#2292 - Josh Waitzkin

25:24But in the general public, anonymous, and then all of a sudden, a movie star. And not a movie star in the sense that you're on the screen, but it's about you, which is probably even weirder. So you have these false expectations or false narratives of how your life played out and who the people and who the piece, and so everywhere you run into people, they have a version of you that they've seen that's not real. And they think they know you very intimately, which is weird, but they don't. Same with you, you're so public, right? Everyone probably, most people think they know who you are and what you think.

25:58But at least they know me from me talking. Yeah, that's a really good thing. They don't know me. Imagine if like Mario Lopez played me in a movie. You know what I mean? There's someone, someone, less handsome than Mario Lopez. And then you would have this thing where like, oh, you're the guy that, that guy played in the movie. And I'd be like, yeah, but it's not really, I don't, it doesn't really me. I don't really, I didn't have that problem. This is not real. That's fake. And also when you're a teenager, you're susceptible to all of the temptations. Oh, yeah. I mean, suddenly you've got groupies everywhere.

26:31And that's awesome. And it's a lot of fun. But it does not necessarily, it's not necessarily consistent with sitting for six hours at a time in competition playing chess. No, with probably destructive, too. Quite destructive. Yeah, which is interesting and you have to integrate all of that. How old were you when the film came out? 15. Yeah, that is a crazy time to get any kind of attention. Because you're, you're just getting testosterone for the first time. You're like, what is all this? Right? And your body's growing. And it was coming hard. Yeah. And you're becoming a man. Now also girls like you.

27:01Like what? What is this about? This is craziness. I already had a very strange life because, and I think like a foundational part of my psychology came from. So I started playing chess when I was six years old. By the time I was seven, I was the top -rated player for my age in the country. My first national championship, I got my ass kicked, which was tremendous. It was great last round. I lost the last round of my first nationals I lost to the guy who later became my best friend for many many years. David Arnett. And you say tremendous because was that like a jumping point for improvement for you?

27:35Because I didn't learn that I could win without getting my ass kicked first. I had to grapple with my demons. And I relate the year from then to winning my nationals. My first nationals the next year was when I really developed a love for chess. And I had to work very hard. And I didn't associate winning the nationals with talent or a smooth trip or all the bullshit that people can connect when they have, when they're, when they're called the prodigy from the outside. And I had to not have a term I ever related to myself at all. But like, I mean, these labels are put on from the outside. And if you win too fast to young, you can just develop this relationship to, this brittle relationship to success and to training and to everything.

28:20You don't realize that getting your ass kicked is a huge part of the journey. That's a problem with very talented fighters as well. A lot of very talented martial artists, they never developed the discipline to truly become great. Because like from the very beginning, they had, and whatever the advantage was, whether it's a speed advantage, a strength advantage, I mean genetics plays such a large part in martial arts success. You know, if you have someone who's an elite mind, who is incredibly disciplined and also has great genetics, you get a Mike Tyson. Well, that's amazing. You can have that combination.

28:58Yeah, that's what you're looking for. But if you don't have that, and Mike Tyson is competing in your division, you're fucked. Like you can be really disciplined. But like so genetics do have, they do play a factor. Circumstance is coaching. There's a lot of different factors. But if you're a real prodigy, and there are people out there that are just extraordinary from the beginning, I find that if success comes too quickly, you don't develop the metal to really push through boundaries and really push through boundaries. And then you get to reach new levels. Because the only way you get there is through, you have to, I think oftentimes training becomes, it becomes regimented, becomes something you do.

29:40You see incremental growth and improvement, you get confidence, but then when you compete, if you get your ass kicked, then you have to kind of reassess everything. Like, okay, was I working at 10, or was I working at 8, was I studying tape, or was I fucking off and calling girls? Was I paying attention to my training routine and my recovery? Oh, was I just training and partying? Like, what was I doing wrong? Like, what led this person to land those shots? What led this person to beat me? Yeah. And if you don't have those moments where you lose, I don't think you ever really achieve your true potential.

30:14Because you have to be challenged. And the best expression of challenge is total humiliating defeat. Absolutely. And so consistently, the biggest losses, the most crushing losses are what lead to the biggest wins later. Yeah, sometimes many years later, but it, like that. And people often, I remember I was giving a simultaneous chess exhibition for a charity one, you know, in my 20s somewhere, and this guy introduced his son, and he said his son hadn't lost a chess game in two years. And he was so proud. And it's just like, I knew it was a fucking train wreck. I mean, the kid, because the kid obviously just was only choosing people to play who he could beat.

30:55Right. Wouldn't compete up in tournaments, would only play down. And he was the only kid who didn't want to play against me in the simile. And his life was protecting this perfect, perfect thing, right? People who don't lose. So in my chess life, the interesting thing that happened in my psychology is that I was the top rated player for my age in the country from a young age. But I always played up. I always played against adults, except for nationals and worlds I played up. And so, and all of my rivals were targeting me, because I was the top seed in youth events. But their coaches and their were much stronger players than me.

31:31They were adult international masters, grandmasters, and they could see all my weaknesses. Psychological, technical, everything. And so if I ever made a mistake, the weakness was exploited until I took it on. And so I developed from really young ages relationship to training, which was, if I didn't take on my weakness, I got my ass kicked and I felt pain. And so not taking on my weakness became outside of my conceptual scheme. So from age eight, I just, and it can be a blind spot like today in life, like a criticism of me that something loved ones would have is that I'm always, I love training.

32:06I love pushing my limit as a way of life in whatever I'm doing, if it was chess, if it was fighting. Now it's, it's foiling, surfing, then foiling, and in the biggest waves that I can find. And like just if I'm playing at my edge, I feel, it feels beautiful. It feels like where I want to be. But the comfort zone doesn't feel beautiful. And it's me that works really well. But it's a big part of like my foundation in that was being eight years old and being targeted, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, my whole life. And I, I wasn't until recently that I realized that it was actually outside of my conceptual scheme.

32:39Not to take on the weakness because it was just connected to pain from such a young age as a competitor. There's no luck in chess. There's no fucking luck in chess. If you have, like if you, if you're playing chess, if you have an opening repertoire that's massive and you go into a game, there's one little place that there's a weakness and you don't want your opponent to go, he always fucking finds it. You don't know why. You can, you never like make a move and hope he doesn't see it or I'll play, let's hit this trap and it's not the best move but maybe he'll fall into it. No, that never works at a high level.

33:08So you just, you, you have to take your shit on. So you associate not taking it on with pain. Yeah, I don't anymore. I did young now. I don't associate it with anything. I just don't do it. Right. Yeah. And that's a try. That's a better way to handle it. To recognize it's a, there's a real process. There's the right way to do this. It's the only way to do this. And so don't even think about the other way. Right. But if it's, if it's kind of driving you, for me, I think it's healthier for me to recognize that pattern of myself and then roll with it as opposed you just not even see. Like that it's there.

33:42That it's there. Right. Yeah. Well, yeah, acknowledge. Well, you have to have acknowledgement of it because you have memories. Like when I'm cooking a turkey, I have to cook a world class turkey. I have a friend Jim that was asking me, Josh, what you have to do is cook a terrible turkey. Just cook an average turkey. You know, don't crush it. In other words, like don't it's an interesting thing when you become present to the fact that you have this like youthful story running through everything you do. And you can choose to live that way. But it's good for to be a choice as opposed to just driving you.

34:13It's definitely good for it to be a choice. It's always good for it to be a choice because sometimes life will, you know, there's a curve that you have to take and you have to put something aside for a bit or maybe forever. And you have to be able to transition to something else. And if you can't do that, then you'll be stuck. Yeah. And you see a lot of that with martial arts people. You know, most of us at a certain point in time realize that injuries are not just inevitable, but at a certain point in time you go, maybe I should stop doing this. Because training, no matter what you do, training is all about you using your body as a weapon and someone using their body as a weapon.

34:53Whether it's martial arts, like stand up fighting or whether it's jujitsu, it's the same thing. You're trying to isolate joints. You're trying to cut off blood and you're resisting all these things. And all the weak points get exposed. Shoulders, knees, ankles, back, neck, all those things get exposed. And if you're a meathead, like I've been in the past, you train through injuries and they get chronic and then you get to a certain point where you're like, what am I doing? And if you can't transition to something else, if you can't find something else to do with your time, then you're a cripple.

35:30Then you're getting your 10th surgery on your back and you're still trying to train. And then when I was like, look, Bob, he's crazy. He's got all his disc fused, but he's still training. Maybe Bob shouldn't be training. Maybe Bob's going to break something else now. Maybe it's time to move on to something else. And if you don't have this ability to constantly take on new projects and be excited by different things, you're going to have a shallow life. Like life has so many challenges and so many fascinating things to dive into. For you now, it's foiling. For a while, jujitsu, chess, like anything like that, you'll find something else like that.

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37:30You'll just suit. Just who was the art I had to I had to move on from not on my own terms because I am a ruptured male 405 disc trained trained on it like a crazy person for a couple years and then the doctors looked at that and they just like if you keep on doing this, you're not going to walk. Not going to be able to play well. It's a lot now. It's great now. Yeah. I mean it's a little foiling probably makes your core incredibly strong. Yeah, I mean I I've done a lot of stuff. I mean I spent you. I never had surgery. They all told me to but I didn't have surgery and I did tons of I mean I've been doing total immersion swimming and foundation training and everything I could do for the back and the foiling feels I'm training like I'm all in on this art and I'm doing it in a way that feels healthy in the back.

38:17I trained you did so now but like I mean I can't train all it all out like I'd love to when it was hard it was hard breaking to give it up. It was hard and I was so madly in love and all in with Marcelo and having that like I was at that part of the learning process which is where I get good at the learning process which is like toward the higher levels of something that's where I'm best at learning. Did you have a small injury that got worse over time or did you have a significant moment where you realize you heard it. I was so stupid. No it was significant moment. I was I was on position sparring.

38:51Marcelo was in that where that our school in New York it was a week before my my eldest son Jack was born. So it was bit over 13 years ago I we were Marcelo was was gone we I was at the school. Paul Shreiner was running class that day I think and there was this 240 pound blue belt visiting this is like ripped dude and Paul had everyone doing position sparring half guard position sparring and this guy was matched up against one of our guys. I had that hebristic invincible feeling about me in that moment I was just when you're feeling at your very best in martial flow and I was like and ended up where we were doing half guard position sparring where I was holding half guard and he was doing this past twisting the spine and it was so fucking stupid to do it.

39:37I mean I was just holding half guard in it in like in position sparring and I just felt it go. And then like you know it was I couldn't move it was fucking terrible. Did it herniate? Yeah and all the fluid gone. Oh yeah it was brutal you know it was and I remember so how was the disc now. I couldn't list I couldn't lift up my child for the first three or four months of his life. Then I had this strange period where I couldn't I couldn't standing and walking was the toughest but then I had this period like if I would go into the corner store to get milk like three or four months later I have to bike to the corner store and come back.

40:20And I can't explain this but I had a period where I couldn't walk but I could ski because of the angle so Marcel and I were going to the mountains out around New York just bombing down I just was trying to get my my fix in just skiing without turning was my goal. He was snowboarding I was skiing you couldn't walk but you could ski. Yeah I was very strange period. Don't fucking ski. I would have been a smart thing to tell me. Yeah I was dumbass for the first two years after the injury and then I and then I realized I had to. What is the disc look like now? I haven't looked at it in a long time.

40:55It doesn't trouble you anymore. It does trouble me I take care of it all the time. Yeah they replaced them now. Eddie Bravo got a fake disc in his lower back titanium disc and he's able to train again I know quite a few guys have got them. Algebraane Sterling got one in his neck and then went on to defend the UFC Bannemweights Championship several times. Yeah they replaced them all together. They didn't know that. Yeah they put artificial discs now. Yeah. You know your point about I remember I was studying back in the early 2000s studying Eddie's game. Setting the rubber guard studying all the Twister stuff.

41:33Just trying to wrap my head around it. Yeah he's got some wild stuff. If you're not used to it it's really interesting to watch people that just have never encountered it before. When I would go to train in other places like I live in Colorado for a bit and I trained at Amal Eastons and when I go up there there's so many positions that guys just didn't understand. They didn't know what was going on. They figured it out after a while. If he goes this way he's going to try to get me in a Twister. If he goes this way he's going to try to set this up but there's certain things that people do all the time.

42:01Like especially like put your hands on the mat. If you put your hands pull up Jeremiah Vance highlights. This is like one of Eddie's best black belts with rubber guard. And the way he does it is phenomenal. He has incredible leg dexterity and his technique is so sharp. And he catches people and stuff where they're like how am I even stuck here. Do you find that that's not yeah here it is. So watch watch how quick he sends things up. It's like right away you're in your foxville. Who does this who sets up a go go plot right off the bat and then triangles it look how he sets this up I mean this is insane and just massive crank on your fucking neck.

42:48Yeah. And he switches it to Omoplata re -rolls. Yeah. Omoplata crucifix finish. And everything he does involves this incredible dexterity and flexibility. There's like a whole series of highlights. That's not even some of his best stuff but he's able to do this to people that just don't know what he's doing. Like they don't understand some of these transitions. And this is just like one of the best expressions of the techniques that Eddie's developed. So like Jeremiah's fantastic at that. Like this this particular technique of being able to isolate the Omoplata and then secure a choke in the transition.

43:35He does this to everybody look at how he this transition right here brutal is so nasty. Yeah. It's so nasty and you just you don't know what the fuck you're doing how am I getting out of this. I mean he just hits this over and over and over on people and so many times and people go for an Omoplata people say okay I worst case scenario I might roll out of this and wind up on my back inside control. But not with him. Oh, this is like you're really close to checkmate from the moment the Omoplata set up from a position where you're defending. So you're defending correctly from the Omoplata and that winds up setting up this choke.

44:13What was your your how do you feel about Ryan Hall's game in MMA like he because he also is entering the MMA game. Oh he's been in the MMA game for quite a while. Yeah, I know. Yeah, but I mean when he entered the game he came into it with a repertoire that was so unusual for very unusual. Well, he's really really smart. Obviously. Yeah. And when you see his style the problem with his style in my opinion is it's so jujitsu heavy that he's vulnerable when he's fighting world class strikers like Ilya Toporia smashed him. Yeah. And it was a horrible horrible knockout. It's because Ilya's a legit Brazilian jujitsu black belt but also like way more technical on the feet.

44:53And when you're fighting a guy who's just any one mistake you make in striking it is a concussion. Anyone mistake boom a big hands come in a knees come in a kicks comment. It's like some things coming if you make mistakes. It's just like being a blue belt rolling with a high level black belt. It's the same thing. It's like you're just way too vulnerable. So his jujitsu is off the charts but his standup is not at the level of his jujitsu and that's just a real problem today. It's very you can kind of be a specialist if you're a striker. A striker like there's a few guys that can pull it off if they're really strong and they have good takedown defense like per error is the best example right to division world champion kickboxer comes over dominates becomes a two division UFC champion as a striker.

45:41Because every fight starts standing up but if you don't know how to strike every fight starts standing up so the beginning of the fight is always something you're not good at. And if you're getting tagged at the very beginning of the fight and now you're in desperation mode and all this person has to do it's an enormous space they're fighting in the octagon and the cage of the octagon actually makes it easier to get up if someone takes you down. So there's a lot of elements that wouldn't even exist if you had a flat surface with no walls so it's easier to defend. It's it's easier to move around because it's an enormous surface so you're now chasing this person and you might have already gotten concussion you might have already been rocked so you're already like a little out of it and now you're like desperado mode it's just a bad place to be that you have to have world class striking to compete at a world class level in MMA at this point.

46:30Yeah, you have to have you have to have something at the very least you have to be really good defensively really good but then you're just going to get picked apart on the feet. Yeah, your legs are going to get kicked you're going to get brutalized. Yeah, you have to be a really good striker and Ryan is one of those guys that's a specialist and you know he tapped a lot I mean tapped BJ pen like 10 seconds. He's tapped a lot of guys. He's when he gets a hold of you you're in this complex web of transitions and techniques that if you're just a regular MMA fighter trained just three times we cannot know what he's doing.

47:05Yeah, he's a brilliant guy. He trained at our school from in New York I think from 2010, 2012 that range and it was so interesting watching him in Marcello. Because Ryan had a huge amount of humility relative to Marcello and he wanted to train with him and Marcello was so curious about Ryan's game but Marcello never studied anyone's game. His core principle of Marcello is if you if you study my game you're entering my game and no one will be better at my game than me. And so when he in competition, he would that guys would be studying tape of everybody. He would never study one's tape never study one's fights but you watch them the fight before they went against him and he pick up on some kind of elemental read.

47:43He has this incredible he's what I call a low rep learner his ability to learn from a single repetition is just unbelievable. And it was really interesting watching him in Ryan because Ryan and Ryan just came and visited me my home a month ago and we were talking about how formative those training experiences with Marcello were. And it was like the way one way that Ryan described it is that he had this like layers of traps seven steps in. But Marcello had this deep understanding upstream of that and it was like watching Marcello put himself like right next to the fire like right next to Ryan's game.

48:20He wanted to learn Ryan the edges of a lot of Ryan's game but never enter it and his ability to play right at the threshold of all of Ryan's traps which he could pull almost everyone else into in just pure grappling. And but not just his ability to learn it felt like a cat putting its paw right up against the edge of a fire and just like learning about what heat was and deconstructing it but then not ever getting into the heat. And you'd watch Ryan will roll anyone else he just pull them into the fire into the spider web. That's fast. Marcello has a really incredibly deep almost semi and physical intelligence and his ability to learn from a single rep is unique in my observation.

49:05That's amazing. Ryan has had a ton of surgeries, hasn't he? Oh yeah man that dude has had such a bad look. What is wrong with him? What's going on? I mean tons of stuff with his knee with his hip with I think he's starting to come I think it's shoulder something now. He's still you know he said like 923 sir I think it was 23 I think he said 23 surgeries dude is good and the bad one happened with someone just falling on him and training. What was that? I don't know. I don't know that was a hip. Oh god. Yeah I don't know exactly what did you get done to his hip? Ask him. I don't know. Yeah he's had a lot of surgeries.

49:40Something just fell on him. So was he training with someone else and someone else? No he was training with somebody and he was taking it easy on them in a transition trying to not hurt them and then they just collapsed on him on his hip in a certain way. He just grabbed it. Oh yeah. Yeah brutal. When you were training did you do any weight lifting just to sort of slap a month to keep your joints strong and you're yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I did a lot of I tended to do weightlifting that was consistent with the movement patterns of the arts that I was training. So I would do a lot of biking lower body strength and then I would do I wasn't didn't have I think if I did it now I would do much more weightlifting.

50:20But when I was rolling usually twice a week six days a week and I was I would do cardio work in addition and then some like some resistance work but I didn't I wasn't like I'm doing a lot of work with the Boston Celtics now and I'm seeing how they're the last few years and I see how they're really their sports science team and their physical trainers are and like I don't think that I was when I was training to do I was at the level of for example the Boston Celtics in the West. In in the resistance training that I was doing supplemented and Marcelo didn't do weight training that was part of it when I was training with him we were like I was just he didn't wait for at all.

50:59No. How did he get those legs? He's rolls man and he was biking he was going to bike into that those bikes without without breaks we were biking all over New York. He bikes without breaks. Yeah. What do you mean what are they called? Fixed. Yeah. What is that? Fixed fixed wheel. Yeah fixed wheel. What does that mean? Just got no breaks. How do you slow down? You go slow. You gotta slow your foot on the edge of the wheel. What? Fixed wheel biking. I mean he loved fixed wheel around New York and I was biking then I switched over. Why would you ever get on a bike with no breaks? You control it. You're breaking.

51:34I'll show you videos. Show me. People love it but man in New York it's quite something. I mean in New York when you're going down a hill in New York City and traffic there's there's some adventures. You're going down a hill. How are you fucking slowing down? You don't go fast. Oh he was going fast. You're going fast. You know what I mean that's the you just got your you got to see a high hot. This isn't going to be a good video. This is the dumbest thing I've ever heard of in my life. This is something only white people would figure out. Let's have a bike with no breaks. The other thing was what I did after this which is that I when I fell in love with surfing I was one wheeling all over New York.

52:05Oh five ways to stop on a fixie. How about don't get a fixie. Get breaks you fucking idiot. This is the dumbest shit I've ever seen in my life. Why wouldn't you have breaks? Why wouldn't you have an option to control the bike better? This episode is brought to you by Life Lock. Tax season is always stressful. You have to worry about filing on time, making sure you have all the right documents, and getting all the deductions you possibly can. It's overwhelming. And by now I know we're all sick of looking at numbers. But here's an important one that you should hear. 16 .5 billion dollars. That's how much money and refunds the IRS flag for possible items that were made by the identity fraud last year.

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54:12Veteran, Founded and Veteran Lead, each Black Rifle Coffee purchase. You make helps them give back to those who serve our nation. Shop now at blackriflecoffee .com slash Joe Rogan with the code Rogan for 30 % off. Or visit your local grocery and convenience stores, Black Rifle Coffee, America's Coffee. The people that ride these, they argue they control it probably better. Look at all white people. Ridiculous white people that would be doing back flips with skateboarders. This is a big New York thing now. Of course it is. They like suffering over there. That's what they all live jammed on top of each other.

54:55That's a stupid. There's no good videos on that. That's a stupid thing. There's a movie I've seen. That's why it's all about it. Brakes, you fucking freaks. I last two years living in New York, I had fallen so in love with surfing. And I knew Ocean R to my next chapter. And I was so heartbroken not to be able to do it every day. So I got a one wheel. It was like the first generation, the one wheel of the Electronics skateboard to the one wheel. Yeah, yeah. It was like one of those. It just came out first generation. And I was just like thousands of miles biking, one wheeling all over New York.

55:21And then, but it was at the early one. If you push past the pushback, it had this pushback thing which would slow you down. But you could push past it and go faster. Push past the final pushback and just bottomed out. Wham. He's went 23, 24 miles. It's a fwack. Over taxi cabs. Under taxi cabs. There's three taxi cabs. Everything. The one wheel is like when you're a kid or sorry, the fixie. It's like you just skid. Oh, there is like a monster. You just like a monster. Yeah, I guess that's a better way to describe that. I was thinking about that way. Okay. So you can break. You can also reverse which you can't do on most bikes.

55:53You can ride backwards. It's really beautiful. I mean, I, this wasn't this. I never did it. Sorry. It's really beautiful to watch when it's done well. Okay. Well, that makes me feel better that you could just skid. Yeah. You could skid. You could stop. There's lots of things that can go wrong. Yeah. It's one of the most beautiful things. There are lots of things that go wrong. Foiling. There's a lot of f**king things that can go wrong. You're 35, 40 miles an hour on top of a guillotine. Big waves. I mean, dude, I learned how to foil two years ago. And it took me like three hours to get on that f**king thing for the first time.

56:26Because I've never served efoil or... Yeah, efoil. Yeah. Took me forever. Yeah. Just kept falling down, getting back up, falling down. Meanwhile, my kids, my youngest at the time, she was 12 humiliated. Yeah. She just hopped on it instantly and was scooting around and, like, she know how to do it immediately. But she, she, um, weight boards. Yeah. She does a lot of that shit. She's really athletic. But she was just humiliating me. And I was just like, I'm gonna prove it as well. Eat the f**k. Hours. I kept falling down, getting back up, falling down. And eventually I got it. And then once I got it, it was like easy.

57:00Yeah. Once I got it, I was like, oh, I see. Efoiling is the best... It's like, it's the best way to learn how to foil. Because they weigh 90 pounds, the efoils do. Like a high performance, big wave, a high performance foil. The whole set of a wave, four or five pounds. Really? Yeah. I mean, efoil, you have a battery. It's heavy and you've got electricity to learn how to... So you learn foil dynamics. Foiling, when your high performance foiling in big surf, you're... You're just on a... Like, if you're towing in, you're on a three and a half foot board. Um, no, no batter. It's not powered. It's just...

57:30Okay. If you're just riding hydrodynamics. Are you getting towed in to these waves? You're getting towed in. You can paddle in. Or, um, but if you're towing in to bigger waves, you're on a small board.

57:43Um... You're on a jet ski whipped in and then you're just riding. It's epic. It's frictionless. So beautiful. And what's the benefit of that above surfing? Is that you're above the water? You're above the water. You're not... Like the ultimate... If you think about the... The glaciest surf day possible. Um... The frictionless feeling. It's more frictionless than that. Because you're above the water. Yeah, I get that on the efoil. When you get cooking on the efoil, you're above the water. It's wild. It just... I always feel like I'm on a fall. I'm on a fall. I'm on a fall. Yeah. So just to get above the water, like, okay, we're going to do faster.

58:12As you're going to wipe out... The foil is interesting. It's like the ultimate receptivity. Because the foil picks up on underwater wave circulation. So it's picking up on lift when you're going very fast. And also when you're in a wave, the waves have... have upward circulation at the face of the wave and you get to the top of the wave, it accelerates. And so your foil is riding the underwater currents. And you're receiving it. So amplified. So tiny movements have big effect on the thing. So the surf movement will be very big and the foil movement is very subtle, the body mechanic. And then you learn to really crank into it.

58:47And it's limitless. So you can do open water foiling, crossing oceans on long high aspect wings, riding open ocean swells. And you can push high performance foiling. It's just like high performance surfing that the lines you can draw. The turns are epic. The Gs are crazy. So you're... It's all in on this. Oh yeah, I'm all in on this. Is this an everyday thing for you? Yes. Everyday. Say Sam is Jitsu. Six days a week. Twice a day if possible. Really? Wow. Yeah. Wow. Do you have goals? Virtuosity. Mmm. Yeah, I competed in my whole life. And so now I live... Like, I train the way I would if I was in a world championship training camp.

59:28That's hilarious. With foiling. Grail is doing that. Just a couple lunatics. How many other people are foiling? Like, they're training for a world championship activity. Yeah. But the interesting thing is that I... Yeah. I love it. It's... But all these arts to me are connected. That's the strange thing about my... Like, chess, Chinese martial arts Jitsu surfing foiling. To me, the fascinating thing when you get toward the pinnacle of an art is that you start to experience, at least in my... From my perspective, that the apexes of these arts are much closer to one another than lower down in the mountain of the same art.

1:00:08Mmm -hmm. So people who are virtuosos in various fields are often speaking a much more similar language than people who are at lower levels of the same art than they're training. And like, when I think about... About chess, I related to chess through... Through core principles. And those principles manifest in the martial arts. I remember that I had this... When I wrote my first book, the art of... Or my second book, The Art of Learning. It was about my experience of crossing over my level from chess into the... Into the Chinese martial arts. And I had this really interesting experience where I was giving a simultaneous chess exhibition playing 40 games at once in a charity for Tushen Moskler's Distrophy.

1:00:48But I was... At that point I've been training martial arts for two years. And I had not been... I'd kind of moved to... I was moved in the transition away from chess during that period. And I had this realization that I was winning these chess games, playing 40 games at once. But I was not playing chess. I was feeling flow riding space left behind. I was riding the energetic wave of the game like I would if we were flowing on the mats. But I was making chess moves. And I realized that these arts had become fundamentally connected. And then that became like an area of interest and of exploration.

1:01:20And I started making what I was doing unconsciously, more and more conscious. And now when I relate to... Like chess, I don't move chess pieces anymore. But chess is manifest in everything that I do. As is Jiu Jitsu. And as is... Like in the ocean arts, I'm manifesting these other arts, the core principles I've experienced through them all the time. And that's... One of the things that I've been puzzled by for many years is why chess is so fucking hard. Like chess has no luck. The best chess players in the world are so brilliant at what they do. I listened to your episode with Magnus Carlson. He was great.

1:01:56Yeah, it was cool. Like someone like Magnus, he's so fucking good at what he does, such a virtuoso. But if you look at the top 100 or top 1000 chess players, they're tremendously strong. But when they try to translate their ability to other fields, they often can't. And it's surprising. And I tried to figure out why for a lot of years. Because you think like if you're able to just be so excellent at something that's super hard, you could take something that's relatively easier and become very good at it. And I think that the reason that people often can't cross level over from one thing to the other is that they learn it in a localized language.

1:02:30So you can learn chess in a way which is very specific to chess. Like principles that are just chess principles. Or you can learn chess in a language which connects to all of life. And that won't slow down. It might accelerate your chess learning. But you can... But like, and if children are taught games like chess or gymnastics or musical, whatever else. So they're learning about that art very deeply. They're touching quality, they're pushing their limits. They're living a life of training as I know you value very much. But they're doing so in a language which connects to the rest of life. Then they're studying thematic interconnectedness while they're studying chess, what should you do or anything else.

1:03:12And then they're just learning the language of excellence. Yeah. And it's interesting because if you watch chess players, chess teachers teaching students, many of them don't do this. They teach it within like the confines of the chess board, like a prison. And if you learn chess that way, then it's like you're living on an island and the ocean around you is like prison walls. But if you study chess in a way that you're learning how each chess principle connects to every other art you could ever study, then there's web of interconnectedness forming in your mind. Then when you take on something else, you're able to cross the level over really naturally.

1:03:51In many ways that's my, that's a big part of my life's work is the study of that interconnectedness. Do you think that a huge, well, it had to be a huge factor for you that you were sort of forced to re -evaluate the way you interface with life when you became famous because of the film at 15. So childhood chess player become very well recognized in all sudden this movie. And now you have to kind of like grapple with things. And as you said, these challenges make you more complex person. And then your ability to sort of push chess aside and try other things. Do you think that's because of that?

1:04:32It has to be a factor in your, this desire to explore other things. Because you're kind of thrust into this thing where your thing is now changed. Your thing is now not just flowing and learning and getting better and doing battle with chess. Now it's image and groupies and this bizarre thing that you're living up to. And you don't like it and you want to escape it. And so you have to re -evaluate. And so this forced re -evaluation from a young age at 15 years old, this key developmental period as a young man, sort of opens you up to the possibilities of all sorts of different ways of living life.

1:05:10And all sorts of different things to do with life. Yeah, a language I use for this is the passage from the pre -conscious to the post -conscious competitor or artist. And like when I, up until 15, I would relate to myself as the pre -conscious competitor. I love chess, it was free -flowing, I love the battle, I love the competition. I love the ass kicking and the kicking ass. I just love the fucking battle of the thing. And then I had, I fell in love for the first time when I was 15. The movie came out after that. And I started studying existentialist literature. I started reflecting on the absurdity of it all.

1:05:45I started to become present to the fact that these were just 64 squares. And 32 pieces like I was spending my life studying this fucking box, wooden box, like the construct, the absurdity of being stuck in that construct became clear to me. And then I was becoming more and more self -conscious about how what I was doing was perceived by others. And I got lost in all of that. And in many ways, like the journey, like most people, like some people don't run into that for a long time. Like there are some chess players that just become insanely strong without ever reflecting on the absurdity of the fact that they're just playing chess.

1:06:18And that's a great liberation. Like the moment you become aware of the fact that you're mortal, that you can get your ass kicked, that your arm can break, that you can die, that what you're doing is absurd. Like you get locked up by that knowledge. And there's so many different forms that can take. Or the moment you, for example, Boston Celtics, like you're hungering to win a world championship, then you win the NBA finals. Suddenly, everything changes. Your relationship, your motivation changes. All the reasons you're doing it are no longer valid in some ways, because now you've accomplished the thing you always dreamed of and you have to discover.

1:06:47It's true in any form of competition or art in my experience, is that there comes a moment where someone's consciousness becomes more complicated. And they can't just return to the innocence they had before, because now they can't do that. You can't put it back in the box. It's out. So then you have to work through that journey, which is a lot of what I did from my late teenage years, leaving studying philosophy and then moving into other fields and sort of relating to art in a way that was integrating that self -awareness, integrating that sense of mortality. It's like when I, a very powerful example of this was I drowned in a pool.

1:07:27I guess like nine, ten years ago, I was doing hypoxic breath work, Wim Hof training in a pool. And never do Wim Hof training. Everybody, please, in a pool. Because you're, you're flushing the CO2 from your body, but CO2 is what gives you the urge to breathe. And so without carbon dioxide and you're being in your, you don't feel the urge to breathe. And so I, and I'd been a lifetime free diver, spearfishing from when I was five, six years old, but I was never doing hypoxic breath work before free diving. So if you're diving 80, 90, 100 feet, you're not flushing the CO2 from your body before you do so.

1:08:00So you have, you still have that, that sense for when you need to breathe. But I was in a NYU pool. I was just swimming 50 meters, 50 meters back and forth underwater and then doing this, this hypoxic worth breath work in between. And then I, my last recollection was being stretched out in bliss that those tingles through your body, you get from, have you done Wim Hof training? Yeah, those, you know, those tingles had those fucking tingles. And then I woke up 30 minutes later. What happened was that I blacked out. I was in the bottom of the pool for over four minutes after blacking out from shallow water blackout.

1:08:32Oh my God. Which should, it should be 45 seconds to a minute and you should be brain dead or dead because your post shallow water blackout. I know the time it was because there's an old man at the pool who saw me in the bottom of the pool and swam one lap at his lips for a little bit over a minute. So I'm a second lap. After his third lap, he said, let me, I'll check on him if he's still down. He thought I was holding my breath, but I was only holding my breath while swimming. So if I was still, I was fucking out. His fourth lap, after his fourth lap, he pulled me up. I was blue. Oh my God. My whole body was blue.

1:09:02My head was red. My body saved me. My training saved me and almost, and killed me. I sent all the blood to my brain. My eyes were blown out red, like bloodshot for three weeks at followed. And I, I remember waking up and having this, everyone looking everyone around me and like, what the fuck is everyone? What's going on guys? Like, what's the drama? I was, I was the fucking drama. And I spent that night in the hospital going through old chest variations trying to like test my brain. That's my brain ruined, like to remember things. Somehow my brain, maybe it's fucked up, but it seems like it'd be working pretty well.

1:09:36And um, but like, I can't, and that was also a big part of me realizing I had to spend my life in the ocean. Because like, I could feel the potential for some PTSD response. Like, I could actually feel the potential trauma response, like a cloud that was washing over me. Like, I could see the cloud coming and I just fucking decided not to let it in. And I got back in the water the next day. Um, and I, I just fucking, and I think that's a big part of my relationship with the ocean is having died in water. Um, I need to spend my life in the water. Did you have any sort of out of body experience or anything where you're gone?

1:10:13What's really fucked up about it is no. That's what's really what I went, just black. That's what's crazy is that I went, my last memory is of just tingles and bliss. And then waking up. And so if I hadn't been pulled out, there would have been no flash. No, no seeing my life pass before my eyes. No tunnel on the other side. Nothing. You know what's really fucking wild though? Is that many years later, I was doing this, um, this guy, Brandon Powell is a brilliant guy who's, um, a train, a top Wim Hof trainer and a trainer of trainers of his guys. And I was doing some retreats with teams of mine and we're doing some Wim Hof work.

1:10:58And he had this methodology of kind of accelerated hypoxic work where that he said, I'm not sure if it's true, but he said release DMT in your body and inhibited the DMT inhibitors in your body. And I did these journeys with him twice through pure breath work. No second Alex. And I experienced these two times months apart. I experienced one time I experienced the center of my consciousness as, where I, as my busted disc. And I experienced the world through like the electrical connections emerging from my, from my L4L5. It's very strange. And the other one was the only memory I have of that, and I'm not sure if this is accurate or some kind of illusion.

1:11:40But, um, I saw the drowning experience from above the whole thing. I watched the 20 minutes that I was on the, that I was on the bottom of the pool and then up in 25 minutes, and then on the pool deck, and I saw the whole thing from above. But that was like years after it happened that, so I can't explain that. Were all the people there, the same people? I don't know. My memory of it consciously from what actually happened is so fuzzy, right? Because I just died and came back, but, but, and then I saw, I saw it from above. I think I was mostly focused on the memory of myself. And, yeah, so I relate to myself now like I've, I've died, and I'm living, and I, I live with a sense of, um, gratitude and, and, uh, commitment.

1:12:27That's a big part of why we moved to the jungle with my family. It's like, I emerged from that with a commitment to living life as beautifully and deeply and truly, as I, as I possibly could into it, and to, um, not let anything slip. Just all in, isn't that fascinating that sometimes it take, again, it's the same thing as like loss propels you to a next level, even the moment in life where you realize it all could just go away like that. So fucking fast instantly. No warning. Just gone. No warning. I've done so many stupid fucking things like in these extreme sports I've done, you know, like so many times I almost died free diving or, um, but that one was different, man, because there was, like I didn't, it was just a, it was the crazy thing.

1:13:11It was just a technical blind spot. I just didn't know this thing about carbon dioxide. I didn't know I was taking a risk in that moment. I thought I was just taking a swim. Has, did you learn from other people who do Wim Hof breathing when they swim? After or did you know before? No, before. Oh, yeah. Who taught you to do this? Nobody. I did Wim Hof breathing on land and I was like, you know, fucking do it. Let's do it fucking on the swim right now. Sounds like a great idea. I think other people have done that and died. Yeah, they have. And most people who died from shallow water blackout are highly trained, um, Navy seals.

1:13:44Yeah. Because they're very good at inhibiting the urge to breathe, but you can get too good at it. Or you can just not feel it at all. The ocean is such a fascinating thing. It's so alive. Yeah. It's, uh, it's just a strange thing when you get in the ocean if you haven't been for a while. You, you climb in and you feel it moving around you and pulling and, and the water just feels different. It feels like it's a living thing. Like you're in a, you dunk your head under and you look at this world that's three quarters of the surface of the earth. And it's so, it's so vibrant. And you see people that are surfers that just get drawn into its spell.

1:14:26And it just becomes a part of their life is to ride that energy and to feel it. And, and the addiction that they get from, like guys like layered now guys like you, I know so many people that they, like Jaco, he won't leave San Diego. He doesn't even want to be in California, yes, but South, San Diego is the ocean for him. He has to be by the ocean. Yeah. Yeah, and you can't dominate the ocean. Oh, you have to receive her. Yeah. Yeah, you just, and if you have any, brittleness in your ego, she will kick your ass until you just blend. I know you're a favor, you're in favor of optimizing training and finding ways to learn things quicker.

1:15:08Would wave surf pools, those crazy ones like Kelly Slater style, wave surf pools, where they have, that would give you like way more reps, right? If you're surfing for sure, wave pools of revolutionized surf training, because for foiling, you have the ocean. And foiling is much more abundant. Like this surf community is quite scarce in some ways because you have to, you can only surf in specific kinds of waves. And like if you, if you're trying to make one turn, you might not see that section again for two years. You can't replicate conditions in the ocean. Foiling you can, because you can pump a foil, you can drive it down, let it float back up and drive it down.

1:15:43Or you can whip yourself on it behind a jet ski into a certain kind of wave. So if I want to work on like a certain turn, I can get 40, 50 reps in a given day while surfing pre -wave pool, you couldn't at all. So most great surfers, I would, my are brilliant low rep learners. Because by necessity in the ocean, you don't get tons of reps. So my observation, the greatest, that competitive surfers in the world are excellent at learning from one or two reps, like Marcel Garcia is on the mats. I'm not, I'm not naturally a great low rep learner, I'm a higher rep learner. Foiling is, what one could say, it's, it's, it's more technically complex than surfing, because it's everything that surfing is, but also you have a foil, which has lift dynamics and a tail, and you can change the foil shape, the tail shape.

1:16:30If you change the angle of attack on your tail by a quarter degree, it changes the whole feel of everything. It's super technical. And so many ways one could argue that it's harder. I would not that it's harder. These, any of these arches are infinitely deep, because you can refine anything forever. But it's more technical shit to deal with, but it's more trainable, because you can replicate conditions. Like you now can in wave pools. Wave pools for surfers now, you can, you can hit the same section 30, 40 times. So I do, I do think it's an incredible, it's incredible. But the interesting thing is that most surfers of this generation aren't, they don't train in the same way that chess players do, or judicisers do, because it's a low rep art, that you can't replicate conditions.

1:17:16And so surfers aren't, most surfers aren't constructed psychologically in a way that they will take advantage of wave pools the way a judicist guy would. That's interesting. Like drilling, like you do. That's interesting, because they're accustomed to just taking what the ocean gives you. You can't just take a low rep learner and tell them to live like a high rep learner. It's a different fucking thing. Right. And it's very interesting to me that, so surfers crossing over to foiling is very interesting, because they, a lot of surfers, some surfers do it, and they just, they're all in, and they, they want to take it on.

1:17:48A lot of the high, that, that, that surfers in the world are crossing over. But it's a different lifestyle. The ones who cross over the ones who can embrace the high rep training life. Hmm. The one who can adapt, yeah. Yeah. That's the low rep training thing with surfing, I never really consider it, but that doesn't make sense. You have to be able to optimize, you have to be able to take advantage of each one of those things and pick it up pretty quickly. You have to. Especially in the early, think about like learning as a, as a kid. And then like, everything you're exposed to, the, the oceans always moving, always changing.

1:18:17But if you can, like, learn from one rep and burn it in, then that just, well, in Jiu Jitsu, for example, you can say, I'm going to drill this on bar, 40 times to a, 40 times, like this afternoon, hundreds of times, thousands of times over the next two weeks, right? So you can get as many reps as you need. It's not true in the ocean. Right. Yeah, it totally makes sense. Why do you think that children learn quicker than adults? Yeah, beautiful question. I think it's, I think a lot about unlearning, right? So my life's work is in learning, and I think a lot about unlearning because so much of what high level learning is, is being unblocked, which is getting rid of the blocks.

1:18:57The egoic blocks, the false constructs we have, the fucking bullshit we put on everything we do, trying to control the situation we should just embrace, the lack of, children don't have to unlearn that. They haven't learned it in the first place. So they're unblocked. Like my little boy, Charlie, learning how to surf was so beautiful to watch. He just, like, he grew up in the ocean, he grew up in the jungle in ocean, and he just, from a young age, was swimming and tumbling, and we made a game of tumbling. And then when he first got into surfboard, it was, like, he wasn't, we didn't make a technical.

1:19:28It wasn't like he should telling him what to do. Like he could be right foot forward or left foot forward. It wasn't, we didn't impose things on him. He just, like, danced on the board and would find his way, and he started doing things that were very technical, that he would just create. It was pure playfulness. While if you watch people come to a surf, like a surf break, who are, like, New Yorkers who travel down for five days, and they've got all this gear, the gears amazing, they've got, like, gloves, and booties, and knee guards, and, like, everything has covered white face. Everything is just, like, not a part of their body is designed to touch the ocean.

1:20:00They're trying to keep the ocean away. And they're like, they want to be super -controlled about everything they learn. They're like, everything is so regimented in their minds, but they're trying to control their relationship with the ocean. But the way to learn on the ocean is to not control it, to embrace it, to listen, listen to it, to observe it, to feel it, to, like, let it envelop you. Right? Right. Our kids will just play. They're not afraid of failing. They'll, they'll just, like, the moment a kid becomes afraid of looking bad, like, you see that wash -over kids when they're like, nine, 10, 11, 12, different ages, and they become, oh, they don't want to fall.

1:20:34They don't want to look bad, and then, then that's when they get locked up. The freedom of, I mean, to me, a lot of what, like, the beacon is, is, as adults, is being the post -conscious, discovering the post -conscious freedom as a learner. Like, how can we learn without the ego of blocks, right? Without having to look good. So if you're crossing over, like, if you're a world -class striker, and you're getting on the Jutsumats and you're getting your ass kicked, or if you're a great Jutsu fighter, and you get onto an MMA gym, and suddenly the guys can just beat the shit out of you. Like, having, or a great surfer switching over to foiling, right, or a great chess player moving into the martial arts.

1:21:09So you're a fucking, or if you're like training in some esoteric, you know, Chinese martial art, like I was, and then you're moving into the Jutsu match, and you might have some ego, but you're just tapping out to everybody all the time, right? And, like, having the freedom to learn without ego of blocks is, and I actually think that culturally, this is one of the most important things that we need to cultivate, because we're living in a world now where the pace of technological disruption is. Accelerating so fast. I know you've done a bunch of explorations on this with, with, with, with, just, and Harris and others in, in terms of what AI is bringing into society.

1:21:44It's a bit of a big focus of mine for many, many years, and it's an area where I'm working. I think that, that we are going to be living in a world where AI is better at everything than we are. Right? So if you think about it in the context of chess, I grew up in the world of where chess was crossing over into the computer room. So computers are first, like I, I began playing chess in the pre -computer era, computer chess era, then computers entered, and I initially was very resistant, romantic to it. And I remember, I, I, at 19, I sort of, I, developing chess master, this computer chess program, and I developed this academy of mine for the next 10 years that followed teaching the human side of chess through computers.

1:22:27But when it first, they first approached me, I didn't want to do it because I, I felt like it was going to disrupt. It was going to kill the beauty of, of, of human chess, the art of chess, which is so much about imperfection. And then, but like chess players, when I grew up, had to sit in the unknowing in, in tolerance, they had to have a, tolerance of cognitive distance. You might, I might study a chess position and go three months without knowing what the solution is. Right? So our psychology has had to be constructed so that we could sit in cognitive and emotional distance for long, long periods of time.

1:22:56Days, weeks, months, sometimes years. Now chess players can click on a button and they have got a supercomputer right by their side. We'll tell them the answer instantly. It's interesting to think about how different that is psychologically and the different kinds of people that draw us in. But what happened then is that you had deep blue entered the game like super computers and then you had the movement of AI entering into chess. And we had AlphaGo and then Alpha0, which came out of DeepMind. So, Demis Hasipus was the developer of DeepMind. He was a child of chess friend of mine. So Demis and I from age 11 on were good friends and we had dialogue about the birth of DeepMind, which was this AI company he began.

1:23:34And then he developed AlphaGo and Alpha0. And to give a feel for what Alpha0 did in chess. Alpha0 was able to, without being taught anything about humans playing chess. No education of like the history of human chess playing within three hours of experimentation was stronger than any human or computer in history. So imagine your life's work like you know I was a pretty good chess player. Like someone like Magnus Carlson is much much stronger chess player. He's the world champion. Gary Kasparov, Anna Swede Carpov, Bobby Fisher. I think about people who are world champions. Alpha0 within three hours of experimentation without being taught anything was stronger than them.

1:24:10So like we really need to say the strongest AI engine in the world today is rated 3 ,700 ELo. So to give a sense for what that means when I was nine years old my rating was like 1900 or so. Magnus Carlson is like the strongest, you know the strongest human players in the world now are rated somewhere about 282850 ishilo. The strongest AI is 3 ,700 ELo. So just like the absurdity of the fact the gap between like a strong nine year old and the world human world champion is the same ELo wrap graph as between the world champion and the strongest AI. Wow. It gets so hard for us to really wrap our heads around what that means.

1:24:49That means that everything like chess players had a front row seat to that happening early. And I listen to some of your dialogues with these guys and I could feel you and them trying to grab with like how to communicate what it means to to have these these insanely powerful intelligences in the world. And I think like if you can imagine like an art like chess having millennia of development people studying it like you trained Jiu Jitsu right so imagine people's training 10 hours a day for 30 40 years being the greatest human in the world at it. And then something can come in within three hours of experimentation be much stronger than that.

1:25:27And imagine that's going to be in fucking everything. Right. So like we have to be like children in how we learn we're going to have to like release the egoic relationship that we have to our level to our knowledge to everything. You know the great you know Thomas Coons structure of scientific revolutions. Yes. Right. So like you think about what happens what the human has to do to the internal resistance we have to overcome to embrace the new paradigm. So I say you're a Newtonian physicist right you've been studying physics your whole life you've got tenure you've got 40 50 years of knowledge built up everyone revires you.

1:26:05And now there's this new thing quantum mechanics enters the picture right like to embrace this new thing is to realize is to admit to oneself and everybody else that your life's work is kind of you have to release it it's wrong it's old right this new paradigm is but we resisted individually and ego we and society right because we will fight to the nail to maintain our conceptual schemes. That's one of our strongest drivers of all humans right. And so I think we're moving into a world now where you're going to have 37 38 hundred E .Lo rated everything kicking our ass at everything. So we have to become like children to go back to your question in my opinion and how we relate to learning right we can't a decision making right like when we think about like social media.

1:26:54Imagine a 38 hundred E .Lo rated network to imagine net million a million networked 38 hundred E .Lo rated super super super intelligences utilizing everything that they can gather about you on social media to manipulate to manipulate you to do whatever that it wants or whoever is controlling it wants. It can have you do anything right but we have to like it's so hard for us to admit that we are the ant relative to the human right like we are the ant we have to have that humility. And one of the things that I think that that's the most important question today as that we face as a species is like what do we do.

1:27:37Well we won't know until it happens and we will become a different thing we will have to admit that we are no longer the apex intelligence on the planet. We will have something that's akin to an artificial life form that's far superior to us in reasoning access to resources logic it'll be far more technically proficient it'll make far better versions of itself probably pretty quickly. They've already seen A .I .s duplicating itself it's not being prompted to do this but when you say we don't I mean I would argue we should operate as if it's already happening it's an ability it is happening but it hasn't completely transformed life yet.

1:28:23Right it's emerging right now it's about to it's a yeah it's a god it's a god that's emerging and if it's not a god yet it'll be a god in 50 years. It's just it's going to be attached to quantum computing it's going to figure out ways to implement better strategies for utilization of energy resources it'll be much better at everything than we are. Yeah. And then the question is will it be used to manipulate us will it be used to control populations will it be Elon says his estimation says there's an 80 to 90 % chance it'll have a radically positive impact on society at that large that a 90 % likelihood that it'll radically improve the quality of everyone's life.

1:29:13But then there's 20 or 10 % that it will not and that will be imprisoned. It's like 10 % possibility of the matrix you know 90 % possibility of a technologically inspired utopia. My feeling about it is that I mean there are places where it's going to be incredibly it's going to be beautiful like just how computer chess raised the level of a human chess game chess players right and now AI chess has made chess players much much stronger. And in part of it is because great chess players are partially great because they have had their excellent knowing we're not to look right great chess players don't actually look at more they look at less but look in the right most potent directions.

1:30:02What's fascinating is that AI entering the picture has forced really strong chess players to unlearn where they've been correct to learn not to look. So in other words areas where they were well trained not to look because humans couldn't play those positions AI can now play those positions and actually those are the right positions to play they're the objectively correct positions to play. But now humans studying with an AI can be much better playing those positions right and so like for example I'm working on this fascinating project called Lila science which is focused on combining cutting edge science the best scientists in the world and cutting edge AI to try to have huge break.

1:30:43But now I can take through in material science and life sciences and now that can only be done in my opinion with just best best best best in class safety practices and in my view that involves having a higher level AI running safety then you have running the actual science. When you say safety like what are you referring to making sure that we don't do that doesn't go wild that you create that you don't create things that get out there that could be terribly destructive. I think that the part of the AI race that's happening is that people are driven by ego and there's a there's like a game theory of a race going on and when you have a race everyone just running running as fast as they can but they're not if they slow down to think about what's safe they might fall behind in the race.

1:31:32And I believe ethically if we're in the AI scene at all then we must be developing safety practices that are making it responsible. That's a very logical perspective unfortunately we are in a race and that's where it gets weird right and because we're not just an race in America right we're in a race internationally and the consequences of losing the race are grave it's akin to the consequences of losing the Manhattan project of not coming to the bomb the first not being the first to implement a bomb which is really crazy to think. But I think it's that on steroids I think it's the Manhattan project on steroids because I think it has the if if used in the wrong way it has the possibility of completely imprisoning society all you have to do is lock down resources food power electricity everything and you you put society at a complete halt if you can figure out a way to completely disable grids and you know every car has a computer.

1:32:37In it now most cars are connected to Wi -Fi it's most new ones I've at least an option to connect a there's a way that someone can connect to your car and this is this is crazy in phones everyone's reliant completely on your phone. There's AI in your phone now who knows what what could happen if that could hijacked you know there's a guy named Robert Epstein who spent a lot of time analyzing. what the impact of curated searches can do to presidential elections, to public opinion on things, and that when you're getting a search, when you're using Google or some of these search engines, you're getting curated search results.

1:33:20If you look for specific political opinions, political positions, you will get a curated result that is oftentimes skewed in whatever ideology, towards whatever ideology the people that programmed it, are aligned with. So if you Google something about Donald Trump, you will have as many negative responses they can possibly throw to the front of the line, it will take you page after page after page to find what you're looking for, but you'll be confronted immediately with negative stuff. Now, if you're a person that's in the middle and maybe a person that's undecided in electoral process, in an electoral race, you can be swayed in a significant manner and he estimates it's high as 30 to 50 percent of the people that are on the fence that are sort of undecided voters can be swayed by search result engines, which is kind of crazy.

1:34:19And that's just an algorithm. That's just something that they've divided. But this is not like a purposeful changing of narratives in order to implement whatever strategy they think would be the best for them financially, whether it's a central bank digital currency or a social credits course system or something where they could completely control behavior and have your behavior locked up to your bank account, locked up to your ability to make a living, your ability to travel, that's spooky stuff because that's all AI. If AI can be, if someone figures out the best version of AI that can traverse these boundaries that we have with encryption and with grids and computer systems and just completely lock everything down, we're fucked.

1:35:10Yeah, that's why I don't, you know, when I hear people say things like that, 80 to 90 percent positive, I feel like they're jumping to the destination without thinking about the journey to it because the journey to it is going to involve so much disruption, so much pain, so much chaos. And I think what you just said about grids and everything is true. I mean, you think about how many people had the ability to disrupt in that way 15 years ago, handful of countries, right? Now it's going to be hundreds of thousands or millions of individuals who just have access to supercode, supercoders, right?

1:35:43And so how could it be 80 to 90 percent positive when there is just going to be limitless humans who have the ability to disrupt armed with 3 ,800, elo rated coders that can do anything you want, hackers. It's just like insane. In the hands of broken people. It's much easier to destroy than to create, right? You can create for thousands of years and you destroy instantly, right? So it only takes one terribly destructive act or a handful of them to overcome all the positive. I don't believe that that 80, 90 percent thing is right. I think that there are areas like science where we could easily create materials that could have a massively positive impact on the climate.

1:36:24We could have life science breakthroughs that eliminate cancer, eliminate diseases, make the human lifespan hundreds of years. I think those things could happen, which is great. I also think that we could be manipulated into doing increasingly destructive things. And we could have horrific things happen like the great. There's a guy who was very brilliant in the espionage world years ago who said to me, he said to me, he's someone who would know. And he said, you know, Josh, what you don't realize is a strong AI. And this was years ago, armed with the information that the social media companies have about you.

1:37:07Could convince 99 percent of Americans to move to Alaska or Antarctica or anywhere within two weeks easily, easily. Easily. I mean, just like it's so hard to have the humility that we are the ant relative to the human. Yeah. Right? If you have a 3800, I'm just using that rated intelligence, trying to manipulate you and it's armed with everything. I mean, humans can manipulate you with what's on social media. Yeah, with a British accent and an infomercial. Yeah, no problem. Show some leg. You're gone. Yeah. I mean, it's just so hard to have the, so we have to have the, like the real humility that we are manipulatable.

1:37:48And a super intelligence, which is out there and there are humans controlling the super intelligence so far. Maybe that will end. So I personally feel I know everyone should get the fuck off social media. I just think it's, I think that's the most important thing because everything that we're feeding in to, I've never been on social media. I made that, there's an a long time ago. Really? When did you make it? I was never on it. I made it, right? When, first, I remember when like my space came out like, what did you, what did you think at the time? Is it fucked that? Really? Yeah. Um, I didn't, I didn't, it felt off to me.

1:38:21It felt like something I didn't want to be involved with. I didn't, not, I'm not saying that I was prescient and I saw everything that would happen. But I never, there was some people who were impersonating me on social media. But I was never on any form of social media. And, and, and good for you. Yeah, I, I mean, I'm on everything but TikTok. TikTok is fucked. It's hilarious. I was, when I was flying here, I was listening to your, your conversation with Tristan Harris -Walls, the dude next to me was, was scrolling TikTok on the plane. And it was amazing. Listening to this dialogue here and watching him just like, watching it happen again.

1:38:55Hour and a half straight. It's like, boom, boom, boom. It was incredible. I've never actually seen someone fucking do that. It was the most brainless thing I've ever seen in my life. It's so brainless and so addictive. And so manipulative. Like you can just, just, just, like, you can guide you to anything you, but why don't we, this one thing I kind of disagreed with you on this talk where you, you were saying that you just don't think that humans are going to do anything about it until we're, we're forced to. But I, I don't know, man. I think that what if we just wake the fuck up and take ourselves off of this thing that can be used to steer us anywhere, this other humans or AI wants to steer us.

1:39:32Like, why don't we just remove ourselves from it? Well, that's a very rational perspective. That's just fucking do what people aren't rational. But why don't we help people be rational and just, just, you have to change the whole way they interface with life. And that's a big ask. It's not as simple as logically social media is bad for you. I'll stay off. The, the small dopamine hit that you get from opening up a reels, just scrolling through and seeing people get knocked out and car accidents and big boobs. That is for whatever reason, much more compelling than the idea of possessing autonomy and the idea of, you know, having the ability to completely remove yourself from the thing that everyone is addicted to, which is likes and engagement and getting an outrage.

1:40:27The algorithm showing you things over and over again that outrage you. It's, it's so compelling to be born. We're so averse to being bored that at any time when nothing's going on, you pick up your phone, you start scrolling at any time. You just get nonsense, just fed into your head at any time. But think about like the first time that somebody experiences jiu jitsu, right? They get on the mats and they're, and they realize they might have some hubris there, an athlete, maybe they've been some stand up, maybe they haven't, they're football player or whatever. And they suddenly are like a fish out of water.

1:40:57They're flopping on the sand, right? And their joints are being popped and they're being choked out. And the humility that they experience, right? Like I think we need to culturally experience that humility before it's too late. Because that's what, that's how manipulatable we are. Just how like a first date grappler is on the jiu jitsu mats against a decent fighter, a decent grappler. Like that's how helpless we are next to a 3800 elo which exists. It'll be stronger than 30. I'm just saying that's where it is now. It'll be much stronger than that tomorrow. Once it's attached to quantum computing, it literally would be a god.

1:41:35Yeah. And we're about to experience the most bizarre transition that I think any human civilization has ever experienced. And you know, it's electricity times a billion. It's, you know, computers times a billion. It's something completely different. And we're going to adapt to it. We're going to have to. We're going to have to figure it out. It's just what will that be like? What will life be like when we adapt to it? That's when things are going to get strange. I think the 80 to 90 % improvement of life experience, I think what he's talking about, quality of life experience. I think what he's talking about is it'll make allocation of resources much more efficient.

1:42:21It'll be much easier to get water and health services to third world countries. It'll be much easier to keep power on in places. It'll be much easier for people to get sanitation, medicine, things along those lines. And then starving, poverty, nutrition, all those things could probably worked out in a far more efficient and a far more effective way. Then the problem is control. That's the problem. The problem is human beings, every single government, every single leadership position, everything involves control. The CEO controls the company. The president controls the country. There's Congress.

1:43:05There's senators control control control. Everything is control and then financial benefit from that control. That's where it gets scary. Because whoever is actually programming this thing, as we've seen with Google's AI disaster, when they program their AI to show you images of Nazis and it showed you multicultural, multi -ethnic, multiracial Nazis. Instead of actual, like what is it? No, Nazis with fucking dueling scars on their face, hard looking, scary German dudes. That's Nazis. These are not Nazis. This is a fever dream. This is some nuttiness that you've put your DEI nonsense into an artificial version of what the past is.

1:43:52That's crazy. You can't do that. Because if you start doing that with everything else, then we have a distorted version of reality itself by the most potent intelligence that we currently have at our disposal. That's nuts. The question is what should we do? As individuals, I know you're having dialogue with people who have a lot of ideas about the society. I'm thinking about it on the individual level as well. Your question about children and learning. I feel that there's something about having that beginner's mind, which is so liberating. Yes. Right? It's very difficult for adults to release their egoic addiction to what they do, to their habits, to what props up their identity.

1:44:39But I think that what we could do is take on thinking, take on learning, take on the art of decision making, for example, with a beginner's mind. For the world that's coming, like you think about skating to where the puck is going, not to where it was or where it used to be. Right? So what does it mean to be a human in the world that we're a year or two or three away from? Right? Where there's a super intelligence out there that can manipulate us. Where so many jobs are lost. Well, let me throw that at you. What do you think the world will look like? What do I think it will look like? Yeah. I think that we're going to have thrillingly exciting discoveries being made.

1:45:21We're going to have problem solved that we are as humans unable to solve. And so there'll be like amazing technological innovations that are going to make things much more convenient. I think there'll be huge life science breakthroughs. I think there'll be huge material science breakthroughs. I think there will be wild competition for who controls it. I completely agree with you about that. And I think that as that unfolds, it's going to be really messy. I think that there's going to be like unbelievable amounts of jobs are going to be lost and people are going to not have jobs. So what the fuck are they going to do?

1:45:59Right? So this is part of what I'm describing. People need to train at the ability to recreate themselves. Right? Like how some people can move from one art to another and others can't. I think we have to train at the art of rediscovery. Right? So I think we're going to be tested as a species in our ability to recreate our identities and to live in a state of dynamic flux of embracing new paradigms. Paradigms are going to be shifting all the fucking time. The pace of change is going to be radically accelerating for the rest of our lives. The rest of our lives, right? So if that pace of change is accelerating, then we need to have the ability to recreate ourselves as things shift.

1:46:35We all know that you can't be solving the problem that was important in a fight a minute ago. Right? It's a different fucking problem than we have right now. Or in a chess game an hour ago or 10 minutes ago or one minute ago. As a society, we need to be solving the problems that are and that are coming, not the ones that were 10 years ago that were emotionally addicted to. But humans don't fucking do that. We tend to cling to our ideas, the decisions we made, then we try to justify our ideas. We cling to our identities. I mean, I think that this question of identity is a really important one, whether it relates to a belief system, a decision you've made, like this idea of humans fighting tooth and nail to maintain our conceptual schemes is something like you think about someone who has like what one might frame as a fear of success, right?

1:47:22Like that's a term people use, fear of success. The way I understand fear of success is that why do people undermine themselves when they are close to something that they want, right, to a breakthrough they earn? I think the reason is because if their conceptual scheme, if their identity is in not being the person who wins the big game, right, or who succeeds, it is more terrifying to succeed than it is to give up that old identity. That's a core driver of human psychology, right? In competition, that's a lot of what we do, right? We plant identities in people, tells in people, little egoic addictions in people.

1:47:58Then we exploit the mind being stuck there because it's not dynamic, it can't keep on moving, right? Robert Persig, my favorite, the most important philosopher in my life, Robert Persig wrote that in the art of motorcycle maintenance. Have you read that book? Yeah, awesome. He was a really important person in my life. I can tell you an interesting story about him. He's the idea of dynamic quality, right? I think we have to live in a state of dynamic quality, not static quality, right? You think about the front of the freight train, surging through space time versus sitting in the restaurant car.

1:48:30We want to be strapped to the front of the freight train as realities unfolding and adapting to the new realities. I think we need to build the way of life that allows us to do that, right? I have a lot of ideas about what that way of life looks like. I think if we don't do that, then we're going to be dinosaurs in a fucking world with the coming coming. It's going to blow us the fuck up. So we need to create the ability to reinvent ourselves, to be creative, to adapt. So what do you think happens with all these people that lose their jobs? Because most people believe that some form of universal basic income, people that studied this believe that some form of universal basic income is inevitable and necessary.

1:49:12I worry about that psychologically, because I worry about people being dependent upon checks from the state and not having agency and not having a personal sense of worth. I think people identify with what they do. If someone's a great mechanic and they have a great relationship with the people that bring their cars to them and they enjoy being able to fix things and help people, they identify with this. This is a part of who they are. They're a person who fixes cars. It works on cars. If that's gone and now also they just have a check, who are they? What do dudes do when they have nothing to do?

1:49:52Well it depends on the dude. Some people learn new things. Some people get excited and some people, there's going to be people that take advantage of it in a very positive way. There's like a real living wage that you get from the government where you really don't have to worry about your housing anymore. You don't have to worry about your food. I think that would be, if you were an ambitious person, that would be amazing. So as then you could dedicate yourself entirely to what you love. Whatever that thing is and just really dive into that and let that become your focus in life. We're accustomed to believing that survival itself is the primary driving force.

1:50:31Food and shelter is the primary driving force for this intelligent species of human beings. But part of me says why? Why is that? Why does that have to be your driving force? If we have unlimited resources, which assumingly will, assumingly we will with AI, if it's implemented correctly, we have unlimited resources in terms of your ability to never worry about being hungry, never worry about shelter. You would hope that what people would do then is pursue their dreams. But some people don't have fucking dreams. Some people, they've gone too far down this journey of life with a rigid mindset and a very limited perspective.

1:51:12And now they're forced to change. And many will change, but many will not. And that's where it gets weird. Because then you have a whole entire class of society and enormous swath of human beings that are addicted to TikTok that now get checks, have no hobbies or interests, live off garbage food, and they're lost. Yeah. And they're being told, probably, they're really manipulated that someone's responsible for this, that these people need to be taken down and shut down. We need to return to our old way of life. You give enormous potential for unrest. Well, I think that, like, in dialogue that I've had over the past 10 years or so with people who are AI optimists, there's this jump to the utopian future, right?

1:52:04Where land of abundance, no more resource scarcity, everything is beautiful. People have the ability to study art and poetry and opera. And they don't need to work anymore. They don't need to be grinding anymore. They can think about philosophy, et cetera, et cetera. That's the argument. That's just like, assume that that would be a positive end. I'm not so sure. I think that we have some other energies flowing through us that we won't want to express. But let's just like say that that would be great. The problem is getting there, right? So in chess, there's this interesting dynamic between strategy and tactics all the time.

1:52:37We need to liberate ourselves to be strategic and to think ahead, like, think about what would be the ideal place to go. But then we also have to get the tactics, right? The math, right, to get there. We can't just hang our queen or hang our bishop or hang our rook on the path to our strategic dream, right? We need to integrate execution with strategic dreaming. Because often if we're thinking too much tactically, we can't see the long -term plan we want to utilize, right? Like the end result we want to move toward. And so when I think about this path of AI, I think there's going to be so much disruption along the way to that place of resource abundance and utopia.

1:53:13Even if that was a positive place, I think it's going to be really messy path to get there. But for us to navigate the path, the question to me now is, what should we be doing as individuals as a species in order to allow us to navigate that path? Well, I think certain people certainly, if universal income becomes ubiquitous, we're certainly going to need some sort of guidance. We're certainly going to need something that guides people towards a feeling of relevancy, towards a feeling of purpose. Like you got to give people something. Training is a beautiful thing to do. Like any kind of training, anything where you're learning something.

1:53:51Again, it comes to this comfort thing. You and I have very similar paths in life and that we've sought things that are, many people find uncomfortable and difficult. And I think there's great value in uncomfortable and difficult things and in the beginner's mindset and the learner's mindset. Because you learn more about everything by learning about something. And I've lived my life like that and so have you. There's many people out there that resonate with these ideas. And they also live their life like that and they get excited. But there's many people that don't. And those are the people that I really worry about.

1:54:28The people that just want a good job where there's nothing wrong with that. There's nothing wrong with wanting a good job and being able to take care of your family and having a place where you enjoy working and being able to go there every day. And when that's taken away from people and they have to kind of restructure the entire way they interface with reality. And then there's this bizarre connection with the government. Now, where the government, the government is now your provider. It's not just for the people by the people. It's not representative of the people. It is now your provider, which is a very strange relationship to have.

1:55:06And we see it in welfare states and which I think social safety nets are very important. I think if we're going to be a compassionate society, we need to be able to take care of people that aren't doing well because a lot of life is about fortune. And sometimes people run into horribly unfortunate situations and there's massive potential in those people. And those people can realize that potential if they're helped. And I think that's real too. But I do think there's a certain psychological aspect to having the state take care of all your food and money and resources and housing that all of a sudden who are you?

1:55:42And what do you do to give yourself meaning if you're not the type of person that seeks out difficult things and you're 45 or 47 years old or whatever you are? And this is happening to you. And you feel lost. There's going to be a lot of people like that. And throughout history, terrible times have been very cruel to people who weren't prepared. Yeah. And I worry about it almost like an intellectual famine, like a psychological famine that people will be deprived of the thing that they have rested their hat upon, like their identity, who they are, what it means, their sense of purpose that it will be pulled away from them.

1:56:29That scares the shit out of me. Especially when I know how many people get addicted to drugs and how many people get addicted to all sorts of weird lifestyle choices to provide them with some dopamine or some rush or just something that makes them feel like they're alive. There's something so powerful about being grounded in a path to being grounded as being immersed in an art like for example, like Chit -Zoo or Chess where if you're on the Chit -Zoo mats and you over send your arm and you get on barred, like you're not going to say that's not my fault. That was his fault. Or like that's, then you just don't fucking get better and you get on barred again.

1:57:12You only get better by taking you shit on. Or if you're a chess player and you make a mistake and you lose, you, you, if people who say that's not my fault, don't, they fucking, they're irrelevant very, very quickly. They just get blazed by. And they're just like, everyone else is racist past and they're not in the race anymore. And if you're, if you think about a community, for example, of fighters, let's think about Chit -Zoo as like a vision, like the, one of the things that separates people as they get deeper into an art is whether they want to take themselves on as a way of life, whether they're hungry to have their weaknesses revealed, right?

1:57:49You think about about a school where like somebody, like you can, I always found it interesting to watch people when they're four or five rounds and disbarring, like do they look for the blue belt to rest with or do they look for the, like, like 240 pound fucking bruiser to be the shit of them or the high level brown belt to exploit them or the black belt to like kick their ass, right? Who do they look for? Who do you like the, you know, I've been coming purple belt look for when like the, the young competitor is you looking for the egoic rest or the place to be exposed, like the people who hunger for exposure to get better, right?

1:58:20It's like seeking accountability as a way of life. I think there's something really powerful to do that with decision making, right? Because we're making decisions and we're making decisions in a higher and higher stakes world. And if we train at the art of decision making in something that's grounded in reality, like for example, the chess rating system is just a fucking thing. It's objective. There's no bullshit to it. But I hear people, like I know people who play chess online and then they're like, yeah, this is my rating, but I'm actually much stronger than that because of this and this. It's like, no, you're not.

1:58:51You just haven't taken your shit on, right? Like you're not stronger than you're rating. You're rating is how strong you are as a chess player, right? But there's something about, there's something so beautiful about an accurate feedback loop, right? Whether that can be with a coach, training with you could be on the, just getting tapped out, getting your ass kicked, right? Getting hit, losing, whatever it is. I think that there's something so powerful about people cultivating some way of life where they're grounded in some kind of feedback loop in their training life, that there's no bullshit involved.

1:59:26That they learn to accept accountability as a way of life. They seek feedback loops. I think that we can do this in decision making. I mean, my view is that we're going to be making decisions as a species in an increasingly complex world where there is a super intelligence. So we need to track our decisions and we need to see objectively when they are good and when they're bad, like just how you can study tape as a basketball team or as a jiu -jitsu fighter, whatever. Like we need to create game tape in our decision making, right? We have to stop deluding ourselves about the fact that we're actually better than everything shows we are.

1:59:59People love to think that way. They fucking love it. It gives them a nice little out in their accomplishments. It gives them a nice little excuse for why things haven't gone their way. Like if you make a decision, write down what the decision is and write down why you made the decision and then look back on it in a week or two or three and create like a spreadsheet or a log or whatever the fuck you want to use of all of your decisions and why you made them and look back on them. And then if the reasons for making a decision no longer are valid but you're holding to the decision, which is what everyone does, then don't do that.

2:00:30Don't do that. Let go of it. Re -evaluate. So when you work with people and I know a big part of what you do is help organizations learn and how do you instill these ideas in people? Do you have a structure that you follow when you go to work with people? Do you try to see what they do? Yeah, I try to see what they do. So I've been training for the last 15, 16 years, elite mental and physical athletes, decision makers, investors, athletes, fighters, MBA teams. Well, in my school with Marcelo we had a huge group of fighters. I've been in dialogue with people who are the pinnacles of different fields my whole life.

2:01:24And one thing is that I love working with people who want to take themselves on. So it begins with them being all in on the process. I'm not great at motivating people to take their shit on. I love to begin once we're taking our shit on. And then it's individualized. I get to know someone's pattern. Just 99 % listening, observing. A lot of what I try to do is understand the entanglement of their brilliance and their eccentricity or their genius and their dysfunction. I think so quickly people try to come in. If you come in with some kind of formula for how things will be done, you're going to be slicing away the brilliance of individuals.

2:01:59All of our most brilliant creations are interwoven with the dysfunctional parts of our mind. Everyone wants to normalize people. Most in the realm of like trainers or coaches of different fields, I think it's mostly bullshit. Because mostly armchair professors who don't understand what it actually means to be playing on that razor's edge of peak performance where you have to make a decision, which is taking a risk that's right on the edge of something catastrophic, but that's the thread the needle solution. And so when I start working with someone, I try to get to know them very, very deeply. Their patterns, their patterns of success, their patterns of failure, their, where they're genius and their dysfunction are entangled.

2:02:40I often go into what I call a cave process, which is trying to understand what their self expression is, like going into the cave with them metaphorically, trying to understand what their self expression would be liberated from reactivity and inertia. So not reacting away from what they did before and not being subject to the inertia of what they did before. But just blue skying what the ideal solution would be. Well, what the most pure self expression for them would be. So it's completely dependent upon the individual and their approach initially. Yeah. And not their approach, the individual and the patterns of their approach, right?

2:03:17Not that we would do things the way they did before, but I have a lot of humility. Like, I don't think that I know the way. I don't think there is a way. I think we all have our own way. We need to discover. Like coaches who have been most damaging to me, for example, when I was in that same period when I was 15, 16 years old, I had a coach who was part of the Russian school of chess who essentially had me move away from my self expression, move away from my style. My style of chess play at that point, my whole life had been creative, attacking, improvisational. I love to create chaos and find it in harmonies and chaos.

2:03:48I love to battle. He urged me to stop playing that way, stop studying that style of play, play like these cold blooded prophylactic chess players, like Petrojan or Carpuff. I played much more in the style, not the strength, the style of like Garicosporov or Mikhail Tal or Bobby Fisher, like players who were aggressive, right? Who had a lot of like red blood flowing through their body. Like I was a hot blooded. And he urged me to play in the opposite style from what was natural to me. Think what would Carpuff do here? Not what would Josh do here. Is there a benefit to that just to expand your repertoire?

2:04:24Yes. There is absolutely a benefit to that. But there is also the movement of a young competitor away from their self -expression, love from their love for the game, love from their passion. I think I had this brilliant man named Yuri Razdevaya, who was on the other pillar of the Russian school of chess, who said this amazing thing to me. He said to me, Josh, you can learn Carpuff through Carpuff. And I didn't understand what he meant for many, many years after that. And it was a little too late in my chess life to take that in. But what he was saying is that you can learn the great defensive chess by studying the defense of the great attackers.

2:04:57Why was it late in your career to take that in? Well, good question. When he said it to me, like I was in my early 20s and my love for chess, it had gotten static still. Good challenge. It probably wasn't late, but I couldn't hear it. I would have had to go into the cave, go away, go through an existential crisis and come back to chess. But there were a lot of things that were moving me away from chess at that point in addition to that. I didn't want to be trapped inside of the confines of 64 squares anymore. I felt like a lion in a cage. So it was like, if I had known him when I was 14, 15, he would have been a different arc for me in the chess life.

2:05:38But maybe it would have been much worse for my life. If I had known him in the 60s, I might have played chess with us in my life and I'm so grateful I didn't. So who knows. It's an interesting life takes you on these, or you go on your own journey. And you realize that decisions that you've made that have turned you in one way. Those are critical decisions if you think of the life that you're living now as this optimal. If this is optimal, then yes, it's good that you moved away from chess. But if you had gotten that coaching when you were younger and it reignited your love of chess, then it would be good for the life that you currently have.

2:06:17Because you would say, well, as a person who's just like so in love with chess, I'm so grateful that I ran into this person while I was 11 years old and they sent me in this correct path. Yeah, I mean, I absolutely. I mean, for me, I love the life that I live, that I'm so grateful for the life that I've lived. And I was moved away from chess in many ways by this alien experience of that I just described and then also the dynamics of the movie and everything. But I played just for eight years after the movie. And so my results were very good, but I was moving into this internal, I was in an existential crisis.

2:06:56Yeah. And then but I, every like catastrophic injury or heartbreaking loss or losing a world championship in the like when you're a millimeter from winning the finals, like all of those losses that were so heartbreaking to me, every big loss, I'm grateful for now and led to the biggest wins and led to the biggest insights and transitions and and my life today, like the crises that I had in many ways have armed me to help people express themselves in their arts, right? And a lot of the reads that I made as a competitor to go back to your question, like I invert now. So like the things that the way I would read chess players, find where their minds were stuck, find where their bias patterns were, like find where their energy was stuck, find where they were like static.

2:07:40Now, like then I would exploit them, right? Same thing you do in the fight game, you find where someone's pattern is static and exploit it, right? Then what I do in training people is I find those, I have a very good nose for those because I spent my life as a competitor sniffing them out, feeling my way to them, but then I work on liberating them, releasing the obstruction. So a lot of what I do today in my work with brilliant performers is is work on unleashing what I used to exploit. That's interesting. That's great. That must be very satisfying to teach people how to get better at things. Yeah.

2:08:16It's interesting. I don't use that. I don't know it. I'm not teaching some people something I know, but you're teaching what you know. Well, I'm kind of discovering their path with them. Like I don't go in thinking like this is the way you fucking should do it. Right. I don't believe that I know what they should do. And I believe that any coach who thinks that they know what someone else should do without listening to the self -expression of that person very, very deeply is just wrong and they should not reject that coach. Right. Yeah. Well, you have to really understand someone psychologically to be able to coach them as well.

2:08:48Yeah. Because sometimes you don't know like what the hitch is until you run, you're like, oh, there it is. So this is your whole problem with your whole life. Like a hitch. But the amazing thing is you find the hitch, then you see, oh, that hitch is interwoven with your biggest, like I think you, that thing I wrote about Marcelo, right? And like there was this incredible moment that I had with Marcelo, such an emotional moment. You know, he, so he's in, I just grabbed him as like this great lower up learner. And he's someone who uniquely in my life, I've never seen anyone better at learning from one experience, bigger, large, right?

2:09:29And then there was this moment we were sitting, I guess it was six years ago. We were sitting just talking about life and our journey and everything. And he started, he started weeping. And he said to me, you know, Josh, I never forget my pain.

2:09:51And he said, you know, Marcelo had a real tragedy. He lost a baby. Marcelo and Tachi, his wife, they lost, they had twins and they lost their baby, Joey. Livy and Joey were born premature and Joey, Joey died. It was a terrible tragedy. It was just devastating for, I mean, just beyond belief, devastating. And like the loss of his son, the loss of his mother, the loss of his father, every moment someone looked at him a certain way, every moment somebody like raised their voice at him and triggered him into like a fight place. Every time he'd been submitted, every time he'd been swept, every time I realized he was saying this, like all of his pain is with him every moment.

2:10:34And as he described this to me, it was this incredibly emotional scene where he was just weeping in his exploration and his, like just brother to brother talking to me about like he walks around with every wound he's experienced in life present all the fucking time. And so we think of like this brilliant low rep learner, the guy who has a superhuman ability to learn from one experience. But it's a superpower, but also it ravages him, all the fucking time. And you can't just remove that. You can't be like, yeah, release your pain. Be great. And then you're also releasing the genius. And the thing about people that are really amazing at something, the pain of losing is so devastating to them.

2:11:20Like when you talk about genius in, like people use Michael Jordan as an example, genius basketball player, but unbelievably competitive. Yeah, like just can't help himself in everything and everything on and off the court. I've heard if you beat him, it pool, he won't talk to you for a week. So you can be like, Mike, just take it fucking easy on the pool table. What do you care? But you can't say that. Gary Sparver was the same way. Yeah. Competitive and everything. But you can't just like remove that. You're removing the genius with it. Right. Right. But you have a Ferrari engine and you're trying to like navigate 30 mile per hour traffic.

2:11:55You know what? Fuck. I'll never forget this, this, this chess coach, Mark DeBretzki, who has, he said to me this unbelievably heubristic thing. When I was 15, 16 years old, he said to me, if he had had Bobby Fisher as a student, as a, as a, from as a seven year old, he could have made Fisher a much, much stronger chess player without any of the craziness. Well, without the craziness. And I was just like, as a teenager, like I just might know. But my hands started like sweating when I just said that. It's just like, because to me, it's just, it's just not fucking true. Right. Like Fisher is crazy to think to say.

2:12:33Yeah, it's a, it's a, it's hubris, right? And this is, this is the same. The guy who is urging me into that, that direction. Like, but that, that, that's the opposite of my approach. Right. I think we need, and then if we are going to try to disentangle the dysfunction from the genius, we need to understand it very deeply. We need to plant the seeds patiently for the genius to sprout somewhere else. We need to water those seeds. We need to observe them coming. We have to very, like, slightly sand away that is functional patterning while observing if it, like it's a very delicate process, right?

2:13:05You can't just fucking excise the tumor. Well, there's also a problem in when someone becomes very good at doing something and they have a very specific way, they become very good at doing something. They assume that this is the way and that this is the way for everyone and that they can impose their way on other people and what led them to become great in the first place is also that hubris that makes them think they could take Bobby Fisher and make him even better. Well, that's why great coaches, like great fighters often aren't great coaches, right? Because most teachers teach the way they learned, which will alienate 70 or 80 % of their students by definition.

2:13:43Great coaches can, well, great coaches for a large group need to be able to teach different ways for different kinds of learners. Yeah. Different modalities of learners. Are they visual? Are they somatic? Are they auditory? Like, what makes them tick? And you have to know, if you're teaching a chess class, I started teaching a group of kids chess when I was in my teens. I taught them from kindergarten through fifth grade and we ended up winning in New York. It was a beautiful journey with kids at PS116. And from moving the pieces to winning city, state, and national championships. And it was so interesting because I'd be like, teaching eight, ten kids at once and I would be teaching, it was like giving us simultaneous exhibition.

2:14:20Each one had their own language. And I was so involved with this theme that I was exhausting because I was teaching ten chess lessons at the same time that ten kids. And I remember I had this moment, this heartbreaking moment, where I had this one student named Ivan, who I just charismatic intense, you know, we had a very close relationship. I love the kid. And like, I was, he was, or at the national championship, I was giving him this pep talk. And I was just like firing him up and speaking to him the way he needed to be seen. And he spoke into it. And then he was like, he ran off, stoked, fired up to go kick some ass.

2:14:52And then this other kid who was on the team, his beautiful sensitive boy came over and I looked at him with the same energy that I just been speaking to Ivan and I prided at him. And I was like, 15 seconds into speaking to him and I looked at his eyes and I realized I was like, this is a disaster. I'm being, this is terrible. And then I stopped. I was like, and I gave him a hug and we like slowed it down. You know, he needed to go into a very different way that Ivan went in. Right. But coach, think about how often you see Korneman fucking up fighters. Yeah. Right? Yeah. I mean, as a coach, I think we have to like put our own ego aside and our idea that we know how one should learn.

2:15:28Yeah. And it's, that's what's very important is finding the right coach. You have to find a coach that understands you and has a style that you can implement. Because there's some coaches that just have styles that you don't physically, you're not designed for. You don't, you can't learn the way they learned. Yeah. That's what's fascinating about you is that you've gone from being this hyper competitor to teaching people or coaching people to find the very best version of themselves and how to, how to acquire that. That's very rare that someone who gets really good at something also becomes really good at showing people how they can get better at things.

2:16:13Like, that's a specific focus that you've had. Like, why is that so rewarding to you?

2:16:26Well, I took on this interesting challenge when I broke my back because I was already doing this, but I, I was training people, but when I broke my back, I remember I said, okay, during this healing process, after the year and a half to two years of denial and training through it, when I stopped, I tried to take on training people with the same passion and love that I had for training myself. I wanted to see if I could like love it as much. And I never got there. And then I got into, you know, that's part of what moved me into discovering the ocean arts and being all in on training. So a big part of my relationship with training other people is training myself as a way of life.

2:17:06Like, I'm always, like, I'm living at my limit in the arena myself. The moment I think a coach like leaves the arena where they're putting their own ego on the line all the time, or their life on the line or whatever the fuck they're putting on the line, then they become static and they start to think they know the answer. It's like the fat, you know, martial arts instructor who's many years past training and is smoking cigarette in the side of the line telling people what to do and no longer is like actually dynamic them putting their, the moment our ego is get protected. Right? So my relationship to training is something that I live all the time.

2:17:42I think also becoming a dad was a big part of it. Like the nurturing. And a lot of what I've done is invert what I used to do to break people. Now I invert to heal them or unleash them. Like, being a father is about the most humbling thing I've ever, I mean, I thought I had ideas about about education until I became a dad. And I realized I didn't know anything I had to start over. Yeah, and also the wound pattern, like I think understanding people's wound patterns is very important. And a lot of my wound pattern is in loving something very, very deeply, being alienated from it. And then finding a post -conscious relationship to it and a self -expression within it.

2:18:26And I think that helping people with that journey is really important. And also I love engaging with all and mother fuckers. I just love like, you know, my current projects are like, cutting edge science and AI, just brilliant scientists. It's such an incredibly interesting and like, being deeply involved with the Boston Celtics, like just the very top of the NBA world. And my relationship with Joe Mazzullo that had coach and kind of coaching the coaches and modality that I've been developing in for a long time, helping the leader of an organization express themselves as the coach of their people is a big part of what I do and a couple other interesting investing in tech projects.

2:19:04And like, just helping some, like, it allows me to play in fascinating realms and then studying the interconnectedness. I mean, a big part of my passion is the medic interconnectedness. Like, how is what's happening with the Boston Celtics, the same as what's happening in this cutting edge science program? The same as what's happening in this wildly interesting tech investing program, right? And how do those principles, those interconnecting fibers relate to culture more broadly and relate to me and what I'm doing every day on the on the water, boiling. Yeah, that's Miyamoto Musashi. Yeah, once you understand the way broadly, you can see it in all things.

2:19:38So the book of five rings, right? Like, to me, I feel that I cannot believe how few people have studied Musashi deeply, right? I mean, whether you're reading the novel about his life and then studying like book of five rings, I think everyone should read like 10 times, maybe a day a page, 10 times over. I am, you know, one of my favorite cadences of Musashi is so many chapters of book of five rings, how he comes back and says, like, essentially, these words are empty, you have to practice it as a way of life. Yes. Again, and again, and people just skip these things, but they don't realize. And everyone wants to be told what the fucking do, as opposed to understanding they have to work for the path to figure out what the fuck they should do.

2:20:21And you have to practice as a way of life, right? Yeah, talk about a real motherfucker. Well, just fascinating that he learned this by being a sword fighter. Yeah. What is the best way to be a sword fighter? You can have no bullshit in your mind. So you must be balanced. And his approach was you must be an artist, you must be a poet, you must be a warrior, you must be in tune with all of your feelings and all of your senses and everything about you and to do everything correctly. Do all, at all things. And he was fighting to the death to the death. So there was no bullshit. There's no room for 60 to men.

2:21:00Yeah. And one on one combat. You can't say like, oh, no, that wasn't my fault. That doesn't fucking work. No, you take your shit on. Yeah. But that's that, but there's something so beautiful about the truth, telling nature of living. Like if you, you know, you know, when you're on that, when you're in a jujitsu team and, and you've got some, you watch someone who doesn't think they're competing for a while, but then they're suddenly like, they're competing next week. How the repertoire compresses, like all the fat just flies off. Right. There's something so beautiful about that process and the cadence.

2:21:27Yeah. And like, if we live putting ourselves in the flame, then we're not going to be bullshit in ourselves at the time, because there's this truth telling modality. Right. So the question is, how can we, how can we, as many of us as possible, live in some form that's true to us, where we are, there's this grounded truth telling, accurate feedback loop, and what we're doing. We're practicing as a way of life. Life fears that there's so many of us, probably even people are listening to this right now, that have never developed that aspect of their life. And it's very difficult to get started on that path.

2:22:01Once you've been on this path of complacency and comfort, it's very hard for people. To sort of embrace this new way of thinking and interfacing with reality. But when things are hard, that's beautiful. Like that's the beginning. We want things to be hard. So the first thing is, I think we want people to love that is comfortable being hard. It's hard. Fucking everything worthwhile is hard. Right. Like we, what have you done that's that's been interesting that hasn't been hard? Every time you get in an ice plunge, it's fucking hard. Yeah. Like I hold plunge every day. I think you do too, right?

2:22:29Yeah. Yeah. Like it's a way of life. It's fucking hard every time. It's not easy. Hard is beautiful living on the other side of pain. It's really valuable. Not doing it. And that's knowing that you didn't do it. Yeah. That's hard. That's not good for you. No, it's not good. If you let that that part of you, when you're 40 seconds in, you're like, let's get the fuck out now. If you let that part win, you feel terrible for the rest of the day. But if you just hang in there for two minutes and 20 seconds more, you'll feel so good. You get out of there like, all right, got this one done. It's like you're a foiling and you don't fall.

2:23:01That's a terrible day. Because you're not pushing your turns hard enough. You're not breaching enough. You're not ripping it around hard enough, right? Like everyone finds these, it's like one thing that happens with investors, right? They become successful and then they develop a mental model to replicate the success, right? So they figure out a mental world become a groove that they can follow. But then the groove becomes a rut. They get stuck in and then it starts to collect water and it's stagnant water. And then they hold to an old mental model based on a success 10 years ago or 20 years ago and they're trapped in it for the rest of their lives.

2:23:31It happens again and again in every field, right? Some early success creates, you make a framework, you make a modality, you create a mental model, you replicate the success. It's not working but you stick to it because your identity gets connected to that mental model and you're not living with dynamic quality. Your quality has become static. Yeah, it's so hard for people to recognize when that's happening as well. Because once people get success, then the fear of losing that success over welms them. And then it's sometimes it's easier to control a person who's been successful because they don't want to let this go.

2:24:06They don't want to go back. They want to move forward. So what do I have to do to make sure that I'm, I mean, you see this in Hollywood. It's a big thing in Hollywood. People panic when they start doing well and then they align themselves with other people doing well and they kind of changes the way they think and the way they behave because everything is dependent upon you being chosen for things. So your whole life is like wondering what your social status is and how you advance that and hey, what do I have to say? What should I tweet today to make sure everybody knows them on the right side?

2:24:37And then you're playing nuts and lose. You're not playing to win. It happens all the time in sports. Like if you're a basketball team and you've been dominated in the game and you're up eight or ten in the fourth quarter, then you start to protect the lead. Yes. No, you didn't get the lead because you were protecting the fucking lead. You were dominating with aggression. Right. The moment it's like the pre -vent defense in my opinion is the worst thing ever created in sports strategy. Right? Like you know, pre -vent defense. I've heard of it. I don't know if you're a football team and you're and you have a 14 point lead in the fourth quarter or an eight point lead in the fourth quarter and you stop doing the dominant things that got you the lead but you start protecting the lead.

2:25:11So your defense it backs it back. You start allowing eight or ten or twelve yard completions. It is now you're protecting the lead versus dominating the opponent. But then you let the opponent feel their strength, feel their greatness. They're not dominating anymore. The moment a fighter stops feeling dominated and starts to tap into their greatness, then your fucking opponent's a beast again. Right? We see it all the time. All the time. Right. So don't protect the fucking lead. Dominate. Yeah. Right? I do. I brought you to the dance. Yeah. Exactly. It's just it's in life. I think that thing that you're talking about is very critical.

2:25:44That fear of losing once you've won. Yeah. Yeah. It's very interesting in the surf world. So many people I've observed who are great surfers. They want to learn to foil because foiling opens up so much. Right? You can foil all the time in different conditions and slapping conditions in ocean. Big, big wave, small wave. It's just it's so abundant and they can see how epic it is. But then they try once and they get their ass kicked. It doesn't matter how good a surfer you are. Not to have an e -foil. I'm talking about like wave foiling and high performance gear. You're going to have two, three months of ass kicking as part of it.

2:26:15It doesn't matter how good you are as a surfer. But now you have to like be you have to look like a beginner again. You have to be go from being like the coolest guy in the lineup. If you're socialized to being the quote -unquote cook being the guy who's just getting asked if he was falling all the time. Right? And they don't want to do that. So their ego of the excellent surfer prevents them from learning this art. They want to learn because they're unwilling to look bad for a while in front of the people who they're used to looking good with. Right. They're so used to being cool. So the foilers are people who it's very interesting micro culture inside of surfing.

2:26:48Is it foilers have been people who learned how to had a foil because they were willing to get their ass kicked and look bad? Are there any other things that are exciting to you like that that you think of like if one day you can't foil any longer. Do you have like an escape strategy? I don't have an escape strategy. I never did. I never had like this is going to be planned to be. I've never been a plan B guy. I know I could recreate myself. But I love the start profoundly and I love being in the ocean. Like there's something about this. This is like to me also this is not about destroying anything.

2:27:19It's not about beating anybody. It's about self discovery pushing my limits in the ocean, which is an element. And the foil taps into ocean energy so fucking potently. And the other thing is that the art is at such an early stage of technological growth that foil gear is progressing so quickly. And the people who are actually at the bleeding edge of foil performance wise can ride this gear which is increasingly difficult to ride. But the hardest gear to ride is the gear which is can do the most epic shit. And so the sensitivity is like as the gear requires more and more sensitivity the sensitivity is is cultivated.

2:27:53And few are very few people in the world can can do it on this gear and it's just so sublime. So I'm so fucking in love with this art. I do not have a plan B. But you know fuck who knows what happens. I love when people love things. That's one of my favorite things to watch is people that are just absolutely engrossed in what they're doing and fascinated by it and love with it and on the journey. It's very addictive. It's very inspirational. It gives you something. It's like there's something out of watching people and learning from people that are really really passionate about something that's so contagious.

2:28:27I've never loved it art more. Like I've loved some art really fucking deeply in my life. You know, foiling is number one. I have never loved maybe it's because I'm I'm at this moment of life where I'm at and I'm like integrating everything I've learned from different arts and bringing it into this one and this one's manifesting all of it. But but in terms of like the day to day experience of it. Oh yeah man. I'm a lunatic. I fucking just love it. Yeah. Yeah. So you can't you have to live by the ocean. You're fine. I do. That's beautiful. I live right where the jungle meets the ocean. You were telling me before we were at this up.

2:28:59You were telling me about a crocodile encounter. Oh yeah. That was before I started before I started foiling. I was surfing and I it was like 5 a .m. and I was I was flying back to New York that day. So I went out for like a just pre sunrise right at sunrise surf and I was on this glassy like head high wave and this um narrow log came up in front of me this piece of fucking wood and I saw it and I hit it and jumped off just emerged right in front of me. I didn't know how I didn't see it. I thought it was a big tree and when I hit the water my brain was still thinking log but my it was so interesting my my my skin lit up goosebumps and I just realized like like red alert like prehistoric danger and I jump back on my board and this like a 10 11 foot crock came swimming just viewed you viewed away from me it was so interesting.

2:29:50Wow. I spent my life like I spent a lot of since I was six years old I've been free diving spear fishing with a Hawaiian Hawaiian slaying like bone arrow underwater deep deep water diving and like I I spent tens of thousands of sharks but this was so different like crock energy and I haven't I don't know crocks like I know sharks I don't know crocks and crocks are fucking trying to eat you. Sharks a lot I mean there's a lot of people that believe the sharks are attacking people because the people are where the sharks are and they don't want the people there. Yeah you know like when they're they're interfering with their hunting grounds and they attack people in that regard I've heard people say that and I'm like whoo that kind of resonates that makes sense but crocodiles are different they're just hunting everything and if you're there you're on the menu they're hyper aggressive they're very different than alligators which are also very dangerous but crocodiles are significantly more dangerous and more aggressive.

2:30:42It was interesting when I hit the water my body lit up like like I was in the water with a dinosaur and then it came up and it's interesting that my body this speaks to the nature of the intuition right because my mind still thought it was log I hit the water something energetically told me something get the fuck out and then it came swimming right up next to me and like the feeling of the snout the eyes like it just came and then a big another wave was coming in I managed to pop up and ride the next wave to the beach yeah yeah and maybe if I knew the last day I foiled well maybe like if I knew the language of crocs like I know language of language murder kill eat that's the language maybe there's an internal language I do not believe that's true I think they are they are the waste management of the ocean and of the ground I mean they are there to make sure that anything that slips anything that gets too close anything that fucks up it doesn't pay attention to the ripples in the water that's a meal they they clean up they're the cleaning crew they make sure that there's no weakness in the system and they devour and they live forever that's the crazy thing is like the ones that they spotted in the early journeys when they were talking about like there's talks of 40 40 foot plus crocodiles probably were real because crocodiles don't die of old age they don't have like a 20 year lifespan they just keep growing and if a crocodile lived before people had guns and you know they weren't on the menu and you got to imagine they could live hundreds of years hundreds of years eating deer and wild abeased and anything that fucked up antelopes anything that fucked up anything they can get a hold of and they just keep growing they they could be enormous enormous enormous super predator dinosaurs that live amongst people yeah I have a friend of mine who's a professional hunter chimshaki and he was flown to Africa because this particular village was being targeted by crocodiles so they they hired hunters to hunt these crocodiles and while he was there he said every one you would meet had a chunk taken out of them people were missing hands some people were missing feet and while while he was there one of the women in the village got taken and they would set up these posts in the water so that the crocodiles couldn't get through to this one area where they would gather water and wash clothes and do things the crocodiles had figured this out so they went onto the shore and then they would go into the water where the posts are and wait for them so the feeling of humility and danger that you have relative to crooks yeah I have about AI relative to the ability to manipulate humans unless we take on our abilities to be manipulated as a way of life like I feel it like that much in my skin I think you're correct yeah I think you're correct I think it's going to be an incredibly incredibly challenging time in history and one that I don't think the brightest amongst us can truly predict the outcome I want to make one other point which is that I think that when we talk about like training as decision -makers it doesn't matter how good you are at something it matters that you're on the road you're on the journey so let's just say people started to play chess it doesn't matter how strong a chess player you are if you're good or if you suck that doesn't matter it's a journey right if you're if you're if you're putting yourself in any arena that's objective and you're trying your hardest and you have a feedback loop like the mats like the Jiu Jitsu mats whatever they are for you and you look at the quality of your decisions and you jot down why and you are willing to change your mind and you take on that training as a way of life then you're you're on the road to like being grounded in like in a way that we're not today and I think that being grounded in reality in something like feeling the earth beneath our feet in our process is a big part of how we're going to be able to navigate a world where everything is being deconstructed all the time by a superior intelligence because we're going to need to recreate ourselves but we have to have you know how like when you're deep into an art like think about you with your knowledge of of MMA like you have this intuition about where the truth is right you have a sense for where it is right we need to cultivate that sense in in an increasingly chaotic world and I do feel that that like being involved in some kind of truth telling arena whatever it is is a hugely important practice and then taking on the art of training as a way of life is um I feel like it's one of our and like that combined with getting the fuck off social media really amazing advice yeah that's my thank you Josh my pitch this is a lot fun I really appreciate this is great yeah I was really excited to do this and really happy to meet you so yeah really appreciate awesome Jeff thank you for using that my pleasure all right all right but can't find our social media don't look