends that lost their homes, they will say, well, at least we have our health, we have our things. We can do this, but it's not how the human emotion system responds reflexively to our own losses.

50:29So I don't think it's like dismissive or sociopathic to experience a big loss in one's life as a big loss, even if it's not the worst possible loss. It's just not how we're wired. And one of the things that I reflect on and that I've cultivated, it's very hard, but that I work to cultivate is when you're in those moments of rupture to both be in the rupture and have the perspective that we will have later about the rupture, which is not to say not being in the rupture. One of the things I feel badly about in like when I wrote the art of learning, I spoke a lot about process and outcome and it had a big impact in the chess world and then what happened is there were generations of parents who were young kid chess players who their kids would go to compete and the parents would say it doesn't matter if you win or lose, It's all the matters of the process.

51:24It doesn't matter if you want to lose. And the kids are like putting on their armor to go to battle, mental battle. And the chest is fucking intense. Like when you're playing chest, you're putting your mind, your body, your psyche, everything. Like you, on the line. And if you lose, you feel shattered. Like that's just how you feel. If you're not trying your hardest, then we can't, we don't know what you should be talking about. You know, so let's say you are trying your hardest, you're putting it on the line. It's on the line. And you lose and you're shattered. Like every part of you didn't you feel destroyed.

51:57So the kids are putting on their armor to go to battle and the parent tells them it doesn't matter if I win or lose. It's deeply confusing. And the kids actually usually know that the parents are full of shit. The parents actually care so much and they feel guilty about how much they care about their kids result. They're telling their kid that to feel less guilty about the fact that they're putting their own ego needs on their child. And it's all like in the kids see it all. That's the hilarious thing. It's like in an 8, 10, 11 year old, they see it all. They're like, mom, give me a break. in the parents are just stuck in their guilt and absurdity.

52:25I've seen this so many times. So, like the discussion of process and outcome is so subtle, right? Because yes, it's about the process, it's about the journey, it's about the long -term process. But if we don't care about the results, the process won't work. So we need to put ourselves on the line enough to be shattered and the process is what really matters. But it's not that we can liberate ourselves from caring enough to be shattered because then we're not engaged. And it is something about putting our egos on the line that is what leads to the growth surges that great competitors have, the ones who become virtuoses, right?

53:04And so then that stated, how can we experience the simultaneity of being shattered and having the perspective that this is probably the greatest thing that ever happened to me? But you have to be in a mode of theory of mind with yourself about your future self somehow. And this is what I think losses are so beneficial for is that you've had a couple of breakups. You realize that you can fall in love again. If you've only had breakups, perhaps you think, well, it always leads to a breakup. But you know that the process of moving forward is the only way to test that hypothesis again. And so I think repeated failure is essential, right?

53:45Because with repeated failure means that there was also repeated fighting one ways back after failure. So, yeah, I think sometimes not to take us into a different course of story, but just very briefly, the first manuscript I ever submitted in graduate school took forever to get published. And it went from the highest of journals down to a good journal, solid journal, but it took forever. And that was so beneficial. I was crushing at the time, but my reward circuitry is built up around very long latency between effort and final outcome. I'm just used to long weights between figuring out what's going to happen.

54:32And actually one of the weirdest things about podcasting or social medias that I feel like you go to quote unquote to publication so fast Things used to projects used to take two years and then you get reviews and then you know, so I think You're early devastating failure or failures because you had a few of them in there. Oh a lot more than a few I probably set you up for a tremendous frustration tolerance and And this not just hearing, I mean the words this too shall pass. They're helpful, but that's really something that needs to be experienced in my view. It's a very interesting thing when you're talking about competitors.

55:14What is the right balance between like playing up and playing down? Right? Like how much do you want to build the confidence of a young competitor or artist or person or any of us, young or whatever age? when how much do you want to be stretched a little bit beyond your ability so that your weaknesses are exposed if you take them on and you have to grow. And getting that balance right is hugely important and it's not simple. Like in a lot of boxing training camps are based around the boxers confidence being everything and you want them to feel invincible going into the ring. And then from another perspective it's something very powerful about having a training camp that's so intense that all your weaknesses are exposed if you take them on.

55:50If you're not sparring against people who can expose your weaknesses then you don't what they are, and you don't have the chance to grow. I live at this point with a trying to be at max stretch without snapping. For example, if I look at my foiling, like if I'm not falling enough during a foil session, then I'm not pushing my turns hard enough.

56:17And if you're just succeeding all the time, then you're not pushing yourself enough. Do you believe in optimal levels of arousal for different aspects of practice or game? Autonomic arousal is something I've worked on for many years and one of the most impressive features I think of our brains as humans. First would be our ability to think into the past, present, or future or combination of those two. If other animals do that, they don't do it nearly as well and they certainly don't create technologies to bridge those different time scales. that's number one, but the other one is our visual and temporal aperture of focus.

56:59So when we are in a state of elevated arousal, our visual aperture shrinks, I'm sure you're familiar with this, and we slice time more finely. Much, you know, it's like a higher framerate, which is why people who, for instance, see a devastating traumatic car crash report seeing experiencing things in slow motion, right, because their frame rate is high, like a slow motion video. Whereas when we are relaxed, our frame rate is larger bins of time. And I feel like so much of the discussion around things like flow and optimal states for learning have to do with assuming that there's one optimal state of arousal.

57:42But I feel like in every endeavor I've ever been involved in, and it's about learning the transitions between the arousal states that allows us to pull back a little bit as things, as you said, get tense. It just relax just a little bit to be able to maybe see a different perspective or ratchet up our level of tension or AKA arousal in order to be able to find slice the micro expressions of a competitor. I mean, these two cameras on the fronts of our skull and the rest of our brain are really devoted to this process of shrinking or expanding the aperture of our consciousness. And it can be talked about in terms of space, just a vision, like tunnel vision versus panoramic vision.

58:29Yep. It can be talked about at space time, tunnel vision, fine slice, panoramic vision, broader slice. But then when you start getting into like the then you map that onto the past present and future mapping and that's where I feel like we're into the game of skill learning and chess and strategy So forgive me for the kind of you know top contort neuroscience district, but that's how I See the human primate is so different than all the other creatures in the world That's how we're different because we can learn chess or ballet, foil, you know, Gibbons are pretty amazing at what Gibbons do, but if they're trying to learn other stuff that they've been failing so far.

59:14I spent a lot of time playing with frame rates and I had this experience that I wrote about that slowing down time chapter of the art of learning where I, when I had these experiences This is both in chess and in fighting. I was one time I was fighting against a super heavyweight dude in a competition in my handshattered. And I broke my hand right here. And it was interesting because the fight was very intense, reasonably hard, and my hand broke and instantly time slowed down. And he was moving in slow motion. And I was able to just so easily play with someone with a broken hand compared to what had been a war before.

59:53We know what that is. Right. We do adrenaline adrenaline yeah adrenaline and that and that tunnel vision and then the frames are fat Or so if I inject you with just that little bit of adrenaline it stays in your periphery but it activates systems in your brain and parallel to that and You're gonna experience an immediate dilation of your pupils Your you'll have more tunnel vision. I mean every process is Sped up in the direction of higher frame rate So then the question then what came from me and this would be fun to talk I've never spoken to a scientist about this process. Like how do I learn to do that at will?

1:00:27Right? And then how can I train? Because I can't just pump myself with adrenaline all the time. Although maybe I, or maybe I can learn to have that physical experience. You can deploy it. Right. So then how, how can I deploy it? How would our triggers for having that chemical change? And then also how can I train so that I have the experience of more frames than my opponent? And so Marcel Lugar, he's known as the King of the Scramble. He spends his whole time in transition. So if you're training Jiu Jitsu with most people, they're always finding a position holding it. Marcelo, one of the unique things about his training life for most of his life was that he never held positions.

1:01:02He was always moving. He was always in the in -between. And it's true in most arts is that people think that the art is the position that they see, but the real high level art is the space in between the positions. So if we have this position, leads to this position, that's gonna be like there's gonna be no frames in between for most people. for some people that might be four frames, but if I have a hundred frames, then I can play in pockets that you don't see. And so if you're living your life in the training process in the in between, in the transition. If you're always, the way that manifests in the actual, like, for example, jujitsu training or submission grappling training is if you're not holding positions, you're always moving, and you're spending all of your time in the in between while people who are holding position are always static.

1:01:42So if you go to a university, just go and you sit and watch. It's interesting to look for this one thing. Notice the amount of time static versus in motion. Marcelo is always in motion. There's a beautiful clip of him that you got, people can look up, it's an art de Suave, it was an old documentary back in the day, like 25 years ago I think it was. It's on YouTube. It's like an eight minute clip of him training as an, I think an 18 year old. And you watch him just like in the early days of him learning this transitional approach and he's just never stopping. He's always allowing the person, but you have to get past the ego dynamics.

1:02:14because you can't, you're giving up on dominating people all the time. Because when you're in a dominant position and you just say you want hold it because you've won. And there's all this bullshit passing between men who are fighting or women who are fighting each other. We want to dominate. But if you release that and you're thinking about the learning process, then you stop holding, then you're moving, and then you're getting non -stop exposure to the in -between. So if you spend your life training in the in -between, then you have more frames than other people do. That's what a lot of what illusionists are doing.

1:02:41They spend all of their time training in the spaces that other people don't look at. And so it's not magic. It's brilliant training. It's the art of illusion at the end between. And a lot of the things that you can do, more high -level martial artists can do to a lower -level martial artist or someone who doesn't train that feels mystical, it's all about that principle manifest in interesting ways. But in general, like for me, and this goes back to the question you asked, two or three brilliant expansive questions ago around intense moments. A lot of what my training has been is having some serendipitous intense moment and then learning and that becomes a beacon.

1:03:25So for example, there was a moment I was playing in a world chess championship in Calicut, India. And I was deep into a calculation, couldn't find the solution and there was an earthquake. wake and everything started like in the actual world, everything started shaking, right? But I experienced the earthquake from the inside of the chest position. And I knew there was an earthquake, but I also was lost. My brain was lost in the labyrinth. And, and I found the solution. And then I got up and left vacated because we had to leave the playing hall and we came back and I made my move and went on to win.

1:04:01And it was so interesting because it was like, and then I the earthquake Quick, and a lot of what happens in chess is that you're reaching so deep into the complexity, into the cupboard, but the solution is right here at the front. All you have to do is come back out and surface. One of the best ways, by the way, to minimize chess blunders with talented young players or players of any age is to shift the order of decide, make the move, and then write it down because you know, take your chess games to decide, write it down, and then make the move. The right at down is a resurfacing and you have common sense look at the position.

1:04:39Almost all chest blunders, you realize you've blundered instantly. You can think for 20 minutes, make your move, you know instantly you blundered. Because there's not that surfacing, right? But then you can learn to just do the surfacing before making the actual move. It's true with human decision making in general. Right. We realize that the scrub right as we yeah, complete it. Yeah. Because like we're caught up at all of our bullshit, we make the move and then And we've left our thought process and like, oh, that was just absurd, right? And we see it. I mean, you think about the heartbreaking literature, you know, studies in how people who've jumped off a bridge relate to it the moment after they've jumped off the bridge, those who have survived, right?

1:05:17The interviews afterwards. Yeah, they report wishing they hadn't jumped. Right. Immediately. Like, they jump and then they wish they hadn't jumped. Such an important message. You know, we hear all this stuff about suicide prevention, you know, but just that knowledge. I mean, I don't know how conscious of that sort of thing people are as they're headed down the trench. I mean, what a suicidal depression, but these apertures that we're talking about, these time -space apertures where frame rate is set and visual apertures set, I think for most people, we experience them as sort of notches. So it's like, you're in a high -state of a rouse on high frame rate.

1:05:54you know, and then, and just like being like a ball bearing down in a trench, you can't really see out the other side. You're literally in there at a certain frame rate of, let's say an argument, an intense argument with somebody where you want to win and you're frustrated with them and the whole situation and you're in the trench. The, whereas when you're relaxed, it's more, you know, a broad concave or a flat table where the ball bearing can move around at will. If it sounds like Marcelo and people that train these different transition states as you're really learning to access the different frame rates, but from a place of like kind of like a little dimple in a table and then being able to move to the next one as a dimple and kind of moving from dimple to dimple as opposed to like these trenches of brain states.

1:06:40And I think that I think about this a lot a lot because I feel like most bad decisions are made from a high frame rate, high arousal state. Most of the terrible things that humans have done to one another, I suppose they're sociopathy and pre -planned things, but they tend to be associated with high arousal states where people regret what they did all second degree murder, for instance. In any event, I think the ability to move through these different arousal states at will is possible. You asked earlier like how would one do that? Well the beautiful thing about the visual system in these different frame rates and States of arousal is that it works in both directions.

1:07:22So when you're in a higher state of arousal, your visual aperture shrinks, you go to a higher frame rate, but it's also true that if you shrink your visual aperture, you go to a higher frame rate. The converse is also true if you deliberately, for instance, as we're looking across one another right now, if I start to take in the fullness of the picture here, the walls, etc. there's a natural relaxation of the autonomic arousal system, so the parasympathetic activity goes up. And what's incredible is that anytime we view a horizon, that naturally happens because you're not setting to a single fixation point.

1:07:57So anytime you see a horizon, you relax, and it's not a coincidence. So the visual system can drive it inward and your autonomic arousal can drive it toward your visual system. The other thing is there's a really beautiful paper that came out about two years ago, which show that people who do a biofeedback game, where they're watching a little, you know, it's like a more kind of like a sine wave, and they're deliberately trying to increase the level of arousal as the curve goes up for those that are just listening. Within a few days, they can learn to control their pupil size, which sets their arousal and their aperture for a segmenting time.

1:08:38So you can learn this through biofeedback. And I think that the script for that is available online. I haven't tried it yet, but if you ever heard of these yogis that could control their pupil sizes, even independently of one another, that's amazing because it's not supposed to be able to occur, but you can. So you can learn to, you know, I guess the poor man's version of this would be looking the mirror, stare at yourself and try and ramp up your level of autonomic ralsal, watch your pupils get bigger, and then try and relax yourself and make them smaller. that practice that seems in biofeedback allows people to do it without staring into the mirror, so to speak.

1:09:10So it can be done. It's just that it hasn't been parsed by science that finally until recently. It's interesting. I have this term I use called fire walking, which for me what it means is cultivating the ability to learn from experiences is one doesn't have with the same somatic intensity that one learns from really intense experiences that we have. For example, let's just say you're a Jujutsu fighter and you over -examine your arm and you're in a world championship and you get your arm broken or your shoulder ripped off for something. So you've lost the world championship and you got a shattered arm.

1:09:45You're not going to over -examine your arm that way again. You've learned that lesson is burned in. But if you're watching a Jujutsu fight and someone over -examine's arm gets arm -barred and then tap satin. It's very, very different experience. How can we cultivate the ability to study other people's, like worst, most heartbreaking blunders, worst moments, etc. And learn from that with the same somatic intensity that they learned from it, right? So much of that is physiological. So I've spent a lot of time doing biofeedback and a lot of time doing visualization practices and doing very intense visualization practices and many, many years working with triggers for my own psychology and physiology.

1:10:23in so that I can get my physiology primed to have an intense learning experience while studying something that might otherwise just feel intellectual. And then combining that with my own experience of things. And it's such a, I mean, if we can, we can 100x or 1000x or 10 ,000x are learning curve by being able to learn from other things with the same intensity that we can learn from our own things, but people don't harness that. But why do you think they don't? Is it takes time and it doesn't seem as intuitive as going out and shooting free throws or something like that? I think people are really amazingly unreflective about the training process.

1:11:02But I told you, I'm working. I haven't written a book since The Art of Learning and I'm a couple years into this beautiful process of writing my next book, which is going to be called The Art of Training, which which is really what I've been cultivating for the last decades. And I'm deconstructing my approach to training in mental and physical disciplines. And it's really interesting to go through that process myself. Like, what do I do? What have I done? And what have I helped others do? And it's interesting that the art of learning kind of was a birthing process. That's what it felt like to me.

1:11:39I took notes to it for five years, and then after 2004 Worlds, I wrote it in nine months. It just kind of came out of me and I'm kind of in that process now with this which feels really organic and intrinsic the creative process and I I don't know it's very interesting when you talk to people who were really playing at elite levels of different fields Or were just below like full self -expression or like they're just in the edge of her trosity But not quite there and you start to deconstruct what they do. There's so much low hanging fruit that they can do Why I don't know I think in many ways people I mean there's lots of reasons I think of one thing people who are very talented in arts don't have to be so deliberate about their training often to reach a certain level.

1:12:20Often people have other people building their training process and they're not reflective about their own training process because they have big teams of coaches who are creating it for them. People haven't cultivated the art of deconstruction which is an art that's very important. People haven't cultivated the art of loving training which is a hugely important, like meta skill to learn. People haven't taken on like all of the skills around physiological triggers, around changing one's physiological state at will. People haven't practiced visualization very intensely. They're all of these, like these skills that we can put together in order to train at a world class level.

1:13:01But it takes patience and creativity and not just being subject to whatever else does, but being able to look expansively at everything. I'd like to take a quick break and thank one of our sponsors, Function. I recently became a function member after searching for the most comprehensive approach to lab testing. While I've long been a fan of blood testing, I really wanted to find a more in -depth program for analyzing blood urine and saliva to get a full picture of my heart health, my hormone status, my immune system regulation, my metabolic function, my vitamin and mineral status and other critical areas of my overall health and vitality.

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1:14:22Comprehensive lab testing like this is so important for health, and while I've been doing it for years, I've always found it to be overly complicated and expensive. I've been so impressed by function, both at the level of ease of use that is getting the test done, as well as how comprehensive and how actionable the tests are, that I recently joined their advisory board, and I'm thrilled that they're sponsoring the podcast. If you'd like to try function, go to functionhealth .com slash huberman. Function currently has a wait list of over 250 ,000 people, but they're offering early access to Huberman Lab listeners.

1:14:54Again, that's functionhealth .com slash Huberman to get early access to function. We had a guest on this podcast, Jim Hollis, he's 84 -year -old, probably 85 -year -old, Jungian analyst on, and he just brilliant guys written some really important books, under Saturn's shadow, and etc. And he said, you know, so he has a real kind of like suit -up show up, you know, get to work kind of mentality, but he also is very reflective person. And he said, you know, if there's one simple key to life, it's that one. Understand that most of our daily lives are waking lives are in stimulus response, but that it's so critical to take 10 to 15 minutes each day to just get out of stimulus and response.

1:15:43And either to just let stuff guys are up out of our unconscious, subconscious mind, or to to just put some real thought to something that most everybody is in stimulus response. I wonder these days with social media and so many things filling the space between walking to the car or with the pro players that you work with, I'm guessing the moment they're on the plane, they're on their phones and texting and all these things are wonderful technologies but they fill all the space with stimulus response. Yeah. They fill all the space with stimulus response. And you know, it's not unless you go to a place with no Wi -Fi accessibility that you suddenly realize like, wow, like in most of modern life, we're just constantly in this tennis or ping pong match with this trivial thing and that trivial thing and some of it's essential, but that there's no, quote -unquote, space anymore.

1:16:40Many ways my life is built around creating that space. And it's interesting when I was playing chess I experimented with studying chess from everywhere between 45 minutes a day to 16 hours a day to see where the sweet spot was and what I came to was about 4 and a half hours a day. But that 4 and a half hours a day was like a 10 out of 10 like fucking just on fire. And then the rest of the day became about cultivating those 4 and a half hours. And my life today has that kind of rhythm as well. And you know, training, like I've spent many years working with people who are just brilliant in the investment space has been a really interesting wave because it's a great laboratory because people are very driven.

1:17:18They want to, they're all in, they're motivated. They'll take themselves on and it's great place for me to, over the last couple decades to, to like refine the art of training. because I don't like solving for motivation. That's one thing. And I think part of that relates to that quirky dynamic from when I was seven that I described as of always being the target and so never having like not taking on my weaknesses it was outside of my conceptual scheme. And so in many ways, I don't, I haven't really had to struggle with motivation myself for better or worse. And I love working with people, partnering with people with who are all in, who want to take themselves on.

1:17:57I don't love having to motivate people. And so a great laboratory for me is with people who have all sorts of problems, who might have been obstructed, but who are all in. And like you're working with world class investors and what you know, they're grinding themselves out 14, 15, 16 hours a day. Doing less is a huge part of doing much more. And then you start to see like they might be like if you think about a 10 out of 10 as being like in terms of like when they're at their very best Creatively they could slip from like a 10 to a 2 and not even notice And then you begin to cultivate an awareness of where one is in one's creative spectrum Right, and then you start to cultivate the art of stress and recovery and like Amping one stuff up and then releasing and you see that the ability to turn it on is is directly connected to the ability to turn it off, as you know.

1:18:48If you walk into a fight gym and you study a bunch of fighters in the match, one great read you can make is looking at the depth of physiological relaxation when the guys aren't fighting and you'll see who the highest level fighters are. The best guys, man, they can turn it on with wild intensity, but their bodies are so mellow when they're not going. And then, man, they're so efficient. And so that oscillation, that range is so huge, right? cultivate the art of turning it off in order to learn how to turn it on. You know, I've for many, many years, decades, I've been practicing what I call now the MIQ process, most important question process.

1:19:23And the essence of it is, it's what I came to as the most potent way so far that I've found to train analysts or thinkers in mental arenas. You're training people in the art of discovering what matters most. If you look at, if you talk to like a great chess player, actually looks at less than a lower level chess player, but they look at the right direction. So you might think a great chess player, people often think like, oh yeah, I can calculate 50 moves deep, 100 moves deep. It's all irrelevant, move two was inaccurate, so it was just all an illusion. The great chess player might look at much less, but they're looking in the most potent directions.

1:20:01The lower level chess players are lost in a sea of complexity. So if you're working with like a scientist or an investor or whatever, then straining their mind for what is the most important question. Ideally to begin the practice toward the end of their work day with like a release, a recovery period with full intensity and a peak performance state, stretch one's mind for what matters most and then release it, release the work day completely, don't work all night grinding your self out at a low level release and then first thing in the morning waking up pre - and put return on one's mind to the critical question and brainstorm on it.

1:20:38It's very powerful because you're opening up the the you're systematically opening the channel between the conscious and the unconscious mind. You're feeding critical questions to the unconscious which is processing overnight and like I know you know all this like the consistency with which you come up with an insight in the morning is incredible. Interestingly and you'll probably know why I'm much more than me. Improved dreamer call often happens simultaneously when one starts to have more and more insights about the MIQ in the morning, which is fascinating. Then over time, you can have micro manifestation of this throughout the day before going for a workout, before taking a walk, before taking a break, before taking a piss.

1:21:13Instead of going to go to the bathroom the day instead of checking your phone while taking a piss, you pose yourself in a MIQ, you do not do anything but piss in the bathroom. and breathe and then return to the question and you'll have an insight. So you're learning to just oscillate between the conscious and unconscious states and you're opening up that channel and you're practicing stress and recovery. And then your physiological workouts are also stress and recovery all the time. So you're building that theme and everything that you do. And you realize that like when you're at your very best for four or five hours a day, you're doing multiples of the work that you're doing if you're just grinding yourself at, what I've called in the past, the simmering six or whatever, at, you know, for 15 or 16 hours a day.

1:21:56And so people can do so much more in less time. And my lifestyle is based on that. You know, I'm training very intensely physically and I'm doing really intense mental work and I oscillate between them in beautiful ways. And I have a lot of empty space for reflection, for meditation, for like zoning my mind on what matters most. It's about quality, not quantity. But it's so interesting how we live in this culture or just quantity is just consuming everyone. Yeah, well, it says, Hollis said, you know, with a stimulus response, thing dominates, and it dominates, I think, because, well, I have several reflections.

1:22:34First of all, I just have to say, you're absolutely a scientist. You just proved it to us. All right. Through the description of this process, which I might ask you to describe once again, because I think there's so much value in each of the pieces and how it's put together. Three things come to mind. First of all, yes indeed, as you know, in listeners of this podcast, we'll know that yet it is during sleep that we reorganize our neural connections and actual neuroplasticity occurs. The stimulus is provided in wakefulness and focus and attention, and the actual rewiring occurs during sleep, deep sleep, and rapid eye movement sleep.

1:23:12One little fun, I think, but also powerful tool that I learned from, maybe you know who this is well, I'm blessed to have Rick Rubin as a very good friend. Oh yeah, Rick and I have had beautiful jams. Yeah, wonderful. Such a wise soul. It's running more and more time with Rick. And he taught me something extremely valuable, which was the process of taking some time to just lie completely still and let your mind go as wild as it needs to or as calm as it needs to while keeping the body completely still. This mimics rapid eye movement sleep when we're paralyzed and the mind is very, very active.

1:23:50And I actually think that practices such as yoga, knee draw, and non -sleep deep rest are also mimics of rapid eye movement sleep. And there are data starting to emerge now that it mimics rapid eye movement sleep, but in wakefulness, so puts simply lying still, relaxing the body as much as possible and letting the mind be extremely active. Rick also taught me a little trick for which I don't know any science but it certainly seems to work for me which is that if you wake up from a dream and you want to continue having that dream, keep your body completely still. Whereas if you wake up from a dream and it was a troubling or anxiety provoking dream, move your body and it seems to work extremely well and I have my theories about why this works.

1:24:27I have to ask about this process of reflecting on one's own mistakes deliberately, kind of addressing one's own pain points or shame points as such a key feature of your upbringing and your practice around learning. Forgive me for going a little bit longer here, but recently somebody taught me something extremely useful. She said, you know, our consciousness is sort of like a like a lighthouse and we have this beam of light sweeping around 360 degrees. But where we have places of shame about whatever, things that were done to us, things that we've done, whatever, just points of shame, things that we don't want people to know about us, that we don't even like to think about.

1:25:14It's like a stain on that lighthouse. And when that light passes through that stain, it casts a wedge, a shadow in the shape of a wedge. And she described it in somewhat mystical terms. She said, you know, it's through that shadow that evil things enter us and that the world can hurt us and that the process of getting over our shame, but also experiencing life in much more fullness and being able to cultivate our craft and be more present for ourselves and for others is a process of going right up to that lighthouse window and looking at the stain and going That's what it is and that's the process of wiping it off Now that's all You know that that's just an illustration for us to understand What I think is the process you're describing which is that you get right up next to your worst nightmar as you're worst mistakes the things you don't want to think about and in doing so you learn to relax in their presence and they sort of disappear as points of shame.

1:26:19Yeah, it's interesting. When I wrote the art of learning, it was in many ways cathartic for me. Because there were parts of my life that I had felt like I had let myself down. Like there were parts that... Like my chest life, I moved away from, and there were certain moments of it where I felt like I hadn't fully expressed my potential. And I just wrote them all. I just shared it all. And it was so beautiful. It was so cathartic. When I think about leadership, I think that it's so important. Like leading with vulnerability is such an exquisite. I spent on Joe Mizzoula and I spent today, a couple days ago with Sean McVeigh, who's the head coach of LA Rams, who just a few days after the big loss against the Eagles.

1:27:09And we actually ended up watching the tape. It was his first watching of the tape of this heartbreaking playoff loss he had. And watching him process it. And he's such a great leader. Both Joe and Sean, like, lead. They both take themselves on more intensive than anything, but they lead with vulnerability. Like they go up against their stains. and like being authentic there as opposed to being a leader or a father or a mother or a coach who just keeps it in the pocket as if they're perfect. There's something so inauthentic about that. I think in human relationship and in the cultivation of oneself as an artist going right at one's weakness is so powerful.

1:27:55Now of course there's also the tender balance of how much we should cultivate our strengths and how much we should be spent shoring up our weaknesses. And one of the most important principles which I learned too late in my chest life is that we can take on our weaknesses through the lens of our strengths. Remember this brilliant sage Russian coach, Yuri Razavayev said to me at one point, you can learn carpav through Kasparov. His point is being you can learn about the great defensive chest through the great defense of great aggressors like you. As opposed who was just studying carpuff and thinking, what should I, what would carpuff do here, what should it was urge to do by other people?

1:28:33Like learn defense through offense, right? So it was part of my self -expression. I learned that principle too late for my chest life, but it's manifest everywhere else, right? So while we're cultivating our strength, which I think we should do as a way of life, how do we go up against our stains? But in ways that we're not fundamentally,

1:28:54it's not shame. I don't relate to, personally, Like, I don't, that's a word I don't like a shame. It's not shame. It's like, like when it becomes just like a breath pattern, like we lose, we put ourselves in the line, we lose, we go at it, we study it, we, you know, we study how, we study about what, the other thing that's incredible to me is that when you study your losses, when you go up against what you're calling, like that, that, that's a beautiful image, like the, like the shadow of the lighthouse, right? The interconnectedness of the technical, the psychological, and the thematic is so powerful in the learning process.

1:29:34Almost every technical mistake that we make in an art, if we're pushing ourselves to our limits, if you and I are around the same level and we're competing in something where we're about this in anything, like any technical mistake I made will have a psychological because I most likely, my technical weakness was emerged because I was so psychologically pressured that I wasn't able to solve the technical position. Or if I make a psychological error, it's often because I was a little technically out of my water. And so it put extra pressure on my psyche, then you were able to exploit. And every technical mistake is local.

1:30:15right? But there's themes. There's like a theme that houses hundreds of those technical manifestations. So if we are always thinking about the technical, the thematic, the psychological, and we have what I call a sixth -dimensional introspective process, right? And we're looking at all of these, the interconnectedness of those different parts of the human experience of an art or anything else. Then the growth curve is incredibly explosive because we recognize, we make a technical mistake, and we learn the theme. We take on the theme that housed that one, but also houses dozens of others. And so was we turn that theme into a strength, into a power zone, then that technical mistake goes away, but as do the other manifestations of that theme.

1:30:56And if we're also studying the psychological weakness that allowed that technical weakness to manifest to like unearth itself, then that psychological dimension becomes something we take on. And then we're studying the magic interconnectedness is a way of life, because then that lesson we learned through that chest, that like I made a subtle chest mistake, but that connects to my love life, it connects to my fatherhood, it connects to my like my foiling, my jujitsu, my everything, because it connects to the theme and it connects to my psychology and it manifests, I don't believe in compartmentalization, I believe in thematic interconnectedness, right?

1:31:29And like the core themes of my life, I would say if I had to boil it down would be love, interconnectedness and receptivity. I only do what I love and I spend time with people who I love, That's how I live. The study of interconnectedness is my way of life, in similar ways I've been describing. And receptivity is what I cultivate every day in my life, in the ocean, with people, with humans. And we always get isolated. We get, like, siloed. Oh, yeah, is this chess mistake? Like one of the things I've found so confusing is why don't more great chess players who who try successfully translate their level from chess to other things.

1:32:16Because chess is so hard, and chess is such a relentlessly truth -telling art. If you become a world -class chess player, you're fucking good. Because there's no luck in chess. Especially if you become very good, very young. I mean, I think this is true of most prodigies. I don't want to name them, but I have a colleague, a very smart guy. His science is very solid, and I remember I met with him, and I said, is it true that you're - He's going to love that. That's okay. He's done nice work. I just wouldn't say that it's like transformed our understanding of like everything in that field He's made some very important contributions is a fabulous teacher and a nice person but he's Said I one day I was meeting with him and I said I You're a child prodigy.

1:32:55I heard and he said former child prodigy And I was like okay, well they were getting technical, but yeah, okay, I think we're and I asked my dad because he my dad lived in the same building as Daniel Barronbaum, the musician who has if you've ever seen the movie, Hillary and Jackie, it was a accomplished piano player said a very young age. And my dad used to hear him playing when he was a kid and they wouldn't let him play with other kids and he was like, I mean, Barronbaum is a seret for classical musicians and pianists in particular, it's like this is serious stuff. And I, so I asked my dad, I was like, what's the deal with this child prodigy thing?

1:33:33and he said, yeah, very few of them go on to do much in their adult careers in any field. Right. And I was like, wow. And I thought, okay, so what's missing there is clearly not a lack of ability, focus. I mean, you could just say raw talent. You said to kids to last a focus. So what's missing is this transfer of understanding. It seems or what you're talking about the interconnectedness of things. And so, yeah, I probably will get myself in trouble with this colleague, but hey, listen, maybe he'll take on something new and do something additionally spectacular. He's got a lot of things on his plate.

1:34:17But you know, that struck me. I was like, oh, you know, it's not clear that being a quote unquote child prodigy is such a good thing for the long arc of one's life. But you have seen to bring in these other elements, love. I'd like to just talk more about that. And I would also add, at least from an outsider's perspective, of you seem to have broken the mold with what's expected of you based on your prior accomplishments. In fact, I have no identity in being a prodigy. It's to be clear. So I don't relate to that word at all. I mean, that word has been put on me from the outside, but I have, I just don't associate with it.

1:34:58I don't relate to it at all. Because I was, you know, maybe somewhat talented in chess compared to most people, but then very early in my, like, by the time I was like six and something, I was only competing against people who were better than me and kids who were as talented as me and then on the world stage kids who are more talented than me and I couldn't rely on my talent at all because ever I mean I had to work my ass off and I won and I lost and I got my ass kicked and so for me it was all about the battle and taking my cell phone and like I think what happens it's funny how many years ago I was giving us a simle and simultaneous test exhibition and I showed up at this place and all these kids were there and they're all excited to play against me and then And the organizer of it said, my son hasn't lost a chess game in two years.

1:35:52And that's all you need to know. Because it's just like, that means you're just, and of course he was the one who didn't want to play against me, right? Because even if you lost a chess game in two years, you're not taking your shit on. You're finding people who you can beat and you're only playing against them. So there's a couple levels to this. Let's dig into it. So, I think that people who have identity in being a prodigy develop a brittleness often, because they associate their level of mastery with talent, with something in eight, with being smarter, more brilliant, more gifted, whatever.

1:36:22And then that is, you think about Carol Dweck's work in Entity and Corrential Theory of Intelligence, right? That's an entity theory of intelligence. I think there's that, and there's something fundamentally brittle about that. And then what, then one doesn't take risk, one doesn't expose oneself, one associates, one's great moments with something ingrained or an eight versus the hard work that it took to get there. And there's all sorts of paralyzing dynamics there. Oh, there's also a tendency to lie. Carol's for sure early papers referred to this in the discussion sections. You have to read deep into those papers.

1:36:52But she describes how the students who did not have growth mindset that really identified and held so much of their ego with their performance were at a significantly greater tendency to lie about their performance when they didn't do well. To themselves and to others. That's right. But the lying to oneself is the really interesting part, right? So there's that dimension, right? Which you and I have both seen just countless manifestations of. And believe me, when you're competing against them and you see has that kind of psychological construction they're done. You can just break them, right? You can, there's so many chinks in the armor.

1:37:33You can, it's like, so, and so, there's a brittleness there. Like, you can just find where their mind stops when false constructs, where the energy stops, where their bodies crimped, right? Like, you can just find their connection to the ground and explode through it. And mental and physical disciplines, if someone has that kind of identity in being the more brilliant one, the more gifted one, whatever, their prey, from a competitive perspective, which, you know, is ultimately good for them if they expose themselves to it, But the dynamic that I was reflecting on in chess players is a little next door to this, which is that I think that if you're learning how to play chess, and let's just say I was teaching you, do you play chess?

1:38:20Trivially. I was teaching you to play chess, right? I could teach you to play chess with a language that is chess specific. I could teach you chess principles. I could teach you very effectively with chess principles, but I could also teach you just as effectively, or maybe somewhat more effectively, but it's just as effectively, with chess principles that are also life principles. Right? And it's interesting when you watch most chess teachers, they teach in a localized manner. So people can spend 20 years inside of chess but never break beyond the 64 squares. Or they can from the age of six or seven on be learning that principle as it connects a chess but also seeing how it connects to life.

1:38:56Could you give me an example of one such principle because I love in biology teaching not names, not using nouns, but instead teaching verbs, because ultimately if you want to understand, for instance, how the nervous system works or the immune system, you teach the verb actions of molecules. And the names of the molecules are important if you decide to go into that field professionally, but otherwise the principles and verbs are what's most important. So what's an example of a principle of chess or a mode of action on the board that you think transfers? Everything transfers, first of all. Like, I mean, if we're open to it, then everything in chess connects.

1:39:33So when people ask me to use the play chess, I say metaphorically. I mean, I play chess all the time. I just have not moved a piece in many, many, many years. Right? So, but okay, to be specific. So, I could give you many examples, but... All right. So, so in chess, there's a bishop and there's a knight. Right? They're both worth about three ponds. Now, I could teach you, okay, so the knight moves like an L and can jump over pieces. is the bishop moves diagonally and is stuck on one color for its whole life. They're both worth about three pawns, but knights are, and I can just say to you, but knights are a little bit better in closed positions because they can jump over things.

1:40:09Bishops are a little better if the pawns, if your pawns are on the opposite color from them, right? But you should also know that rooks and bishops are, bishops and knights are about the same. Rooks and bishops are much stronger than rooks and knights. and you should also know that queens and knights are a bit stronger than queens and bishops. So the bishops' value is a little bit stronger compared with the rook and the knight's value a little bit stronger with the queen and pawn structure influences them. So I could teach you a very simple set of principles through which you can understand how to evaluate bishops and knights.

1:40:44And there's many other layers to that, but that's some of it. I can also teach you the same thing and be teaching you the nature of relativity. I could be teaching you the nature of like of interdependence, right? I could teach you the nature of like I could teach you the pond structure play that dick the way you can play with pond structure that influences bishops and knights in ways that are chess specific or in ways that just allow you to understand dynamic quality and static quality. You know what leaps to mind when you made that description and I was didn't follow So all of it to memorization was family feud.

1:41:25I just imagine two families in a feud, right? You get two brothers together that they can do certain things. We get a brother and sister together, I have a sister. She can do certain things that are powerful and diabolical in ways that two brothers can't. Yeah, you get two big strong brothers, but maybe one that can't creep through small places. And so you can map to different, that's more of a minute, just kind of an analogy for it all. But I started to immediately think about, oh, it's like a family feud. If I were to view the pieces as as sibling dynamics and parent sibling cousin dynamics.

1:41:55It's like matchups with humans or in basketball like this team is better than this team and this team but against there's some matchups that are much are hugely favorable. A lot of like the inside game of basketball is around is around which teams thrive against which other teams even though they might be inferior because of the nature of the construction of the team. And you have networks of those teams and how do you deal with lineups, how do you deal with rotation patterns, like the inner game of basketball is all based on the same stuff that dictates the bishop in the night and the rook and the queen and how they influence it, right?

1:42:26It's interdependence. Beautiful. It's relativity. It's dynamic quality. And you can think about Robert Persick's work in Zanahar of Mostuckle Maintenance and Lila around dynamic quality versus static quality. And you can be teaching a student while you're teaching about rook and bishop and rook and knight or knights and bishops. You can be teaching them about dynamic quality, right? And then you can like expand into the study of the metaphysics of quality. And then a 7 -year -old student who's learning chess or 12 -year -old was learning chess or who's learning about life and philosophy and everything.

1:42:54And you can do it in the same amount of time. But you're just you're trapping a mind inside of 64 squares or you're teaching a mind about life through the 64 squares. And I think so many of the reasons that people who become excellent in one thing can't translate it into other places, it's not will later on in life. They have the will. It's because they didn't learn with universal principles. They didn't study their art with a presence to the importance of interconnectedness. Which is a lot of what my life's work is in. I'd like to take a quick break and thank our sponsor, 8 Sleep. 8 Sleep makes smart mattress covers with cooling heating and sleep tracking capacity.

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1:45:14You know, what's missing from a kind of basic understanding of a transformation of points into another transformation of points are these verb actions, like it's the algorithms, If you will, that's not present in how we map one context onto another context. It requires a lot of thinking to do what you describe. I don't think it's reflexive for most people to say, watch a game of basketball and think about the emotional dynamics and the consistencies of the emotional dynamics. Like last night I had the great gift of Josh brought me to a Celtic game. So, he brought me to a Celtic game and they were playing the Clipper so I was cheering during against the hometown crowd here in Los Angeles.

1:45:53But it was friendly. And you were describing the players in their recent history and the last season, and you said something about the difference between pre -conscious effort and post -conscious effort. Maybe we could talk about that as a gateway into ego, which is like a term that the moment you throw out the word ego, it's like saying sex. It's like people make all sorts of assumptions about what it is and what it isn't. But let's talk about pre -conscious and post -conscious. Because we'll get back to the Celtics and the game that was played last night, by the way, the Celtics won in overtime by a good -sized margin.

1:46:30So there's something very beautiful that I think all of us are drawn to as observers, but hopefully everyone gets to experience this at some point in their life as well. first hand, when somebody in art music sport or whatever is just being themselves and this seeming virtuosity comes out. If I think about kind of what Rick Rubin does, a lot of what Rick has done historically is to find artists and work with artists and just bring out what they're already doing like the core elements. Like when Beastie Boy started, it was like a joke, he said, and then we're kind of making fun, had wrestling elements and hardcore and punk and all this stuff and hip hop.

1:47:14But he tends to work with artists early on when they're in that really pure state of not thinking about the returns on their investment and all that. He said many times before to me and publicly that after people achieve a certain level of fame, it's much harder to get back to that, just pure picture of oneself, pre -conscious expression. Just Josh being Josh as an eight -year -old, You just happen to be in Washington Square Park learning chess or you know pick any number of different examples So very different than when people now reflect on their trophies on the wall or their platinum records or the fact that they won and lost or that There's another champion in the house that you know that um and the real Virtue osos seem to be people that Um can get back to that over and over again The Yoyomas, the, you know, and people live longer now.

1:48:07So it used to be the Mozart's, the Bach's, you know, they could make their contribution and then they died. Yeah, now we live longer lives. So people have many more chances, but there's also that longer window for lack of productivity. This is a really important theme. And it's a gateway into so much that we can explore a lot through this tunnel. When I use this term pre -conscious and post -conscious artist or competitor, it's my own language. So I'll describe what I mean by it. Well, you think about myself in the chess world, right? Like one discovers an art, one feels a passion for it, one it's beautiful, it's joyous, it's self -expressive, I love the battle, I'm winning, I'm losing, I'm having fun, I'm just letting it rip, right?

1:48:53There's an avatator there. There's a freedom, there's a playfulness, right? There's a lack of complexity, a lack of self -awareness, a lack of awareness of my own mutability, a lack of awareness that I can be shattered or I can die, a lack of awareness of the existential absurdity of the fact that I'm devoting my life to 64 squares and 32 pieces of wood on top of 64 squares. I haven't reflected on the fact that this is ridiculous, right? Or if you're fighting, like, what am I doing? I'm spending my life in combat. Like, what about love? What about saving the planet? What about everything else?

1:49:28I was like, what? I haven't reflected on the fact that this is just a joke in its absurdity, right? And one's liberated from those kinds of things. And then there comes this moment. And for me, it was triggered by the movie, by losing that sense of self -expression, by thinking what would someone else do here instead of what's my freedom, my playfulness, tell me to do. It can happen one has a near -death experience, right? it can happen when one has one one's heart broken. It can happen when one starts reading existential literature and reflecting on the absurdity of things or one has a friend who starts pointing out over and over like this is fucking ridiculous you're just playing chess what are you doing right or it can happen when one wins the world championship or the NBA finals because suddenly the thing that you have oriented yourself around your whole life the goal you had your whole life.

1:50:25You've now accomplished. And now you're on the other side of it. And so suddenly your world has shifted. The things that motivated you no longer motivate you. The things that felt so important to you now seem somewhat trivial because you've already accomplished that. Like where's the intrinsic motivation? Where's the like the deep self expression, right? You think about like as we gain complexity in our psychology and we can gain that complexity in many different ways, we hit this tunnel, right? And often when someone becomes self -aware or when someone becomes less liberated, or like the chain's hidden, or when one, I guess you say you're an extreme athlete, but you feel invincible.

1:51:05And then suddenly you have a terrible accident. You realize, holy shit, I could actually die. I can break. Then how do you get back to that freedom of taking the wild risks that you've been taking as that extreme athlete within awareness of the fact that you can die? Like for me, I had, you know, I, I, I, foil now in the biggest waves that I can find in where I live in Costa Rica. And you know, you have big hold downs. You're foiling on top of a long mass, which is a carbon mass, which is very sharp and then a wing, which is sharp. You're basically going 40, 45 miles on top of the guillotine. And if you're trying to, you know, you're really cultivating high performance foiling, you're pushing turns really hard.

1:51:40You're breaching wing tips. Like you can taco and have the thing come right at your head or your neck. Like you can diet any minute if you get something wrong, which is very different. like foiling straight or e -foiling, talking about high performance training. You, by definition, have to be risking these things in order to push the limits of what's possible. And if you're not, you're not at that stretch point, right? And so, but then suddenly, you have a terrible injury. Or let's just say you're like, I drowned on the bottom of a pool some 11 years ago, 10, 11 years ago. I've heard about this.

1:52:08Yeah, I was doing hypoxic breath work. I did not realize, which maybe if you could have taught me if I'd known you that carbon dioxide that what gives it the urge to breathe. I didn't realize that. So I had all the CO2 flushed out of my body. I felt blissful. I was swimming underwater. Exhale, I guess we should save a few lives here or prevent a few deaths rather. Anytime you emphasize the duration or intensity of your exhales, you're gonna blow out more carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide is the trigger for the gas reflex. So yes, you'll be able to hold your breath longer above or below water if you first do cyclic hyperventilation and then a long, and dump all your air, but never ever ever do cyclic hyperventilation folks or any long exhale emphasized breathing, even standing in a puddle because that gasp reflex is the thing that makes you shoot for the surface.

1:53:00And if you don't do that, you feel pretty peaceful until lights out. Or drive a car. Don't do it while driving a car. Or drive a car. I know people who haven't done that. Right, actually rather exceptional people who I know. Yeah, dumping carbon dioxide is let you hold your breath longer, but that that's part of the problem. And shallow water blackout usually happens to very high level athletes Navy seals, right? Because they're training at pushing their limits. They're learning to suppress the urge to breathe. And if you're flushing CO2, you're learning you're training yourself not to feel it.

1:53:27And I've been a free diver my whole life. I grew up free diving, spearfishing in the Southern Bahamas. But I wasn't I wasn't doing hypoxic breath work while free diving. Here I was at the NYU pool. I drown. I was in the bottom of the pool for four and a half minutes after blacking out. Which four and a half minutes. Yeah, I should have I wish I know because you should be dead I should be dead or brain damage the big way The I know the time it was because there was an old man who I knew who was in the locker room We saw me in the bottom pool lying there and he timed his laps and he did four laps And he said after the third one I'm gonna check on him and he does fourth lap pulled me and his lap laps are a little bit over a minute and I was unconscious for 25 minutes.

1:54:04I was totally blue, except my face was blown out, red, my eyes, my body, my training almost killed me and also saved me. My body handled it really well. I had no water in my lungs. I spent that night in the hospital, of course. And I was like testing, I remember doing, like remembering old chest variations, like testing my mind in any way, like was I ruined. And I somehow survived and I survived intact. And that's one of those moments, shattering moments, which I am ultimately grateful for, because it's what catalyzed me to. I emerged with more of a commitment, and I've had this kind of commitment in my life for many years, but a more intense commitment to live life as truly and beautifully and authentically as conceivable.

1:54:51And then, soon after, we moved to the jungle, and we live life, we live now, which is awesome my family. But I bring that up now because like imagine how one relates to big wave, surfing or big wave, foiling pre and post drowning. There's like one has to have an integrated sense for one's own mortality versus being naive to the fact that it can happen. So that tunnel from the pre -conscious to the post -conscious performer is a passage where during that passage most people are locked up. They underperform where they were when they were more naive. And I don't personally relate to it as a return to the pre -conscious state.

1:55:34I relate to it as an integration of one's mortality, of the existential absurdity, into one's consciousness and then a discovery of a deeper sense of liberation, of freedom, but that is not in denial of what we've learned in that tunnel or what triggered that tunnel, But that is more complex. Yeah, trying to be our previous selves is not a great strategy. Trying to integrate our previous experiences in our current and future selves seems like a good strategy. I feel that way. And I think it's also pretty, you can't go back. You can't pretend you're not, the dying is impossible. You can't pretend you're unbreakable.

1:56:13We are breakable. Some people do it without being really reflective. But I think that if you ask anyone who really has been in life in death situations as a way of life for a long time Whether they relate to the idea of fearlessness if they really reflect on it they'll say no Because if you're listening to things. It's how one works with fear Usually what locked people up isn't fear. It's the fear of fear We're afraid of our fear we're afraid of being afraid, but like you ask a great Navy seal They work with their fear you ask a like a great MMA fighter. They're not without fear of course they have fear They don't have fear they have a problem Right and there are some examples of people who might be wired a little bit differently, right like but the integration of the more complex world view into One's liberation is the post -conscious performer, right?

1:57:06And it can be it can play in lots of ways right it can also play and so like one thing that when you think about a sports team that has Accomplished like everyone's dreams and now we want to win a championship again. We can't go back to what worked before because they're different men, right? One needs to find a different kind of mission, a different kinds of internal relationship to the mission, a different kind of freedom. How important do you think it is to attach language to these things of identity and source of motivation? In other words, let's say, okay, you're working with the Celtics, they won the championship last year.

1:57:39This year, they are in a completely different mental frame as a consequence. They're quote unquote dominant in the sense that they hold the crown, they hold the trophy. But they're more vulnerable too because the only place to go from there is either stay or you're you're going down a notch or more. So do you think it's important for them to create a verbal label for where they're at? Like where the champs and we're going to hold on to the belt, we're going to hold on to, I realize there's not a belt in basketball. That by the way, that they're going to hold on to their status or is that the wrong way to think about it?

1:58:13Because the game is played through verbs. It's not played through adjectives. I don't think we ever want to hold on to, like that's static. Like you think about predator and prey dynamics in the world or in competition or in anything. Like you want to be competing. Now there's a fusion of the predator and You want to have the awareness that pray has, but one wants to have it be playing to win, not to lose. The moment we're trying to hold on to something we already have, we're falling into the static quality. Right? Or you think about, for example, brilliant investors, right? They'll have success, and then they'll try to figure out how to replicate their success, so they'll build mental models, frameworks to replicate their success.

1:58:57And those become grooves, like neural pathways. So then when they follow those grooves, but then the grooves become a rut and the water stops. And they get stuck in an old, so they succeeded. They built mental models. They recreated the patterns. It was beautiful, but then it got static. And then it's that stuck energy. And it doesn't apply to the world, because the world's changing. And what actually made them succeed was dynamic quality. Was being at the, like what Robert Persick would call the front of the freight train, driving through space -time pre -intellectual consciousness. Right? And then they're trying to recreated.

1:59:30they're getting two stuck in things and they create mental models that are stale. And then other people replicate those stale mental models and you have huge industries that emerge from static quality later on top of static quality, which is most of humanity. Right? So I think that as a world class competitor who's trying to win after winning, one needs to have the same dynamic mindset one had when one was hunting for it in the first place. Rediscovery. Marcelo Garcia, one of my favorite moments in Marcelo was, so Marcelo, nine -time world champion in the grappling arts five time ADCC. Five time Brazilian Jutsu four time ADCC.

2:00:08ADCC is when Abu Dhabi combat championship when all the different grappling arts come together. It happens every two years. So Russian, Sambo, Judo, wrestling, Jutsu, Smith, right? Everything comes together and you see who's the strongest grappler in all the different arts. He's known by many as the greatest pound for pound grappler to ever live. Just for context, Marcello is one of my dearest friends. We own a school together in New York. We trained together for very, very long time. He and his, he's an amazing woman right now. He and his wife, Tatjee, who's also one of my dearest friends, had a terrible tragedy years ago.

2:00:45They lost a baby. and just devastating period. And then Marcelo had cancer. He had stomach cancer. He had surgery eight rounds of chemotherapy. He hasn't competed in 13 years and he's actually competing tomorrow for the first time in I think it's 13 years in Bangkok. It was going to be in Denver and I was going to fly there between the Lakers and the Mavs games but it's in Bangkok so I get there, but he's weighed in, he's doing great, he's feeling awesome. So the story I'm about to tell is about this epic, beautiful human being who in many ways created, he's the innovator that led to much of what is modern grappling today.

2:01:27So back in, I think it was 2005 and 2007, this story, or maybe 2007, 2009, I think it's 2005 and 2007. Chronology is not a strong point for me in terms of my recollection in general. know, um, we were in a training camp, um, we were, you know, training all the time. He had his innovative repertoire. He goes into ADCC, dominates it. And it's a very specific repertoire, but back taking repertoire, guillotine's, um, just dominates, blows the grappling world away. For the two years that followed him winning that ADCC, the entire grappling world was studying what he had just done or a lot of the grappling world.

2:02:05setting me to just on a Rutland regret recreate it. It was so beautiful, innovative, powerful, playing upweight classes, just unbelievable. I was on the mats with Marcelo the next day, the Monday after he fought Sunday. I also want to say Marcelo never, I never, and all the years I had of training with Marcelo, I never saw him miss a Monday training after winning a major competition on Sunday. Wow. Everyone takes time off. I never saw him miss a Monday. You talk about dynamic quality and humility and a way of life, right? The Monday he was on the mat, he shed the entire repertoire. So we just won the World Championship.

2:02:41He, everyone spent the next two years chasing his quality, which was dynamic, they turned it static. He shed the whole repertoire and created a whole new repertoire. And he was playing this homoplata game, which he then went on the next 80s, two years later, and won again with this brand new thing. Just shedding the snake skin or shedding the old shell, right? It's such a beautiful example of like pushing one's limits as a way of life, not being stuck in old mental models, breaking new ground as a way of life, dynamic quality. That's what it takes. And so hard for people to do. I mean, I think about Michael Jordan and the fact that he wanted to be a pro baseball player so he had a brief stint at that and it was underwhelming, certainly compared to his basketball career.

2:03:19But of course, his basketball career was so spectacular that the expectation wasn't there. But nonetheless, you know, it's so rare to find people that are super successful repeatedly within domain, let alone across domains. It's just, yeah. Richard Feynman, yeah, he could paint a little bit and draw a little bit, but I don't know, I've seen those pictures of the roosters. They're kind of first year art school. Yeah, so it's cool. Like cool, you learn to draw and paint, but he weren't like, if his name wasn't on them, like no one would care. Well, Jordan had an incredible competitive drive, incredible competitive drive.

2:04:04And like the amount of like, it's very hard to replicate success in an art because one that shouldn't replicate, one should drive to re -discover, right? It's like a recreation of something new, not old, right? I think the impulse once won wins is to do what one did before. But the world changes. Like one of the gifts the Celtics have this year is that everyone is targeting us. Right? Because we're the champions. Like we won it last year. And so everyone brings like an extra 30 % every night, every team. And the NBA is stacked with brilliant athletes. Even the lower level teams from the outside in are filled with amazing athletes.

2:04:43Who if you if you're the game of the week or the month for them, they bring it all. So all of our weaknesses are being exposed, which is what we want, right? And so you have, there's growing pains, you work through it all. And so the good thing about the competitive truth -telling world is that our competitors' arrivals help force us to take our shit on, which makes it very hard to sit in static quality unless we're happy with mediocrity. The Celtics have, you know, one of the most Joe Mizzoula's that had coached at the Boston Celtics, and He's one of, he and I are dear friends. And for the last two and a half years or so, we've been thought partners and brothers in this journey.

2:05:23And I've never seen anyone in my life better at turning weaknesses and strengths than Joe, which is a huge statement, because I spent my life with all in performers. Not taking weaknesses and making them less weak or like leveling them out, but turning an area of core weakness into a core power zone. That's a superpower. And that's something that Joe trains harder than anybody else and he leads by example and he leads with vulnerability And there's something he embodies dynamic quality And that's really special and that's something I have unbelievable respect for and you look at Joe now like Joe Just has learned to just thrive in pain and discomfort in In his limits in living at his limits and that's that's like the leadership, which I think Will leads a beautiful things So I feel like there are at least three components to what you're describing.

2:06:16One is that maybe in this pre -conscious phase, people are thinking about what they have to gain from this process that they're in and the process is natural, at least to the extent that they're motivated to do it. It comes from some source. This seems to be the stage and the thing that Rick Rubin is trying to tap into in the artist that he works with, whether or not they're established or new. it's that it's the identification of that pre -conscious energy, which is so pure and so beautiful by definition. As opposed to the second thing which is when people have something to lose, you know, they went from poverty to having a really nice home, they bought their mama home, they're loving this life, they don't want to lose it.

2:06:58They don't want to go back to where they were before. Even though they were before, probably played a key role in that pre -conscious state that allowed them to get to that next level. Versus something to protect. And trying to not lose everything you've got is very different than trying to protect certain elements of what one has. So like in terms of the Celtics, they hold the championship title now. So they have something to lose, frankly, they could not get it again, but it's in the record So it's nuanced, right? It's not like in a fight, you can get knocked out or worse. But you're still a champion if you were a champion once.

2:07:44I mean, certain fields are like that. Well, going back to back is an approach way of framing that. Like going back to back is if protecting the title. Right. Because then the words like raining champions, you know, is like even though you're already the raining champion, You know, or you think about dynasties. Like I grew up in the 49ers, we're like kind of in multiple dynasties. It was like the Joe Montana era and the Steve Young era. And like, you know, like these dynasties where they were just considered such an important team overall because of how long they were able to do what they did, the bulls, right?

2:08:18You know, so Tiger Woods, right? And there seems to be a kind of obsession with this process, at least in the United States where we love to see the rise of somebody from, you know, nominee to fame or rags to riches and then, but there also seems to be this kind of obsession with their fall, their demise, and then coming back again. And I think the most, you know, prominent example of this in my mind is Mike Tyson whose life is like, as a friend described as almost Shakespearean and the way they came from nothing, then the youngest heavyweight champion, then all these issues, you know, legal and financial, then back again.

2:08:57And now he seems to be in kind of, he's at least of a level of status where he can wear his own shirt and no one thinks it's weird. It actually looks cool. He's probably the only guy who can wear a shirt with his own name on it. And he just, and it just seems right. Like he earned that one. And I think ironically it was the hangover. It was him pretending to have a, you know, act as an actor that kind of brought him back as a lovable character. It's kind of interesting. like he seems to now be on the Mount Rushmore of famous American athletes who, you know, like I only wish the best for him, but whatever happens next, like that he cemented.

2:09:37His legacy is cemented. At some point, people's legacy is cemented. And I wonder how that feels too. So maybe we can talk about these different stages of the sine wave that hopefully is upward and drifting right. One of the things that's very difficult in modern society and in life of a professional athlete or team in modern society is that, you know, you think about NBA players. They're always being interviewed by the media. And the media is always trying to drum up drama. And always trying to ask if the media always asks the question that is exactly what the performance psychologist of the player would not want the player to think about.

2:10:15So for example, like they might ask something about like how do you feel known you can the expectations of you or so large you can never live up to them right like or is it shameful? Do you feel ashamed about your performance now because of the expectations on you questions like that or your wife is eight months pregnant like how do you feel being you know 5 ,000 miles away right now? That would be pretty benign. Yeah, it's like thanks. You know right there's something because like you want a player to be liberated from self consciousness. You don't want a player to be playing with an awareness or a fixation on external expectations or the external eye.

2:10:51Like I remember with the feeling in my chest life when I transitioned from losing myself and thought to thinking about how I looked thinking to the cameras of the groupies or whatever on the outside. Like wildly different mindsets as a chest player. Right? And so you have all these pressures that are trying to pull you out of an ideal performance state. And so one needs to learn and develop thick skin or a way of integrating it or be playful with it I really believe in embracing adversity We have this theme hunting adversity on the team which is like these things that could be um seen as detrimental or You know problems or or things that could get in the way of our Liberation is where we're like we're welcome them like cold water Right getting in cold water every day is a very important.

2:11:39I think it's a beautiful opportunity to train it so much But we don't want to get in cold water gritting our teeth and hating it. Now we want to like love the fact that we're about to suffer in that cold water. I've been cold plunging for, you know, many, many years, maybe 15 years. And like, it's not like we get into 34 degree water, even if you've been trading for a very long time, you're thrilled about this five minute or ten minute plunger about to do. The most consistent stimulus for adrenaline release and noradrenaline release in the brain that is safe, if done properly. Right. And you never really habituate.

2:12:12I, maybe we would just really quickly double click on this thing of cold plunging. I don't go for time. I think only in terms of walls of adrenaline. So some days, like just getting in the thing is a big wall. I think it's just lack of a better word, it's a wall. On a hot day, I'm happy to get into the cold plung. Yeah. But then what I think is so valuable about cold plunging is that if you start to focus on what neuroscientists call interoception, everything, our perception of everything from our skin inward, you can start to feel the deployment of adrenaline in your body, or at least its effects.

2:12:48And you can say, here's another wall of adrenaline. You watch your frame rate go up, the impulse to stay still because as you move, you break up that thermal layer gets even colder. But then you also want to get out and then that wall passes. And then you start to notice that the distance between the walls changes. And then playing with that in one's mind as, you know, when I distract myself, the walls come suddenly, or when I'm focused on the walls, they seem like big swells as opposed to when I relax myself. They seem like just like kind of more sharp peaks. And learning that those dynamics of how adrenaline impacts us cognitively and frame rate and all that, I think is an immensely valuable practice.

2:13:29and I can't think of anything else, not sprinting, not lifting weights, you know, not real -life arguments because that can be destructive. I can't think of any other kind of venue for exploring one's ability to work through stress and tension than the cold orange. I agree. I have this principle I call living on the other side of pain. And I think that pain, one, like mental discomfort, physical discomfort, or confronting some issue one doesn't want to think about or taking on one's bias pattern or if you're, let's say, like a professional decision maker taking on like what the network of your cognitive biases tends to lead to like these are all forms of pain, right?

2:14:09I think the cold water training is such an exquisite way to practice living on the other side of pain in a way that is thematically resonant and you can train at that doing that physical practice can liberate you and your mental arenas to to to take on shit you don't want to take on. One thing I found is that when you're training peak performers there can be the impulse to go right at their weakness in the place they're making the error. But it's usually much less potent to it that way because they're well calloused over in that area. So if you're like a poker player who has like some control issue, right?

2:14:46It's you could like take on the control issue in poker, but they're so They've built ways of dealing with it, and they're able to play at a high level despite, but they're probably very controlling at home as well with their spouse or their kids or whatever. If you take on the control issues in places they're much less developed, it'll be much easier to take it on because it's less calloused and it will be massively liberating in their poker game. So I often, this is a deal of interconnectedness and thematic interconnectedness. All I did is find a theme someone needs to work with, but then we'll practice that theme in other areas of their life.

2:15:22And then you could have core habits, which manifests that theme. And then there comes this amazing moment where the theme just becomes like internalized because when practice is it in things that are away from where it manifests professionally. And then it just releases. And then all the manifestations of that theme just become your way of life. So for example, like if one wants to take on one's resistance to discomfort, to pain, to pushing one's limits, right? One can practice things like cold plunging, like cardiovascular interval training, like, you know, other things like withholding orgasm, whatever.

2:15:54You can have ways of practicing, like, the theme that are completely separate from where it's manifesting or hindering you in your professional life where you're probably very good at dealing with it. And then the unlock will just happen and you'll be liberated from it. Right. This is one of the most powerful ways that I've found to train. I also find cold plunging is just unbelievable for sleep quality for I do you know I do contrast training now and I agree with you like I've spent a lot for years I was doing like really long cold like 36 degree water for 11 or 12 minutes and I pushed myself really hard and man 11 minutes is so different from 9 minutes Oh, different world and then and now I don't now I I found that like I have a practice of, you know, I'll do three to four rounds of, you know, 42 to 44 degrees between that and the sauna.

2:16:48And I'll do like one longer plunge a week. But like in daily practice, I don't feel the urge to do very long breath holds or very long cold plunges. I don't necessarily. Yeah, same. I'll do cold plunge for one to three minutes. Yeah. And I love contrast with heat. Oh, so I'm very heat tolerant. I love, I love, I love, love, love the sauna. I don't love the cold, but I love the long arc of dopamine that comes after the cold. I always say, no one really enjoys being in the thing. You'd be feel, does that have better sleep hack? I'm asking you, because you know this stuff. Well, there is supplements that could support sleep and that kind of thing and people learning how to deliberately relax their body can help with transition to sleep and back to sleep.

2:17:29But one core principle that I haven't really talked about in the podcast is that if you, the more adrenaline, nor epinephrine, nor adrenaline, and dopamine that you experience early in the day, as well as cortisol from bright light, exercise, caffeine, and cold, the better you're gonna sleep at night. It also sets your circadian rhythm around kind of like a big, you know, set of arousal promoting stimuli early in the day, and then, you know, last third of your day, you're very parasympathetic. For lack of a better way to put it, and that eases the transition to sleep. I mean, you know, dimming the lights, parasympathetic bright lights.

2:18:05Increases the amount of cortisol with your morning cortisol pulse by 50 % five zero, which is great. Keeps you less susceptible to infection all day. These kinds of things. I mean, we're meant to be in oscillation. Obviously, across the 24 hour cycle, but even within the day, it's a little bit tougher when people have evening activities or you put like last night I was watching these guys play a hard game of basketball at, you know, eight to 10 p .m. Yeah, that's a lot of late night work. And where on the west coast, you can think of what time that is east coast. Right. Right. So is there a better sleep stack?

2:18:38Not really. I mean, and if you want to increase your rapid eye movement, sleep non -pharmacologically, yeah, I would say, meaning not exogenous pharmacology. Yeah, the cold plunge in the morning, a early part of the day for evening, anything that moves blood out to your periphery. So sauna, pot shower, that sort of thing is going to drop your core body temperature when you get out, right? It's a little paradoxical to people, but you know, you warm up to then cool off at the level of corbide temperature and it'll ease the transition to sleep. Yeah. And it's a wonderful practice and people who pick at cold plunging, they're like, well, it blocks hypertrophy.

2:19:13Okay, yeah. Okay, that's true. So in the six hours after you're trying to get your, you know, a little more peak on your biceps or something, it's going to block that. But most people have not experienced control over their physiology at the level that comes from doing consistent cold plunging in the early part of the day, warming up and becoming more parasympathetic later in the day. It's like, they start to feel a level of control over their mood and energy that's so striking with basically zero cost. Yeah, sorry to riff on that, but people will probably wonder about specifics. I want to make sure that we talk about two things and you can decide which one to talk about first one is ego.

2:19:57And then the second one is earlier you described a set of dynamics across the day and some concrete things about how one picks the most important question. What am I working on today? And how to kind of push that into certain portions of the day, how long to do that, and then how to stay out of stimulus and response in the transition points so that you can make the most of that work or extract the most from that work as you had the evening dinner with your family sleep and then wake up repeat. Which one do you think would be most about the game? It's go wherever you want to go. Where should we go?

2:20:32All right, let's before we get practical, let's get a little bit more theoretical and then get back to practical. ego. The constriction is what comes to mind, like the idea that like I want to impose my will on something. I want a certain outcome. And if I don't get it, it's going to hurt in some way. There's some punishment mechanism internally like that might drive me to work even harder. It's not always bad. But how do you frame ego? And I will say that the words I am seem very important, like when when people identify as I am the champion, I'm part of a champion team in the NBA. I'm a Celtic player, you know, I'm a Celtics player.

2:21:21Clearly I'm not. But when we attach identity to ego, that's also where it seems like it kind of deepens the trench a bit. But maybe it can be more relaxed than the way I'm describing it. How do you think about ego? We had, so Graham Duncan, my dear friend, joined us at the game last night. and grandma I consider to be in the realm of like elite mental talent mapping and assessment to just being the League of Zone. He's such a genius in the realm of just finding and like identifying people who have world -class potential and mental arenas in really quirky ways. He's a beautiful soul. And one of the ways he frames this in the investment space when he's looking at at high potential investors is like he doesn't want to find people who have too specific and identity in the way that they relate to what they do to make money to invest to whatever.

2:22:21Because there's something static in like I am a x, y, or z versus I am something more broad than which leads to one's relationship to like tenant to tenant quality to rediscover it to changing as the world changes, right? I think that that there's relates a little bit to what I was describing in terms of learning chess locally versus learning chess in a way that connects to all of life, which is so dynamic. I think I spent many years studying my Yamagabuza's philosophy and so I come from both a Western and Eastern perspective when I think about the question of ego. And I think that one of the things that happens in the West when we talk about East Asian philosophy is that we oversimplify and we create, we kind of polarize things.

2:23:08And I think, so it's easy to, people talk so quickly about being ego lists, right? Or say someone is low ego. And when they say they're low ego, they don't actually mean that they're low ego. They mean that they have a sound ego structure. Like they're not in, like if they say they're low ego, they're usually saying that they are, they're not expressing insecurity all the time. Which means that it's not that they have a low ego. It's that their ego is not fundamentally, like it's not a rupture in the structure that's leaking all the time. So the way I relate to ego from like a competitive perspective or from an artistic perspective or a self -cultivation perspective is that I relate to it around dynamic versus static.

2:23:57Constant exploration is opposed to being stuck in a how -one relates to old patterns. I relate to understanding the emptiness of our ego dynamics, understanding the non -absolute nature of our ego, the relational nature of things, the interconnectedness, and the interdependence of all things. I think it's so easy to have an identity, which we think is like, I am this. But we're not this. This doesn't exist out of relation to that, and that doesn't relate in relation to is other thing. So understanding the chain of relationality and then how are ego manifests in all of that. So having the ability to both dissolve one's relationship to like static egoic dynamics, but also having a sense of identity and having a sense of what oneself expression is and having like when we are there is this thing about will.

2:24:50When you're competing, you can feel when someone has an unbreakable will. When you're matching up against somebody and their and their and their wishy washy you can just blow through them. But you when they're when their will is just like I never forget Marcelo Garcia against Colossons and a big in a big world championship match putting Colossons was risk locking everybody and Marcel put his hand right into the wrist lock and looked into his eyes. It's like try it. Just put his hand into it and you can break someone by being unbreakable. You can see a lot of fights where somebody tries to submit someone and someone is unsubmitted and the person who has the huge advantage gets broken because they realize, holy shit, this guy is unbreakable and so they've become broken.

2:25:33Right? So there's having the ability to have that like when you when you touch a fighter, like body, fighters all rub against each other. You know, you learn a lot, like feeling someone. So if you meet like fighters of hug, they'll give you learn so much on the touch, you know? And like you can feel when someone is is brittle. You touch them, you can feel how much contact they've taken, how much they've been hit, how much they've absorbed, how much they've been abused, how much they've received, and you can feel like whether energy stops, you can feel if there's just static things in them, and then you can also feel when the earth is moving inside of them.

2:26:10When it's just this molten energy, it's just moving in them. When you feel a body that it can envelop you, and it can be a mountain, or it can be like water. So I relate to ego and that you want to be able to be like water and be like a mountain. I've never answered that question before. I just rift on that. But that's like the essence of how I relate to it. I mean, and as I walked in here to take a seat at my chair, I got a good hard slap on the back from you and I was wondering if you were testing me. I've had you last night too. I won't ask what your read of my ego was, but I felt it as a slap of camaraderie.

2:26:47Like, let's do this. Yeah. Um, great. And I was also thinking about my good friend Lex Friedman who is a black belt in Brazilian Jiu -Jitsu and a very intense guy who wears his heart honestly publicly and people sometimes will take shots at him for that, which really upsets me. I really respect Lex. I think what he does is awesome. I love his podcast and the way he in really prickly issues has gone and got people on both sides of things and welcomes everyone and it has dialogue. I have a huge amount of respect for how Lex handles himself in the public world. Yeah, you guys would have a fun conversation.

2:27:21He's going to be jealous that we got a chance to sit down here. But Lex is at home and with his friends exactly how he appears to be. Like all that intense self -tourcher around what to do and how to frame something, who to talk to, how to to talk to them and that's the world he lives in. And but in terms of his physicality, like I think it's hard to understand just how, I mean, like he's like dense, like dark matter. You know, like it's the, it's the, and I think a lot of guys that rule a jujitsu, like you shake their hands and like there's a solidity there that's very different than just muscle.

2:28:07It's like people that are just like, They're used to being up against bodies, apparently. You know, so it's an experience, you know. These are subtle things, but clearly they matter. And as you've pointed out, one brings them to their professional life. You bring it to friendships. You know, I can't think of, I have many, super quote unquote, solid friends, but Lex is among the most solid of them. He's just beautiful. His presence. Yeah. He has a courageousness with which he, in my observation from afar, or comports himself in the world that I have a lot of respect for. And Rick Rubin, we both know Rick, and people know Rick as this bearded icon of creativity.

2:28:48And he is indeed that. The fluidity that he moves through life with is just, it's astonishing. I've spent a lot of time with him, and I don't wanna get into my observations of Rick, the Rickisms, if you will, but it's astonishing how much attention and he puts into creating this thing that we're talking about space like getting out of stimulus and response. It's I don't think he'd mind me sharing this. It's not uncommon for me to like go over, hang out with him and he'll just say like, hey, like before we talk, you want to just like do this meditation. We're just like sit there and meditate and you quickly go into a mindset of like, oh my goodness, like this is like a thing.

2:29:30And then, But like nope you just get into being present and then I don't know then you hang out and you talk about if you're asking You know the the Ramones because we both love the Ramones. Yeah, so I love the way you frame ego. I think that that's very helpful Because a physical embodiment of something that is Largely psychological to most people at least the concept is very helpful Well, do you ever just as a practice, just look at how people walk or how they interact? Oh, yeah. I mean, of course, that's my way of life. I mean, it's funny as a chess player, even like I used to study people off the board all the time.

2:30:10I'd watch them. Like, I remember you used to play these tournaments in Bermuda. And once a year, an invitational, like high level tournament, and then like, you'd watch someone walking and they'd get caught in the rain. And you're watching someone in the rain, you learn so much. Like, would they just stand and brace it? Would they put something over their head and run away? What would they do, right? And in general, if someone has a static, that is a negative relation to rain, they're usually pretty controlling, and then you have a feel for how to handle them in the board, create chaos in the board.

2:30:41Like just like mix it up, make it uncontrollable. And then, or if someone is like a full free spirit on the rain like me, like maybe you wanna make the game like a little bit more quiet conservative, like strategic, not so chaotic, like where one has to find exact precise solutions and specific kinds of positions where like you can't improvise, you're not finding hidden harmonies and chaos, you're finding specific thing, right? Control and rain and then the fight game, man, you watching people all the time. I mean, you watch fighters watching one another, you see a lot, feeling one other, watching one another.

2:31:19And I love watching people away from what they do. Because all those themes are much more visible than when they're doing what they do. What about a non -competitive endeavors like ballet, opera, music where certainly it's competitive in that, you know, you're competing for people's attention, time, and money, but it's not direct competition. Do you spend time working with people performers in these domains where, you know, like just I heard from someone recently who she said, you know, I'm a good dancer, but then I went to New York and I discovered that I'm not such a good dancer. Like, like, the level of who gets to actually dance in some of the premier venues there is like so unbelievably high that, and by the way, that shouldn't discourage anyone that should encourage people to show them what's possible.

2:32:11Do you work with people like Like that or is it usually competitive arenas? I've utilized competitive fields as beautiful laboratories for refining my relationship to the training process because of how relentlessly truth -tellingly I was. I also come from a family of artists. My grandmother was a brilliant abstract expressionist painter and sculptor. Stella Wateskin, an amazing woman. She was in the, she was good friends with Hans Hoffman and Gounen and Jackson Pollock. I mean that was her crowd. She was part of the, like, the early beat generation back in the day. and I come from a family of artists.

2:32:44And, um,

2:32:48yeah, I mean, one of the, you know, a lot of what I'm thinking about in recent years is how to channel my life's work into making the biggest positive impact possible in the world. And I'm really worried in this moment around what's happening in human consciousness, the depths of distraction. how can we enhance the human ability to make decisions in an increasingly complex world where there's so much misinformation? And also, how can we take on humanities biggest challenges? And so for example, one of the projects that I'm really excited about that I've been working on for the last couple of years is called Lila Science.

2:33:28And these aren't competitors, these are scientists. And we're essentially, so I was sitting with this question for two or three years. like who should I partner with to try to take on humanity's biggest challenges? And I met this guy. He ended up renting Graham's house, who we were at the game with yesterday, next door to mine in Costa Rica, and this name is Jeff, I'm also, and Jeff is a just a brilliant scientific visionary and creator. And we ended up having three weeks of dialogue, and I incidentally invested one of his companies years before, which was interesting. But we had this incredible three weeks of dialogue while he was standing next door.

2:34:13And then we looked at each other and we were like, we should be teaming up. And I've also been very close to and observing the world of artificial intelligence for a long time, partially because Demis Hasibis was a childhood friend of mine. We grew up playing chess together from when you were like 11 years old. And so I've observed his journey. And I think that it is very interesting in chess, like the seat that I had watching the impact on chess of first computers, increasingly powerful machines, and then artificial intelligence was fascinating. Because if you imagine like what it's like to see one's life's work be overcome in three hours of experimentation, like what Alpha Zero did, just breathtaking.

2:35:04And to give some perspective on things, there's an ELO system in chess, right? There's the ranking system. The highest rated chess players in the world, human chess players are rated, you know, from Gary Kasparov, Magnus Carlson, Bobby Fisherman, all the world champions are rated somewhere in the 2800 to 2900 level, right? ELO. The strongest AI engines now are north of 3800 ELO and just for context of how wild that gap is when I was eight years old my rating was 1800 Right, so the gap between me at eight, which is like I was ridiculous and the world champion human is the same gap as the world champion and The strongest AI engines in the world and so like it's very hard for humans to conceive of being the ants Right relative to the humans we are the ants now in terms of where we soon will be what is possible And I think that that could be channeled for the good or could be channeled for the bad and the question The one of the motivations of the people who are really driving these companies.

2:36:00So I've been thinking for a long time if out of combine Like what's the lights out of the force of the artificial intelligence world and what Jeff and I and and a dear friend Chris Fussle who is a brilliant man who he wrote team of teams in one mission. He was Elite Navy seal and then he ended up running joint special operations command Jay Sock with Stan McChrystal, Lenny was president of the McChrystal group and now he's president of Lila Science. Jeff Chris and I and a brilliant man named Jack Millwood who's the Chief Cultural Officer have been teaming up and I brought together this tribe of a few different brilliant friends were part of this and it's basically taking cutting edge science and taking cutting edge AI, bringing them together to create scientific superintelligence focused on and we're creating these AI science factories where the entire scientific process can be replicated, can be driven, non -stop.

2:36:55The way Alpha Zero was driving non -stop iteration in the chess world, what if this is happening in the scientific process from... So, pose a hypothesis. Study, isolate variables, test hypothesis, feedback to hypothesis, confirm or deny hypothesis and just... An experimental design and experimental execution and then study of experimental results and then study of the entire scientific literature. And imagine all of that happening with robotics, with 3 ,800 elo -rated scientists, AI scientists, and then millions of them networked. And now if you have this from my perspective, the most important thing is the safety, right?

2:37:32And I think that a lot of these AI companies aren't prioritizing safety first, we are. And I think for me, it's been a really important thing to think about this, because I've been sitting with this question for a lot of years. Like in order to do something like this, you have to trust that the people who are driving it, If they have max temptation, but something could be like the Manhattan Project, could be potentially negative for humanity, that they would not push the button. They would lead to the satisfaction of all their dreams if it would be taking an existential risk for humanity. And this team, I really believe in that way.

2:38:03And so, like, what's most exciting to me about this is the material science side. I mean, the life sciences, we could, you know, the eradication of disease, it's unbelievable could happen. I think we'll be blown away by what happens in the coming years. But the material science part of it for me personally is what matters most because I really don't think it matters if Humans are all living for a hundred fifty two hundred years if we have no climate to live on Right and and we're the material innovations that could be emerging in the coming years to take on the climate crisis Sir our breath taking so it's a project.

2:38:33I'm deeply involved in and it has nothing to do with competition I mean I guess everything is competitive from one perspective, but this is about Driving discovery driving innovation. I love it It also reflects your clearly repeating pattern of being willing to segment your life into different goals and different pursuits, applying what you've learned previously, learning new things and incorporating those. It brings me back to two things that we touched on earlier, one that if we don't close the hatch on, we're going to get it from the listeners, which is this paper that we both read. I just want to or took a look at.

2:39:09Before the paper, let me just say one important thing. And to me, what you just said really hits home, but I think while one is taking on all these different things for me personally, it's important to always be in the fire. I need to be training myself, like what I'm doing on the ocean every day in my own training. The thing that drives me crazy are armchair quarterbacks, or what Robert Persack used to call philosophologists, right? Which are like the literary critics first the right or the philosophologist first the philosopher or the armchair quarterback versus the quarterback. So for me, like my way of life, I just don't know, it's hard for me to believe in anybody in these things who isn't putting themselves in the line as a way of life.

2:39:47So like my own ocean training and my own competitive training and like being immersed in the truth telling nature of the competitive world is something that I feel is really like, we never have the truth nailed. We're never liberated from our ego academics. We're always susceptible to becoming static. I have really come to feel that. And I don't believe, so like, it's a big value system for me. And the daily physical interactions with the ocean, with fear, with uncertainty, with just variables that you can't control and try to identify what are the variables I can control in this context and work with those to try and tease out new learning.

2:40:34that running those algorithms every day seems absolutely essential. There's nothing like the ocean to expose any little micro inkling of the illusion of control because you cannot control the ocean. You can't overcome the ocean. The ocean is going to kick your ass. You need to blend with her and receive her and honor her. Yeah, that's where I do my inner work out there. Okay, you're a study. Go ahead and do it. Well, so it's not my study, but this paper that I sent you, I think is really interesting as paper published in the journal Neuron, very fine journal, excellent paper. We'll post a link to it.

2:41:09But has many interesting features about, it's really about the study of surprise and the dopamine system, but they use as the experimental context, people watching a game of basketball, and they observe that the reset on sort of the interval timer is essentially said anytime there's been a reversal of which team has the ball. So a drive -down court, you know, by one team then the other team and you know if there's a rebound and then it switches direction whatever, might not switch direction, basketball provides the perfect dynamic to study this while people are being, while there's some detection of brain activity going on.

2:41:50And one of, I think the most interesting questions about this paper and implications are that just as we can set the aperture of our vision or the frame rate of how well we're clocking time, how finally we're clocking time or how of course we're clocking time, there's this big question, which is kind of a philosophical question really, which is how do we segment time in our life? Earlier you mentioned that one of the major kind of time stamps, if you will, is a bad event, like a... Oh, shit, like the things weren't completely... differently than I would have preferred them to. It could be the death of another, it could be the death of a dream, it could be a, you know, a setback or whatever.

2:42:32That it marks time and we just had these fires. I mean, LA will be before and after the fires of 2025. I remember early in 2020, Kobe Bryant dying. So these things, I remember the challenger explosion. Negative events occupy a certain place in our memory more easily than positive events, but no one will forget the birth of their first child or hopefully their second child to if they had a second child or their wedding day. These things segment time. You seem to be able to segment your life into a series of pursuits where you cut ties with the practice of something like chess and you take what you learn and move it forward into.

2:43:19What seems to be a very different lifestyle and way of being, I think one of the major challenges for a lot of people it seems is how to thread the different elements of their life forward in a way that feels contiguous. And I think it's probably true that most people would prefer to not have major losses be necessary in order to segment their life in the most fulfilling way. So how do you think about the segmentation of time? And maybe we'll run this backward from the scale of your lifetime. We don't know how long you'll live, but hopefully a long time. That's assumed by way of standard genetic somewhere in the neighborhood of between 90 and 110 if you take good care of yourself Which you seem to that's good.

2:44:07Okay And then let's compare that to How one structures a day That will allow us to bring back to what you talked about before with this most important question dynamic and focus and and Replenishing and dynamic between conscious and unconscious mind so when you think about your life your 48 years old Yeah, okay, I'm 49 so we're more or less the same point looking backward anyway. Our lives are very different but same age roughly if you think you're going to live to be about a hundred, how are you thinking about your time frame? Are you thinking okay here's what I'm going to do for the next five years.

2:44:47Ten, I'll allow that whatever's happening in my life to dictate what I do next. I mean how are you running this analysis? That's an awesome question. I mean So we're basically taking all the macro and all the micro and we're going to boil down right here. It's beautiful.

2:45:09That was a very expansive elegant question. I think the true answer is interesting. There's I find this distinction between how like when I think about a question like that between how I actually relate to the question and how I might deconstruct how I actually relate the question to make it relatable but is the deconstructed version actually true to how I really relate to the question right? Because accurate deconstruction is so nuanced and difficult right? So if I how I My experientially relate to that question is that I'm living, I want to live my life with just relentless truth to myself with authenticity, with love, with receptivity.

2:46:05I want to deepen my connection to what I'm doing, the arts I'm practicing in specifically, and in utilize and tapping into my relationship to the universe through the artistic exploration. I have not planned out the next 10, 20, 40, 50, 60 years. I do have a long time horizon on how I think about plans and developments and projects I'm working on. But it's like this fusion of the cultivation of full presence right now and playing the long game. But I don't I'm not clear on where the long game is going. What are my dear friends? Boyd Vardy. You know boyd? I know of him and I'm a huge admirer of his work.

2:46:53Oh, you should have him on He's awesome. He's a beautiful or you should go to South South Africa and go and go on the black track. Oh, sorry I didn't mean to yeah, so he's an awesome connected to him through Martha back previous guests on this podcast And she spent all that their good friends. They've spent a lot of times in a lot of time in London and the lozzy together. I'd love to get boydew already on here. He's a beautiful soul. He's a real brother. He's a kindred spirit. Like every once in a while, you run into someone you're like. Ha ha ha. In his book, Lion Tracker's Guide to Life, he has this gorgeous quote, which is the words of a master tracker, Renès.

2:47:33I have no idea where I'm going, but I know exactly how to get there. When I read those words, I was just like, they resonated very deeply in my soul. I think those words are really good. I would take out the exactly, I don't know anything exactly. So I don't know where I'm going, but I have a really beautiful sense that I'm tracking my way there. You've got a process that seems to work very well. At least up until this point, there's no reason to think it wouldn't work well, especially given that you said not exactly, leaving that openness to changes in our biology, life events, and in four people around us.

2:48:14I have a big part of me and it's a strength and a weakness. I think a lot, when I meet people, I think a lot about the entanglement of their brilliance and their eccentricity or their genius and their dysfunction. And when you're working with peak performers, you need to understand it. And that's entanglement is often very, very complex. And people can think, oh, I can make this person more efficient by just removing this. But that will be connected to their genius. and you'll be like cutting some of it away. Right? And so when you're working with like crazy, brilliant, and anyone who's really a virtuoso has some craziness built into what they're doing.

2:48:44And the entanglement of their brilliance in their dysfunction is so complex and nuanced. And one should be very careful to not do anything until one understands that entanglement with huge nuance. And so the art of coaching people of that nature is like 99 .9 % listening, observing, not doing. And one of the biggest mistakes that coaches make is doing, doing too much, because they need to show that they're valuable, right? And so I think a lot about, like, we need to really understand the nature of that entanglement. And in me, that entanglement's complex. And I have a profound allergy to being untrue to myself.

2:49:26Why? Well, I think a big part of the reason is that period when I was 15, 16, 17, 18 years old and I described where I got pulled into this externalized thing from the film in the public scrutiny when I wasn't ready for it and being urged and not having the maturity to resist it because that's ultimately on me. It's a take -on chest outside of myself expression Like what would Carp of Do here not? What would Josh do here? And I didn't have the understanding of learning Carp of Thrukisparov, right? And so I moved into like my first love was taken away from me or I allowed myself to have it taken away from me, which is how I'd actually frame it.

2:50:05And it was made static and stale and corrupted and externalized. And there's so much existential heartbreak in me about the loss of that first love that I have the gift of being just fucking allergic to being untrue to myself. And so that's part of how I track through life. is I, if I don't love someone, I don't work with them, no matter what the temptation is. If something feels untrue to me, I don't do it. Now sometimes we have to sit in the unknowing for a while and something can be off for a while, right? So there's peaks and valleys of everything, right? And we're so in the learning process, right?

2:50:48We can have long plateaus. Like when I stopped playing chess, I felt like I'd lost the love, but I sat for two years with the question to be clear on whether I was in a plateau of the love or if I'd lost the love. And then I get in clarity, no, no, you've lost the love. And then I was done. I've ever played again. I've ever played a chess game again. So that factored in. Like I have this, this is so interesting how our, like some of the, like our most powerful guiding principles or voices in us can come from our deepest wounds, right? They absolutely do. I mean, I think it's a because I think, you know, this concept of energy is a complicated one and there's no clear definition anyway, but when I think about energy, I don't think about caloric energy.

2:51:42I think of neural energy and I think about certain neural circuits like that. Like if you like I love the feeling of excitement and tension that then is funneled into a specific activity that then yields some new vista repeat, you know, it's just that science and that's learning. The day I realized that I'll never, you know, saturate all the knowledge that I could gather, organize and disseminate through through the podcast, I was like, F -Yes. Like, that's just great because there's, but I realize also that we can saturate ourselves internally. We can drive ourselves to the point of no replenishment.

2:52:21We can get so narrow focus. That's why I think so much about aperture in time and space. We can get so narrow focus that we end up, like a gopher that dug our way into a desert. And then we're like, where you're just far from your family, from home, you know, because you just dig, dig, dig, dig. So you know, I think what is it, you know, like ego vision, you know? I think that the diving's birds are probably the ultimate in terms of having panoramic vision. You know, they have a horizon viewing density of cells so they can view the horizon and they have a pupil to view the fish so that they can dive and grab the fish despite the refraction of light under the water because the fish isn't actually where they see it.

2:53:04When people say ego vision versus, you know, like, you know, what's it, what, that, you know, like predator vision up close or something? The comrades, like, they hit, so they're, like the diving birds. Those birds, yeah. Yeah, so they're, they're, they're flying and they're tracking the horizon. And they're also tracking things right below them, simultaneously. That to me is the ultimate state to try and achieve in terms of space and time tracking. That's a beautiful metaphor. And they have to also adjust for, right? refractory. And if you've tried like archery from above water underwater, which I used to paddleboard while playing with a while I spearfishing above water with a bow, that refraction is hard to calculate.

2:53:46Yeah, diving sea birds are the ones that really just I'm gonna do like they're the ultimate. I'm gonna do a study there. I gotta I want to learn about them. Okay, it's beautiful. Yeah, I can send you some literature there. I love it. The time you did of a day is what most people can manage in their minds. Maybe you could return to this cycle of conscious focus stimulus response and getting out of that. I love the example of going to take a piss because everyone does it. I do think too many people do it holding a phone. Yeah, oh my God. Can't be good for a number of reasons. Maybe just it'll walk us through that.

2:54:30So, um, do you think it's, let me ask a series of short questions. So when I wake up in the morning, for instance, like many people, I'm not, I don't feel immediately alert. I don't feel like I could just dive into writing, if writing is the most important thing I need to do that day or, or I have some transition time. Do you think that people should embrace natural transition times on the time scale of a day, or that they should train themselves to like, you know bounce into effort like go with the flow or Or force oneself through through the door. Well, how I relate to that personally I've spent a lot of time thinking about day architecture.

2:55:05Well, I call it like I call day architecture and and And there's I think there's some very systematic things we can do and I think but I think like Anything they should be individualized, right? I don't think that everyone should follow a certain model because we're all very different You know that old book that Tim actually produced the audiobook daily rituals? Oh, yeah. Like one of the best things about daily rituals is how few patterns there are through them. I just... I love that book. Larry, it's a brilliant... We'll put a link to it. Such a good book. So good. I'm so glad that Tim Ferriss is who we're referring to.

2:55:37He collected all these habits of different writers and like some of them are so quirky and crazy and some are downright dangerous. Well, he published the audiobook of it. Right. And I think I told Tim... He'll remind me. I think I might have, I think I told him about that book, like many, many years ago, and he did the audio book and it's so good. It's so good. But it just follows the daily routine. It breaks down the daily routine. It's like two to three four -page chapters on, like, 100 -some brilliant artists and scientists and creators, and they're just so random. How they like... Some are out partying all night.

2:56:10Drugs, alcohol, caffeine, others are super regimented in monk like. like it's the range of daily architectures is so vast. So I think we need to have like that awareness and that sense of humor and humility about it and we can get systematic instructions at the same time. I think it's important to hold both of those. I mean, what you just asked, I do believe that that beautiful period when we first wake up and that dream state is so powerful. And I think that people almost, almost all people will immediately pick up their phone and start checking messages, which just shuts down one's awareness of what's been happening beneath the surface all night.

2:56:50So I think that that's a real lost opportunity. I remember when I was 11 years old, I read this. My dad actually gave me this, this Hemingway essay on his creative process. And there's one of my favorite, one of the most, sometimes there's like an insanely potent book that's put together and it's two that come to mind are Lessons of History, which which is this short compilation of Will and Ariel Durant, two of the greatest historians who published tens of thousands of pages. This is a short compilation of a handful of thematic essays. It's only like 100 pages of all their life's work boiled down to a few themes, unbelievably potent.

2:57:26And Hemingway on Writing is another book of that nature, which takes all of Hemingway's from his books, from his letters, private letters, from his articles and essays and notebooks, like everything He's written about the creative process and boils it into this like short book on his principles of creativity just unbelievable But before that book came out I read this piece The short thing he'd written about the creative process which was essentially he'd always leave a sentence unwritten He'd end his workday with a sentence like half written so leaving with a sense of direction and Then he would let it go, you know, he'd go out drinking he would Do all the things that Hemingway did and then he returned to it first thing the morning and that like like unwritten sentence, it would become a paragraph and a page in his mind and it would be a way to hit the ground running.

2:58:11And that's what really spurred me to start creating this process in my chest life of always ending my chest study with something left like posing my unconscious a question, like studying the complexity and then releasing it, which later became, and then tapping into it first thing in the morning pre -input, which later became my M IQ process and then I developed team wide M IQ processes of the teams that I work with all have versions of the M IQ that they utilize as individuals within his teams and it's an amazing way to develop a shared consciousness in a team, to have everybody be able to tap into the question that's top of mind for every member of their team, or for a leader to be able to be aware of what is the most important question for everyone of my scientists or my analysts or anything.

2:58:50It's a really powerful way to cultivate shared consciousness and it becomes our game tape. Because if we have an, if we're tracking our MIQs, let's say I'm studying something for three weeks or for four weeks. And what do I think is, if I'm tracking the questions that I think are most critical for that thing, and I'm deepening my analysis of it, what I arrive at, what I think in day one, will be very different from the M IQ in day 14. And then we can study the gap. And then we can study the patterns of the gaps, the gaps. And this is what I call M IQ gap analysis. So if I'm setting a chess position, like if I play a chess game against you and it's incredibly complex, and I don't quite understand this position, and then I do a deep, deep analysis of it.

2:59:33What I'll arrive at after 14 or 16 or 18 hours of study will be different from what I felt during the game. Now what's interesting is this is a cool thing about chest study. If my understanding was here during the chest game, after like a few hours, I might be like really far away from that. But after I've completed the study, I'll usually be like very similar, but deeper. So it's often like deeper, like closer than where you were after a few hours study, but it's like a deeper level in. But what's the gap between that and that, between where I was in the game, and what are the patterns in the gaps?

3:00:09And then if you think about those patterns in the gaps through those lenses of the technical, the thematic, and the psychological, right, we deconstruct it in that way, then that becomes our game tape, right? One of the hardest things for mental athletes is to actually have game tape the way basketball players do, or spoilers do, or fighters do. We can see the actual game tape. We need to create our mental game tape. So this is a way that I, it both enhances the creative process and creates the game tape for the training process. And then studying the gap analysis we do reveals what we need to focus our deliberate practice on.

3:00:43This difference between physical endeavors and cognitive endeavors, I think is so key. Nowadays most people are involved in cognitive endeavors and there's so much, it's basically like being in a glass house with with with windows everywhere. I mean, social media, texting, windows, internet connection on the computer. There's just so many points of entry and where one can become distracted, whereas if you paddle out to ocean, you know, sure you could bring your phone perhaps, but you're limited by the environment and the need for safety of the number of things that you can think about. Funny, I wore an Apple watch training a little bit on the ocean.

3:01:22And it was good for me because I wanted to like align my intuition on speed with what actually it was showing and it was good to calibrate myself but man it I took it off. It's so much better being on the ocean without technology. Being liberated from it, tracking, but yeah. I'm learning to turn stuff off while I work. I mean I have had to learn to just fight things back because when I started in science I didn't have a smartphone and any of that and one really has to fight nowadays for their freedom from these interruptions. So it's something that people really have to cultivate. So in terms of the structure of that day, to oppose a question for the daily, the most important question, would it be like, let's say, I can work on a revision of this book that I delayed release on because I wanted to add a bunch of things to it.

3:02:09So would one say the most important question is, how do I finish this book today? Or is there, I'm guessing it's more conceptual than that? I think that you can, I mean, is a tool that one can utilize tactically or strategically? So it can be like if you're in creative flow just leaving yourself with a sense of direction or it can actually be zooming out and Thinking about like what is the highest order question? That I that I'm grappling with right, but I think it's like one wants to stretch for the quiet if one is doing the latter The higher order strategic thinking it's like you can think of like one is stretching for the question that matters most with the same kind of intellectual or cognitive intensity that one is experiencing, for example, pushing yourself from like 168 to 176 in cardiovascular interval training.

3:02:57Like you're really stretching mentally. So you need to be at your stretch point. Growth comes at the point of resistance, right? So we, but intellectually we're not used to really feeling when we're at our stretch point. So we're thinking about a question, but that's a question. What's the higher order question? What's the higher order question? What's the question that really matters? And one way to frame it is like, our mind, if we're good at something, slice is like a knife through butter, through most things, but then there's a place where stuck, like those stuck points are the M .I .Q's. Those stuck points are like, right?

3:03:26Like we don't need to wait, we don't need, but my animals get there, like, oh, that's the thing. And then we explore there, like, how do that stretch within that stuck point? And that's usually where people, including myself pivot away, I'm thinking outside of the work domain now, Like, I don't want to think about it. So when we tend to, I notice that there's an infinite amount of distraction available nowadays if we want it. And audio books and podcasts and podcasts are wonderful. But they can be a source of distraction from the critical question we need to be asking, or they can be a source of answers, for perhaps the critical questions we're asking.

3:04:01But there's just so many of these opportunities to just look away from something that is like emotional infection. It's different than an infection in your skin that's nagging because you can feel it there and you want to get that thing out, right? Very, very primal instinct. Get that thing out, get the infection out. This is like an emotional infection that you can just kind of not see. If you choose to turn away, those are the things that really get you over time. That's why we do our cold water training. That's where we train at living on the other side of pain, enjoying it. Like that place that place that like itches like a bounce away from that, but that's where you need to sit Right Right, but we can practice that thematically like loving that discomfort wanting it hunting for it Like finding the place where we're stuck and then then letting it sit and then not bouncing away from it But just releasing it and returning to it and we have insights right because often in those moments like where we have our insights are Like when we wake up in the morning are in those stuck points and and I find it's very interesting I'm sure you've done this.

3:05:06Like I've done hundreds of diagnostics with people on my teams. Like where do they have most of their creative breakthroughs? And so many of them are in the shower. It's really interesting. I think a big part of that is that like the full body, it's somatic immersion, moves them out of conscious thinking into like, because their mind is experiencing. And then the release of the conscious mind allows the unconscious to run and then it's happened to it. First thing in the morning is when I get my insights or understanding, or when the truth hits me square in the face. Well, like there's no avoiding.

3:05:38I wake up, I think about like, okay, that's the thing I got to deal with. And I tend to write it down right away, trying not to write it down on my phone. I think having a point of capture that doesn't offer any other distractions. Dude, that's why I'm a big believer in pain and pain. I 100 % agree with you. And like what, so first of all, I agree first thing then morning, that's the juice. And then I'll hold on to my cue process as geared toward harnessing that, like tapping into that, right? Like feeding the month, because that just happened to me so many dozens of times where I would just have the insight in the morning, but then I realized I should be finding the areas of stuckness and feeding it to myself to have the insight about.

3:06:10So it's like directing that creative process. But then if we open up our phones, like if the moment we start to see emails without reading them or see anything, we're unconsciously solving for what's in the emails. Yeah, it's all stimulus response. You're going into stimulus. If people can start to think about being reflective versus in stimulus response, I think that's sort of like the widest bending of all this. I have to say the shower. I've talked about this thing about why people have insights in the shower with my friend. I'd love to introduce you to him at some point. For instance, we were seven years old.

3:06:40My friend, Dr. Eddie Chang, he's a neurosurgeon in the chair of neurosurgery at UCSF. And he studies speech and language. And he's taking people locked in syndrome and developed AI algorithms so that they can speak through a screen with their face moving and real time by decoding human speech or human speech cortex. And a truly brilliant individual. He's been on this podcast. He'll come back again. That's about the shower thing because he used to work on neuroplasticity of the auditory system. We think we wonder if it's the kind of white noise of the shower as well. Yeah. Because Eddie's done beautiful work showing that it's the signal to noise in the auditory system that defines whether or not a certain pattern of speech or auditory cue gets remembered.

3:07:23So when you have this in the background, let's just put this in the terms that we've been referring to this up until now. The thoughts that surface above that noise have a big sharp peak relative to the background. So it's the signal to noise, whereas certainly the opposite would be when you're on your phone and you're scrolling through and you're looking at all the thoughts and feelings and stuff of other people. So how do you capture your own thoughts in terms of which are and filter them through what's meaningful and what's not meaningful? is I think a really important question to begin with, and white noise background with very deprived, you know, visual stimulation, most showers aren't that interesting.

3:08:02It's white noise, blank walls, a few things that are familiar to you, so they basically disappear from your visual field, and the ideas that thoughts then can, that are constantly geysering up through your unconscious mind, can be captured because everything else is noise, Perhaps. This is a hypothesis. And maybe I'll put you in any together sometime and just be able to observe it. That's powerful. So, I mean, that's how we learn language. It's the error signals against the background noise. It's all, that's just how you fix stutter. It's, you create background noise. You increase noise to, which actually elevates signal in the auditory system, oddly.

3:08:43In any case. So you found that four and a half hours was the sweet spot of a focused work, but for some people it might be an hour. They might need to train up that level of focus. And if it's four and a half hours, it's not like that's like a lot of the rest of the day is feeding into like those being brilliant, right? So if it's four and a half hours of creative output time, then there's other periods where one can do have inputs that feed it, right? I think it's very good for people to have an awareness of what their energy, like what their peaks and valleys are of their energy throughout the day and then align their peak creativity work with their peak energy periods.

3:09:17I think it's really important to not be in a constantly reactive state. One thing I find fascinating is how people will have meetings scheduled everywhere and then fit their thinking between meetings and how liberating it is for them when they actually know block out their time for creative output time. It might be color coded in their calendar and then have meetings fit around there. So their day is driven by their self -expression, is opposed to by a constant of reactivity and just more and more and more and more. I think harnessing the undulation of stress and recovery throughout the day is usually important.

3:09:48I think having workouts throughout the day, even micro workouts during their day, meditation periods during the work day, everything being quality over quantity. We can get so much more done. And if you think about it, you talk about elite performing competitive teams. It's all about, like if you saw how much video analysis and time the Boston Celtics coaching staff puts into what ends up being like a 35 second clip that's shown to a player or the team. Like, it's so much work to then the most potent thing, right? It's like when you're in a lead because because like the players are doing something so intense, right?

3:10:31like it's all about quality. Not quantity. They're not training basketball 17 hours a day. They could not possibly play then. They're training brilliantly for like, you know, maybe an hour and a half a day brilliantly, but like with scientifically, or if they're competing, if they're playing for two and a half to three hour game, right? Then what's the way to optimize for that? You don't stack six hours of training in before or three -hour game? No. So much of it is body work and setting some tape and then being primed in the right way to remember what you're looking at on tape and then taking breaks and returning to it and then you're like understanding exactly how much load is in your body and your mind and how you're sleeping right and you're nutrition right and getting everything optimized and then being a peak performer when it's on.

3:11:16But we don't have that discipline as mental beings very often but we should in our creative process in our relationships right in the art of being a mom or a dad or a husband or a wife or a friend. Like why wouldn't we be cultivating ourselves and being brilliant at that? Like I really believe in quality as a way of life. That's another very important principle for me. We're either practicing sloppiness or practicing quality. If we do something shitty, then we're practicing shitty. And that will just how we can harness them, they're thematic into connectedness on the positive side. We can also really harness it brilliantly on the negative side.

3:11:50But every time we practice being sloppy and as we're using thematic interconnectedness to be sloppy and everything, I really believe that. So quality's a way of life is a beautiful way to practice quality everywhere because it will manifest everywhere. Right? Not in a way that's like robotic or constrictive, no in a way that's self -expressive and beautiful. Living one's life like a work of art. Yes, beautiful. Amen. Let's do it. Well, clearly you are. I'm in the fight, man. You're in the fight and you're setting an incredible example and you have your entire life which is remarkable and and so deeply appreciated.

3:12:31I have to say and now I will reveal this that when I started this podcast I had a short list of people that Would be kind of like pinch me guess not because I want the guest to pinch me But like wow like I can't believe I'm sitting down with blank and you were on that list. I've read the art of learning I've watched and read everything I could about your work and I did see the search for Bobby Fisher with the understanding that that's Accurate about certain things and probably inaccurate about others. So if people choose to watch that They should keep that in mind. It is Hollywood. Yeah More importantly In fact, this chance to sit down and do this and I have to say I I gain so much from your incredible precision, but also scope of observation in the world because I'm not a basketball player.

3:13:27I don't know how to play chess and and yet I've learned so much from you and your writings and your teachings and just the chances to sit down here and to learn from you. I know I'm speaking on behalf of myself and literally millions of people. I just want to say thank you for living your life like a work of art and for incorporating public education, which is what we're doing here, into this set of pursuits that you've been after, one after the other, but that are bound by this set of core themes. So without getting to abstract, I just want to say thank you so much for coming here for educating us, for making us think.

3:14:11I know it's going to change people's thoughts and behavior for the better. And the only question left is to say, would you please come back and talk to us again more? Absolutely, man. Thank you for what you've just said. It's an honor. And I've learned so much from this jam. It feels like the beginning of a beautiful friendship, so just the beginning. I feel the same way. I look forward to it. Thank you, man. Thank you. Thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Josh Waitskin. To learn more about Josh's work and to find a link to his book, the art of learning, which by the way I highly recommend, please see the show note captions.

3:14:45If you're learning from Ender and join this podcast, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. That's a terrific zero cost way to support us. Please also click follow for the podcast on both Spotify and Apple. And on both Spotify and Apple, you can leave us up to a five star review. Please also check out the sponsors mentioned at the beginning and throughout today's episode. That's the best way to support this podcast. If you have questions for me or comments about the podcast, or topics or guests that you'd like me to consider for the Huberman Lab podcast, please put those in the comments section on YouTube.

3:15:14I do read all the comments. And if you're not already following me on social media, I am Huberman Lab on all social media platforms. So that's Instagram, X formerly known as Twitter, Facebook, Threads, and LinkedIn. And on all those platforms, I discuss science and science -related tools, some of which overlaps with the content of the Huberman Lab podcast, but much of which is distinct from the content on the Huberman Lab podcast. Again, that's Huberman Lab, on all social media platforms. For those of you that haven't heard, I have a new book coming out. It's my very first book. It's entitled, Protocols, an operating manual for the human body.

3:15:47This is a book that I've been working on for more than five years, and that's based on more than 30 years of research and experience. And it covers protocols for everything from sleep to exercise to stress control protocols related to focus and motivation. And of course, I provide the scientific substantiation for the protocols that are included. The book is now available by pre -sale at ProtocolsBook .com. There you can find links to various vendors. You can pick the one that you like best. Again, the book is called Protocols, an operating manual for the human body. If you haven't already subscribed to our neural network newsletter, the neural network newsletter is a zero -cost monthly newsletter that includes everything from podcast summaries to what we call Protocols in the form of brief one to three -page PDFs that cover things like how to optimize your sleep, how to regulate your dopamine.

3:16:36mean. We also have protocols related to deliberate cold exposure, get a lot of questions about that, deliberate heat exposure, and on and on. Again, all available at completely zero cost. You simply go to hubrimminlab .com, go to the menu tab in the top right corner, scroll down to newsletter, and enter your email. And I should mention that we do not share your email with anybody. Thank you once again for joining me for today's discussion with Josh Waitskin. And last but certainly not least, thank you for your interest in science.