#2292 - Josh Waitzkin

Whenever someone is like an interesting person and then I find out they do jiu-jitsu too, I go, oh, I could talk to that guy for sure. Yeah.
You know? You know, I get excited when interesting people do jjitsu because I think the outsider to a lot of people that are you know they haven't been exposed to what it's like to train and what it's like to be around high-level jujitsu people they don't they don't know that vibe they don't know what it's like they don't't know the beauty of jiu-jitsu. I feel like jiu-jitsu is beautiful for people who practice it.
You see Marcelo is a great example, your coach. Marcelo is probably one of the most beautiful guys to watch because he just takes advantage of these scrambles in this really beautiful way, Like fast and and slippery and when the opponents react he reacts in the other way it's all just technique and flow it's like ah like the first time i ever saw him i saw him live in 2003 in abu dhabi and uh it's when he fought chowlin that was the first time i'd ever seen him in the flesh i didn't even Choked him out in like eight seconds, ten seconds.
Oh, my God. This is crazy.
But no one even knew him. No one knew of him other than, you know, he was obviously – I think he was a brown belt at the time.
I don't even think he was a black belt. I think Marcelo might have been a brown belt.
That's interesting. I didn't – in 2003.
Find that out. Was Marcelo a brown belt when he won Abu Dhabi in 2003? He may have...
Eddie Bravo was a brown belt when he tapped out Hoyler. He told me recently that right before that fight, his grips had locked up.
So he went into that fight. It looks incredible.
Just that arm drag, take the back, choked him out in seconds. His hands? Yeah, his grips from the fight before were like...
Oh, wow. Yeah.
When Eddie beat Hoyler, he was a brown belt? Yep. Wow.
Yeah. John Jock took his black belt off of his own waist and put it on Eddie.
Amazing. Amazing.
Dude. That's epic.
So it's funny. My background, we have a lot of overlap in our early jujitsu education because my first teacher was John Machado.
Oh, okay. So Jock's brother.
Yeah. And I spent years training with John in L.A.
long before. And then I'm, yeah.
And then when did you move to New York? So, I moved to New York. I think I started training with John.
So, I was doing Chinese martial arts for a bunch of years before that, competing everywhere. Then I started training, cross-training with John in, I think, 2001, 2002.
And then early 2005, moved back to New York, started training with Marco Santos in his school in New York. And I was training with Jucao.
And Alcine Brites, Jucao, is an amazing old-school, Bracey Baja. Like, you know, amazing fighter.
And I was also cross-training with Lucas Lepre at the time. And I was, I needed, I was just ready to, and then I met Marcelo and I was, and he, he had moved from New York to Florida and I was traveling to Florida to train with Marcelo a bunch.
And I, I wanted to be pushed all in. And, um, Marcelo and I gotten really close.
And then I, I just said to him, Hey man, you, you know, you want to, you want to come back to New York and open a school together? And he really loved New York. And we'd gotten very close at this point.
Where was he at the time? He was in Florida. He was in New York before.
He loved New York, but then he had to move to Florida. There was just a lot of jiu-jitsu politics flowing everywhere, as it does.
Jiu-jitsu politics. The worst.
Yeah, anyway, long story short, we opened a school together after that.

And it was amazing.

Then I spent so many years all in training with him.

Such a beautiful, beautiful martial artist.

So in 2002, he's promoted to black belt.

So he was already a black belt because this was 2003.

Yeah.

Okay.

So he had only been a black belt for a year and won Abu Dhabi, which is pretty crazy. Pretty crazy.
Just that. I mean, didn't just beat Chao Lin, won the entire division, and just looked like no one anybody had ever seen.
Just the scrambles and his ability to arm drag and take the back. And then once he gets to your side, the to transition to the back it's just phenomenal and he spends his his like his his whole jiu-jitsu life he spent in the scramble in transition and that was really a philosophy of his have you seen that old um old school arte suave clip remember the old documentaries arte suave from back there around him at as a young teenager training at faber guel's school in Sao Paulo.
And it was so interesting because even then you could see him, he never held position. He always let opponents move.
It'd be fun to pull that up maybe at one point. Interesting.
Like he never, a core principle of his was to allow the opponent to move and spend as much training time as possible in transition. And while most jiu-jitsu guys, as you know,

as they're coming up to ranks, egos are controlling,

they're holding guys.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Is this him?

Yeah, this is what?

He's already a black belt here.

Yeah, this is after he moved to start training with Fabio in Sao Paulo.

And it's such a beautiful thing because if you watch his style, he's not in this moment, actually. Now he's fully controlling.
Now he's fully controlling. But most of the time, he's scrambling.
Yeah, he's scrambling. Did he explain why? Well, you're maximizing time spent in the in-between.
I mean, I think in the martial arts, people are so focused on position when they're learning, position, position, position, but the in-between is where the real virtuosity happens, don't you? Interesting. And so he spent, he maximized his time in the in-between.
So in stand-up fighting, that would be like footwork and angles. It'd be similar to that.
Because the most important thing about any kind of combat sport in terms of striking sports is to be in a better position, to land a shot, and be in a better position to defend. So if you're fighting southpaw to orthodox, you always want to make sure that if you're southpaw, your foot is on the outside of your opponent's leg.
That way your opponent has to kind of cross over, try to hit you, but you're in a position to hit them on the blind side. And the best ever at that is Vasily Lomachenko.

Because Lomachenko, when he was young,

his father made him stop boxing for two years

and just study Ukrainian dance.

Really?

Mm-hmm.

So for two years, he just did Ukrainian dance.

Have you ever seen him box?

No.

Oh, my God.

Pull up Lomachenko highlight.

It's all about movement and position with this guy. It's all about when you punch, he's going to make you react this way, and then he's going to go that way, and then he's going to spin sideways and he'll be behind you.
So this is Lomachenko. Like the way he moves is so different it's almost like it's almost like his he's got just a radar for like where their where their punches are coming from and knows exactly where to put his feet at all times no matter what they do he knows what they're gonna do but when you watch his like footwork it's the most extraordinary thing because his ability to give you all sorts of different reads, like, incredible.
I mean, he won a world title. I think it is fourth pro fight.
Unbelievable amateur record. But it's just the movement.
Like, he's never right in front of you. He's always off to the side.
He's always moving around. He jumps in and out.
And it's with perfect precision. Like a lot of times when guys do a lot of footwork and movement, there's points in that transition where they're off balance, where they can't really throw a punch, or their footwork is out of position, or they're leaning too far over on this side he's never off balance he's

never out of position he's always slide to slide pop out slide to slide pop up and you never know where the fuck he is he's a magician it's fascinating to watch him fight and very few people have tried to incorporate that like you see some of his movement it's just the way he's able to fool the best fighters in the world and just have a level of movement that they just don't really understand what to do with. They just they get baffled by it because everything is coming from different angles.
It's never I'm charging straight forward at you trying to destroy you. Everything is angles and movement.
Virtuosity is so beautiful to watch. Oh, it's incredible in anything.
In anything. When you watch someone who's just unbelievably extraordinary and unique in their, whatever their discipline is, it's always fascinating to watch.
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Get an expert now at TurboTax.com. One way I relate to the transitional training is through frames.
It's like a process of building more frames. We have position, we have position, and for some people there'll be no space in between.
But if you spend your time playing in the transitional space between, you build up frames like an illusionist. I know you, like, remember you spoke to Darren Brown back in the day.
like you know great illusionists magicians mind control guys they have the ability to see in frames that we don't have the ability to see and so it seems like magic it seems like illusion yeah when martial artists are called mystical right it's because people don't understand what they're doing for the most part technically and they have frames where others don't have frames. So they have more options.
It's like having a language and you have access to a larger vocabulary. Yeah.
Yeah, I think that that's right. Yeah.
I think that's right. And people, well, it's like if you think about you're engaging with an illusionist who has done something, has spent hundreds of hours in a certain specific routine and you're seeing it for the first time.
They just have immense knowledge where you have none. They have more frames, and they can play in frames that you don't have, and it seems like something's coming from the sky.
Well, that's where Eddie Bravo had a pretty significant contribution to jiu-jitsu because he was so creative in some of his attacks and some of the things that he developed particularly off his back like the rubber guard variations. They were so

systematic and so like

If you got good at it, it was surprising to anybody didn't understand what you were doing because they didn't know these positions

Well, yeah, so if you got like there's this kid named Jeremiah Vance who's one of Eddie's best guard players, and there's a highlight reel of his submissions off of his back, his rubber guard submissions. And if you don't have a person that you train with, if you train at a traditional school and you don't understand these positions, you don't know how good someone can be at it, there's times where you don't think you're vulnerable where you're incredibly vulnerable.
The difference between a really good guard player in MMA, like Paul Craig for example, he submitted some of the best two world champions off of his back in the light heavyweight division, Jamal Hill and the current champion Ankhlaev. Ankhlaev's only defeat is to Paul Craig because he's just wicked off of his back.
So everybody feels comfortable. In MMA, there's only a couple guys like Oliveira.
You got to really watch your P's and Q's. There's a few guys that are just wicked off of their back, but no one's like Paul Craig.
And so if you're just used to fighting regular guys off of their back and you get in guard and you start, you get a little cocky, you extend an arm to try to land a punch punch and then all of a sudden his legs are wrapped around your fucking neck and you're like oh jesus how did this happen so quick because he's just got that technique it's just so tightened up just it just locks it up so fast it's fascinating to watch the difference between like a really good guard player and someone is just a regular mma fighter who knows how to do a triangle but really doesn't have like the elaborate setups many ways that's in a large scale what what hoist was doing back in the day sure no one had no one had any idea when they're grabbing his gi think they had a huge advantage they yeah but they were entering his his terrain and then when when when we were training in the early days there was so much closed-mindedness about leg locks so the leg lock game was outside of the conceptual scheme to so many jiu-jitsu guys. It was forbidden.
It was forbidden. So they'd get caught.
It's like that dogma. It's so interesting competitively finding where someone's dogma is, where their constructs are, their false constructs.
Well, there's a good argument for it with the gi, with young guys. Oh, for sure.
Yeah. Not shredding each other's ankles all the time.

Yeah, ripping knees apart where they're not going to be able to be repaired. I mean, how many people have ruined their knees forever from a heel hook? A large number.
I would imagine if there's any technique that's ruined an athlete's career, the heel hook would probably be number one. Heel hook is why I started training jiu-jitsu.
Really? Yeah, because I was doing stand-up stuff and I was competing everywhere. and I was doing Chinese martial arts

and my teacher's son, Max Chen,

who is a huge... I started training jujitsu.
Really? Yeah, because I was doing stand-up stuff and I was competing everywhere and I was doing Chinese martial arts and my teacher's son, Max Chen, he was a sanshau fighter and on the US national team, really good stand-up fighter and he was studying UFC before I had even looked at it. And then he was studying, I think it was Frank Shamrock's double heel hook shit from way early days and he was just like, let's just continue to the ground.
And I had never ground fought before. And I ended up in the ground and he just put me in the heel hooks and double heel hooks.
My knees were exploding. He had no idea what the fuck he was doing.
Oh, no. Terrible idea.
Oh, no. My knees were just screaming and I would throw him on the floor and then I'd be tapped.
I didn't even know what tapping out was. I had never grappled before.
You didn't even know how to grapple. He put you in a heel hook.
That's a heel hook nothing the first submission i felt my life was like the heel hook 20 times somehow my acl didn't shred and um i was like i have to fucking train this jujitsu like because max is kicking my ass and i didn't like it so then that's how it all began well hoist was brilliant in wearing the gi because it made people grab it yeah they thought they had an advantage that he had something to grab and next thing you know he's like clenched around you and dragged you to the ground it's an amazing idea right like they had no idea that they were entering his game they thought they were controlling him right and they didn't understand that all that friction from the gi was going to make it very difficult for you to get out of anything and he was so used to people grabbing him he spent his life people grabbing yeah they entered his that changed whole world, didn't it? Oh my god. Changed the whole world.
Changed what street fights look like. Changed everything.
Those first UFC's were just wild. Nuts.
Just bizarre. The first UFC I worked was UFC 12 in Dothan, Alabama.
I had to take a propeller plane. I had to fly into, I think we flew into Birmingham or somewhere, and then we had to take a propeller plane to Dothan.
I was like, what am I doing? This is so ridiculous. But I wanted to just see it live because I'd only seen it on television.
I'd never seen a live cage fight before. I'm like, this has got to be crazy.
ufc 12 how long after the first was that well it's 97 so it was four years later four years later yeah wow man you've been on that the journey from the beginning yeah it was like everybody was like what are you doing don't be associated with this so many people were telling me not to be associated with it it was it was like i was doing snuff or something. I was like, why are you doing this? You're an actor.
I was like, okay. I don't know what to tell you.
I like it. I want to go watch.
I needed to see it. Were you training at that point? Yeah, I'd already started doing jiu-jitsu.
I started jiu-jitsu in 96. You were training at Hickson's then, right? Started at Hickson's and then I went from Hickson's to Carlson Gracie's.

I didn't know. I thought all

Gracie's were the same. Like, this Gracie's

is closer. I'll go to this Gracie.
They all love each other.

And I'd also say, I didn't understand.

They were all tooth and

claw at each other back then.

I didn't know that

I knew Carlson's

from, I think the show was Extreme

Fighting, the John Peretti show.

So John Peretti, who worked for the UFC,

then branched off and had another

the third one. I knew Carlson's from I think the show is extreme fighting the John Peretti show So John Peretti who worked for the UFC then branched off and had another thing called extreme fighting and that's where Conan Silvera came from and a bunch of like elite UFC fighters Mario Sperry fought his first fights over there So it was like a really good competitive organization That was like right up there with the UFC back in the day and so I had Carlson Gracie's Name was on that all the time and they showed some training footage of them training So I found out about that place and that was right when Vitor Belfort was emerging So Vitor was 19.
So I was training at training at the same gym as Vitor. It was incredible.
Just watching him train, you know, he was a freak. Like just an athletic freak at 19.
He was so fast, just so fast and with his hands. And everybody knew he was a black belt under Carlson Gracie, so everybody expected just jjitsu And this guy comes out with little MMA gloves on and just starts tuning people up on the feet You're like whoa a black belt who can do that? Like where's this coming from like this is a totally new thing So that was the first fight that I attended That was the first fight I worked UFC 12.
Wow. It was nuts.
This theme of transitions and developing frames where other people don't have them, like it's so interesting how it's manifest in every art. In everything.
Like I remember when I was playing chess because I was a chess player from age 6 to 23. That was my first art.
Well, you weren't just a chess player. You were a chess player they made a movie about, dude.
Yeah. a movie about dude yeah i think that didn't have much to do with me man well searching for bobby fisher's about you bro yeah you know which has got to be weird many moons ago that was fucking weird was it weird the dramatic representation of your life versus the real life like what is that juxtap like? Is it bizarre watching a fake version of you on television or on a screen, rather? And did you have, like, a feeling like, am I that person? I'm not that person.
Like, I am me. This is not really me, but it's about me.
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So the book came out when I was 11 years old. My dad actually wrote the book.
He was a writer and he ended up just writing about the journey from me starting to play chess to winning my first national championship. And when the book came out, it felt like I read it and it felt true.
I was a little pissed off because I didn't want people to know when I cried.

I was an 11-year-old.

I didn't want to be vulnerable.

But that felt like, and that was my first real thrust into some degree of spotlight.

And I was the national champion at that point,

and I was each year for those years.

So I was at the top of the chess world, the youth chess world, and then I had the movie come out, the book came out.

And then when the movie came out, it was a shit show. I hated the movie when it first came out why'd you hate it because i thought it had nothing to do with my life um years later i was able to see it as a work of art separate from my life and see it that way and i was able to see how it was thematically true in many ways to themes in my life.
But like my first teacher, Bruce Pendolfini, who's still a very dear friend of mine, Ben Kingsley played him as this mean guy. And I've had terrible coaches in my life.
I've had coaches who are super destructive. But Bruce wasn't.
He was beautiful and loving and helped me discover my love for chess. My first coaches were the Hustlers in Washington Square Park and Bruce Penolfini together.
And the way that was represented, I didn't like it. They also combined a bunch of characters in Washington Square Park, the Hustlers that combined them into one in a way that was thematically true but didn't feel.
So when you're a kid, you're a teenager, you see all the difference comes out about your life you see all the differences as opposed to the similarities and it was um yeah and I felt really guilty about it relative to Bruce that was a big part of it because I love Bruce. Did you talk to him about it? Oh yeah.
What was his take on it? Was he named Bruce in the movie? Yeah he was named Bruce in the movie and he honestly he loved it I mean it put him in the spotlight as like the chess teacher in the country in the movie. And he, I mean, he, honestly, he loved it.
I mean, it put him in the spotlight as like the chess teacher in, you know, in the country, in the world. So he rolled with it really well.
I was just sensitive to all of, like, all these mean-spirited things that happened between us in the film that never happened in life. Right.
And years later, like, those things did happen to me. And actually during those years, when it came out, they were happening to me then.
What was interesting is I had some really destructive coaches during that time. And I didn't put that on Bruce.
But also what happened with the movie is that I loved chess so deeply. It was my first form of self-expression.
And up until the film came out, it was just sort of this pre-conscious, innocent form of play, of battle. It was my jiu-jitsu mats it was it was i fucking loved it and and then the the movie is what pulled me into self-consciousness for the first time i started thinking about instead of losing myself in thought i started thinking about how i looked to groupies to cameras to the rest and so like i moved from self-expression to self-consciousness to being locked up.
And then I didn't ask for it. I didn't decide I want to have a movie.
This thing was done. It was ultimately – I mean I'm grateful for it.
From my perspective now, the existential crisis that happened was awesome for me. It forced me to become more complicated as a human and integrate a sense of consciousness into my relationship to something.
So my perspective on it now is that it was a beautiful journey. It made me grapple with a lot of shit.
I didn't become reliant on a flower garden in order to have a deep relationship to an art. But at the time, I was very conflicted about it.
And then when I graduated high school, I took off and left the U.S. for a couple of years, lived in Slovenia with my girlfriend at the time to get away from the spotlight, get away from the media, get away from all the shit that was connected to the movie.
And that was when I started studying East Asian philosophy and meditating and started reading Jack Kerouac and existentialist literature and trying to figure myself out, figure the world out, figure out how I related to these things in some empty space. What's a tremendous burden to place upon a young person to take their life, which is essentially anonymous, you know, to the general public? You know, known in the chess world, obviously, but 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 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 i mean with you you're so public right everyone probably most people think they know who you are and what at least they know me from me talking yeah that's a really they don't know me imagine if like mario lopez played me in a movie right you know what i mean there's someone someone less handsome than mario lopez but 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 that's not really me. 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. And 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 it's probably destructive to it right 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 for the first time. You're like, what is all this? And your body's growing.
It was flowing hard. Yeah, and you're becoming a man.
Now all of a sudden girls like you. Like, 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 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? Because 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 um 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 it's not a term i ever related to myself at all but like when they're these labels are put on from the outside and if you win too fast to too young you can just develop this relationship to this brittle relationship to success and to work and to training and to everything right you don't you don't realize that getting your ass kicked is a huge part of 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 from the very beginning, they had 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. That's what you're looking for.
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.
You can be really disciplined. So genetics do play a factor.
Circumstances, 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 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 you see incremental growth and improvement you get confidence you're you're 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 working at 8? Was I was I studying tape or was I fucking off and and calling girls? You know was I paying attention to my training routine and my recovery? Or 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 because 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 um i remember i was giving a simultaneous chess exhibition for a charity when you know in my 20s somewhere and this this guy introduced his son and he said his son hadn't lost a chess game in 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 like because you're the kid obviously just was only choosing people to play who he could beat. 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 simul.
And so his life was protecting this perfect thing, right? People who don't lose. So in my chess life, the interesting thing that happened to 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 they're coaches and they were much stronger players than me.

They 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 a really young age this 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 certain loved ones would have is that I'm just, I'm always, I love training.
I love pushing my limits as a way of life in whatever I'm doing. If it was chess, if it was fighting, now it's foiling, surfing, and then foiling in the biggest waves 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 to 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, ten eleven twelve thirteen my whole life and i i it wasn't until recently that i realized that it was actually outside of my conceptual scheme not 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 is 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 no that never works at a high level so 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.

Unless I try.

That's a better way to handle it, to recognize there's a real process.

There's the right way to do this.

It's the only way to do this.

So don't even think about the other way.

Right.

But if it's kind of driving you – for me, I think it's healthier for me to recognize that pattern in myself and then roll with it as opposed to just not even see, like, that it's there. That it's there.
Right. Yeah.
Well, yeah. Acknowledge.
Well, you have to have acknowledgement of it because you have memories. Like if I'm cooking a turkey, I have to cook a world-class turkey.
I have a friend, Jim Detmer, who says to 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 it to be a choice as opposed to just driving you.
It'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, it's martial arts like stand-up fighting or whether it's jiu-jitsu it's the same thing you're you're trying to 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 knees, ankles, back, neck. All those things get exposed.
And if you're a meathead, like I have 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. Then, you know, then you're getting your 10th surgery on your back and you're still trying to train.
And everybody's like, look at Bob. He's crazy.
He's got all his discs fused, but he's still training. Like, maybe Bob shouldn't be training.
Like, maybe Bob's going to break something else now. Like, 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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Because I ruptured my L405 disc. There it is.
Trained on it like a crazy person for a couple years. And then the doctors looked at that and they were just like if you keep on doing this, you're not going to be able to walk.
You're not going to be able to play ball. What's it like now? It's great now.
Yeah, that's great. I mean, I think a little of the foiling probably makes your core incredibly strong.
Yeah. I mean, I've done a lot of stuff.
I mean, I spent years. 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 mean, I'm training, like I'm all in on this art, and I'm doing it in a way that feels healthy on the back. I train jiu-jitsu now, but light.
I mean I can't train all out like I'd love to. It was heartbreaking to give it up.
It was hard. And I was so madly in love and all in with Marcelo and having that – 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 realized you hurt it? I was so stupid.
No, it was a significant moment. I was position sparring.
Marcello was at our school in New York. It was a week before my eldest son, Jack, was born.
So it was a bit over 13 years ago. Marcelo was gone.
I was at the school. Paul Schreiner was running class that day, I think.
And there was this 240-pound blue belt visiting. Just 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've had that hubristic, 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 it ended up where we were doing half guard position sparring where I was holding half guard and he was doing this pass twisting the spine and it was so fucking stupid to do it i mean i was just holding half guard in a 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 and yeah it was brutal you know it was and I remember so how is the disc now? I couldn't lift up my child for the first three 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, four months later, I'd have to bike to the corner store and come back.

And 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 was just trying to get 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, it was a very strange period.
Dude, don't ski. Don't fucking ski.
It would have been a smart thing to tell me. Yeah, I was a dumbass for the first two years after the injury.
And then I realized I had to. What does the disc look like now? I haven't looked at it in a long time.
It doesn't trouble you anymore. It does trouble me.
I take care of it all the time. Yeah.
They replace them now. Eddie Bravo got a fake disc in his lower back, a titanium disc.
And he's able to train again. I know quite a few guys have got them.germein sterling got one in his neck and then went on to defend the ufc bantamweight championship several times yeah they replaced them all together i didn't know that yeah they put our artificial discs now yeah you know your point about i remember i was studying back in the early 2000s studying eddie's game studying the rubber guard studying all theister stuff, just trying to wrap my head around it.
Yeah, he's got some wild stuff. Wild stuff.
And 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 lived in Colorado for a bit, and I trained at Amal Easton's.
And when I'd 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. Like, oh, 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, like, 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 yeah so watch watch how quick he sets things.
It's like right away, you're in fucksville.

You're fucksville.

Like who does this?

Who sets up a go-go plata 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.

Yeah.

And he switches it to omoplata, re-rolls. Mm-hmm.
Yeah. Omoplata crucifix finish.
Yeah. 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 yeah 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.
He does this to everybody. Look at how this transition right here.
Brutal. It's so nasty.
Yeah. It's so nasty, and you just 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 when people go for an omopl omoplata People say okay.
I worst case scenario I might roll out of this and wind up on my back and side control, but not with him No, it was like this is like you're really close to checkmate from the moment the 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 What was your your? How do you feel about Ryan Hall's game in MMA like he cuz he also is entering the MMA game Oh, he's been in an MMA game for quite a while. Yeah, I know.
Yeah 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, when you see his style, the problem with his style, in my opinion, is it's so jiu-jitsu heavy that he's vulnerable when he's fighting world-class strikers.
Like Ilya Teporia smashed him. Yeah.
And it was a horrible, horrible knockout. It's because Ilya's a legit Brazilian jiu-jitsu black belt, but also like way more technical on the feet.

And when you're fighting a guy who's just any one mistake you make in striking it is a concussion any one mistake boom a big hand's coming a knee's coming a kick's coming it's like something's 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 jiu-jitsu is off the charts but his stand-up is not at the level of his jiu-jitsu 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 Pereira is the best example, right? Two-division world champion kickboxer comes over, dominates, becomes a two-division UFC champion as a striker because 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 easier to move around because it's an enormous surface. So you're now chasing this person and you might have already gotten a 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.
You have to have world-class striking to compete at a world-class level in MMA at this point. Yeah.
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 Penn in 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 who trains jujitsu three times a week you're not going to know what he's doing yeah he's a brilliant guy he trained at our school from in New from 2010, 2012, that range.
And it was so interesting watching him and Marcelo. Because Ryan had a huge amount of humility relative to Marcelo.
And he wanted to train with him. And Marcelo was so curious about Ryan's game.
But Marcelo never studied anyone's game. A core principle of Marcelo is if you study my game, you enter my game, and no one will be better at my game than me.
And so

in competition, the

guys would be studying tape of everybody. He would never study

one's tape, never study one's fights, but he'd watch

them the fight before they went

against him. And he'd pick up on some kind

of elemental read. He has this

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 and Ryanyan because ryan and ryan just came and visited me um my home a month ago and we were talking about how formative those training experiences with marcello were and 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 Marcelo had this deep understanding upstream of that.
And it was like watching Marcelo put himself right next to the fire, right next to Ryan's game. He wanted to learn the edges 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, just pure grappling. 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 learning about what heat was and deconstructing it, but then not ever getting into the heat. And you'd watch Ryan roll than anyone else, he could just pull them into the fire, into the spider web.
That's fascinating. Marcello has a really incredibly deep, almost simian physical intelligence.
And his ability to learn from a single rep is unique in my observation. That's amazing.
Ryan has had a ton of surgeries, hasn't he? Oh, yeah. Man, that dude has had such bad luck.
What is wrong with him? What's going on?

Some shit with, I mean, tons of stuff with his knee, with his hip.

I think he's starting to come back.

I think his shoulder's something now.

Oh, shit.

He's still, you know, he's- He's had like nine surgeries.

I think 23.

I think it was 23.

23.

I think he's had 23 surgeries.

Dude has got-

And the bad one happened with someone just falling on him in training.

What was that?

I don't know.

I don't know.

That was a hip.

Oh, God. Yeah, I don't know exactly.
I i haven't seen what did he get done to his hip ask him i don't know yeah he's had a lot of surgeries a lot of someone just fell on him so was he training with someone else and someone else no he was 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 on him, on his hip in a certain way, as he described it.

Yeah, brutal.

When you were training, did you do any weightlifting just to sort of supplement it to keep your joints strong?

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 in.

So I would do a lot of biking, lower body strength, and then I would do – I didn't have – I think if I did it now,

I don training in. 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.
But 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, for the last few years, and I see how they're brilliant, their sports science team and their physical trainers are.
And like, I don't think that I was, when I was training jujitsu, I was at the level of, for example, the Boston Celtics in the resistance training that I was doing to supplement it. And Marcelo didn't do weight training.
That was part of it. When I was training with him, I was just saying.
He didn't weight train at all? No. How did he get those legs? He just rolls, man.
He was biking. He was into those bikes without brakes.
We were biking all over New York. Bikes without brakes? Yeah.
What do you mean? What are they called? Fixies? Yeah. What is that? Fixed wheel? Yeah, fixed wheel.
What does that mean? It's just got no brakes. How do you slow down? You go slow.
You got to slow. You put your foot on the edge of the wheel.
What? Yeah, 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 brakes? You control it.
You're braking. I'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 in traffic, there's some adventures. You're going down a hill.
How are you fucking slowing down? You don't go fast. Oh, what? We're going fast.
No, I mean, you've got to see a high clock. 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 brakes. The dumber thing was what I did after this, which is that when I fell in love with surfing, I was one-wheeling all over New York.
Oh, five ways to stop on a fixie. How about don't get a fixie? Get brakes, you fucking idiot.
This is the dumbest shit I've ever seen in my life. Why wouldn't you have brakes? Why wouldn't you have an option to control the bike better? This episode is brought to you by Squarespace.
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They are the shit. So the people that ride these, they'd argue they control it probably better.
Yeah, look at all the white people. All white people.
Ridiculous white people. They'd be doing backflips with skateboards.
This is a big New York thing. Of course it is.
They like suffering over there. That's why they all live jammed on top of each other.
Can't find a good video. That's so stupid.
There's no good videos on that. That's a stupid thing.
There's a movie I've seen. That's why I love it.
Get breaks, you fucking freaks. My last two years living in New York, I had fallen so in love with surfing and I was I knew ocean arts were my next chapter and I was so heartbroken not to be able to do it so I got a one wheel it was like the first generation you know the one wheel electronic skateboards yeah we had one of those just came out first generation and I was just like thousands of miles biking one wheeling all over New York and then but it was at the early one if you push past past the pushback, it had this pushback thing, which would slow you down, but you could push past it and go faster.
But if you push past the final pushback, it just bottomed out. Wham! And he just went like 23, 24 miles.
It was a whack, right? Over taxi cabs, under taxi cabs, through taxi cabs, everything. The one-wheel is like when you were a kid.
Or sorry, the fixie. It's like you just skid.
Remember? Oh, so there is brakes like a kid.

Yeah, I guess that's a better way to describe it.

I wasn't thinking of it that way.

Okay.

So you can brake.

You can also reverse, which you can't do on most bikes.

You can ride backwards if you needed to.

It's really beautiful.

I mean, I never did it, but it's really beautiful to watch when it's done well.

Okay.

That makes me feel better that you can just skid.

Yeah. You can skid.
You can fucking retire, but you could stop. There's lots of things that can go wrong.
Yeah. It seems like you.
There are lots of things that go wrong. Foiling, there's a lot of fucking things that can go wrong.
You're 35, 40 miles an hour on top of a guillotine, big waves. Dude, I learned how to foil two years ago, and it took me like three hours to get on that fucking thing for the first time because I've never served.
were on an e-foil or? Yeah, e-foil. On an e-foil.
Yeah. It took me forever.
Just kept falling down, getting back up, falling down. Meanwhile, my kids, my youngest at the time, she was 12, humiliated me.
Yeah. She just hopped on it instantly, was scooting around.
And, look, she knew how to do it immediately. But she wakeboards.
she 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 figure this out so for hours i kept falling down and getting back up falling down and eventually i got it and then once i got it it was like easy yeah once i got i was like oh i see e-foiling the best. It's like it's the best way to learn how to foil because they weigh 90 pounds.

The E-foils do.

Like a high-performance foil, the whole setup will weigh four or five pounds.

Really?

Yeah.

I mean, E-foil, you have a battery.

It's heavy, and you've got electricity to learn how to foil. You learn foil dynamics.

Foiling, when you're high-performance foiling in Big Sur, if you're towing in, you're on a three-and-a-half-foot board.

No batter.

It's not powered.

It's just riding hydrodynamics.

Are you getting towed into these waves?

You can paddle in, but if you're towing in to bigger waves, you're on a small board.

You're getting towed in behind a jet ski, whipped in, and then you're just riding. it's frictionless so beautiful and what's the benefit of that above surfing is that you're above the water above the water you're not feel like the ultimate if you think about the the the glassiest surf day possible um the frictionless feeling it's it's more frictionless than that because you're above the water you're 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 gonna fall i'm gonna fall i'm gonna fall yeah as soon as i get above the water like okay we're going too fast you're gonna wipe out the foiling is interesting because it's 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 when you're in a wave, the waves have upward circulation at the face of the wave when you

get to the top of the wave, it accelerates. And so your foil is riding the underwater currents and you're receiving it.
It's so amplified. So like tiny little movements have big effects on things.
So like the surf movement would be very big and the foil movement is very subtle, the body mechanic. And then you learn to really crank into it.
And it's limitless. You can do open water foiling, crossing oceans on long high aspect wings, riding open ocean swells.
And you can push like high performance foiling is just like high performance surfing that the lines you can draw. The turns are epic.
The G's are crazy. So you're just all in on this, huh? Oh, yeah.
I'm all in on this.

Is this an everyday thing for you?

Yes.

Everyday.

Same as jiu-jitsu.

Six days a week, twice a day if possible.

Really?

Yeah.

Wow.

Yeah.

Wow.

Do you have goals?

Virtuosity.

Mm.

Yeah.

I competed my whole life.

And so now I live, like, I train the way I would if I was in a world championship training camp. That's hilarious.
With foiling. Who else 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 like I, yeah, I love it.
But all these arts to me are connected. That's the strange thing about my art, like chess, Chinese martial arts, jiu-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 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 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 their 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, or my second book, The Art of Learning, it was about my experience of crossing over my level from chess 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 Duchenne muscular dystrophy.

But at that point, I'd been training martial arts for two years.

And I had not been – I'd kind of moved – I was 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 I started making what I was doing unconsciously more and more conscious and now when when I relate to chess, I don't move chess pieces anymore, but chess is manifest in everything that I do, as is jujitsu.
And as is 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 Carlsen. Enjoyed that.
He was great. Yeah, it was cool.
Like someone like Magnus, he's so fucking good at what he does. Such a virtuoso.
But if you look at like the top 100 or top 1,000 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've 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 on 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. So 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 music or 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 or jiu-jitsu or anything else.
And then they're just learning the language of excellence. 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 chessboard, 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, right? 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 just this web of interconnectedness is forming in your mind.
Then when you take on something else, you're able to cross the level over really, really naturally. And that, in 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 reevaluate the way you interface with life when you became famous because of the film at 15. So childhood chess player become very well recognized then all of a sudden this movie and now you have to kind of like grapple with things and as you said these challenges make you a 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? It 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 reevaluate. And so this forced reevaluation 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 and 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 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. I 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 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.
And that's a great liberation. Like the moment you become aware of the fact that you're immortal, that you can get your ass kicked, that your arm can break, that that what you're doing is absurd like you get locked up by that knowledge right like and there's so many different forms that can take or the moment you like for example boston celtics like they like you're hungering to win a world championship and 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.
It'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 you 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 like my late teenage years, leaving and studying philosophy and then moving into other fields and started 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 die, I pool, I guess, like nine, ten years ago. I was doing hypoxic breath work, Wim Hof training in a pool.
Jesus Christ. And never do Wim Hof training, everybody, please, in a pool because you're flushing the CO2 from your body, but CO2 is what gives you the urge to breathe.
And so without carbon dioxide in your being, you don't feel the urge to breathe. And I've been a lifetime freediver spearfishing from when I was five, six years old, but I was never doing hypoxic breathwork before freediving.
So if you're diving 80, 90, 100 feet, you're not flushing the CO2 from your body before you do so. So you still have 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 hypoxic breath work in between.
And then my last recollection is being stretched out in bliss that those tingles through your body you get from, have you done Wim Hof training? Yeah, those tingles, had those fucking tingles. And then I woke up 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 black oh my god which should it should be 45 seconds to a minute and you should be brain dead or dead because you're 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 and his laps were 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 whole body was blue um my head was red my body saved me My training saved me me and killed me.
Sent all the blood to my brain. My eyes were blown out red, like bloodshot for three weeks that followed.
And I remember waking up and having this, looking at everyone around me and like, what the fuck is everyone, what's going on, guys? Like, what's the drama? I was the fucking drama. Whoa.
And I spent that night in the hospital going through old chess variations trying to, like, test my brain. Is my brain ruined? Like, do I remember things? Somehow my brain, maybe it's fucked up, but it seems to be working pretty well.
Wow. 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, 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.
And I just fucking – and I think that's a big part of my relationship with the ocean is having died in water. I need to spend my life in the water.
Did you have any sort of out-of-body experience or anything where you were gone? What's really fucked up about it is no. That's what's really wild.
It 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

this guy Brandon Powell

is a brilliant guy who's

a trained is that many years later, I was doing this guy, Brandon Powell,

who's 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 were doing some Wim Hof work.

And he had this methodology of kind of accelerated hypoxic work where he said, I'm not sure if it's true, but he said release DMT in your body, inhibited the DMT inhibitors in your body. And I did these journeys with him twice through pure breath work, no psychedelics.
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 L4-L5. 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.
But I saw the drowning experience from above, the whole thing. I watched the 20 minutes that i was on the that was in 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 i my memory of it consciously from what actually happened is so fuzzy, right? Because I just died and came back.
And then I saw it from above. I think I was mostly focused on the memory of myself.
Yeah, so I relate to myself now. I've died, and I'm living, and I live with a sense of gratitude and commitment.
That's a big part of why we moved to the jungle with my family. I emerged from that with a commitment to living life as beautifully and deeply and truly as I possibly could and to not let anything slip.
Just all in. Isn't it fascinating that sometimes, again, it's the same thing.
it's 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 many times I almost died free diving or, um, but that one was different, man. Yeah.
Cause there was like, I didn't, it was just a, the crazy thing 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 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, I'll fucking do it.

Oh, boy.

I'll just 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 die from shallow water blackout are highly trained Navy SEALs 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.
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Rated M for Mature. It's just a strange thing when you get in the ocean, if you haven't been for a while.
You climb in and you feel it moving around you and pulling, and the water just feels different. It feels like it's 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 and it just becomes a part of their life is to ride that energy and to feel it And the addiction that they get from it.
Guys like Laird, now guys like you. I know so many people that they, like Jocko, he won't leave San Diego.
He doesn't even want to be in California, yes, but San Diego is the ocean for him. He has to be by the ocean.
Yeah. And you can't dominate the ocean, you have to receive her.
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 Would 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 have revolutionized surf training because for foiling, you have the ocean and foiling is much more abundant. Like the 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'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.
Or you can whip yourself on 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 are brilliant low rep learners.
Because by necessity in the ocean, you don't get tons of reps. So in my observation, the greatest competitive surfers in the world are excellent at learning from one or two reps like Marcelo Garcia is on the mats.

I'm not naturally a great low rep learner.

I'm a higher rep learner.

Foiling is – one could say it's more technically complex than surfing because 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.

If 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 in many ways one could argue that it's harder. Not that it's hard.
Any of these arts 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 hit the same section 30, 40 times. So I do think 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 jiu-jitsu fighters do because it's a low rep art that you can't replicate conditions in so surfers aren't most surfers aren't constructed psychologically in a way that they will take advantage of wave pools the way um a jiu-jitsu guy would that's interesting like drilling like you'd like psychologically that's interesting because they're accustomed to just taking what the 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.
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 want to take it on. A lot of the best surfers in the world are crossing over.
But it's a different lifestyle. The ones who cross over are the ones who can embrace the high rep training life.
The one who can adapt. Yeah.
The low rep training thing with surfing I never really considered, but that does 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 learning as a kid. Everything you're exposed to, the ocean's always moving, always changing.
If you can learn from one rep and burn it in, then that just... Well, in jujitsu, for example, you can say, I'm going to drill this armbar 40 times today, 40 times 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 a lot about unlearning, right? So my life's work is unlearning, 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, the 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 control.
Children don't have to unlearn that. They haven't learned it in the first place.
So they're unblocked little boy charlie learning how to surf was so beautiful to watch he just like he grew up in the ocean um he grew up in the jungle and 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 on a surfboard it was like he wasn't we didn't make it technical it wasn't like he should um telling him what to do it was like he could be right foot forward or left foot forward it wasn't we didn didn't make it technical. It wasn't like he should – telling him what to do.
It was 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. Well, 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 gear is amazing.

They've got like gloves and booties and knee guards and like everything is covered.

White face.

Everything is just like not a part of their body is designed to touch the ocean.

They're trying to keep the ocean away.

And they're like they want to be super controlling 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 to it, to observe it, to feel it, to like let it envelop you. Right? Right.
Well, kids will just play. They're not afraid of failing.
They'll just – like the moment a kid becomes afraid of looking bad, like you see that wash over kids when they're like 9, 10, 11, 12, different ages. they become, oh, they don't want to fall.
They don't want to look bad and then that's when they get locked up. Yeah.
The freedom of, I mean, to me, a lot of what like the beacon is as adults is being the post-conscious, like discovering the post-conscious freedom as a learner. Like how can we learn without the egoic 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 jiu-jitsu mats and you're getting your ass kicked, or if you're a great jiu-jitsu 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.
So you're fucking, or if you're like training in some esoteric, you know, Chinese martial art, like I was, and then you're moving to the jujitsu match, 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 egoic 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 Tristan Harris and others in terms of what AI is bringing to society.
It's been a big focus of mine for many, many years. And it's an area where I'm working.
I think 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 realm. So computers are first, like I began playing chess in the pre-computer era, computer chess era.
Then computers entered and I initially was very resistant and romantic to it. And I remember at 19 I started 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. But when they first approached me, I didn't want to do it because I felt like it was going to disrupt.
It was going to kill the beauty of human chess, the art of chess, which is so much about imperfection. But chess players, when I grew up, had to sit in the unknowing, had to have a tolerance of cognitive dissonance.
I might study a chess position and go three months without knowing what the solution is. So our psychologies had to be constructed so that we could sit in cognitive and emotional dissonance for long, long periods of time, days, weeks, months, sometimes years.
Now chess players can click on a button and they've 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 that draws in. But what happened then is that you had Deep Blue entered the game, like supercomputers,

and then you had the movement of AI entering into chess.

And we had AlphaGo and then AlphaZero, which came out of DeepMind.

So Demis Hassabis was the developer of DeepMind.

He was a childhood 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. And then he developed AlphaGo and AlphaZero.
And to give a feel for what AlphaZero did in chess, AlphaZero was able to, without being taught anything about humans playing chess, no education of 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, right? Like someone like Magnus Carlsen is a much, much stronger chess player. He's a world champion.
Gary Kasparov, Anatoly Karpov, Bobby Fischer. Like think about people who are world champions.
AlphaZero within three hours of experimentation without being taught anything was stronger than them, right? So 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 1,900 or so.
Right? Magnus Carlsen, like the strongest human players in the world now are rated somewhere about 2,800, 2850-50-ish ELO. 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 human world champion is the same ELO gap 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. That means that everything, like chess players had a front row seat to that happening early.
When I listened to some of your dialogues with these guys, and I could feel you and them trying to grapple with like how to communicate what it means to have these insanely powerful intelligences in the world. And I think that like,

if you can imagine like an art like chess,

having millennia of development,

people studying it like you train jujitsu, 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

and within three hours of experimentation

be much stronger than them.

And imagine that's going to be in fucking everything.

Nuts.

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.
One of, you know, the great, you know, Thomas Kuhn's 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 let's 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 reveres you.
And now there's this new thing. Quantum mechanics enters the picture.
Right. Like to embrace this new thing is to new thing 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 resist it individually.
Ego. Ego.
And societally, right? Because we will fight tooth and nail to maintain our conceptual schemes. That's one of our drivers of all humans right and so i think we're moving into a world now where you're going to have 37 3800 elo 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't, decision-making, right? Like when we think about social media, imagine a 3,800 ELO rated networked, imagine a million networked 3,800 ELO rated super intelligences utilizing everything that they can gather about you on social media to manipulate you to you to do whatever they it wants or whoever is controlling it wants they 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 um i that that's the most important question today as that we face as a species is like, what do we do? Well, 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 AIs 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 inability.
It is. It is happening, but it hasn't completely transformed life yet.
Right. It's emerging right now.
It's about to. 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 just is. It's going to be attached to quantum computing.
It's going to figure out ways to implement better strategies as far as 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 large.

That 90% likelihood that it'll radically improve the quality of everyone's life.

But then there's 20% or 10%.

Thank you. 90% likelihood that it'll radically improve the quality of everyone's life.
But then there's 20 or 10% that it will not and that will be imprisoned. It's like 10% possibility of the matrix, 90% possibility of a technologically inspired utopia.
My feeling about it is that there are places where it's going to be incredibly it's going to be beautiful like just how computer chess raised the um the level of of human chess game chess players right and now ai chess has made chess players um much much stronger and part of it is because great chess players are partially great because they have had, they're excellent at knowing where not to look, right? Great chess players don't actually look at more, they look at less, but they look in the most potent directions. And what'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 at 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 breakthroughs in material science and life sciences.
And now that can only be done, in my opinion, with just best, best, best in class safety practices. And in my view, that involves having a higher level AI running safety than you have running the actual science.
When you say safety, what are you referring to? Making sure that we don't do, that doesn't go wild, that you don't create things that get out 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 like a game theory of a race going on.
And when you have a race, everyone's just running as fast as they can, but if they slow down to think about what's safe, they might fall behind in the race. And 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 in a race in America.
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 used in the wrong way it has the

Possibility of completely imprisoning society all you'd 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 in it now most cars are connected to wi-fi it's most new ones have at least an option to connect it 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 could happen if that got 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 where you're using Google or some of these search engines, you're getting curated search results.

If 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, you know, they're 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 an electoral process, in an electoral race, you can be swayed in a significant manner.
And he estimates it's as 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. And that's just, you know, an algorithm.
That's just something that they've divided. 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 credit score 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. And 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.
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Just completely lock everything down. We're fucked.
Yeah, that's why I don't you know, when I when I hear people say say things like that 80 to 90% 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, a handful of countries.

Now it's going to be hundreds of thousands or millions of individuals who just have access to super coders.

And so how could it be 80% to 90% 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. Yeah.
Right? You can create for thousands of years and you destroy instantly. Yep.
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% 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. We 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 have been manipulated into doing increasingly destructive things.
And we could have horrific things happen like the grid. You know, there's a guy who was very brilliant in the espionage world years ago who said to me, he said to me, you know, 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, could convince 99% of Americans to move to Alaska or Antarctica or anywhere within two weeks 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 ELO, 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

and 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, know you everyone should get the off social media i just think it's like 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 decision a long time ago really when did you make it i was never on it i made it right at when first i remember when like myspace came Like what did you think of the time fuck that really yeah

I didn't i didn't it felt off to me it felt like something i didn't want to be involved with i 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 and but i was never on any form of social media. And, and, um, good for you.
Yeah. I, I mean, I'm on everything but tick tock.
Tick tock is fucked. It's hilarious.
I was, I was, when I was flying here, I was listening to your, your conversation with Tristan Harris was the dude next to me was, was scrolling tick tock on the plane. And it was amazing listening to this dialogue here and watching him just like watching it happen an hour and a half straight it's like 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 it's brutal addictive and so manipulative like it can just this is like it can guide you to anything but why don't we there's 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 forced to.
But 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? Why don't we just remove ourselves from it? Well, that's a very let's just fucking do it most people aren't rational but why don't we help people be rational and just just you have to change the 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 small dopamine hit that you get from opening up 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. The idea of, you know, having the ability to completely remove yourself from the thing that everyone's addicted to, which is likes and engagement and getting an outrage, the algorithm showing you things over and over again that outrage you.
It's so compelling to people. We're so a 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 jujitsu, right? They get on the mats, and they realize they might have some hubris.
They're an athlete. Maybe they've done some stand-up.
Maybe they haven't.

They're a football player or whatever. And they suddenly are like a fish out of water.
They'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? Yeah.
Like I think we need to culturally experience that humility before it's too late. Because that's how manipulatable we are.
Just how like a first day grappler is on the 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 like that word is now right it'll be much the fuck stronger than that tomorrow once it's's attached to quantum computing, it literally would be a god.

Yeah.

We're about to experience the most bizarre transition that I think any human civilization has ever experienced.

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.
It'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 um and then starving poverty uh 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, every single government, every single leadership position, everything involves control. The CEO controls the company, the president controls the country.
There's Congress, there'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 programmed their ai to show you images of nazis and it showed you multicultural multi-ethnic you know multi-racial nazis like instead of actual right like what is it though 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 you've put your DEI nonsense into An artificial version of what the past is That's crazy. You can't do that because if you start doing that with everything else then we have a distorted version of what the past is.
That'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. And that's nuts.
The question is, what should we do? And like as individuals, societally, I mean, I know you're having dialogue with people who have a lot of ideas about the society, societally.

And I'm thinking about it on the individual level as well.

And it goes like your question about children and learning, right?

I feel that there's something about having that beginner's mind, which is so liberating.

Yes.

Right?

And it's very difficult for adults to release their egoic addiction to what they do, to their habits, to what props up their identity. But 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 what 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.
We're going to have problems solved that we are, as humans, unable to solve. And so there'll be 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. And 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 are going to be lost and people are going to not have jobs.
So what the fuck are they going to do, right? 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 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 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.
We all know that, like, you can't be solving the problem that was important, like, in a fight a minute ago. Right.
Right? It's a different fucking problem than we have right now. Right.
Or in a chess game an hour ago or 10 minutes ago or one minute ago. Right? 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 we're emotionally addicted to.
But humans don't fucking do that. We tend to cling to our ideas, the decisions we've 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 like a fear of success, right? Like 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 that they yearn. 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. And then we exploit the mind being stuck there because it's not dynamic.
It can't keep on moving, right? Like Robert Persig, my favorite, the most important philosopher of my life, Robert Persig wrote Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Have you read that book? Yeah, I did.
Awesome. He was a really important person in my life.
I could tell you an interesting story about him. His idea of dynamic quality, right? I think we have to live in a state of dynamic quality, not static quality, right? Like you think about the front of the freight train surging through space-time versus sitting in the restaurant car.
Like we want to be strapped to the front of the freight train as reality is unfolding and adapting to the new realities and i think we need to build the the way of life that allows us to to do that right right and 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 comet coming and it's going to blow us the fuck up so we need to create the ability to 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 study this believe that some form of universal basic income is inevitable and necessary i 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. You know, 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 and works on cars. If that's gone and now all of a sudden they just have a check, who are they? What do dudes do when they have nothing to do? Well, it depends on the dude.
Some people learn new things. Some people things some people get excited and some people there's gonna be people that take advantage of it in a very positive way if there's a you know there's like a 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 mean I think that would be if you were an ambitious person that would be be amazing.
So 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.

And we're accustomed to believing that survival itself is the primary driving force.

Food and shelter is a 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? Because if we have unlimited resources, which assumingly we will with AI, if it's implemented correctly, if 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. And 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, an 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 being 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 where where everything like land of abundance no more resource scarcity everything is beautiful people have the ability to study art and poetry and opera and right 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. Let's just 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 say that that would be great. The problem is getting there.
So in chess, there's this interesting dynamic between strategy and tactics all the time, right? We need to liberate ourselves from 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. Even if that was a positive place, I think it's going to be a 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've got to give people something. Training is a beautiful thing to do.
Any kind of training, anything where you're learning something. But again, it comes to this comfort thing.
You and I have very similar paths in life in that we've sought things that 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 there's just, you learn more about everything by learning about something.
And I've lived my life like that. And so have you.
And 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. This episode is brought to you by ZipRecruiter.
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Or visit your local grocery and convenience stores, Black Rifle Coffee, America's Coffee. And those are the people that I really worry about.
The 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 people. It's not representative of the people.
It's now your provider, which is a very strange relationship to have. And we see it in welfare states, 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? And 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, times, terrible times have been very cruel to people who weren't prepared. Yeah.
And, you know, I worry about it almost like an intellectual famine, you know, 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. That 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. And a path to being grounded is being immersed in an art, like, for example, like jiu-jitsu or chess, like if you're on the jiu-jitsu mats and you overextend your arm and you get armbarred, 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 armbarred again.
Right. You only get better by taking your shit on.
Right. Or if you're a chess player and you make a mistake and you lose you you if the people who say that's not my fault don't they fucking they're irrelevant very very quickly they just get blazed by they're just like everyone else's race is passed 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 jujitsu as as like a vision like Like 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? You think about a school where somebody, I always found it interesting to watch people when they're four or five rounds into sparring, like do they look for blue belt to rest with or do they look for the like like 240 pound fucking bruiser to beat the shit out 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 does like the up and coming purple belt look for when like the young competitor is he looking for the egoic rest or the place to be exposed like people who hunger for exposure for exposure to get better, right? It'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,, 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.

You just haven't taken your shit on, right?

Like, you're not stronger than your rating.

Your rating is how strong you are as a chess player. Yeah.
Right?

But there's something about – there's something so beautiful about an accurate feedback loop.

Right?

And 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, that 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 studying tape as a basketball team or as a jujitsu fighter or whatever.
Like we need to create game tape in our decision making. We have to stop deluding ourselves about the fact that we're actually better than everything shows we are.
Right. People 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, 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 the decision no longer are valid but you're holding to the decision, which is what everyone does, then don't do that. Don't do that.
Let go of it. Re-evaluate.
So when you work with people and, you know, 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 have been training for the last 15, 16 years elite mental and physical athletes, right? Decision makers, investors, athletes, fighters. You've worked with fighters? NBA teams.
Well, at my school with Marcelo, we had a huge group of fighters, jiu-jitsu fighters. and um so i've been in dialogue with people who are the like the pinnacles of different fields

um my whole life. And 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.
No. 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, right? Like all of our most brilliant creations are interwoven with the dysfunctional parts of our mind. Everyone wants to normalize people.
Like 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 of success, their patterns of failure, where their genius and their dysfunction are entangled, I 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, try 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, 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? Not 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 hidden harmonies in chaos. I 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 Petrosian or Karpov.
I played much more in the style, not the strength, but the style of like Gary Kasparov or Mikhail Tal or Bobby Fischer, like players who were aggressive, who had a lot of like red blood flowing through their body. Like I was hot-blooded.
And he urged me to play in the opposite style from what was natural to me. Think what would Karpov do here? Not what would Josh do here? Is there a benefit to that just to expand your repertoire? Yes.
There is absolutely a benefit to that. But there's also the movement of a young competitor away from their self-expression, a love from their love for the game, a love from their passion.
I think I had this – there's this brilliant man named Yuri Razovayev 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 Karpov through Kasparov.
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 defense of chess by studying the defense of the great attackers. Why was it late in your career to take that in? Well, good question.
It's just when he said it to me, like I was in my early 20s and I'd lost my love for chess. Like it had gotten static, stale.
Like I would – you know, good challenge. It probably wasn't late, but I wasn't – I couldn't hear it.
I didn't, like 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, it would have been a different arc for me in the chess life. But maybe

it would have been much worse for my life. If I had known him in the 15, I might have fucking played chess for the rest of my life.
And I'm so grateful I didn't. So who knows? Isn't it interesting when 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, like those are critical decisions.
If you think of the life that you're living now, is 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.
Because you would say, well, you know, as a person who's just like so in love with chess, I'm so grateful that I ran into this person when I was 11 years old and they sent me in this correct path. Yeah, I mean, absolutely.
I mean, for me, I love the life that I live. Like, I'm so grateful for the life that I've lived.
And I was moved away from chess in many ways by this alienating experience that I just described. And then also the dynamics of the movie and everything.
But I played chess 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. Yeah.
But every catastrophic injury or heartbreaking loss or losing a world championship you know 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.
Now, 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 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. It's interesting.
I don't use that.

I don't know it.

I'm not teaching people something I know.

But you're teaching what you know.

Well, I'm kind of discovering their path with them.

Okay.

I don't go in thinking, like, this is the way you fucking should do it. Right, 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 be they can reject that coach right yeah well you have to really understand someone psychologically to be able to coach them as well yeah because sometimes you don't know like what the the hitch is until you run you're like oh there it is so this is your whole problem with your whole life but the amazing amazing thing is you find the hitch, but then you see, oh, that hitch is interwoven with your biggest... I sent you that thing I wrote about Marcelo, right? And there was this incredible moment that I had with Marcelo, such an emotional moment.
So he's... I describe him as 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, big or large, right? And 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.
And, and he, 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. Olivia and Joey were born premature, and 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 raised their voice at him and it triggered him into a fight place, every time he'd been submitted, every time he'd been swept, I realized as he was saying this, all of his pain is with him every moment. And as he described this to me, it was this incredibly emotional scene where he was just weeping in his exploration in 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 it it's a

superpower but also it it ravages him all the fucking time and you can't just remove that you can't be like yeah release your pain right be great yeah but then you're also releasing the the genius that's the thing about people that are really amazing at something the pain of losing is so devastating to them like when you when you talk about genius and like people use michael jordan as an example genius basketball player but unbelievably competitive yeah like just can't help himself in everything in everything on and off the court i've heard if you beat him at pool he won't talk to you for two weeks you can be like mike just take it fucking easy on the pool table what do you care but you can't say that garyk spar was the same way competitive in everything everything but you can't just like remove that you're removing the genius with it right right that you you have a ferrari engine and you're trying to like navigate 30 mile per hour traffic and you're like fuck i'll never forget this this um this chess coach, Mark Deveretsky, who he said to me this unbelievably hubristic thing when I was 15, 16 years old. He said to me, if he had had Bobby Fischer as a student, as a seven-year-old, he could have made Fischer a much, much stronger chess player without any of the craziness.
What? Without the craziness? And I was just like, as a teenager, my hands started sweating when I just said that. It's just like, because to me, it's just not fucking true.
Right. Like, Fisher's...
It's a crazy thing to say. Yeah, it's hubris, right? And this is the same guy who was urging me into that direction.
Like, but that's the opposite of my approach, right? I think we need, and 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 that 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 the dysfunctional patterning while observing if it, like it's a very delicate process, right? You 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've 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 Fischer and make him even better.
Well, that's why great coaches, great fighters often aren't great coaches, right? Because most teachers teach the way they learned, which will alienate 70 or 80 percent of their students by definition. Great 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 PS 116.
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

a simultaneous exhibition.

Like each one

had their own language

and it was,

I was like so involved

with this theme

that I would be,

it was exhausting

because I was teaching

10 chess lessons

at the same time

to 10 kids

and I remember

I had this moment,

this heartbreaking moment

where I had this one student

named Ivan

who I,

who I,

just charismatic,

intense,

you know,

we had a very close relationship.

I loved the kid

and like I was,

he was,

at the national championship

I was giving him

this pep talk. And I was just like firing him up and speaking to him in the way he needed to be spoken to.
And, and then he was like, he ran off, like stoked, fired up to go kick some ass. And then this other kid who was on the team, this beautiful, sensitive boy came over.
And I looked at him with the same energy that I just was speaking to Ivan. And i brought it to him and and i i was like 15 seconds into speaking to him and i looked at his eyes and i realized like this is a disaster like i'm being this is terrible and then i stopped i like and i like gave him a hug and we like slowed it down we you know he he needed to go into a very different way that ivan went in right but But coach, think about how often you see cornermen fucking up fighters.

Yeah. Right? Yeah.
I mean, so as a coach, I think we have to, like, put our own egos aside and our idea that we know how one should learn. Yeah, and 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 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

like that's a specific focus that you've had. Why is that so rewarding to you? Well, I took on this interesting challenge when I broke my back.
Because I was already doing this, but 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 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 love it as much.
And I never got there. And then I got into the, 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. Like I'm always, like I'm living at my limit in my, 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 on the line, then they become static, and they start to think they know the answer. It's like the fat martial arts instructor who's many years past training and is smoking a cigarette on the sideline telling people what to do and no longer is actually dynamic.
The moment our egos get protected, right? So my relationship to training is something that I live all the time. I 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 to unleash them.
Being a father is about the most humbling thing I've ever I thought I had ideas about about education until I became a dad then I realized I didn't know anything I had to start over um 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, being alienated from it, and then

finding a post-conscious relationship to it and a self-expression within it.

And I think that helping people with that journey is really important.

And also, I love engaging with all in motherfuckers.

I mean, I just love, like, whether, 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, the head coach, and kind of coaching the coach is a modality that I've been playing 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 and tech projects.
And just helping some, it allows me to play in fascinating realms and then studying the interconnectedness. I mean, a big part of my passion is thematic 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 water, boiling? Yeah, that's Miyamoto Musashi. Yeah.
Once you understand the way broadly, you can see it in all things. So 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. Yeah.
10 times over. I um

you know one of my favorite

cadences of Musashi

is in 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 to fucking do as opposed to understanding they have to work for the path to figure out what the fuck they should do. And you have to practice as a way of life.
Right. 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 things.
And he was fighting to the death. To the death.
So there was no bullshit. Right.
There's no room for... Killed 62 men.
Yeah. In 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 there's something so beautiful about the truth-telling nature of living. Like if you...
You know when you're in a jiu-jitsu team and you've got some... You watch someone who doesn't think they're competing for a while, but 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. Yeah.
And like if we live putting ourselves in the flame then we're not going to be bullshitting ourselves all the time because there's this truth-telling modality. Right.
So the question is 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 in what we're doing we're practicing as a way of life my fear is that there's so many of us probably even people that 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 once 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 the discomfort of being hard it's hard hard. Fucking great.
Everything worthwhile is hard. Right.
Like what have you done that's been interesting that hasn't been hard? Every time you get in an ice plunge, it's fucking hard. Yeah.
Like I cold plunge every day. I think you do too, right? Yeah.
Yeah. Like it's a way of life.
It's fucking hard every time. Yeah.
It's not easy. Hard is beautiful.
Living on the other side of pain. That's where things get valuable.
Not doing it and 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 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'll 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 go foiling and you don't fall.
That's a terrible day, man. 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 model that becomes 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.

It happens again and again in every field.

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 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 qualities 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 overwhelms them. And then sometimes it's easier to control a person who's been successful because they don't want to let this go.
They don't want to go back. They want to move forward.
They want to continue. 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 then it 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 I'm on the right side? Right, then you're playing not to 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 dominating the game and you're up eight or 10 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 prevent defense, in my opinion, is the worst thing ever created in sports strategy. Right? Like, you know, prevent defense? I've heard of it, but I don't know exactly.
Yeah, it's like if you're a football team 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. So your defensive back, sit back.
You start allowing eight or 10 or 12-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.
A 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? Do what brought you to the dance. Yeah, exactly.
It's just... In in life I think that thing that you're talking about is very critical that 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 sloppy conditions and ocean, big wave, small wave.
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 talking about 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. It 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 kook, being the guy who's just getting his ass kicked who's 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 a very interesting microculture inside of surfing is that foilers have been people who learned how to 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 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 plan b i've never been a plan b guy i i know i could recreate myself um but i i love this art 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 it's not about beating anybody it's about self-discovery pushing my limits in the ocean which is an element and 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 can do the most epic shit

and so the sensitivity is like

as the gear requires more and more sensitivity

the sensitivity is cultivated

and very few people in the world 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

Thank you. And very few people in the world can do it on this gear, and it's just so sublime.
So I'm so fucking in love with this art. Wow.
I do not have a plan B. But, you know, fuck.
Who knows what happens? I love when people love things. Oh, me too.
One of my favorite things to watch is people that are just absolutely engrossed in what they're doing and are fascinated by it and in 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. I've never loved an art more.
Like I've loved some arts really fucking deeply in my life. You know? Foiling is number one.
I've never loved an art more. Well, maybe it's because 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 just love it yeah yeah so you can't you have to live by the ocean you're i do that's beautiful i live right where the jungle meets the ocean you were telling me before before we wrap this up, you were telling me about a crocodile encounter.
Oh, yeah. That was before I started.
Before I started foiling, I was surfing. And it was like 5 a.m.
and I was flying back to New York that day. So I went out for like just pre-sunrise,, right at sunrise surf.
And I was on this glassy like head high wave. And this gnarled log came up in front of me, this piece of fucking wood.
And I saw it and I hit it and jumped off. It just emerged right in front of me.
I didn't know how I didn't see it. Like I thought it was a big tree.
And when I hit the water, my brain was still thinking log. But it was so interesting.
My skin lit up, up goosebumps and i just realized like like red alert like prehistoric danger and i jumped back on my board and this like a 10 11 foot croc came swimming just a few feet away from me it was so interesting i spent my life like i spent a lot of since i was six years old i've been free diving spearfishing with a hawaiian swing hawaiian sling like bow and arrow underwater deep deep water diving like I I spent tens of thousands of sharks but this was so different like croc energy and I haven't I don't know crocs like I know sharks I don't know crocs and crocs are it was fucking trying to eat you sharks a lot I mean there's a lot of people that believe that 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 interfering with their hunting grounds and they attack people in that regard. I've heard people say that and I'm like, Ooh, 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.
It was interesting. When I hit the water, my body lit up 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 a 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 just pop up and ride the next wave to the beach.

God damn. Yeah, and maybe if I knew the-

That would have been the last day I foiled.

Well, maybe like if I knew the language of Crocs, like I know language of shark.

What's the language?

Murder, kill, eat. I don't know.
That's the language. Maybe there's an internal language.
I do not believe that's true. I think 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 and doesn't pay attention to the ripples in the water, that's a meal.

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.

It's like the ones that they spotted in the early journeys when they were talking about,

like there's talks of 40-foot-plus crocodiles probably 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 wildebeest and anything that fucked up, antelopes, anything that fucked up, anything they can get a hold of. And they just keep growing.
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, Jim Shockey, and he was flown to Africa because this particular village was being targeted by crocodiles. So they hired hunters to hunt these crocodiles.
And while he was there, he said, everyone you would meet had a chunk taken out of them. People were missing hands.
Some people were missing feet. And 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. Oof.
Oof. Oof.
Yeah. So the feeling of humility and danger that you have relative to Crocs.
Yeah. I have about AI relative to the ability to manipulate humans unless we take on our ability 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 or if you're good or if you suck.
That doesn't matter. It's a journey, right? 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 on the road to being grounded 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 you're deep into an art, like think about you with your knowledge 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 an increasingly chaotic world. And I do feel 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... I feel like it's one of our...
And that combined with getting the fuck off social media. Really.
Amazing advice. Yeah, that's my...
Thank you, Josh. That's my pitch.
It was a lot of fun. I really appreciate it.
This it this was great yeah i was really excited to do this and uh really happy to beat you so yeah really

appreciate you awesome jim thank you my pleasure all right bye everybody can't find on social media

don't look