The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #2292 - Josh Waitzkin

00:00:01.000 Joe Rogan podcast, checking out.

00:00:04.000 The Joe Rogan experience.

00:00:06.000 Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day.

00:00:12.000 Whenever someone is like an interesting person and then I find out they do Jiu-Jitsu tour, oh, I could talk to that guy.

00:00:19.000 For sure.

00:00:20.000 Yeah. You know?

00:00:23.000 You know, like I get excited when interesting people do Jiu-Jitsu because I think to 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 Jiu-Jitsu people.

00:00:38.000 They don't know that vibe.

00:00:42.000 They don't know what it's like.

00:00:43.000 They don't know the beauty of Jiu-Jitsu.

00:00:47.000 I feel like Jiu-Jitsu is beautiful for people who practice it.

00:00:51.000 You know, like you see, like Marcel is a great example, your coach.

00:00:54.000 You know, Marcelo is probably one of the most beautiful guys to watch because he just takes advantage of these scrambles in this like really beautiful way, like fast and slippery.

00:01:07.000 And when the opponents react, he reacts in the other way.

00:01:10.000 It's all just technique and flow.

00:01:12.000 It's like, ah.

00:01:14.000 Like, the first time I ever saw him, I saw him live in 2003 in Abu Dhabi.

00:01:20.000 And it was when he fought Chowlin.

00:01:21.000 That was the first time I'd ever seen him in the flesh.

00:01:25.000 I didn't even...

00:01:26.000 Oh my God, this is crazy, scound. 1.00

00:01:28.000 But no one even knew him.

00:01:29.000 No one knew of him other than, you know, he was obviously...

00:01:31.000 I think he was a brown belt at the time.

00:01:34.000 I don't even think he was a black belt.

00:01:36.000 I think Marcel might have been a brown belt.

00:01:39.000 That's interesting.

00:01:40.000 I didn't...

00:01:41.000 In 2003.

00:01:42.000 Find that out.

00:01:42.000 Was Marcelo a brown belt when he won Abu Dhabi in 2003?

00:01:46.000 He may have...

00:01:47.000 Eddie Bravo was a brown belt when he topped out.

00:01:48.000 He told me recently there right before that fight, his grips had locked up.

00:01:52.000 So he went into that fight.

00:01:54.000 It looks incredible.

00:01:55.000 Just that arm drag, take the back, choked him out in seconds.

00:01:57.000 His, like, hands?

00:01:58.000 Yeah, his, like, grips from the fight before were like...

00:02:00.000 Oh, wow.

00:02:01.000 Yeah. When Eddie...

00:02:03.000 Beat Hoyler?

00:02:04.000 He was a brown belt?

00:02:05.000 Yep. Wow.

00:02:06.000 Yeah, John Jock took his black belt off of his own waist and put it on Eddie.

00:02:12.000 Amazing. Amazing.

00:02:14.000 Dude. That's epic.

00:02:15.000 So it's funny.

00:02:16.000 My background, we have a lot of overlap in our early Jiu-Jitsu education because my first teacher was John Machado.

00:02:22.000 Oh, okay.

00:02:23.000 Yeah. And I spent years training with John in L.A. long before.

00:02:28.000 And then I'm, yeah.

00:02:30.000 And then when did, when did you move to New York?

00:02:32.000 So I moved to New York.

00:02:34.000 I think I started training with John.

00:02:36.000 So I was doing Chinese martial arts for a bunch of years before that, computing everywhere.

00:02:39.000 Then I started training, cross-training with John in, I think 2001, 2002.

00:02:44.000 And then early 2005, moved back to New York, started training with Marco Santos in his school in New York.

00:02:51.000 And I was training with Joucao and Alison Britius.

00:02:54.000 Jukau is an amazing old school, Bracey Baja.

00:02:58.000 Like, you know, amazing fighter.

00:03:01.000 And I was also cross-training with Lucas Lepri at the time.

00:03:04.000 And I was, I needed, I was just ready to, and then I met Marcello, and I was, and he had moved from New York to Florida, and I was traveling to Florida to train with Marcello a bunch, and I, I wanted to be pushed all in.

00:03:17.000 And Marcel and I got in really close, and then I, I just said to him, hey, man, you know, you want to come back to New York and open a school together.

00:03:26.000 And he really loved New York.

00:03:27.000 And we gotten very close to this point.

00:03:29.000 Where was he at the time?

00:03:30.000 He was in Florida.

00:03:31.000 He was in New York before.

00:03:31.000 He loved New York, but then he had to move to Florida.

00:03:35.000 He'd been, there's just a lot of Jitsu politics flowing everywhere as it does.

00:03:40.000 Jitsu politics.

00:03:41.000 The worst.

00:03:42.000 And yeah, anyway, long story short, we opened a school together after that.

00:03:47.000 And it was amazing.

00:03:48.000 Then I spent so many years all in training with him.

00:03:52.000 Most such a beautiful, beautiful martial artist.

00:03:55.000 So in 2002 he's promoted a black belt.

00:03:57.000 So he was already a black belt because this is 2003.

00:04:00.000 Yeah, that sounds right.

00:04:02.000 So he had only been a black belt for a year and won Abu Dhabi, which is pretty crazy. 0.94

00:04:07.000 Pretty crazy.

00:04:09.000 Just that.

00:04:10.000 I mean, didn't just beat Chow Lin, won the entire division.

00:04:14.000 and just looked like knowing anybody had ever seen.

00:04:18.000 Just the scrambles, and his ability to arm drag and take the back, and then once he gets to your side, the ability to transition to the back.

00:04:25.000 It's just phenomenal.

00:04:28.000 And he spends his whole jih Tzu life he spent in the scramble, in transition.

00:04:33.000 And that was really a philosophy of his.

00:04:36.000 Have you seen that old school Artes-Souave clip?

00:04:39.000 Remember the old documentaries, Artes-Suave?

00:04:41.000 From back and there, around him as a young teenager training at Fabry Gugel School in Sao Paulo.

00:04:47.000 And it was so interesting because even then you could see him.

00:04:49.000 He never held position.

00:04:50.000 He always let opponents move.

00:04:51.000 Right. It'd be fun to pull that up maybe at one point.

00:04:53.000 Interesting. Like he never is, a core principle of his was to allow the opponent to move and spend as much training time as possible in transition.

00:05:03.000 And while most jutsu guys, as you know, is they're both coming up ranks, egos are controlling, they're holding guys.

00:05:08.000 Yeah. And this, is this him?

00:05:14.000 He's already a black belt here.

00:05:16.000 Yeah, this is after he moved to start training with Fabio in Sao Paulo.

00:05:22.000 And it's such a beautiful thing, because if you watch his style, he's not in this moment, actually.

00:05:30.000 Now he's fully controlling.

00:05:32.000 But most of the time he's scrambling.

00:05:34.000 Yeah, he's scrambling.

00:05:34.000 Did he explain why?

00:05:37.000 You're maximizing time spent in the in-between.

00:05:39.000 I mean, I think in the martial arts, people are so focused on position when they're learning position, position, position.

00:05:44.000 But the in-between is where the real virtuosity happens, don't you?

00:05:48.000 Mm.

00:05:48.000 Interesting. And so he spent, he maximized his time in the in-between.

00:05:52.000 So in stand-up fighting, that would be like footwork and angles.

00:05:56.000 Yeah. It would be similar to that.

00:05:58.000 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.

00:06:11.000 So if you're fighting south paw to orthodox, you always want to make sure that if you're south paw, your foot is on the outside of your opponent's leg.

00:06:18.000 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.

00:06:24.000 And the best ever at that is Vasily Lomachenko.

00:06:27.000 Because Lomachenko, when he was young, his father made him stop boxing for two years and just study Ukrainian dance.

00:06:36.000 Really? Mm-hmm.

00:06:37.000 So for two years, he just did Ukrainian dance.

00:06:39.000 And his foot, have you ever seen him box?

00:06:41.000 No. Oh, my God.

00:06:42.000 Pull up a Lomachenko highlight.

00:06:45.000 Mm-hmm. It's all about movement and position with this guy.

00:06:50.000 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 it'll be behind you.

00:06:59.000 So this is Lomachenko.

00:07:01.000 Like, the way he moves is so different.

00:07:04.000 It's almost like...

00:07:05.000 It's almost like he's got just a radar for like where their punches are coming from and knows exactly where to put his feet at all times.

00:07:16.000 No matter what they do, he knows what they're going to do.

00:07:20.000 But when you watch his footwork, it's the most extraordinary thing, because his ability to give you all sorts of different reads, like, incredible.

00:07:30.000 I mean, you won a world title.

00:07:31.000 I think it is fourth pro fight.

00:07:34.000 Unbelievable amateur record.

00:07:37.000 But it's just the movement, like he's never right in front of you.

00:07:41.000 He's always off to the side.

00:07:43.000 He's always moving around.

00:07:45.000 He jumps in and out, and it's with perfect precision.

00:07:49.000 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.

00:08:04.000 He's never off balance.

00:08:06.000 He's never out of position.

00:08:07.000 He's always slide to slide, pop, pop, slide to slide, pop, pop.

00:08:10.000 And you never know where the fuck he is.

00:08:13.000 He's a magician.

00:08:14.000 It's fascinating to watch him fight.

00:08:16.000 And very few people have tried to incorporate that.

00:08:19.000 Like, you see some of his movement.

00:08:19.000 Like you see some of his movement.

00:08:26.000 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.

00:08:40.000 Because everything is coming from different angles.

00:08:44.000 It's never, I'm charging straightforward at you trying to destroy you.

00:08:48.000 Everything is angles and movement.

00:08:52.000 Virtuosity is so beautiful to watch.

00:08:54.000 Oh, it's incredible.

00:08:55.000 In anything.

00:08:56.000 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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00:10:06.000 One way I relate to the transitional training is through frames.

00:10:09.000 It's like a process of building more frames.

00:10:12.000 We have position.

00:10:12.000 We have positioned.

00:10:13.000 And for some people, there'll be no space in between.

00:10:14.000 But if you spend your time playing in the transitional space between you build up frames like an illusionist.

00:10:21.000 I know you, like, remember you spoke to Darren Brown back in the day.

00:10:24.000 Yes. 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.

00:10:32.000 And so it seems like magic.

00:10:33.000 It seems like illusion.

00:10:34.000 Yeah. When martial artists are called mystical, right?

00:10:38.000 It's because people don't understand what they're doing for the most part, technically.

00:10:42.000 And they have frames where others don't have frames.

00:10:44.000 Right. So they have more options, more...

00:10:48.000 It's like having a language and you have access to a larger vocabulary.

00:10:52.000 Yeah. Yeah, I think that that's right.

00:10:54.000 Yeah. I think that's right.

00:10:55.000 And people...

00:10:57.000 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.

00:11:07.000 They just have immense knowledge where you have known.

00:11:10.000 They have more frames, and they can play in frames that you don't have, and it seems like...

00:11:14.000 something's coming from the sky.

00:11:16.000 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.

00:11:29.000 Like the rubber guard variations, they were so systematic and so like...

00:11:35.000 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.

00:11:42.000 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.

00:11:53.000 And if you don't have a person that you train with, if you train in 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.

00:12:06.000 Like, the difference between a really good guard player in M.M.A., 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, Anka Lyev.

00:12:21.000 Anka Lov's only defeat.

00:12:23.000 is to Paul Craig, because he's just wicked off of his back.

00:12:26.000 So everybody feels comfortable.

00:12:28.000 In MMA, there's only a couple guys like Olivera, you gotta really watch your P's and Q's.

00:12:33.000 There's a few guys that are just wicked off of their back, but no one's like Paul Craig.

00:12:37.000 And so if you're just used to fighting regular guys off of their back, and you get in guard, And you get a little cocky, you extend an arm to try to land a punch, and then all of a sudden his legs are wrapped around your fucking neck.

00:12:47.000 And you're like, oh, Jesus.

00:12:49.000 How did this happen so quick?

00:12:50.000 Because he's just got that technique.

00:12:52.000 It's just so tightened up.

00:12:55.000 It just locks it up so fast.

00:12:57.000 It's fascinating to watch the difference, which means 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.

00:13:07.000 Many ways, that's in a large scale what Hoyce was doing back in the day.

00:13:10.000 Sure. No one had any idea.

00:13:12.000 When they were grabbing his geese, they had a huge advantage.

00:13:14.000 Yeah. But they were entering his terrain.

00:13:17.000 And then when we were training in the early days, there was so much close-mindedness about leg locks.

00:13:23.000 Mm-hmm. So the leg-lock game was outside of the conceptual scheme to so many jujitsu guys.

00:13:26.000 It was forbidden.

00:13:27.000 It was forbidden.

00:13:28.000 So they'd get caught.

00:13:28.000 It's like that dogma.

00:13:31.000 It's so interesting competitively finding where someone's dogma is, where their constructs or their false constructs.

00:13:36.000 Well, there's a good argument for it with the ghee with young guys. 1.00

00:13:41.000 Oh, for sure.

00:13:42.000 Yeah. Not shredding each other's ankles all the time.

00:13:45.000 Yeah, ripping knees apart where they're not going to be able to be repaired.

00:13:49.000 You know, I mean, how many people have ruined their knees forever from a heel hook? 0.98

00:13:52.000 A large number.

00:13:53.000 I would imagine if there's any technique that's sort of ruined an athlete's career, the heel hook would probably be number one.

00:13:59.000 Heel hook is why I started training jujitsu. 0.89

00:14:01.000 Really? Yeah, because I was doing stand-up stuff and I was competing everywhere.

00:14:04.000 I was doing Chinese martial arts and my teacher's son, Max Chen, who was a Sancho fighter and on the U.S. national team, really good stand-up fighter and he was studying UFC before I had even looked at it.

00:14:18.000 And then he was studying, I think it was Frank Shamrock's double heel hook shit from way early days.

00:14:23.000 And he was just like, let's just continue to the ground.

00:14:26.000 And I had never ground fought before.

00:14:28.000 And I ended up in the ground.

00:14:29.000 Then he just put me in the heel hooks and double heel hooks. 1.00

00:14:30.000 My knees were exploding.

00:14:32.000 Oh, no.

00:14:33.000 Terrible idea.

00:14:35.000 Oh, no.

00:14:35.000 My knees were just screaming.

00:14:36.000 And I would throw him on the floor and then I'd be tapped.

00:14:39.000 I didn't even know what tapping out was.

00:14:41.000 I had never grappled before.

00:14:41.000 Oh, no.

00:14:42.000 You didn't even know how to grab me put you in a heel hook. 1.00

00:14:45.000 That's so awful.

00:14:45.000 The first submission I felt my life was like the heel hook 20 times.

00:14:49.000 Somehow my ACL didn't shred.

00:14:51.000 And I was like, I have to fucking train this jiu-jitsu because Max is kicking my ass.

00:14:56.000 And I didn't like it.

00:14:57.000 So then that's how it all began.

00:14:58.000 Well, Hoyce was brilliant in wearing the ghee because it made people grab it.

00:15:04.000 They thought they had an advantage that he had something to grab.

00:15:06.000 And next, you know, he's like...

00:15:08.000 clenched around you and dragged you to the ground.

00:15:10.000 It's an amazing idea, right?

00:15:11.000 Like they had no idea that they were entering his game.

00:15:13.000 They thought they were controlling him.

00:15:14.000 Right. And they didn't understand that all that friction from the ghee was going to make it very difficult for you to get out of anything. 0.96

00:15:20.000 And he was so used to people grabbing him.

00:15:21.000 He spent his life people grabbing.

00:15:22.000 Yeah. They entered his river.

00:15:24.000 That changed the whole world, didn't it?

00:15:26.000 Oh my God.

00:15:26.000 It changed the whole world.

00:15:27.000 It's awesome.

00:15:27.000 Changed what street fights looked like.

00:15:30.000 Changed everything.

00:15:31.000 Those first, um, those first UFCs were just...

00:15:35.000 Wild. Nuts.

00:15:36.000 Wild. Just the bizarre.

00:15:38.000 The first UFC I worked was UFC 12 in Dothan, Alabama.

00:15:43.000 Yeah. I had to take a propeller plane.

00:15:47.000 I had to fly in to, I think we flew into Birmingham or somewhere, and then we had to take a propeller plane to Dothan.

00:15:52.000 I was like, what am I doing?

00:15:55.000 This is so ridiculous.

00:15:56.000 But I wanted to just see it live because I'd only seen it on television.

00:15:59.000 I'd only seen it.

00:16:00.000 I'd never seen a live cage fight before.

00:16:03.000 I'm like, this has got to be crazy.

00:16:05.000 So UFC 12. How long after the first was that?

00:16:08.000 Well, it's 97, so it was four years later.

00:16:10.000 Four years later.

00:16:11.000 Yeah. Wow.

00:16:12.000 Man, you've been on that journey from the beginning.

00:16:14.000 Yeah. Everybody was like, what are you doing?

00:16:18.000 Don't be associated with this.

00:16:20.000 So many people were telling me not to be associated with it.

00:16:22.000 It was like I was doing snuff films or something.

00:16:26.000 You know, it's like, why are you doing this?

00:16:27.000 You're an actor.

00:16:28.000 I was like, okay.

00:16:30.000 I don't know what to tell you.

00:16:31.000 Yeah. I like it.

00:16:32.000 I want to go watch.

00:16:34.000 I needed to see it.

00:16:35.000 And you were, were you training at that point?

00:16:37.000 Oh, yeah.

00:16:37.000 Yeah, it already started doing jujitsu.

00:16:39.000 I started juxton's then, right?

00:16:42.000 Started at Hicksons, and then I went from Hicksons to Carlson Gracie's.

00:16:46.000 I didn't know.

00:16:47.000 I thought all graces were the same.

00:16:49.000 Like, this grace is closer.

00:16:50.000 I'll go to this gracy.

00:16:51.000 They all love each other.

00:16:52.000 And I'd also say, yeah, I didn't understand.

00:16:54.000 They were fight.

00:16:54.000 They were all tooth and clawed each other back then.

00:16:58.000 I didn't know that I knew Carlson's from, I think the show was Extreme Fighting, the John Peretti show.

00:17:06.000 So John Peretti, who worked for the UFC, then branched off and had another thing called Extreme Fighting.

00:17:11.000 And that's where Conan Silvera came from and a bunch of like elite...

00:17:18.000 UFC fighters, Mario Sperry fought his first fights over there.

00:17:23.000 So it was like a really good competitive organization that was like right up there with the UFC back in the day.

00:17:32.000 And so I had Carlson Gracie's name was on that all the time and they showed some training footage of them training. 0.98

00:17:38.000 So I found out about that place and that was right when Vitor Belfort was emerging.

00:17:42.000 So Vitor was 19, so I was training at the same gym as Vitor.

00:17:46.000 It was incredible.

00:17:48.000 Just watching him train, you know.

00:17:50.000 He was a freak.

00:17:52.000 Like, just an athletic freak at 19. He was so fast.

00:17:57.000 Just so fast and with his hands.

00:18:00.000 And everybody knew he was a black belt under Carlson Gracie, so everybody expected just jiu-jitsu.

00:18:05.000 And this guy comes out with little MMA gloves on and just starts tuning people up on the feet.

00:18:11.000 And you're like, whoa.

00:18:13.000 A blackbell who can do that? 1.00

00:18:15.000 Like, where's this coming from?

00:18:16.000 Like, this is a totally new thing.

00:18:18.000 So that was the first fight that I attended.

00:18:20.000 And that was the first fight I worked.

00:18:23.000 Wow. It was nuts.

00:18:26.000 This theme of transitions in developing frames where other people don't have them.

00:18:30.000 Like, it's so interesting how it's manifest in every art.

00:18:33.000 In everything.

00:18:34.000 Like, I remember when I was playing chess, because I was a chess player from age six to 23, that was my first art.

00:18:42.000 You weren't just a chess player.

00:18:43.000 You were a chess player that made a movie about, dude.

00:18:47.000 Yeah. I didn't have much to do with me, man.

00:18:50.000 Well, searching for Bobby Fischer's about you, bro.

00:18:53.000 Yeah. You know, which has got to be weird.

00:18:55.000 Many moons ago.

00:18:56.000 That was fucking weird.

00:18:56.000 Was it weird the dramatic representation of your life versus the real life?

00:19:01.000 Like, what is that juxtaposition like?

00:19:05.000 Is it bizarre watching...

00:19:07.000 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'm me this is not really me but it's about me yeah 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.

00:19:31.000 And when the book came out, it felt like I read it and it felt true.

00:19:34.000 I was a little pissed off because they didn't want people to know when I cried.

00:19:36.000 I was an 11-year-old.

00:19:37.000 I didn't want to be vulnerable, right?

00:19:39.000 But, like, that felt like, and that was my first real thrust into the, into, like, some degree of spotlight.

00:19:46.000 And then, and I was the national champion at that point, and I was each year for those years.

00:19:49.000 So, like, I was at the top of the chess world, the youth chess world, and then I had the movie come out.

00:19:53.000 The book came out.

00:19:54.000 And then when the movie came out, it was a shit show.

00:19:56.000 I hated the movie when I first came out.

00:19:58.000 Why did you hate that?

00:19:59.000 because I thought it had nothing to do with my life.

00:20:02.000 Years later, I was able to see it as a work of art separate from my life and see it that way.

00:20:09.000 And I was able to see how it was thematically true in many ways to themes in my life.

00:20:18.000 But my first teacher, Bruce Pendelphini, who's still a very dear friend of mine, Ben Kingsley played him as this mean guy.

00:20:25.000 And I've had terrible coaches in my life.

00:20:27.000 I've had coaches who were super destructive.

00:20:29.000 But Bruce wasn't.

00:20:30.000 He was beautiful and loving and helped me discover my love for chess.

00:20:36.000 My first coaches were the hustlers in Washington Square Park and Bruce Penalphini together.

00:20:40.000 And the way that was represented, I didn't like it.

00:20:41.000 They also combined a bunch of characters in Washington's and Court Park, the hustles that combined them into one in a way that was them mathematically true but didn't feel...

00:20:50.000 So like when you're a kid, you're a teenager, you see all the difference.

00:20:53.000 A movie comes out about your life.

00:20:54.000 You see all the differences as opposed to the similarities.

00:20:57.000 And it was...

00:21:00.000 Yeah, and I felt really guilty about it relative to Bruce.

00:21:03.000 That was a big part of it, because I love Bruce.

00:21:04.000 Did you talk to him about it?

00:21:05.000 Oh, yeah.

00:21:06.000 What was his take on it?

00:21:07.000 I mean, was he named Bruce in the movie?

00:21:09.000 Yeah, he was named Bruce in the movie.

00:21:12.000 Honestly, he loved it.

00:21:12.000 I mean, it put him in the spotlight as, like, the chess teacher in, you know, in the country and the world.

00:21:19.000 So he rolled with it really well.

00:21:20.000 I was just sensitive to...

00:21:23.000 all of, like, all these mean-spirited things that happened between us in the film that never happened in life.

00:21:28.000 And years later, like, those things did happen to me.

00:21:30.000 And actually, during those years, when it came out, they were happening to me then.

00:21:33.000 What was interesting is I had some really destructive coaches during that time.

00:21:38.000 And I didn't put that on Bruce.

00:21:39.000 But also what happened with the movie is that I love chess so deeply.

00:21:43.000 It was my first form of self-expression.

00:21:46.000 And up until the film came out, it was just sort of this pre-conscious, innocent form of of play, of battle, of, like, it was, it was my jih Tzu mats.

00:21:55.000 It was, it was, I fucking loved it.

00:21:58.000 And, and then it, the, the movie is what pulled me into self-consciousness for the first time.

00:22:03.000 I started thinking about, instead of losing myself and thought, I started thinking about how I looked to groupies, to cameras, to the rest.

00:22:10.000 And so, like, I moved from self-expression to self-consciousness, to being locked up, and then, you know, And I didn't ask for it.

00:22:18.000 I didn't decide I want to have a movie.

00:22:20.000 This thing was done.

00:22:21.000 It was ultimately, I mean, I'm grateful for it.

00:22:23.000 From my perspective now, the existential crisis that happened was awesome for me.

00:22:28.000 It forced me to become more complicated as a human and integrate a sense of consciousness into my relationship to something.

00:22:35.000 To my perspective on it now is that it was a beautiful journey.

00:22:38.000 It made me grapple with a lot of shit.

00:22:40.000 I didn't become reliant on a flower garden in order to have a deep relationship to an art.

00:22:46.000 But at the time, I was very conflicted about it.

00:22:49.000 And then when I graduated high school, I took off and left the U.S. for a couple 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.

00:23:01.000 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.

00:23:14.000 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.

00:23:30.000 And then all of a sudden, a movie star.

00:23:33.000 And not a movie star in the sense that you're on the screen, but it's about you, which is probably even weirder.

00:23:39.000 So you have these false expectations or false...

00:23:43.000 false narratives of how your life played out and who the people and who the piece and so everywhere you've 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.

00:24:05.000 Imagine if, like, Mario Lopez played me in a movie.

00:24:09.000 Right. You know what I mean?

00:24:10.000 There's someone less handsome than Mario Lopez.

00:24:13.000 But, and then you would have this thing where like, oh, you're the guy that that guy played in the movie.

00:24:19.000 And I'd be like, yeah, but that's not really, I don't, that's not really me.

00:24:24.000 I didn't have that problem.

00:24:26.000 This is not real.

00:24:26.000 That's fake.

00:24:27.000 And also when you're a teenager, you're susceptible to all of the temptations.

00:24:31.000 Oh, yeah.

00:24:31.000 Like, I mean, suddenly you've got groupies everywhere and that's awesome.

00:24:35.000 And it's a lot of fun.

00:24:36.000 But it does not necessarily, it's not necessarily consistent with sitting for six hours at a time in competition playing chess.

00:24:42.000 No. It's probably destructive to it, right?

00:24:44.000 Quite destructive.

00:24:45.000 Yeah, which is interesting, and you have to integrate all of that.

00:24:47.000 How old were you when the film came out?

00:24:49.000 15. Yeah, that is a crazy time to get any kind of attention.

00:24:53.000 Because you're just getting testosterone for the first time.

00:24:57.000 You're like, what is all this, right?

00:24:58.000 And your body's growing.

00:24:59.000 And it was flowing hard.

00:25:00.000 Yeah. And you're becoming a man.

00:25:02.000 Now, all of a sudden, girls like you? 0.99

00:25:03.000 Like, what?

00:25:04.000 Yeah. What is this about?

00:25:06.000 This is craziness.

00:25:07.000 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.

00:25:17.000 By the time I was seven, I was the top-rated player for my age in the country.

00:25:20.000 My first national championship, I got my ass kicked, which was tremendous.

00:25:23.000 It was great.

00:25:23.000 Last round I lost the last round of my first nationals I lost to the guy who later became my best friend for many, many years, David Arnett.

00:25:32.000 And you say tremendous because was that like a jumping point for improvement for you?

00:25:37.000 Because I didn't learn that I could win without getting my ass kicked first.

00:25:42.000 I had to grapple with my demons.

00:25:46.000 I relate, the year from then to winning my nationals, my first nationals the next year was when I really developed a love for chess and I had to work very hard and I didn't associate winning the nationals with talent or a smooth trip or all the bullshit that people can connect when they have, when they're called the prodigy from the outside.

00:26:08.000 It's not a term I ever related to myself at all, but like when 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 training and to everything, right?

00:26:23.000 You don't realize that getting your ass kicked is a huge part of the journey.

00:26:27.000 That's a problem with very talented fighters as well.

00:26:30.000 A lot of very talented martial artists, they never developed the discipline to truly become great.

00:26:35.000 Because from the very beginning, they had, and whatever the advantage was, whether it's a speed advantage, a strength advantage.

00:26:43.000 I mean, genetics plays such a large part in martial arts success.

00:26:49.000 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.

00:26:59.000 Well, that's amazing.

00:27:00.000 If you can have that combination, that's what you're looking for.

00:27:02.000 That's what you're looking for.

00:27:03.000 But if you don't have that, and Mike Tyson is competing in your division, you're fucked.

00:27:09.000 You can be really disciplined.

00:27:11.000 So genetics do have, they do play a factor.

00:27:14.000 Circumstances, coaching.

00:27:16.000 There's a lot of different factors.

00:27:18.000 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.

00:27:32.000 Because the only way you get there is through, you have to, I think oftentimes training becomes, it becomes regimented, it becomes something you do.

00:27:42.000 You see incremental growth and improvement.

00:27:44.000 You get confidence.

00:27:46.000 But then when you compete, if you get your ass kicked, then you have to kind of reassess everything.

00:27:51.000 Like, okay, was I working at 10 or was I working at 8?

00:27:55.000 Was I studying tape or was I fucking off and calling girls?

00:28:00.000 You know, was I paying attention to my training routine and my recovery?

00:28:04.000 Or was I just training and partying?

00:28:05.000 Like, what was I doing wrong?

00:28:07.000 Like, what led this person to land those shots?

00:28:09.000 What led this person to beat me?

00:28:11.000 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.

00:28:19.000 And the best expression of challenge is total humiliating defeat.

00:28:23.000 Absolutely. And so consistently the biggest losses, the most crushing losses are what lead to the biggest wins later.

00:28:30.000 Yes. Sometimes many years later, but it, like that, and people often, I remember I was giving a simultaneous chess exhibition for a charity when, you know, in my 20s somewhere.

00:28:43.000 This guy introduced his son, and he said his son hadn't lost a chess game in two years.

00:28:48.000 And he was so proud.

00:28:49.000 And it's just like, I knew it was a fucking train wreck.

00:28:53.000 I mean, the kid obviously just was only choosing people to play who he could beat, wouldn't compete up in tournaments, would only play down.

00:29:01.000 And he was the only kid who didn't want to play against me in the simul.

00:29:04.000 And so his life was protecting this perfect thing, right?

00:29:07.000 People who don't lose.

00:29:10.000 So in my chess life, the interesting thing happened to my psychology is that I was the top-rated player from my age in the country from a young age, but I always played up.

00:29:19.000 I always played against adults, except for nationals and worlds, I played up.

00:29:23.000 And all of my rivals were targeting me because I was the top seed in youth events.

00:29:30.000 But they're coaches and they were much stronger players than me.

00:29:33.000 They were adult, international masters, grandmasters, and they could see all my weaknesses.

00:29:37.000 psychological, technical, everything.

00:29:39.000 And so if I ever made a mistake, the weakness was exploited until I took it on.

00:29:43.000 And so I developed from 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.

00:29:53.000 And so not taking on my weakness became outside of my conceptual scheme.

00:29:57.000 So from age eight, I just, and it can be a blind spot, like today in life, like a criticism of me that something loved ones would have is that I'm just, I'm always, I love training.

00:30:09.000 I love pushing my limits as a way of life in whatever I'm doing.

00:30:11.000 If it was chess, it was fighting.

00:30:13.000 Now it's foiling, surfing and then foiling in the biggest waves I can find.

00:30:17.000 And like just, if I'm playing at my edge, I feel...

00:30:22.000 It feels beautiful.

00:30:22.000 It feels like where I want to be.

00:30:24.000 But the comfort zone doesn't feel beautiful.

00:30:26.000 And to me, that works really well.

00:30:28.000 But it's a big part of, like, my foundation in that was being eight years old and being targeted, eight, nine, 10, 11, 12, 13, my whole life.

00:30:38.000 And 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.

00:30:47.000 There's no luck in chess.

00:30:48.000 There's no fucking luck in chess.

00:30:50.000 If you have, like if you're playing chess, if you have an opening repertoire that's massive and you go into a game and there's one little place that there's a weakness and you don't want your opponent to go, he always fucking finds it.

00:31:00.000 Yeah. I don't know why.

00:31:02.000 You never like make a move and hope he doesn't see it.

00:31:05.000 Or I'll play, let's set this trap and it's not the best move, but maybe he'll fall into it.

00:31:09.000 No, that never works at a high level.

00:31:11.000 So you just, you have to take your shit on.

00:31:14.000 So you associate not taking it on with pain.

00:31:19.000 Yeah, I don't anymore.

00:31:20.000 I did young, and now I don't associate it with anything.

00:31:22.000 I just don't do it.

00:31:23.000 Right. Unless I try.

00:31:25.000 That's a better way to handle it.

00:31:27.000 To recognize there's a real process.

00:31:30.000 There's the right way to do this.

00:31:31.000 It's the only way to do this.

00:31:33.000 So don't even think about the other way.

00:31:35.000 Right. But if it's kind of driving you, for me, I think it's healthier for me to recognize that pattern to myself and then roll with it as opposed to just not even see that it's there.

00:31:45.000 That it's there.

00:31:45.000 Right. Yeah.

00:31:46.000 Well, yeah, acknowledge.

00:31:48.000 Well, you have to have acknowledgement of it because you have memories.

00:31:50.000 Like if I'm cooking a turkey, I have to cook a world-class turkey.

00:31:54.000 I have a friend Jim Detmer who says to me, Josh, what you have to do is cook a terrible turkey.

00:31:57.000 Just cook an average turkey, you know?

00:31:59.000 Don't crush it.

00:32:00.000 In other words, it's an interesting thing when you become present to the fact that you have this youthful story running through everything you do.

00:32:10.000 And you can choose to live that way.

00:32:13.000 But it's good for it to be a choice as opposed to just driving you.

00:32:16.000 It's definitely good for it to be a choice.

00:32:18.000 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.

00:32:29.000 And if you can't do that, then you'll be stuck.

00:32:32.000 Yeah. And you see a lot of that with martial arts people.

00:32:35.000 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.

00:32:45.000 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.

00:32:55.000 Whether it's martial arts like stand-up fighting or whether it's jiu-jitsu, it's the same thing.

00:33:00.000 You're trying to...

00:33:03.000 You're trying to isolate joints.

00:33:05.000 You're trying to cut off blood.

00:33:08.000 And you're resisting all these things.

00:33:09.000 And all the weak points get exposed.

00:33:12.000 Shoulders, knees, ankles, back, neck.

00:33:16.000 All those things get exposed.

00:33:17.000 And if you're a meathead, like I have been in the past.

00:33:21.000 You train through injuries, and they get chronic, and then you get to a certain point where you're like, what am I doing?

00:33:27.000 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. 0.89

00:33:34.000 Then you're getting your 10th surgery on your back, and you're still trying to train.

00:33:39.000 And everybody's like, look at Bob.

00:33:40.000 He's crazy.

00:33:40.000 He's got all his discs fused, but he's still training.

00:33:42.000 Yeah. Maybe Bob shouldn't be training.

00:33:44.000 Like, maybe Bob's going to break something else now.

00:33:47.000 Like, maybe it's time to move on to something else.

00:33:50.000 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.

00:33:58.000 Like, life has so many challenges and so many fascinating things that dive into.

00:34:02.000 For you now, it's foiling.

00:34:04.000 For a while, jiu-jitsu, chess, like anything like that.

00:34:07.000 You'll find something else like that.

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00:35:33.000 You'll find...

00:35:34.000 Jiu-Jitsu was the art I had to, that I had to move on from, not on my own terms, because I ruptured my L-405 disc.

00:35:41.000 There it is.

00:35:41.000 Trained on it, like a crazy person for, like, a couple years.

00:35:45.000 And then the doctors looked at that, and they just like, if you keep on doing this, you're not going to walk.

00:35:49.000 Not going to be able to play ball.

00:35:50.000 What's it like now?

00:35:52.000 It's great now.

00:35:52.000 Yeah, that's great.

00:35:53.000 I think it's a little foiling probably makes your core incredibly strong.

00:35:58.000 Yeah, I mean, I've done a lot of stuff.

00:36:00.000 I mean, I spent, I never had surgery.

00:36:03.000 They all told me to, but I didn't have surgery.

00:36:05.000 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.

00:36:12.000 And... The foiling feels, I'm training, like, I'm all in on this art, and I'm doing it in a way that feels healthy in the back.

00:36:20.000 I train jih Tzu now, but light.

00:36:22.000 I mean, I can't train all out like I'd love to.

00:36:26.000 It was hard-breaking to give it up.

00:36:27.000 It was hard.

00:36:28.000 And I was so madly in love and all in with Marcello and having that, like, I was at that part of the learning process, which is where I get good at the learning process, which is like toward the higher levels of something.

00:36:41.000 That's where I'm best.

00:36:43.000 At learning.

00:36:43.000 Did you have a small injury that got worse over time, or did you have a significant moment where you realized you heard it?

00:36:49.000 I was so stupid.

00:36:50.000 No, it was significant moment.

00:36:51.000 I was position sparring.

00:36:54.000 Marcella was at our school in New York.

00:36:56.000 It was a week before my eldest son, Jack, was born.

00:36:59.000 So it was a bit over 13 years ago.

00:37:03.000 We were, Marcelo was gone.

00:37:05.000 I was at the school.

00:37:07.000 Paul Shriner was running...

00:37:09.000 class that day, I think.

00:37:11.000 And there was this 240-pound blue belt visiting. 0.69

00:37:13.000 This is like ripped dude.

00:37:15.000 And Paul had everyone doing position sparring, half-guard position sparring.

00:37:19.000 And this guy was matched up against one of our guys.

00:37:22.000 I had that hubristic, invincible feeling about me in that moment.

00:37:25.000 I was just when you're feeling at your very best in Marshall Flow.

00:37:27.000 And I was like...

00:37:29.000 And it ended up where we were doing half guard position sparring where I was holding half guard and he was doing this path twisting the spine.

00:37:37.000 And it was so fucking stupid to do it.

00:37:40.000 I mean, I was just holding half guard in a, in like, in position sparring.

00:37:44.000 And I just felt it go, and then like, you know, it was, I couldn't.

00:37:53.000 move. It was fucking terrible.

00:37:57.000 Did it herniate?

00:37:58.000 Yeah. And all the flu had gone.

00:38:01.000 Oh, yeah.

00:38:02.000 And yeah, it was brutal, you know.

00:38:05.000 It was, and I remember, so how was the disc now?

00:38:08.000 I couldn't lift up my child for the first three, four months of his life.

00:38:11.000 And then I had this strange period where I couldn't, I could standing and walking was the toughest.

00:38:16.000 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.

00:38:23.000 And I can't explain this, but I had a period where I couldn't walk, but I could ski because of the angles.

00:38:30.000 So Marcel and I were going to the mountains out around New York, just bombing down.

00:38:34.000 I was just trying to get my fix in.

00:38:37.000 Just skiing without turning was my goal.

00:38:40.000 He was snowboarding.

00:38:41.000 I was skiing.

00:38:42.000 You couldn't walk, but you could ski.

00:38:43.000 He was a very strange period.

00:38:45.000 Dude, don't ski.

00:38:46.000 I would have been a smart thing to tell me.

00:38:48.000 Yeah, I was a dumbass for the first two years after the injury.

00:38:51.000 And then I realized I had to...

00:38:54.000 What does the disc look like now?

00:38:55.000 I haven't looked at it in a long time.

00:38:58.000 It doesn't trouble you anymore.

00:38:59.000 It does trouble me.

00:39:00.000 I take care of it all the time.

00:39:04.000 Yeah. They replaced them now.

00:39:06.000 Eddie Bravo got a fake disc in his lower back, a titanium disc.

00:39:11.000 And he's able to train again.

00:39:13.000 I know quite a few guys have got them.

00:39:15.000 Al Jermaine Sterling got one in his neck and then went on to defend the UFC Bannonweight Championship several times.

00:39:21.000 Yeah. They replaced them all together.

00:39:24.000 I didn't know that.

00:39:24.000 Yeah, they put artificial discs now.

00:39:26.000 Yeah. Yeah.

00:39:28.000 You know, your point about, I remember I was studying back in the early 2000s studying Eddie's game, setting the rubber guard, studying all the twister stuff, just trying to wrap my head around it.

00:39:37.000 Yeah, he's got some wild stuff.

00:39:39.000 And if you're not used to it, it's really interesting to watch people that just have never encountered it before.

00:39:44.000 When I would go to train in other places, I lived in Colorado for a bit, and I trained at Amal Easton's.

00:39:49.000 And when I'd go up there, there's so many positions that guys just didn't understand.

00:39:53.000 They didn't know what was going on.

00:39:54.000 They figured it out after a while.

00:39:56.000 Like, oh, if he goes this way, he's going to try to get me in a twister.

00:39:58.000 If he goes this way, he's going to try to set this up.

00:40:00.000 But there's certain things that people do all the time, like especially like put your hands on the mat.

00:40:06.000 If you put your hands up, pull up Jeremiah Vance highlights.

00:40:11.000 This is like one of Eddie's best black belts with rubber guard.

00:40:16.000 And the way he does it is phenomenal.

00:40:18.000 He has incredible leg dexterity and his technique is so sharp.

00:40:22.000 And he catches people and stuff where they're like, how am I even stuck here?

00:40:28.000 Do you find that flexed?

00:40:30.000 Yeah, here it is.

00:40:31.000 So watch how quick he sets things up.

00:40:34.000 It's like, right away, you're in your fucksville.

00:40:39.000 Like, who does this?

00:40:40.000 Who sets up a go-go-plata right off the bat and then triangles it? 0.97

00:40:45.000 Look how he sets this up.

00:40:46.000 I mean, this is insane.

00:40:47.000 And just massive crank on your fucking neck.

00:40:50.000 Yeah. And he switches it to Omaplata, re-rolls.

00:40:57.000 Mm-hmm. Yeah.

00:41:00.000 Oma-plata crucifix finish.

00:41:02.000 Yep. And everything he does involves this incredible dexterity and flexibility.

00:41:09.000 There's like a whole series of highlights.

00:41:10.000 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.

00:41:17.000 Like, they don't understand some of these transitions.

00:41:23.000 Yeah. And this is just like one of the best expressions of the techniques that Eddie's developed.

00:41:29.000 So, like, Jeremiah's fantastic at that, like, this particular technique of being able to isolate the alma plata and then secure a choke in the transition.

00:41:38.000 He does this to everybody.

00:41:39.000 Look at how, this transition right here.

00:41:41.000 Brutal. It's so nasty.

00:41:43.000 Yeah. It's so nasty, and you just, you don't know what the fuck you're doing.

00:41:46.000 How am I getting out of this?

00:41:50.000 I mean, he just hits this over and over and over on people.

00:41:52.000 And so many times, and people go for an Oma Plata, people say, okay, worst case scenario, I might roll out of this and wind up on my back and side control.

00:42:01.000 But not with him.

00:42:02.000 This is like, you're really close to checkmate from the moment the Oma Plata set up from a position where you're defending.

00:42:10.000 So you're defending correctly from the Oma Plata, and that winds up setting up this choke. 0.93

00:42:16.000 What was your...

00:42:18.000 How do you feel about Ryan Hall's game in M.A.?

00:42:20.000 Because he also, he's entering the M.M.A.

00:42:22.000 game. Oh, he's been in an M.A game for quite a while.

00:42:25.000 Yeah, I know.

00:42:25.000 Yeah. No, but I mean, when he entered the game, he came into it with a repertoire that was so unusual for...

00:42:29.000 Very unusual.

00:42:30.000 Well, he's really, really smart, obviously.

00:42:33.000 And when you see his style...

00:42:37.000 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.

00:42:46.000 Like Ilya Teporia smashed him.

00:42:48.000 Yeah. And it was a horrible, horrible knockout.

00:42:51.000 It's because Ilya's a legit Brazilian jiu-jitsu black belt, but also, like, way more technical on the feet.

00:42:56.000 Mm-hmm. And when you're fighting a guy who's just any one mistake you make in striking is a concussion.

00:43:04.000 Any one mistake, boom, a big hand's coming, a knee's coming, a kicks coming.

00:43:08.000 It's like something's coming if you make mistakes.

00:43:10.000 It's just like being a blue belt rolling with a high-level black belt.

00:43:15.000 It's the same thing.

00:43:16.000 It's like you're just way too vulnerable.

00:43:18.000 So his jiu-jitsu is off the charts, but his stand-up is not at the level of his jiu-jitsu.

00:43:24.000 And that's just a real problem today.

00:43:26.000 You can kind of be a specialist if you're a striker.

00:43:31.000 Stryker, like, there's a few guys that can pull it off if they're really strong and they have good takedown defense.

00:43:35.000 Like Pereira is the best example, right?

00:43:37.000 Two-division world champion kickboxer comes over, dominates, becomes a two-division UFC champion as a striker.

00:43:44.000 Because every fight starts standing up.

00:43:46.000 But if you don't know how to strike, every fight starts standing up.

00:43:51.000 So the beginning of the fight is always something you're not good at.

00:43:54.000 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.

00:44:03.000 And the cage of the octagon actually makes it easier to get up if someone takes you down.

00:44:07.000 So there's a lot of elements that wouldn't even exist if you had a flat surface with no walls.

00:44:12.000 So it's easier to defend.

00:44:14.000 It's easier to move around because it's an enormous surface.

00:44:17.000 So you're now chasing this person, and you might have already gotten a concussion.

00:44:21.000 You might have already been rocked.

00:44:22.000 So you're already like a little out of it.

00:44:24.000 And now you're like desperado mode.

00:44:26.000 It's just a bad place to be.

00:44:28.000 You have to have world-class striking to compete at a world-class level in MMA at this point.

00:44:33.000 Yeah. You have to have something at the very least.

00:44:37.000 You have to be really good defensively, really good.

00:44:40.000 But then you're just going to get picked apart on the feet.

00:44:44.000 Yeah. Your legs are going to get kicked.

00:44:46.000 You're going to get brutalized.

00:44:48.000 Yeah, you have to be a really good striker.

00:44:50.000 And Ryan is one of those guys that's a specialist.

00:44:52.000 And, you know, he tapped a lot.

00:44:54.000 I mean, tapped BJ Penn in like 10 seconds.

00:44:56.000 He's tapped a lot of guys.

00:44:58.000 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 Jiu-Jitsu three times a week, you're not going to know what he's doing.

00:45:08.000 Yeah. He's a brilliant guy.

00:45:11.000 He trained at our school in New York, I think, from 2010, 2012, that range.

00:45:16.000 And it was so interesting watching him and Marcelo.

00:45:18.000 Because Ryan had a huge amount of humility relative to Marcelo, and he wanted to train with him.

00:45:24.000 And Marcelo was so curious about Ryan's game, but Marcelo never studied anyone's game.

00:45:29.000 His 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.

00:45:35.000 And so in competition, he would, the guys would be studying tape of everybody.

00:45:39.000 He would never study one's tape, never study one's fights, but he'd watch them the fight before they went against him.

00:45:44.000 And he'd pick up on some kind of elemental read.

00:45:46.000 He has this incredible, he's what I call a low rep learner.

00:45:50.000 His ability to learn from a single repetition is just...

00:45:53.000 Unbelievable. And it was really interesting watching him and Ryan, because Ryan just came and visited me in my home a month ago.

00:46:03.000 And we were talking about how formative those training experiences with Marcello were.

00:46:07.000 And it was like one way that Ryan described it is that he had this like layers of traps seven steps in.

00:46:15.000 But Marcello had this deep understanding upstream of that.

00:46:18.000 And it was like watching Marcello put himself right next to the fire, like right next to Ryan's game.

00:46:23.000 He wanted to learn the edges of Ryan's game but never enter it.

00:46:27.000 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.

00:46:35.000 But not just his ability to learn.

00:46:38.000 It felt like a cat putting its paw right up against the edge of a fire.

00:46:43.000 and just like learning about what heat was and deconstructing it, but then not ever getting into the heat.

00:46:49.000 You know, and you'd watch Ryan will roll anyone else, he could just pull them into the fire, into the spider web.

00:46:55.000 That's fascinating.

00:46:56.000 Yeah, Marcella has a really incredibly deep, almost simian physical intelligence.

00:47:03.000 And his ability to learn from a single rep is unique in my observation.

00:47:07.000 That's amazing.

00:47:09.000 Ryan has had a ton of surgeries, hasn't he?

00:47:11.000 Oh, yeah.

00:47:11.000 Man, that dude has had such a bad look.

00:47:13.000 What is wrong with him?

00:47:14.000 What's going on?

00:47:15.000 I mean, tons of stuff with his knee, with his hip, with, I think he's starting to come back.

00:47:19.000 I think his shoulder's something now.

00:47:21.000 He's still, you know, he's had like 23 surgery.

00:47:24.000 I think it was 23. I think he said 23 surgeries.

00:47:27.000 Dude, his guy.

00:47:28.000 And the bad one happened with someone just falling on him in training.

00:47:32.000 What was that?

00:47:32.000 I don't know.

00:47:33.000 I don't know.

00:47:33.000 That was a hip.

00:47:35.000 Oh, God.

00:47:35.000 Yeah, I don't know exactly.

00:47:36.000 I haven't seen.

00:47:36.000 What did he get done to his hip?

00:47:39.000 Ask him.

00:47:40.000 I don't know.

00:47:41.000 Yeah, he's had a lot of surgeries.

00:47:43.000 Someone just fell on him.

00:47:44.000 So was he training with someone else and someone else fell on?

00:47:47.000 No, he was training with somebody and he was taking it easy on them in a transition, trying to not hurt them.

00:47:51.000 And then they just collapsed on him on his hip in a certain way, as he described it.

00:47:56.000 Yeah, brutal.

00:47:57.000 When you were training, did you do any weightlifting just to sort of supplement it to keep your joint strong and your...

00:48:04.000 Yeah. Yeah.

00:48:06.000 I did a lot of...

00:48:07.000 I tended to do weightlifting that was consistent with the movement patterns of the arts that I was training in.

00:48:13.000 So I would do a lot of biking lower body strength, and then I would do...

00:48:17.000 I didn't have...

00:48:18.000 I think if I did it now, I would do much more weightlifting.

00:48:23.000 But when I was rolling usually twice a week, six days a week, and...

00:48:29.000 And I was, I would do cardio work in addition and then some like, some resistance work.

00:48:35.000 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 a brilliant, their sports science team and their physical trainers are.

00:48:44.000 And like, I don't think that I was, when I was training jihitsu, I was.

00:48:48.000 at the level of, for example, the Boston Celtics in the resistance training that I was doing, it's supplemented.

00:48:56.000 And Marcelo didn't weight training.

00:48:58.000 That was part of it.

00:48:58.000 When I was training with him, I was just saying- He didn't wait-train at all.

00:49:01.000 No. How did he get those legs?

00:49:04.000 He just rolls, man.

00:49:05.000 He was riding, he was into those bikes without breaks.

00:49:10.000 We were biking all over New York.

00:49:11.000 Bikes without brakes?

00:49:12.000 Yeah. What do you mean?

00:49:13.000 What are they called?

00:49:13.000 Fixies? Yeah.

00:49:15.000 What is that?

00:49:16.000 Fixed wheel?

00:49:16.000 Yeah, fixed wheel.

00:49:17.000 What does that mean?

00:49:18.000 It's just got no brakes.

00:49:21.000 How do you slow down?

00:49:22.000 You go slow.

00:49:23.000 You got to slow.

00:49:23.000 You put your foot on the edge of the wheel.

00:49:26.000 What? Like, yeah, fixed wheel biking.

00:49:28.000 He loved fixed wheel around New York, and I was biking.

00:49:31.000 Then I switched over.

00:49:32.000 Why would you ever get on a bike with no brakes?

00:49:34.000 No brakes?

00:49:34.000 You control it.

00:49:36.000 You're breaking.

00:49:37.000 I'll show you videos.

00:49:38.000 Show me.

00:49:38.000 People love it.

00:49:39.000 But, man, in New York, it's quite something.

00:49:41.000 I mean, in New York, when you're going down a hill in New York City and in traffic, there's some adventures.

00:49:45.000 You're going down a hill.

00:49:46.000 How are you fucking slowing down?

00:49:47.000 You don't go fast.

00:49:49.000 Oh, what?

00:49:49.000 We're going fast.

00:49:51.000 You just got your, you got to see a high clock.

00:49:55.000 This isn't going to be a good video.

00:49:56.000 This is the dumbest thing I've ever heard of in my life.

00:49:58.000 This is something only white people would figure out.

00:50:00.000 Let's have a bike with no brakes.

00:50:02.000 The dumber thing was what I did after this, which is when I fell in love of surfing, I was one-wheeling all over New York.

00:50:07.000 Oh, five ways to stop on a fixie.

00:50:10.000 How about don't get a fixie?

00:50:11.000 Get brakes, you fucking idiot.

00:50:13.000 This is the dumbest shit I've ever seen in my life.

00:50:16.000 Why wouldn't you have brakes?

00:50:17.000 Why wouldn't you have an option to control the bike better?

00:50:24.000 The people that ride these, they'd argue they control it probably better.

00:50:26.000 Yeah, look at all the white people. 0.92

00:50:28.000 All white people. 0.92

00:50:29.000 Ridiculous white people, they'd be doing backflips with skateboards. 1.00

00:50:33.000 This is a big New York thing, though.

00:50:34.000 Of course it is.

00:50:35.000 They like suffering over there.

00:50:37.000 That's why they all have jammed on top of each other.

00:50:39.000 You can't find a good video.

00:50:41.000 That's so stupid.

00:50:42.000 There's no good videos on that.

00:50:44.000 That's a stupid thing.

00:50:44.000 There's a movie I've seen.

00:50:46.000 Breaks, you fucking freaks.

00:50:48.000 My last two years living in New York, I had fallen so in love with surfing.

00:50:51.000 And I knew ocean arts were my next chapter.

00:50:54.000 And I was so heartbroken not to be able to do it.

00:50:55.000 So I got a one wheel.

00:50:57.000 It was like the first generation.

00:50:58.000 You know the one wheel of electronic skateboards?

00:50:59.000 Yeah. Yeah, we have one of those.

00:51:01.000 Just came out, first generation.

00:51:02.000 And I was just like...

00:51:04.000 thousands of miles biking, one wheeling all over New York.

00:51:08.000 But it was the early one, if you push past the pushback, It had this pushback thing, which would slow you down, but you could push past it and go faster, but if you pushed past the final pushback, it just bottomed out, wham!

00:51:18.000 And he just went 23, 24 miles, there's a fwack, right?

00:51:22.000 Over taxi cabs, under taxi cabs, through taxi cabs, everything.

00:51:25.000 The one wheel is like when you're a kid, or sorry, the fixie.

00:51:27.000 It's like you skid.

00:51:29.000 Oh, so there is breaks.

00:51:31.000 Like a kid.

00:51:32.000 Yeah, I guess that's a better way to describe, but I wasn't thinking of it that way.

00:51:35.000 Okay. So you can break.

00:51:36.000 You can also reverse, which you can't do on most bikes.

00:51:39.000 You can ride backwards.

00:51:40.000 If you needed to.

00:51:42.000 It's really beautiful.

00:51:42.000 I mean, I never did it, but it's really beautiful to watch when it's done well.

00:51:48.000 Okay. That makes me feel better.

00:51:49.000 You could just skid.

00:51:51.000 Yeah. You could skid.

00:51:54.000 You could skid.

00:51:54.000 There's lots of things that can go wrong.

00:51:56.000 Yeah. There's lots of things that can go wrong.

00:51:58.000 Foiling, there's a lot of fucking things that can go wrong.

00:52:01.000 Oh, yeah.

00:52:01.000 35, 40 miles an hour on top of a guillotine, big waves.

00:52:04.000 I mean, shit can go wrong fast.

00:52:05.000 I learned how to foil two years ago.

00:52:08.000 And it took me like three hours to get on that fucking thing for the first time because I've never served.

00:52:12.000 You're on an efoil or?

00:52:13.000 Yeah. Efoil.

00:52:14.000 Yeah. Took me forever.

00:52:16.000 Yeah. Just kept falling down, getting back up.

00:52:18.000 Falling down.

00:52:19.000 Meanwhile, my kids, my youngest at the time, she was 12, humiliated me.

00:52:24.000 Yeah. She just hopped on it instantly. 0.74

00:52:25.000 She was scooting around and, look, she knew how to do it immediately. 1.00

00:52:28.000 But she wakeboards. 0.97

00:52:31.000 Yeah. She does a lot of that shit. 1.00

00:52:33.000 She's really athletic.

00:52:35.000 But she was just humiliating me.

00:52:36.000 And I was just like, I'm going to figure this out.

00:52:39.000 For hours.

00:52:40.000 I kept falling down and getting back up, falling down, and eventually I got it.

00:52:44.000 And then once I got it, it was like easy.

00:52:45.000 Yeah. Once I got it, I was like, oh, I see.

00:52:48.000 E-foiling is the best, it's like, it's the best way to learn how to foil because they weigh 90 pounds, the e-foils do.

00:52:54.000 Like a high-performance big way of, a high-performance foil will The whole setup away four or five pounds.

00:52:59.000 Really? Yeah.

00:52:59.000 I mean, a efoil, you have a battery, it's heavy, and you've got electricity to learn how to, so you learn foil dynamics.

00:53:06.000 Foiling, when you're high performance foiling in Big Surf, you're just on a, like, if you're towing in, you're on a three and a half foot board.

00:53:13.000 No batter.

00:53:15.000 It's not powered.

00:53:16.000 It's just riding hydrodynamics.

00:53:18.000 Are you getting towed in to these waves?

00:53:20.000 You can paddle in, but if you're towing in to bigger waves, you're on a small board.

00:53:26.000 You're getting towed in behind a jet ski whipped in, and then you're just riding.

00:53:31.000 It's epic.

00:53:31.000 It's frictionless.

00:53:32.000 So beautiful.

00:53:32.000 Wow. And what's the benefit of that above surfing?

00:53:35.000 Is that you're above the water?

00:53:36.000 You're above the water?

00:53:37.000 You're not feeling.

00:53:38.000 If you think about the glassiest surf day possible, the frictionless feeling, it's more frictionless than that because you're above the water.

00:53:46.000 Yeah, I get that on the eph oil.

00:53:48.000 When you get cooking on the eaf oil, you're above the water.

00:53:50.000 It's wild.

00:53:51.000 I always feel like I'm going to fall.

00:53:53.000 I'm going to fall.

00:53:54.000 Yeah. As soon as I get above the water, I'm like, okay, we're going too fast.

00:53:58.000 You're going to wipe out. 0.89

00:53:59.000 The foil is interesting, because it's like the ultimate receptivity.

00:54:04.000 Because the foil picks up on underwater wave circulation.

00:54:07.000 So it's picking up on lift when you're going very fast.

00:54:10.000 And also when you're in a wave, the waves have...

00:54:13.000 have upward circulation at the face of the wave.

00:54:15.000 You get to the top of the wave, it accelerates.

00:54:17.000 And so your foil is riding the underwater currents, and you're receiving it.

00:54:22.000 It's so amplified.

00:54:22.000 So, like, tiny little movements have big effect on the thing.

00:54:25.000 So, like, the surf movement would be very big, and the foil movement is very subtle, the body mechanic.

00:54:30.000 And then you learn to really crank into it.

00:54:33.000 And it's limitless.

00:54:33.000 So you can do open water foiling, crossing oceans on long high aspect wings, riding open ocean swells.

00:54:39.000 And you can push like high performance foiling is just like high performance surfing.

00:54:44.000 The lines you can draw.

00:54:45.000 The turns are epic.

00:54:46.000 The G's are crazy. 1.00

00:54:47.000 So you're just all in on this, huh?

00:54:49.000 Oh, yeah.

00:54:50.000 I'm all in on this.

00:54:50.000 Is this an everyday thing for you?

00:54:52.000 Yes. Everyday.

00:54:53.000 Same as jujitsu.

00:54:55.000 Six days a week, twice a day if possible.

00:54:57.000 Really? Wow.

00:54:59.000 Yeah. Wow.

00:55:00.000 Do you have goals?

00:55:02.000 Virtuosity. Mmm.

00:55:04.000 Yeah, I competed my whole life.

00:55:07.000 And so now I live, like, I train the way I would if I was in a world championship training camp.

00:55:14.000 That's hilarious.

00:55:15.000 With foiling crazy.

00:55:16.000 Who else is doing that?

00:55:18.000 Just a couple lunatics.

00:55:19.000 How many other people are foiling like they're training for a world championship activity?

00:55:23.000 Yeah. But the interesting thing is, like, I...

00:55:27.000 Yeah, I love it.

00:55:29.000 But all these arts to me are connected.

00:55:31.000 That's the strange thing about my art.

00:55:32.000 Like chess, Chinese martial arts, jitsu, surfing, foiling.

00:55:36.000 To me, the fascinating thing when you get toward the pinnacle of an art is that you start to experience, at least in my...

00:55:45.000 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.

00:55:54.000 So people who are virtuosos in various fields are often speaking a much more similar language than people who are at lower levels of the same art than they're training.

00:56:04.000 Like when I think about chess, I related to chess through core principles, and those principles manifest in the martial arts.

00:56:13.000 I remember that I had this, when I wrote my first book, the art of, or my second book, The Art of Learning, It was about my experience of crossing over my level from chess into the Chinese martial arts.

00:56:26.000 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.

00:56:34.000 But I was at that point, I've been training martial arts for two years, and I had not been, I had kind of moved, I was in the transition away from chess during that period.

00:56:42.000 And I had this realization that I was winning these chess games, playing 40 games at once, but I was not playing chess.

00:56:48.000 I was feeling flow, riding space left behind.

00:56:51.000 I was riding the energetic wave of the game like I would if we were flowing on the mats.

00:56:56.000 But I was making chess moves.

00:56:57.000 And I realized that these arts had become fundamentally connected.

00:57:01.000 And then that became like an area of interest and of exploration.

00:57:06.000 I started making what I was doing unconsciously more and more conscious.

00:57:10.000 And now when I relate to the chess, I don't move chess pieces anymore, but chess is manifest in everything that I do, as is jih Tjitsu.

00:57:20.000 And as is, like, in the ocean arts, I'm manifesting these other arts, the core principles I've experienced through them all the time.

00:57:26.000 And that's one of the things that I've, I've been puzzled by for many years is why chess is so fucking hard.

00:57:34.000 Like chess has no luck.

00:57:35.000 The best chess players in the world are so brilliant at what they do.

00:57:39.000 I listened to your episode with Magnus Carlson.

00:57:41.000 He was great.

00:57:42.000 Yeah, that was cool.

00:57:43.000 Like someone like Magnus, he's so fucking good at what he does, such a virtuoso.

00:57:49.000 But if you look at like the top 100 or top thousand chess players, they're tremendously strong.

00:57:53.000 But when they try to translate their ability to other fields, They often can't.

00:57:59.000 And it's surprising.

00:58:01.000 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 out something that's relatively easier and become very good at it.

00:58:10.000 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.

00:58:17.000 So you can learn chess in a way which is very specific to chess, like principles that are just chess principles.

00:58:23.000 Or you can learn chess in a language which, connects to all of life.

00:58:29.000 And that won't slow down.

00:58:31.000 It might accelerate your chess learning.

00:58:33.000 And if children are taught games like chess or gymnastics or music or whatever else, so they're learning about that art very deeply.

00:58:42.000 They're touching quality.

00:58:42.000 They're pushing their limits.

00:58:43.000 They're living a life of training as I know you value very much.

00:58:46.000 But they're doing so in a language which connects to the rest of life.

00:58:50.000 Then they're studying thematic interconnectedness while they're studying chess or jitsu or anything else.

00:58:58.000 And then they're just learning the language of excellence.

00:59:02.000 Yeah. And it's interesting because if you watch chess players teaching students, many of them don't do this.

00:59:09.000 They teach it within like the confines of the chess board, like a prison.

00:59:13.000 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?

00:59:20.000 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 this web of interconnectedness is forming in your mind.

00:59:32.000 Then when you take on something else, you're able to cross the level over really naturally.

00:59:36.000 In many ways, that's my, that's a big part of my life's work, is the study of that interconnectedness.

00:59:42.000 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.

01:00:01.000 Then all of a sudden this movie and now you have to kind of like grapple with things.

01:00:05.000 And as you said, these challenges make you a more complex person.

01:00:09.000 And then your ability to sort of push chess aside and try other things, do you think that's because of, it has to be a factor in your, this desire to explore other things?

01:00:25.000 Because you're kind of thrust into this thing where your thing is now changed.

01:00:28.000 Your thing is now not just flowing and learning and getting better and doing battle with chess.

01:00:34.000 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.

01:00:41.000 And so you have to reevaluate.

01:00:43.000 And so this forced reevaluation from a young age at 15 years old, this key developmental period as a young man.

01:00:51.000 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.

01:00:59.000 Yeah, a language I use for this is the passage from the pre-conscious to the post-conscious competitor or artist.

01:01:06.000 And up until 15, I would relate to myself as the pre-conscious competitor.

01:01:10.000 I love chess.

01:01:10.000 It was free-flowing.

01:01:11.000 I love the battle.

01:01:12.000 I love the competition.

01:01:13.000 I love the ass kicking and the kicking ass.

01:01:15.000 I just loved the fucking battle of the thing.

01:01:18.000 And then I fell in love for the first time when I was 15. The movie came out after that.

01:01:26.000 And I started studying existentialist literature.

01:01:29.000 I started reflecting on the absurdity of it all.

01:01:31.000 I started to become present to the fact that these were just 64 squares and 32 pieces.

01:01:35.000 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.

01:01:43.000 And then I was becoming more and more self-conscious about how what I was doing was perceived by others.

01:01:50.000 And I got lost in all of that.

01:01:53.000 And in many ways, like, the journey, like, some people don't run into that for a long time.

01:01:58.000 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.

01:02:05.000 And that's a great liberation.

01:02:06.000 Like that, the moment you become aware of the fact that you're immortal, that you can get your ass kick, that your arm can break, that you can die...

01:02:12.000 that what you're doing is absurd.

01:02:13.000 Like, you get locked up by that knowledge.

01:02:14.000 Right. And there's so many different forms that can take.

01:02:16.000 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.

01:02:23.000 Suddenly, everything changes.

01:02:24.000 Your relationship, your motivation changes, all the reasons you're doing it.

01:02:28.000 are no longer valid in some ways because now you've accomplished the thing you always dreamed of and you have to discover.

01:02:33.000 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.

01:02:43.000 Because you can't do that.

01:02:44.000 You can't put it back in the box.

01:02:45.000 It's out.

01:02:46.000 So then you have to work through...

01:02:48.000 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.

01:03:05.000 It's like when I, a very powerful example of this was I die, I drown in a pool.

01:03:13.000 I guess like nine, ten years ago, I was doing hypoxic breath work, Wimhoff training in a pool.

01:03:20.000 Jesus Christ.

01:03:21.000 And never do Wimhoff training.

01:03:24.000 Everybody, please, in a pool.

01:03:26.000 Because you're flushing from your body, but CO2 is what gives you the urge to breathe.

01:03:31.000 And so without carbon dioxide and you're being in your, you don't feel the urge to breathe.

01:03:35.000 And so I'd been a lifetime free diver, spearfishing from when I was five, six years old, but I was never doing hypoxic breathwork before free diving.

01:03:41.000 So if you're diving, 80, 90, 100 feet, You're not flushing the CO2 from your body before you do so.

01:03:46.000 So you still have that sense for when you need to breathe.

01:03:49.000 But I was in a NYU pool.

01:03:51.000 I was just swimming 50 meters, 50 meters back and forth underwater and then doing this hypoxic worth breathwork in between.

01:03:59.000 And then I, my last recollection is being stretched out in bliss that those tingles through your body you get from, have you done Wimhoff training?

01:04:07.000 Yeah, those, you know, those tingles, had those fucking tingles.

01:04:09.000 And then I woke up.

01:04:12.000 30 minutes later, what happened was that I blacked out I was in the bottom of the pool for over four minutes after blacking out from shallow water blackout.

01:04:18.000 Oh my God.

01:04:20.000 It should be 45 seconds to a minute and you should be brain dead or dead because you're post-shallow water blackout.

01:04:25.000 I know the time it was because there was an old man at the pool who saw me in the bottom of the pool and swam one lap.

01:04:31.000 His laps were a little bit over a minute, so I'm a second lap.

01:04:34.000 After his third lap, he said, I'll check on him if he's still down.

01:04:37.000 He thought I was hold my breath, but I was only hold my breath while swimming.

01:04:40.000 So if I was still, I was fucking out.

01:04:42.000 His fourth lap, after his fourth lap, he pulled me up.

01:04:44.000 I was blue.

01:04:46.000 My whole body was blue.

01:04:48.000 My head was red.

01:04:49.000 My body saved me.

01:04:50.000 My training saved me and killed me.

01:04:53.000 Sent all the blood to my brain.

01:04:54.000 My eyes were blown out, red, like bloodshot for three weeks that followed.

01:04:59.000 And I remember waking up and having this, looking everyone around me and like, what the fuck is everyone?

01:05:04.000 What's going on, guys?

01:05:05.000 Like, what's the drama?

01:05:06.000 I was the fucking drama.

01:05:09.000 And I spent that night in the hospital going through old chess variations trying to test my brain.

01:05:14.000 As my brain ruined, like, do I remember things?

01:05:17.000 Somehow my brain, maybe it's fucked up, but it seems like it'd be working pretty well.

01:05:22.000 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.

01:05:33.000 Like I could actually feel the potential trauma response like a cloud that was washing.

01:05:38.000 over me.

01:05:39.000 Like, I could see the cloud coming, and I just fucking decided not to let it in.

01:05:43.000 And I got back in the water the next day.

01:05:45.000 And I just fucking, and I think that's a big part of my relationship with the ocean is having died in water.

01:05:53.000 I need to spend my life in the water.

01:05:55.000 Did you have any sort of out-of-body experience or anything where you're gone?

01:05:59.000 What's really fucked up about it is no.

01:06:01.000 That's what's really wild.

01:06:03.000 Yeah. It went just black.

01:06:05.000 That's what's crazy is that I went.

01:06:07.000 My last memory is of just tingles and bliss and then waking up.

01:06:13.000 And so if I hadn't been pulled out, there would have been no flash, no seeing my life passed before my eyes, no tunnel on the other side, nothing.

01:06:24.000 You know what's really fucking wild, though, is that many years later, I was doing this, um, This guy, Brandon Powell, is a brilliant guy who's a top Wimhoff trainer and a trainer of trainers of his guys.

01:06:39.000 And I was doing some retreats with teams of mine and we were doing some Wimhoff work.

01:06:44.000 And he had this methodology of kind of accelerated hypoxic work where that he said, I'm not sure if it's true, but he said, released DMT in your body, inhibited the DMT inhibitors in your body.

01:06:56.000 And I did these journeys with him twice through pure breathwork, no psychedelics.

01:07:00.000 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.

01:07:13.000 And I experienced the world through like the electrical connections emerging from my L4L5.

01:07:17.000 It's very strange.

01:07:18.000 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.

01:07:30.000 I watched the 20 minutes that I was on the bottom of the pool and then up in 25 minutes and then on the pool deck and I saw the whole thing from above.

01:07:40.000 But that was like years after it happened.

01:07:44.000 So I can't explain that.

01:07:45.000 Were all the people there, the same people?

01:07:48.000 I don't know.

01:07:49.000 My memory of it consciously from what actually happened is so fuzzy, right?

01:07:54.000 Because I just died and came back.

01:07:57.000 And then I saw it from above.

01:07:59.000 I think I was mostly focused on the memory of myself.

01:08:03.000 Yeah, so I relate to myself now.

01:08:05.000 I've died.

01:08:07.000 And I'm living, and I live with a sense of gratitude and commitment.

01:08:13.000 That's a big part of why we moved to the jungle with my family.

01:08:15.000 It's like, 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.

01:08:26.000 Just all in.

01:08:27.000 Isn't it fascinating that sometimes it, again, it's the same thing as loss propels you to a next level, even...

01:08:35.000 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 for like so many times i almost died free diving or But that one was different, man. Because there was, like, I didn't, it was just a, the crazy thing was just a technical blind spot.

01:08:59.000 I just didn't know this thing about carbon dioxide.

01:09:02.000 I didn't know I was taking a risk in that moment.

01:09:03.000 I thought I was just taking a swim.

01:09:06.000 Did you learn from other people who do Wim Hof breathing when they swim?

01:09:11.000 After? Or before?

01:09:12.000 No, before.

01:09:13.000 Oh, yeah.

01:09:13.000 Who taught you to do this?

01:09:15.000 Nobody. I did wind off breathing on land and I was like, you know, I'll fucking do it.

01:09:18.000 I'll just do it fucking on the swim right now.

01:09:21.000 Sounds like a great idea.

01:09:22.000 I think other people have done that and died.

01:09:24.000 Yeah, they have.

01:09:24.000 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.

01:09:36.000 Or you can just not feel it at all.

01:09:39.000 The ocean is such a fascinating thing.

01:09:42.000 It's so alive.

01:09:43.000 Yeah. It's a strange thing when you get in the ocean if you haven't been for a while.

01:09:49.000 You climb in and you feel it moving around you and pulling and the water just feels different.

01:09:55.000 It feels like it's a living thing.

01:09:57.000 Like you're in a, you dunk your head under and you look at this world that's three quarters of the surface of the earth.

01:10:05.000 And it's so vibrant.

01:10:08.000 And you see people that are surfers that just get drawn into its spell.

01:10:13.000 And it just becomes a part of their life is to ride that energy and to feel it.

01:10:17.000 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.

01:10:27.000 He doesn't even want to be in California, yes, but San Diego is the ocean for him.

01:10:32.000 He has to be by the ocean.

01:10:33.000 Yeah. And you can't dominate the ocean at all.

01:10:37.000 You have to receive her.

01:10:38.000 Yeah. You just, and if you have any brittleness in your ego, she will kick your ass until you just blend. 0.93

01:10:45.000 I know you're in favor of optimizing training and finding ways to learn things quicker.

01:10:54.000 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?

01:11:03.000 If you're surfing, for sure.

01:11:04.000 Wave pools have revolutionized surf training.

01:11:07.000 For foiling, you have the ocean.

01:11:09.000 And foiling is much more abundant.

01:11:11.000 The surf community is quite scarce in some ways because you can only surf in specific kinds of waves.

01:11:18.000 And like if you're trying to make one turn, you might not see that section again for two years.

01:11:22.000 You can't replicate conditions in the ocean.

01:11:24.000 Yeah. Foiling, you can because you can pump a foil.

01:11:27.000 You can drive it down and let it float back up and drive it down.

01:11:30.000 Or you can whip yourself behind a jet ski into a certain kind of wave.

01:11:34.000 So if I want to work on like a certain turn, I can get 40, 50 reps in a given day.

01:11:38.000 While surfing pre-wave pool, You couldn't at all.

01:11:41.000 So most great surfers are brilliant low rep learners.

01:11:47.000 Because by necessity in the ocean, you don't get tons of reps.

01:11:50.000 So in my observation, the greatest competitive surfers in the world are excellent at learning from one or two reps like Marcel Garcia is on the mats.

01:11:59.000 I'm not naturally a great lower-up learner.

01:12:01.000 I'm a higher-rep learner.

01:12:02.000 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.

01:12:17.000 If you change the angle of attack on your tail by a quarter degree, it changes the whole feel of everything.

01:12:22.000 It's super technical.

01:12:25.000 And so in many ways one could argue that it's harder...

01:12:29.000 I wouldn't say, not that it's hard.

01:12:30.000 Any of these arts are infinitely deep because you can refine anything forever.

01:12:35.000 But it's more technical shit to deal with, but it's more trainable because you can replicate conditions.

01:12:41.000 Like you now can in wave pools.

01:12:43.000 Wave pools for surfers now, you can hit the same section 30, 40 times.

01:12:47.000 So I do think it's incredible.

01:12:49.000 But the interesting thing is that most surfers...

01:12:52.000 of this generation aren't, um, they don't train in the same way that chess players do or jiu-jitsu fighters do because it's a low rap art that you can't replicate conditions in.

01:13:02.000 So surfers aren't, Most surfers aren't constructed psychologically in a way that they will take advantage of wave pools the way a jiu-jitsu guy would.

01:13:11.000 That's interesting.

01:13:12.000 Like drilling.

01:13:13.000 Like you drill.

01:13:13.000 Psychologically. That's interesting because they're accustomed to just taking what the ocean gives you.

01:13:17.000 You can't just take a low-rep learner and tell them to live like a high-rep learner.

01:13:21.000 It's a different fucking thing.

01:13:22.000 Right. Right.

01:13:24.000 And it's very interesting to me that...

01:13:26.000 So surfers crossing over to foiling is very interesting because they...

01:13:29.000 A lot of surfers, some surfers do it and they just, they're all in and they want to take it on.

01:13:33.000 A lot of the best surfers in the world are crossing over.

01:13:36.000 But it's a different lifestyle.

01:13:37.000 The ones who cross over the ones who can embrace the high rep training life.

01:13:40.000 Hmm. The one who can adapt.

01:13:43.000 Yeah. Yeah.

01:13:44.000 That's the low rep training thing with surfing I never really consider, but that does make sense.

01:13:48.000 You have to be able to optimize.

01:13:50.000 You have to be able to take advantage of each one of those things and pick it up pretty quickly.

01:13:54.000 You have to.

01:13:55.000 Especially in the early, think about like learning as a kid and then like everything you're exposed to that the ocean's always moving, always changing.

01:14:02.000 But if you can like learn from one rep and burn it in, then that just...

01:14:09.000 Well, in Jiu-Jitsu, for example, you can say, I'm going to drill this arm bar 40 times today, 40 times like this afternoon, hundreds of times, thousands of times over the next two weeks, right?

01:14:19.000 So you can get as many reps as you need.

01:14:21.000 It's not true in the ocean.

01:14:22.000 Right. Yeah, it totally makes sense.

01:14:25.000 Why do you think that children learn quicker than adults?

01:14:29.000 Yeah, beautiful question.

01:14:30.000 I think it's, I think a lot about unlearning, right?

01:14:34.000 So my life's work is in learning, and I think a lot about unlearning because so much of what high-level learning is is being unblocked, which is getting rid of the blocks, the egoic blocks, the false constructs we have, the fucking bullshit we put on everything we do.

01:14:49.000 trying to control the situation.

01:14:51.000 We should just embrace the lack of...

01:14:52.000 Children don't have to unlearn that. 0.58

01:14:54.000 They haven't learned it in the first place.

01:14:55.000 So they're unblocked.

01:14:56.000 Like my little boy, Charlie, learning how to surf was so beautiful to watch.

01:15:00.000 He just, like, he grew up in the ocean.

01:15:02.000 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.

01:15:09.000 And then when he first got on a surfboard...

01:15:11.000 It was, like, it wasn't, we didn't make it technical.

01:15:14.000 It wasn't like he should, um, telling him what to do.

01:15:17.000 It was like he could be right foot forward or left foot forward.

01:15:19.000 It wasn't, we didn't impose things on him.

01:15:22.000 He just, like, danced on the board and would find his way.

01:15:25.000 And he started doing things that were very technical that he would just create.

01:15:28.000 It was pure playfulness.

01:15:29.000 While if you watch people come to a surf, like a surf break who are like New Yorkers who travel down for five days and they've got all this gear, the gear is amazing.

01:15:37.000 They've got like gloves and booties and knee guards and, Like, everything is covered.

01:15:42.000 Whiteface. Everything is just like not a part of their body is designed to touch the ocean. 1.00

01:15:46.000 They're trying to keep the ocean away.

01:15:48.000 And they're like, they want to be super controlling about everything they learn.

01:15:51.000 They're like, everything is so regimented in their minds.

01:15:54.000 But they're trying to control their relationship with the ocean.

01:15:57.000 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.

01:16:05.000 Right? Well, kids will just play.

01:16:07.000 They're not afraid of failing.

01:16:08.000 They'll... They'll just, like the moment a kid becomes afraid of looking bad.

01:16:12.000 Like, you see that washover kids when they're like 9, 10, 11, 12th, different ages. 1.00

01:16:17.000 And they become, oh, they don't want to fall.

01:16:20.000 They don't want to look bad.

01:16:21.000 And then that's when they get locked up.

01:16:23.000 Yeah. The freedom of, I mean, to me, a lot of what, like, the beacon is, as adults, is being the post-conscious, Discovering the post-conscious freedom as a learner.

01:16:37.000 Like, how can we learn without the egoic blocks, right?

01:16:40.000 Without having to look good.

01:16:40.000 So if you're crossing over, like if you're a world-class striker and you're getting on the jih Tzu mats and you're getting your ass kicked.

01:16:46.000 Or if you're a great jih Tzu fighter and you get onto an MMA gym and suddenly the guys can just beat the shit out of you.

01:16:50.000 Like having or a great surfer switching over to foiling.

01:16:53.000 Right? Or a great chess player moving into the martial art.

01:16:55.000 So you're fucking...

01:16:56.000 Or if you're, like, training in some esoteric, you know, Chinese martial art like I was, and then you're moving into the jihitsu match.

01:17:01.000 You might have some ego, but you're just tapping out to everybody all the time.

01:17:05.000 Right? And, like, having the freedom to learn without egoic blocks is...

01:17:10.000 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.

01:17:21.000 And 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.

01:17:30.000 It's been a big focus of mine for many, many years.

01:17:34.000 And it's an area where I'm working.

01:17:36.000 I think that we are going to be living in a world where AI is better at everything than we are, right?

01:17:45.000 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.

01:17:52.000 So computers are first, like I began playing chess in the pre-computer era, computer chess era.

01:17:57.000 Then computers entered, and I initially was very resistant and romantic to it.

01:18:02.000 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.

01:18:13.000 But when they first approached me, I didn't want to do it because I felt like it was going to disrupt.

01:18:17.000 It was going to kill the beauty of human chess, the art of chess, which is so much about imperfection.

01:18:23.000 And then, but like chess players, when I grew up, had to sit in the unknowing, in tolerance, they had to have a tolerance of cognitive distance.

01:18:31.000 You might, and I might study a chess position and go three months without knowing what the solution is.

01:18:36.000 So our psychology's 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.

01:18:45.000 Now chess players can click on a button and they've got a supercomputer right by their side.

01:18:49.000 We'll tell them the answer instantly.

01:18:51.000 It's interesting to think about how different that is psychologically and the different kinds of people that that draws in.

01:18:56.000 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.

01:19:04.000 And we had AlphaGo and then Alpha Zero, which came out of DeepMind.

01:19:08.000 So Demas Hasippus was the developer of DeepMind.

01:19:10.000 He was a child to chess friend of mine.

01:19:12.000 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 Alpha Zero.

01:19:22.000 And to give a feel for what Alpha Zero did in chess, Alpha Zero was able to, without being taught anything about humans playing chess, no education of like the history of human chess playing.

01:19:33.000 Within three hours of experimentation was stronger than any human or computer in history.

01:19:37.000 So imagine your life's work.

01:19:39.000 Like, you know, I was a pretty good chess player.

01:19:42.000 Right? Like someone like Magnus Carlson is a much, much stronger chess player.

01:19:44.000 He's the world champion.

01:19:45.000 Gary Kasparov.

01:19:47.000 Anatoly Karpov, Bobby Fisher.

01:19:48.000 Think about people who are world champions.

01:19:50.000 Alpha Zero within three hours of experimentation, without being taught anything, was stronger than them.

01:19:56.000 Right? So, like, we really need to, so the strongest AI engine in the world today is rated 3,700 Elo.

01:20:03.000 So to give sense for what that means, when I was nine years old, my rating was like 1900 or so, right?

01:20:09.000 Magnus Carlson, like the strongest human players in the world now are rated somewhere about 2,800-2850-ish ELO.

01:20:18.000 The strongest AI is 3,700 ELO.

01:20:20.000 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 ELORAP gap as between the world champion and the strongest AI.

01:20:30.000 Wow. It's so hard for us to really wrap our heads around what that means.

01:20:35.000 That means that everything, like chess players had a front row seat to that happening early.

01:20:40.000 When I listen 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...

01:20:51.000 to have these insanely powerful intelligences in the world.

01:20:56.000 And I think that, like, if you can imagine, like, an art like chess, having millennia of development, people studying it like you train Jiu-Jitsu, right?

01:21:04.000 So imagine people's training 10 hours a day for 30, 40 years, being the greatest human in the world at it.

01:21:10.000 And then something can come in, and within three hours of experimentation, be much stronger than them.

01:21:13.000 And imagine that's going to be in fucking everything.

01:21:16.000 Nuts. Right?

01:21:17.000 So... Like, we have to be like children in how we learn.

01:21:22.000 We're going to have to, like, release the egoic relationship that we have to our level, to our knowledge, to everything.

01:21:31.000 You know, the great, you know Thomas Coon's structure of scientific revolutions?

01:21:35.000 Yes. Right.

01:21:36.000 So, like, you think about what happens, what the human has to do to...

01:21:40.000 the internal resistance we have to overcome to embrace the new paradigm.

01:21:44.000 So let's say you're a Newtonian physicist, right?

01:21:45.000 You've been studying physics your whole life.

01:21:47.000 You've got tenure.

01:21:48.000 You've got 40, 50 years of knowledge built up.

01:21:50.000 Everyone reveres you.

01:21:51.000 And now there's this new thing.

01:21:52.000 Quantum mechanics enters the picture, right?

01:21:54.000 Like, to embrace this new thing is to admit to oneself and everybody else that your life's work is...

01:22:03.000 kind of you have to release it.

01:22:04.000 It's wrong.

01:22:05.000 It's old, right?

01:22:06.000 This new paradigm is, but we resist it individually.

01:22:09.000 Ego. Ego.

01:22:10.000 Yeah. And societally.

01:22:12.000 Right. It's because we will fight tooth and nail to maintain our conceptual schemes.

01:22:15.000 That's one of our strongest drivers of all humans, right?

01:22:18.000 And so I think we're moving into a world now where you're going to have 37, 3,000 EO rated everything kicking our ass at everything.

01:22:29.000 So we have to become like children to go back to your question, in my opinion, and how we relate to learning.

01:22:35.000 We can't, a decision making, right?

01:22:37.000 Like when, you know, we think about like social media.

01:22:41.000 Imagine a 3,800 ELO-rated networked.

01:22:44.000 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 do whatever it wants or whoever is controlling it wants.

01:23:12.000 They can have you do anything.

01:23:14.000 Right. But we have to, like, it's so hard for us to...

01:23:16.000 admit that we are the ant relative to the human, right?

01:23:20.000 Like, we are the ant.

01:23:21.000 We have to have that humility.

01:23:22.000 And one of the things that, I think that that's the most important question today as that we face as a species is like, what do we do?

01:23:31.000 Well, we won't know until it happens.

01:23:33.000 And we will become a different thing.

01:23:36.000 We will have to admit that we are no longer the apex intelligence on the planet.

01:23:40.000 We will have something that's akin to an artificial life form that's far superior to us in reasoning, access to resources, logic.

01:23:51.000 It'll be far more technically proficient.

01:23:53.000 It'll make far better versions of itself probably pretty quickly.

01:23:56.000 Um, they've already seen AI's duplicating itself.

01:23:59.000 Um, it's not being prompted to do this.

01:24:01.000 But when you say we don't, I mean, I would argue we should operate as if it's already happening.

01:24:06.000 It's an inability.

01:24:07.000 It is.

01:24:07.000 It is happening, but it hasn't completely transformed life yet.

01:24:10.000 Right. It's, it's emerging right now.

01:24:12.000 It's a, it's a God.

01:24:14.000 It's a God that's emerging.

01:24:15.000 And if it's not a God yet, it'll be a God in 50 years.

01:24:18.000 It's going to be attached to quantum computing.

01:24:22.000 It's going to figure out ways to implement better strategies as far as utilization of energy resources.

01:24:29.000 It'll be much better at everything than we are.

01:24:32.000 Yeah. And then the question is, will it be used to manipulate us?

01:24:36.000 Will it be used to control populations?

01:24:38.000 Will it be?

01:24:39.000 Elon says his estimation says there's an 80 to 90% chance.

01:24:45.000 it'll have a radically positive impact on society at large.

01:24:50.000 That a 90% likelihood that it'll radically improve the quality of everyone's life.

01:24:59.000 But then there's 20 or 10% that it will not and that will be imprisoned.

01:25:05.000 This is like 10% possibility of the matrix, you know, 90% possibility of a technologically inspired utopia.

01:25:15.000 My feeling about it is that, I mean, there are places where it's going to be incredibly, it's going to be beautiful.

01:25:19.000 Like, just how computer chess raised the level of human chess games, chess players, right?

01:25:27.000 And now AI chess has made chess players much, much stronger.

01:25:33.000 And part of it is because great chess players are partially great because they have had, they're excellent at knowing we're not to look.

01:25:43.000 Great chess players don't actually look at more, they look at less, but they look in the most potent directions.

01:25:48.000 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.

01:26:01.000 So in other words, areas where they were well-trained not to look because humans couldn't play those positions.

01:26:07.000 AI can now play those positions.

01:26:08.000 Right. And actually, those are the right positions to play.

01:26:10.000 They're the objectively correct positions to play.

01:26:12.000 But now humans studying with an AI can be much better at playing those positions.

01:26:16.000 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.

01:26:33.000 And now, that can only be done, in my opinion with just best, best, best in class safety practices.

01:26:39.000 And in my view, that involves having a higher level AI running safety than you have running the actual science.

01:26:48.000 When you say safety, like what are you referring to?

01:26:50.000 Making sure that we don't do, that doesn't go wild, that you create things that get out there that could be terribly destructive.

01:26:59.000 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.

01:27:09.000 And when you have a race, everyone's just running as fast as they can, but they're not, if they slow down to think about what's safe, they might fall behind in the race.

01:27:18.000 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.

01:27:27.000 That's a very logical perspective.

01:27:29.000 Unfortunately, we are in a race, and that's where it gets weird, right?

01:27:33.000 Because we're not just in a race in America.

01:27:35.000 We're in a race internationally.

01:27:37.000 And the consequences of losing the race are a grave.

01:27:42.000 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.

01:27:54.000 But I think it's that on steroids.

01:27:56.000 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.

01:28:08.000 All you'd have to do is lock down resources, food, power, electricity, everything.

01:28:13.000 And you put society at a complete halt.

01:28:17.000 If you can figure out a way to completely disable grids and every car has a computer in it now, most cars are connected to Wi-Fi.

01:28:27.000 Most new ones have at least an option to connect it.

01:28:29.000 There's a way that someone can connect to your car.

01:28:32.000 And this is crazy.

01:28:35.000 In phones, everyone's reliant completely on your phone.

01:28:38.000 There's AI in your phone now.

01:28:40.000 Who knows what could happen if that got hijacked?

01:28:43.000 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.

01:29:06.000 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.

01:29:24.000 So if you Google something about Donald Trump, you will have as many negative responses they could possibly throw to the front of the line.

01:29:33.000 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.

01:29:40.000 Now, if you're a person that's in the middle and maybe a person that's undecided in an electoral process, 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...

01:30:00.000 sort of undecided voters can be swayed by search result engines, which is kind of crazy.

01:30:05.000 And that's just, you know, an algorithm.

01:30:08.000 That's just something that they've divided.

01:30:10.000 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.

01:30:26.000 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.

01:30:36.000 That's spooky stuff, because that's all AI.

01:30:39.000 If AI can be, if someone figures out the best version of AI that can traverse these boundaries that we have with encryption and with grids and computer systems and just completely lock everything down, we're fucked.

01:30:56.000 Yeah, that's why I don't, you know, when I hear people say things like that 80 to 90% positive, I feel like they're jumping to the destination.

01:31:06.000 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.

01:31:12.000 And I think what you just said about grids and everything is true.

01:31:14.000 I mean, you think about how many people had the ability to disrupt in that way 15 years ago, a handful of countries.

01:31:21.000 Right. Right.

01:31:22.000 Now it's going to be hundreds of thousands or millions of individuals who just have access to super coders.

01:31:27.000 Right. Right.

01:31:29.000 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?

01:31:44.000 Hackers. It's just like insane.

01:31:46.000 In the hands of broken people.

01:31:47.000 It's much easier to destroy than to create.

01:31:49.000 Yeah. Right?

01:31:50.000 You can create for thousands of years and you destroy it instantly.

01:31:52.000 Yep. Right?

01:31:53.000 So it only takes one terribly destructive act or a handful of them.

01:31:56.000 to overcome all the positive.

01:31:58.000 I don't believe that that 80-90% thing is right.

01:32:02.000 I think that there are areas like science where we could easily create materials that could have a massively positive impact on the climate.

01:32:10.000 We could have life science breakthroughs that eliminate cancer, eliminate diseases.

01:32:14.000 make the human lifespan hundreds of years.

01:32:16.000 I think those things could happen, which is great.

01:32:18.000 I also think that we could be manipulated into doing increasingly destructive things.

01:32:23.000 And we could have horrific things happen like the grid.

01:32:29.000 You know, there's a guy who's very brilliant in the espionage world years ago who said to me, he said to me, you know, he's someone who would know.

01:32:38.000 And he said, you know, Josh, what you don't realize is...

01:32:44.000 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.

01:33:01.000 Easily. I mean, just like, it's so hard to have the humility that we are the ant relative to the human.

01:33:09.000 Yeah. Right?

01:33:11.000 If you have a 3,800 ELO, I'm just using that rated intelligence, trying to manipulate you, and it's armed with everything.

01:33:17.000 I mean, humans can manipulate you with what's on social media.

01:33:21.000 Yeah, with a British accent and an infomercial.

01:33:23.000 Yeah, no problem.

01:33:25.000 Show some leg.

01:33:25.000 You're gone.

01:33:26.000 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.

01:33:34.000 And a superintelligence, which is out there, and they're humans controlling the superintelligence so far.

01:33:39.000 Maybe that will end.

01:33:40.000 So I personally feel, I know everyone should get the fuck off social media.

01:33:45.000 I just think it's, like, I think that's the most important thing.

01:33:48.000 Because everything that we're feeding in to, I've never been on social media.

01:33:51.000 I made that decision a long time ago.

01:33:52.000 Really? When did you make it?

01:33:53.000 I was never on it.

01:33:54.000 I made it, right?

01:33:55.000 It went first.

01:33:56.000 I remember when, like, MySpace came out.

01:33:58.000 What did you think of the time?

01:34:00.000 Fuck that.

01:34:01.000 Really? Yeah.

01:34:04.000 I didn't...

01:34:05.000 It felt off to me.

01:34:07.000 It felt like something I didn't want to be involved with.

01:34:09.000 I didn't...

01:34:10.000 I'm not saying that I was prescient and I saw everything that would happen.

01:34:13.000 But I never...

01:34:13.000 There was some people who were impersonating me on social media, but I was never on any form of social media.

01:34:20.000 And... Good for you.

01:34:21.000 Yeah. I mean...

01:34:23.000 I'm on everything but TikTok.

01:34:25.000 TikTok is fucked.

01:34:26.000 It's hilarious.

01:34:27.000 When I was flying here, I was listening to your conversation with Tristan Harris while the dude next to me was scrolling TikTok on the plane.

01:34:36.000 And it was amazing listening to this dialogue here and watching him just like.

01:34:39.000 Watching it happen.

01:34:40.000 An hour and a half straight.

01:34:41.000 It was like, fom, fom.

01:34:43.000 It was incredible.

01:34:43.000 I've never actually seen someone fucking do that.

01:34:46.000 It was the most brainless thing I've ever seen in my life.

01:34:48.000 It's so brainless and so addictive.

01:34:50.000 And so manipulative.

01:34:51.000 Like, it can just guide you to anything you, but why don't we...

01:34:56.000 This one thing I kind of disagreed with you on this talk where you were saying that you just don't think that humans are going to do anything about it until we're forced to.

01:35:05.000 But I don't know, man.

01:35:06.000 I think that what if we just...

01:35:08.000 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.

01:35:18.000 Like, why don't we just remove ourselves from it?

01:35:20.000 Well, that's a very rational perspective.

01:35:22.000 But most people aren't rational.

01:35:23.000 But why don't we help people be rational and just...

01:35:26.000 You have to change the whole way they interface with life.

01:35:32.000 And that's a big ask.

01:35:34.000 It's not as simple as logically social media is bad for you.

01:35:39.000 I'll stay off.

01:35:40.000 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...

01:35:56.000 Possessing autonomy and the idea of 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.

01:36:17.000 It's so compelling to people, and we're so averse to being bored, that at any time when nothing's going on, you pick up your phone, you start scrolling.

01:36:25.000 At any time, you just get nonsense, just fed into your head at any time.

01:36:29.000 Think about like the first time that somebody experiences Jiu-Jitsu, right?

01:36:32.000 They get on the mats and they realize they might have some hubris.

01:36:35.000 They're an athlete.

01:36:36.000 Maybe they've done some stand-up.

01:36:39.000 Maybe they haven't.

01:36:40.000 They're a football player or whatever.

01:36:41.000 And they suddenly are like a fish out of water.

01:36:43.000 They're flopping on the sand, right?

01:36:44.000 And their joints are being popped and they're being choked out.

01:36:47.000 And the humility that they experience, right?

01:36:49.000 Yeah. Like, I think we need to culturally experience that humility before it's too late.

01:36:57.000 Because that's how manipulatable we are.

01:37:00.000 Just how, like, a first-day grappler is on the jih Tzu mats against a decent fighter, a decent grappler.

01:37:07.000 Like, that's how helpless we are next to a 3,800 ELO, which exists.

01:37:12.000 It'll be stronger than 30. I'm just saying, like, where it is now.

01:37:15.000 It'll be much the fuck stronger than that tomorrow.

01:37:17.000 Once it's attached to quantum computing, it literally would be a god.

01:37:20.000 Yeah. We're about to experience the most bizarre transition that I think any human civilization has ever experienced.

01:37:31.000 You know, it's electricity times a billion.

01:37:34.000 It's, you know, computers times a billion.

01:37:36.000 It's something completely different.

01:37:39.000 And we're going to adapt to it.

01:37:40.000 We're going to have to.

01:37:41.000 We're going to have to figure it out.

01:37:42.000 It's just what will that be like?

01:37:44.000 What will life be like when we adapt to it?

01:37:47.000 That's when things are going to get strange.

01:37:49.000 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...

01:38:03.000 It'll make allocation of resources much more efficient.

01:38:07.000 It'll be much easier to get water and health services to third world countries.

01:38:13.000 It'll be much easier to keep power on in places.

01:38:17.000 It'll be much easier for people to get sanitation, medicine, things along those lines.

01:38:24.000 And then starving, poverty, nutrition, all those things could probably work out in a far more efficient and a far more effective way.

01:38:34.000 Then the problem is control.

01:38:36.000 That's the problem.

01:38:37.000 The problem is human beings.

01:38:39.000 Every single government, every single leadership position, everything involves control.

01:38:46.000 The CEO controls the company.

01:38:48.000 The president controls the country.

01:38:50.000 There's Congress, there's senators, control, control, control. 0.95

01:38:53.000 Everything is control and then financial benefit from that control.

01:38:58.000 That's where it gets scary.

01:38:59.000 Because whoever is actually programming this thing, as we've seen with Google's AI disaster, when they program their AI to show you images of Nazis, and it showed you multicultural, multi-ethnic, multiracial Nazis.

01:39:16.000 Like, instead of actual, like, what is it?

01:39:18.000 No, Nazis with fucking dueling scars on their face, hard-looking, scary German dudes. 0.94

01:39:23.000 That's Nazis. 0.87

01:39:24.000 These are not Nazis.

01:39:26.000 This is a fever dream.

01:39:28.000 This is some nuttiness that you've put your DEI nonsense into an artificial version of what the past is.

01:39:38.000 That's crazy.

01:39:39.000 You can't do that.

01:39:40.000 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.

01:39:49.000 And that's nuts.

01:39:50.000 The question is, what should we do?

01:39:53.000 And like as individuals, societally, I mean, I know you're having dialogue with people who have a lot of ideas about the societally.

01:40:00.000 And I'm thinking about it on the individual level.

01:40:03.000 as well.

01:40:04.000 And it goes like your question about children and learning, right?

01:40:08.000 I feel that there's something about having that beginner's mind, which is so liberating.

01:40:13.000 Yes. Right?

01:40:14.000 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.

01:40:25.000 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.

01:40:37.000 For the world that's coming, like you think about skating to where the puck is going, not to where it was or what used to be, right?

01:40:43.000 So what does it mean to be a human in the world that we're a year or two or three away from, right?

01:40:48.000 Where there's a super intelligence out there that can manipulate us, where so many jobs are lost.

01:40:53.000 Well, let me throw that at you.

01:40:54.000 What do you think the world will look like?

01:40:58.000 What do I think it will look like?

01:40:59.000 Yeah. Yeah.

01:41:01.000 I think that we're going to have thrillingly exciting discoveries being made.

01:41:07.000 We're going to have problems solved that we are, as humans, unable to solve.

01:41:13.000 And so there'll be amazing technological innovations that are going to make things much more convenient.

01:41:17.000 I think there'll be huge life science breakthroughs.

01:41:19.000 I think there'll be huge material science breakthroughs.

01:41:23.000 I think there will be wild competition for who controls it.

01:41:26.000 I completely agree with you about that.

01:41:29.000 And I think that as that unfolds, it's going to be really messy.

01:41:37.000 I think that there's going to be, like, unbelievable amounts of jobs are going to be lost, and people are going to not have jobs.

01:41:43.000 So what the fuck are they going to do?

01:41:44.000 Right? So this is part of what I'm describing.

01:41:46.000 People need to train at the ability to recreate themselves, right?

01:41:49.000 Like how some people can move from one art to another and others can't.

01:41:53.000 I think we have to train at the art of rediscovery.

01:41:55.000 Right? So I think we're going to be tested as a species in our ability to...

01:42:01.000 to recreate our identities and to live in a state of dynamic flux, of embracing new paradigms.

01:42:06.000 Paradigms are going to be shifting all the fucking time.

01:42:09.000 The pace of change is going to be radically accelerating for the rest of our lives, the rest of our lives, right?

01:42:15.000 So if that pace of change is accelerating, then we need to have the ability to recreate ourselves as things shift.

01:42:21.000 We all know that, like...

01:42:23.000 You can't be solving the problem that was important, like, in a fight a minute ago.

01:42:28.000 Right. It's a different fucking problem than we have right now.

01:42:30.000 Right. Or in a chess game an hour ago, or 10 minutes ago, or one minute ago, right?

01:42:33.000 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.

01:42:39.000 Right. But humans don't fucking do that. 0.85

01:42:42.000 Right. We tend to cling to our ideas, the decisions we made.

01:42:47.000 Then we try to justify our ideas.

01:42:49.000 We cling to our identities.

01:42:50.000 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.

01:42:58.000 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 is like a fear of success, right?

01:43:08.000 Like, that's a term people use, fear of success.

01:43:10.000 The way I understand fear of success is that why do people undermine themselves when they are close to something that they want?

01:43:19.000 Right? To a breakthrough that they earn.

01:43:20.000 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.

01:43:34.000 That's a core driver of human psychology.

01:43:36.000 Right? In competition, that's a lot of what we do, right?

01:43:38.000 We plant identities in people, tells in people, little egoic addictions in people.

01:43:44.000 And then we exploit the mind being stuck there because it's not dynamic.

01:43:48.000 It can't keep on moving, right?

01:43:50.000 Like Robert Persig, my favorite, the most important philosopher in my life, Robert Persig wrote Zen and the Art of Most Local Maintenance.

01:43:55.000 Have you read that book?

01:43:56.000 Yeah, I did.

01:43:57.000 Awesome. He was a really important person in my life.

01:44:01.000 I could tell you an interesting story about him.

01:44:04.000 His idea of dynamic quality.

01:44:05.000 I think we have to live in a state of dynamic quality, not static quality.

01:44:10.000 Right? Like you think about the front of the freight train surging through spacetime versus sitting in the restaurant car.

01:44:16.000 Like, we want to be strapped to the front of the freight train as realities unfolding and adapting to the new realities.

01:44:22.000 And I think we need to build...

01:44:23.000 the way of life that allows us to do that.

01:44:28.000 Right. And I have a lot of ideas about what that way of life looks like.

01:44:30.000 I think if we don't do that, then we're going to be dinosaurs in a fucking world with the comic coming, and it's going to blow us the fuck up.

01:44:37.000 So we need to create the ability to reinvent ourselves, to be creative, to adapt.

01:44:43.000 So what do you think happens with all these people that lose their jobs?

01:44:46.000 Because most people believe that some form of universal basic income, people who have studied this, believe that some form of universal basic income is inevitable and necessary.

01:44:59.000 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.

01:45:12.000 You know, I think people identify with what they do.

01:45:15.000 If someone's a great mechanic and they have a great relationship with the people that bring their cars to them and they They enjoy being able to fix things and help people.

01:45:22.000 They identify with this.

01:45:24.000 This is a part of who they are.

01:45:26.000 They're a person who fixes cars and works on cars.

01:45:30.000 If that's gone and now all of a sudden they just have a check, who are they?

01:45:34.000 What do dudes do when they have nothing to do?

01:45:38.000 Well, it depends on the dude.

01:45:39.000 Some people learn new things.

01:45:40.000 Some people get excited and some people, there's going to be people that take advantage of it in a very positive way.

01:45:45.000 If there's a, if there's like a real living wage that you get from the government where you really don't have to worry about your housing anymore, you don't have to worry about your food.

01:45:55.000 I mean, I think that would be, if you were an ambitious person, that would be amazing.

01:46:00.000 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.

01:46:09.000 And we're accustomed to believing that survival itself is the primary driving force, food and shelters, the primary driving force for this intelligent species of human beings.

01:46:23.000 But part of me says why.

01:46:25.000 Why is that?

01:46:26.000 Why does that have to be your driving force?

01:46:28.000 If we have unlimited resources, which assumingly will, 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.

01:46:44.000 You would hope that what people would do then is pursue their dreams.

01:46:49.000 But some people don't have fucking dreams.

01:46:51.000 Some people, they've gone too far down this journey of life with a rigid mindset and a very limited perspective.

01:46:58.000 And now they're forced to change.

01:47:01.000 And many will change, but many will not.

01:47:04.000 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.

01:47:23.000 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.

01:47:34.000 You give them enormous potential for unrest.

01:47:38.000 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 everything, like land of abundance, no more resource scarcity.

01:47:53.000 Everything is beautiful.

01:47:55.000 People have the ability to study art and poetry and opera and they don't need to work anymore.

01:48:00.000 They don't need to be grinding anymore.

01:48:02.000 They can think about philosophy, et cetera, et cetera.

01:48:03.000 That's the argument.

01:48:06.000 that's just like assume that that would be a positive end.

01:48:08.000 I'm not so sure.

01:48:09.000 I think that we have some other energies flowing through us that we won't want to express.

01:48:13.000 But let's just like say that that would be great.

01:48:16.000 The problem is getting there.

01:48:18.000 So in chess, there's this interesting dynamic between strategy and tactics all the time, right?

01:48:23.000 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.

01:48:31.000 We can't just hang our queen or hang our bishop or hang our rook on the path to our strategic dream, right?

01:48:37.000 We need to integrate execution with strategic dreaming.

01:48:40.000 Because often if we're thinking too much tactically, we can't see the long-term plan we want to utilize, right?

01:48:47.000 Like the end result we want to move toward.

01:48:50.000 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.

01:48:59.000 Even if that was a positive place, I think it's going to be a really messy path to get there.

01:49:03.000 But for us to navigate the path, the question to me now is...

01:49:07.000 What should we be doing as individuals, as a species, in order to allow us to navigate that path?

01:49:14.000 Well, I think people certainly, if universal income becomes ubiquitous, we're certainly going to need some sort of guidance.

01:49:20.000 We're certainly going to need something that guides people towards a feeling of relevancy.

01:49:28.000 towards a feeling of purpose.

01:49:30.000 Like you gotta give people something.

01:49:32.000 Training is a beautiful thing to do.

01:49:34.000 Any kind of training, anything where you're learning something.

01:49:37.000 But again, it comes to this comfort thing.

01:49:40.000 You and I have very similar paths in life and that we've sought things that are many people find uncomfortable and difficult.

01:49:49.000 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.

01:50:01.000 And I've lived my life like that and so have you.

01:50:03.000 And there's many people out there that resonate with these ideas.

01:50:07.000 And they also live their life like that and they get excited.

01:50:10.000 But there's many people that don't.

01:50:12.000 And those are the people that are really worried about.

01:50:14.000 The people that just want a good job, where there's nothing wrong with that.

01:50:17.000 There's nothing wrong with wanting a good job in being able to take care of your family and having a place where you enjoy working and being able to go there every day.

01:50:24.000 And when that's taken away from people and they have to kind of restructure the entire way they interface with reality.

01:50:32.000 And then there's this bizarre...

01:50:36.000 connection with the government now where the government is now your provider.

01:50:42.000 It's not just for the people by the people.

01:50:45.000 It's not representative of the people.

01:50:47.000 It's now your provider, which is a very strange relationship to have.

01:50:52.000 And we see it in welfare states, which I think social safety nets are very important.

01:50:57.000 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.

01:51:05.000 And sometimes people run into horribly unfortunate situations, and there's massive potential in those people.

01:51:12.000 And those people can realize that potential if they're helped.

01:51:15.000 And I think that's real too.

01:51:17.000 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?

01:51:29.000 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?

01:51:38.000 And this is happening to you.

01:51:39.000 Like, and you feel lost.

01:51:42.000 Like, there's going to be a lot of people like that.

01:51:45.000 And throughout history, times, terrible times have been very cruel to people who weren't prepared.

01:51:53.000 Yeah. And, you know, I worry about it almost like an intellectual famine.

01:51:58.000 Yeah. 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.

01:52:15.000 That scares a 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 some, just something that makes them feel like they're alive.

01:52:31.000 There's something so powerful about being grounded in...

01:52:37.000 And a path to being grounded is being immersed in an art, like, for example, like chit-su or chess, where if you...

01:52:46.000 Like, if you're on the jihitsu mats and you over-extend your arm and you get armbard, like, you're not going to say that's not my fault.

01:52:53.000 That was his fault.

01:52:54.000 Or, like, that's...

01:52:55.000 Right. Then you just don't fucking get better, and you get on board again.

01:52:58.000 Right. You only get better by taking your shit on.

01:53:00.000 Right. Right.

01:53:01.000 Or if you're a chess player and you make a mistake and you lose, you...

01:53:06.000 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 and they're just like everyone else's race has 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 jiu-jitsu as like a vision like the one of the things that separates people as they get deeper into an art is whether they want to take themselves on as a way of life, whether they're hungry to have their weaknesses revealed, right?

01:53:35.000 You think about a school where, like, somebody, like you can, I always found it interesting to watch people when they're four or five rounds into sparring, like, do they look for the blue belt to rest with or do they look for the, like, like 240 pound fucking bruiser to beat the shit of them or the high level brown belt to exploit them or the black belt to like kick their ass, right? Who do they look for? 0.96

01:53:55.000 Who does like the up and coming purple belt look for when like the young competitor? 0.72

01:54:00.000 Is he looking for the egoic rest or the place to be exposed?

01:54:03.000 Like the people who hunger for exposure to get better, right?

01:54:06.000 It's like seeking accountability as a way of life.

01:54:09.000 I think there's something really powerful to do that with decision making.

01:54:12.000 Right? Because we're making decisions and we're making decisions in a higher and higher stakes world.

01:54:18.000 And if we train at the art of decision making in something that's grounded in reality.

01:54:24.000 Like, for example, the chess rating system is just a fucking thing.

01:54:27.000 It's objective.

01:54:27.000 There's no bullshit to it.

01:54:29.000 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.

01:54:35.000 It's like, no, you're not.

01:54:37.000 You just haven't taken your shit on, right?

01:54:40.000 Like, you're not stronger than your rating.

01:54:42.000 Your rating is how strong you are as a chess player.

01:54:44.000 Yeah. Right.

01:54:45.000 But there's something about, there's something so beautiful about an accurate feedback loop.

01:54:50.000 Right, whether that can be with a coach, training with you, can be on the, just getting tapped out, getting your ass kicked, right, getting hit, losing, whatever it is.

01:54:58.000 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.

01:55:10.000 that there's no bullshit involved.

01:55:12.000 They learn to accept accountability as a way of life.

01:55:15.000 They seek feedback loops.

01:55:16.000 I think that we can do this in decision-making.

01:55:18.000 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 superintelligence.

01:55:26.000 So we need to track our decisions and we need to see objectively when they are good and when they're bad.

01:55:32.000 Like just how you can studying tape as a basketball team or as a jiu-jitsu fighter or whatever.

01:55:36.000 Like we need to create game tape in our decision-making.

01:55:39.000 We have to stop deluding ourselves about the fact that we're actually better than everything shows we are.

01:55:45.000 Right. People love to think that way.

01:55:47.000 They fucking love it.

01:55:48.000 It gives them a nice little out in their accomplishments.

01:55:51.000 It gives them a nice little excuse for why things haven't gone their way.

01:55:55.000 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.

01:56:08.000 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.

01:56:18.000 Let go of it, re-evaluate.

01:56:19.000 So when you work with people, and I know a big part of what you do is help organizations learn and how do you instill these ideas in people?

01:56:31.000 Do you have a structure that you follow when you go to work with people?

01:56:36.000 Do you try to see what they do?

01:56:37.000 Yeah, I try to see what they do.

01:56:39.000 So I have been training for the last 15, yeah, 15, 16 years.

01:56:47.000 elite mental and physical athletes, right?

01:56:50.000 Decision makers, investors, um, athletes, fighters.

01:56:56.000 You work with fighters?

01:56:57.000 NBA teams.

01:56:57.000 Well, in my school with Marcello, we had a huge, yeah, group of fighters.

01:57:01.000 Jitsu fighters.

01:57:02.000 And, um, so I've been in dialogue with people who are the, like the pinnacles of different fields, um, my whole life.

01:57:10.000 And, One thing is that I love working with people who want to take themselves on.

01:57:14.000 So it begins with them being all in on the process.

01:57:17.000 I'm not great at motivating people to take their shit on.

01:57:20.000 No. I love to begin once we're taking their shit on.

01:57:25.000 And then it's individualized.

01:57:26.000 I get to know someone's pattern.

01:57:28.000 Just 99% listening, observing.

01:57:31.000 A lot of what I try to do is understand the entanglement of their brilliance and their eccentricity or their genius and their dysfunction.

01:57:37.000 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?

01:57:45.000 Like all of our most brilliant creations are interwoven with the dysfunctional parts of our mind.

01:57:51.000 Everyone wants to normalize people.

01:57:53.000 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.

01:58:14.000 And so when I start working with someone, I try to get to know them very, very deeply.

01:58:18.000 Their patterns are their patterns of success, their patterns of failure, where their genius and their dysfunction are entangled.

01:58:27.000 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.

01:58:42.000 So not reacting away from what they did before and not being subject to the inertia of what they did before.

01:58:46.000 Mm-hmm. But just blue-skying what the ideal solution would be, what the most pure self-expression for them would be.

01:58:54.000 So it's completely dependent upon the individual and their approach initially?

01:58:58.000 Yeah. And not their approach, the individual and the patterns of their approach, right?

01:59:03.000 Not that we would do things the way they did before, but I have a lot of humility.

01:59:06.000 Like, I don't think that I know the way.

01:59:08.000 I don't think there is a way.

01:59:09.000 I think we all have our own way.

01:59:11.000 We need to discover.

01:59:12.000 The 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.

01:59:27.000 My style of chess play at that point my whole life had been creative, attacking, improvisational.

01:59:32.000 I love to create chaos and find hidden harmonies in chaos.

01:59:34.000 I love to battle.

01:59:36.000 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.

01:59:45.000 I played much more in the style, not the strength, but the style of like Gary Kasparov or Mikhail Tahl or Bobby Fisher, like players who were aggressive, who had a lot of like red blood flowing through their body.

01:59:58.000 Like I was hot blooded.

01:59:59.000 And he urged me to play in the opposite style from what was natural to me.

02:00:04.000 Think what would Karpov do here?

02:00:06.000 Not what would Josh do here.

02:00:06.000 Is there a benefit to that just to expand your repertoire?

02:00:10.000 Yes. There is absolutely a benefit to that.

02:00:12.000 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.

02:00:21.000 Right? I think I had this, this brilliant man named Yuri Razavayev who was on the other pillar of the Russian school chess, who said this amazing thing to me.

02:00:27.000 He said to me, Josh, you can learn Karpov through Kasparov.

02:00:32.000 And I didn't understand what he meant for many, many years after that.

02:00:35.000 And it was a little too late in my chest life to take that in.

02:00:37.000 But what he was saying is that you can learn the great defensive chess by studying the defense of the great attackers.

02:00:43.000 Why was it late in your career to take that in?

02:00:46.000 Well, good question.

02:00:48.000 It's just when he said it to me, like I was in my early 20s and my, and like my love for, I'd lost my love for chess.

02:00:55.000 Like it had gotten static, stale.

02:00:57.000 Like I would, you know, good challenge.

02:01:01.000 It probably wasn't late, but I wasn't, I couldn't hear it.

02:01:04.000 I didn't.

02:01:05.000 Like I would have had to go into the cave, go away, go through an existential crisis and come back to chess.

02:01:10.000 But there were a lot of things that were moving me away from chess at that point in addition to that.

02:01:13.000 I didn't want to be trapped inside of the confines of 64 squares anymore.

02:01:17.000 I felt like a lion in a cage.

02:01:18.000 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.

02:01:24.000 But maybe it would have been much worse for my life.

02:01:26.000 If I had known him in a 60, I might have fucking played chess for the rest of my life.

02:01:29.000 And I'm so grateful I didn't.

02:01:30.000 So who knows?

02:01:32.000 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?

02:01:43.000 Like, those are critical decisions if you think of the life that you're living now, is this optimal?

02:01:51.000 If this is optimal, then yes, it's good.

02:01:53.000 that you moved away from chess.

02:01:56.000 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.

02:02:03.000 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.

02:02:14.000 Yeah, I mean, absolutely.

02:02:16.000 I mean, for me, I love the life that I live.

02:02:20.000 Like, I'm so grateful for the life that I've lived.

02:02:22.000 And I was moved away from chess in many ways by this alienating experience of, of, um, that I just described.

02:02:32.000 And then also the dynamics of the movie and everything.

02:02:34.000 But I played just for eight years after the movie.

02:02:37.000 And so my results were very good, but I was moving into this internal, I was in an existential crisis.

02:02:42.000 Yeah. And then, but every, like, catastrophic injury or heartbreaking loss or losing a world championship in the, like, when you're a millimeter from winning the finals, like all of those losses that were so heartbreaking to me, every big loss I'm grateful for now and led to the biggest wins and led to the biggest insights and transitions and.

02:03:02.000 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?

02:03:11.000 And a lot of the reads that I made as a competitor, to go back to your question, like, I invert now.

02:03:16.000 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.

02:03:25.000 Right. Now, then I would exploit them, right?

02:03:28.000 Same thing you do in the fight game.

02:03:29.000 You find where someone's pattern is static and exploit it, right?

02:03:31.000 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.

02:03:43.000 So a lot of what I do today in my work with brilliant performers is work on unleashing what I used to exploit.

02:03:50.000 That's interesting.

02:03:52.000 That's great.

02:03:54.000 That must be very satisfying to teach people how to get better at things.

02:04:00.000 Yeah. It's interesting.

02:04:03.000 I don't use that.

02:04:05.000 I don't teach people.

02:04:07.000 I don't know it.

02:04:08.000 I'm not teaching some people for something I know.

02:04:10.000 But you're teaching what you know.

02:04:11.000 Well, I'm kind of discovering their path with them.

02:04:14.000 Okay. Like, I don't go in thinking, like, this is the way you fucking should do it.

02:04:17.000 Right. Right.

02:04:18.000 I don't believe that I know what they should do.

02:04:20.000 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 reject that coach.

02:04:28.000 Right. Yeah.

02:04:31.000 Well, you have to really understand someone psychologically to be able to coach them as well.

02:04:34.000 Yeah. Because sometimes you don't know, like, what the hitch is until you run, you're like, oh, there it is.

02:04:41.000 So this is your whole problem with your whole life.

02:04:43.000 But the amazing thing is you find the hitch, but then you see, oh, that hitch is interwoven with your biggest, um, like I sent you that thing I wrote about Marcello, right?

02:04:54.000 And like there was this incredible moment that I had with, with Marcello, um, Such an emotional moment.

02:05:04.000 I describe him as like this great lower-up learner.

02:05:06.000 And he's someone who uniquely in my life, I've never seen anyone better at learning from one experience, big or large, right?

02:05:15.000 And then there was this moment we were sitting, I guess it was six years ago.

02:05:20.000 We were sitting just talking about life and our journey and everything.

02:05:23.000 And he started weeping.

02:05:26.000 And he said to me, you know, Josh, I never forget my pain.

02:05:26.000 And he said to me, "You know, Josh, I never forget my pain." And he said, you know, Marcelo had a real tragedy.

02:05:41.000 Marcel and Tachi, his wife, they lost, they had twins and they lost their baby Joey.

02:05:46.000 Olivia and Joey were born, premature, and Joey, Joey died.

02:05:49.000 It was a terrible tragedy.

02:05:50.000 It was just devastating for, I mean, just beyond belief, devastating.

02:05:56.000 And like the loss of his son, the loss of his mother, the loss of his father.

02:06:03.000 Every moment someone looked at him a certain way.

02:06:05.000 Every moment somebody like raised their voice at him and triggered him into like a fight place.

02:06:10.000 Every time he'd been submitted, every time he'd been swept, every time I realized as he was saying this, like all of his pain.

02:06:18.000 is with him every moment.

02:06:20.000 And as he described this to me, it was an incredibly emotional scene where he was just weeping in his exploration, and his like just brother to brother talking to me about, like, he walks around with every wound he's experienced in life present all the fucking time.

02:06:38.000 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, And it's a superpower, but also it ravages it all the fucking time.

02:06:50.000 And you can't just remove that.

02:06:51.000 You can't be like, yeah, release your pain.

02:06:53.000 Right. Be great.

02:06:53.000 Yeah, but then you're also releasing the genius.

02:06:56.000 That's the thing about people that are really amazing at something.

02:07:01.000 The pain of losing is so devastating to them.

02:07:06.000 Like, When you talk about genius and many, like people use Michael Jordan as an example, genius basketball player, but unbelievably competitive.

02:07:17.000 Yeah. Like, just can't help himself.

02:07:20.000 In everything.

02:07:21.000 On and off the court.

02:07:22.000 I've heard if you beat him at pool, he won't talk to you for two weeks.

02:07:24.000 Yeah. So you can be like, Mike, just take it fucking easy on the pool table.

02:07:27.000 What do you care?

02:07:27.000 But you can't say that.

02:07:28.000 Garik-Spar was the same way. 0.83

02:07:30.000 Competitive in everything.

02:07:31.000 Everything. But you can't just like remove that.

02:07:33.000 You're removing the genius with it.

02:07:34.000 Right. Right.

02:07:35.000 That you have a Ferrari engine and you're trying to like navigate 30 mile per hour traffic.

02:07:42.000 And you're like, fuck.

02:07:43.000 I'll never forget this chess coach, Mark DeVretzky, who I was, he said to me this unbelievably hubristic thing when I was 15, 16 years old.

02:07:53.000 He said to me, if he had had Bobby Fisher as a student as a seven-year-old, he could have made Fisher a much, much stronger chess player without any of the craziness.

02:08:05.000 What? Without the craziness.

02:08:07.000 And I was just like, as a teenager, like, my hands started, like, sweating when I just said that.

02:08:14.000 It's just like, because to me, it's just not fucking true.

02:08:17.000 Right. Like, Fisher's...

02:08:18.000 It's a crazy thing to say.

02:08:19.000 Yeah, it's a, it's hubris, right?

02:08:22.000 And this is the same guy who is urging me into that direction.

02:08:27.000 Like, but that, that's the opposite of my approach.

02:08:30.000 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.

02:08:37.000 We need to plant the seeds patiently for that genius to sprout somewhere else.

02:08:40.000 We need to water those seeds. 0.70

02:08:41.000 We need to observe them coming.

02:08:43.000 We have to very, like, slightly sand away the dysfunctional patterning while observing.

02:08:48.000 Like, it's a very delicate process, right?

02:08:51.000 You can't just fucking excise the tumor.

02:08:54.000 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 that what led them to become great in the first place is also that hubris that makes them think they could take Bobby Fisher and make them even better.

02:09:17.000 Well, that's why great coaches, great fighters often aren't great coaches, right?

02:09:22.000 Because most teachers teach the way they learned, which will alienate 70 or 80% of their students by definition.

02:09:29.000 Great coaches can, well, great coaches for a large group need to be able to teach different ways for different kinds of learners.

02:09:36.000 Yeah. Different modalities of learners.

02:09:37.000 Are they visual?

02:09:39.000 Are they somatic?

02:09:39.000 Are they, Are they auditory?

02:09:41.000 Like, what makes them tick?

02:09:43.000 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.

02:09:48.000 I taught them from kindergarten through fifth grade, and we ended up winning in New York.

02:09:52.000 It was a beautiful journey with kids at PS-116.

02:09:53.000 And from moving the pieces to winning city, state, and national championships.

02:09:57.000 And it was so interesting because I'd be like teaching...

02:10:00.000 eight, ten kids at once, and I would be teaching, it was like giving a simultaneous exhibition.

02:10:05.000 Like, each one had their own language.

02:10:07.000 And it was, I was, like, so involved with this theme that I would be, it was exhausting.

02:10:11.000 Because I was teaching 10 chess lessons at the same time to 10 kids.

02:10:14.000 And I remember I had this moment, this heartbreaking moment where I had this one student named Ivan, who I, who I, like, just charismatic, intense, you know, we had a very close relationship.

02:10:24.000 I loved the kid.

02:10:25.000 And like, I was, he was, at the national championship, I was giving him this, this, this pep talk.

02:10:30.000 And I was just like firing him up and speaking to him in the way he needed to be spoken to.

02:10:34.000 And then he was like, he ran off, like Stoked, fired up to go kick some ass.

02:10:38.000 And then this other kid who was on the team, this beautiful, sensitive boy came over.

02:10:41.000 And I looked at him with the same energy that I just been speaking to Ivan and I brought it to him.

02:10:46.000 And I was like 15 seconds into speaking to when I looked at his eyes and I realized like this was a disaster.

02:10:53.000 This is terrible.

02:10:54.000 And then I stopped.

02:10:55.000 And I like, gave him a hug and we like slowed it down.

02:10:58.000 He needed to go into a very different way that Ivan went in.

02:11:01.000 Right. But coach, think about how often you see cornermen fucking up fighters.

02:11:05.000 Yeah. Right?

02:11:06.000 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.

02:11:14.000 Yeah, and that's what's very important is finding the right coach.

02:11:18.000 You have to find a coach that understands you and has a style that you can implement.

02:11:24.000 Because there's some coaches that just have styles that physically you're not designed for.

02:11:31.000 You can't learn the way they learned.

02:11:33.000 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 acquire that.

02:11:50.000 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.

02:11:59.000 Like that's a specific focus that you've had.

02:12:03.000 Like why is that so rewarding to you?

02:12:03.000 Like, why is that so rewarding to you?

02:12:06.000 Oh.

02:12:12.000 Well, I took on this interesting challenge when I broke my back.

02:12:21.000 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.

02:12:39.000 I wanted to see if I could like love it as much.

02:12:42.000 And I never got there.

02:12:44.000 And then I got into the, you know, that's part of what moved me into discovering the ocean arts and being all in training.

02:12:49.000 So a big part of my relationship with training other people is training myself as a way of life.

02:12:52.000 Like I'm always, like I'm living at my limit in my, in the arena myself.

02:12:56.000 The moment I think a coach like leaves.

02:12:59.000 the arena where they're putting their own ego on the line all the time or their life on the line or whatever the fuck they're putting on the line, then they become static and they start to think they know the answer.

02:13:07.000 It's like the fat, you know, 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 like actually dynamic than putting their...

02:13:19.000 The moment our egos get protected.

02:13:20.000 Yeah. So my relationship to training is something that I live all the time.

02:13:27.000 Um... I think also becoming a dad was a big part of it, like the nurturing.

02:13:34.000 And a lot of what I've done is invert, what I used to do to break people.

02:13:37.000 Now I invert to heal them or to unleash them.

02:13:42.000 Like being a father is about the most humbling thing I've ever.

02:13:46.000 I thought I had ideas about education until I became a dad and then I realized I didn't know anything I had to start over.

02:13:54.000 Yeah, and also the wound pattern, like I think understanding people's wound patterns is very important.

02:13:59.000 And a lot of my wound pattern is in loving something very, very deeply, being alienated from it, and then finding a post-conscious relationship to it and a self-expression within it.

02:14:12.000 And I think that helping people with that journey is...

02:14:19.000 is really important.

02:14:19.000 And also, I love engaging with all on motherfuckers.

02:14:23.000 I mean, I just love, like, whether, you know, my current projects are, like, cutting-edge science and AI, just brilliant scientists.

02:14:29.000 It's such an incredibly interesting.

02:14:31.000 And, like, being deeply involved with the Boston Celtics, like, just the very top of the NBA world and my relationship with Joe Mazzulo, the head coach, and kind of coaching the coach is a modality that I've been Develop playing in for a long time.

02:14:42.000 Helping the leader of an organization express themselves as the coach of their people is a big part of what I do and a couple other interesting investing in tech projects.

02:14:50.000 And like just helping some, like it allows me to play in in fascinating realms and then studying the interconnectedness.

02:14:58.000 I mean, a big part of my passion is thematic interconnectedness.

02:15:02.000 Like how is what's happening with the Boston Celtics the same as what's happening in this cutting edge science program?

02:15:06.000 The same as what's happening in this wildly interesting tech investing program.

02:15:11.000 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?

02:15:18.000 Yeah, that's Miyamoto Musashi.

02:15:21.000 Yeah. Once you understand the way broadly, you can see it in all things.

02:15:24.000 So the Book of Five Rings, right?

02:15:25.000 Like, to me, I feel that I cannot believe how few people have studied Musashi deeply.

02:15:32.000 Right? I mean, whether you're reading the novel about his life and then studying, like, Book of Five Rings, I think everyone should read like 10 times, maybe a day a page, 10 times over.

02:15:44.000 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.

02:15:52.000 You have to practice it as a way of life.

02:15:54.000 Yes. Again and again.

02:15:56.000 And people just skip these things, but they don't realize.

02:15:58.000 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.

02:16:08.000 And you have to practice as a way of life.

02:16:10.000 Right. Right?

02:16:12.000 Yeah, talk about a real motherfucker.

02:16:14.000 Well, just fascinating that he learned this by being a sword fighter.

02:16:17.000 Yeah. What is the best way to be sword fighter?

02:16:20.000 You can have no bullshit in your mind, so you must be balanced.

02:16:24.000 Right. And his approach was, you must be an artist.

02:16:28.000 You must be a poet.

02:16:29.000 You must be a warrior.

02:16:30.000 You must be in tune with all of your feelings and all of your senses and everything about you and to do everything correctly.

02:16:39.000 Do all things.

02:16:41.000 And he was fighting to the death.

02:16:42.000 To the death.

02:16:42.000 So there was no bullshit.

02:16:43.000 Right. There's no room for 62 men in one-on-one combat.

02:16:48.000 You can't say like, oh, no, that wasn't my fault.

02:16:50.000 It doesn't fucking work.

02:16:52.000 No, you take your shit on.

02:16:53.000 Yeah. But that's that, but there's something so beautiful about the truth-telling nature of living.

02:16:56.000 Like, if you, you know, you know when you're on the, when you're in a jih Tzu team and you've got some, you watch someone who doesn't think they're competing for a while, but then they're suddenly, like, they're competing next week, how the repertoire compresses, like all the fat just flies off.

02:17:09.000 Mm-hmm. Right?

02:17:10.000 There's something so beautiful about that process in the cadence.

02:17:13.000 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.

02:17:20.000 Right. So the question is how can we, how can we as many of us as possible, live in some form that's true to us?

02:17:27.000 Where we are, there's this grounded, truth-telling, accurate feedback loop in what we're doing.

02:17:33.000 What we're practicing as a way of life.

02:17:34.000 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.

02:17:43.000 And it's very difficult to get started on that path once you've been on this path of complacency and comfort.

02:17:51.000 It's very hard for people to sort of embrace this new way of thinking and interfacing with reality.

02:17:56.000 But when things are hard, that's beautiful.

02:17:58.000 Like, that's the beginning.

02:17:58.000 We want things to be hard.

02:18:00.000 So the first thing is, I think we want people to love the discomfort of being hard.

02:18:03.000 It's hard.

02:18:04.000 It's hard.

02:18:04.000 Everything worthwhile is hard.

02:18:06.000 Right. Like, what have you done that's been interesting that hasn't been hard?

02:18:11.000 Every time you get in an ice plunge, it's fucking hard.

02:18:13.000 Yeah. Yeah.

02:18:13.000 Like, I cold plunge every day.

02:18:14.000 I think you do too, right?

02:18:15.000 Yeah. Yeah, like it's a way of life.

02:18:17.000 It's fucking hard every time.

02:18:18.000 Yeah. It's not easy.

02:18:20.000 Hard is beautiful.

02:18:21.000 Living on the other side of pain, that's where things get valuable.

02:18:23.000 You're not doing it and knowing that you didn't do it.

02:18:25.000 Yeah. That's hard.

02:18:26.000 That's not good for you.

02:18:27.000 No, that's not good.

02:18:29.000 If you let that part of you, when you're 40 seconds in, you're like, let's get the fuck out now.

02:18:34.000 If you let that part win, you feel terrible for the rest of the day.

02:18:38.000 Would we just hang in there for two minutes and 20 seconds more?

02:18:41.000 Yeah. You'll feel so good.

02:18:42.000 You get out of there, like, all right, got this one done.

02:18:45.000 It's like you go foiling and you don't fall.

02:18:47.000 That's a terrible day, man.

02:18:48.000 Because you're not pushing your turns hard enough.

02:18:50.000 You're not breaching enough.

02:18:51.000 You're not ripping it around hard enough, right?

02:18:53.000 Like, everyone finds these, it's like one thing that happens with investors, right?

02:18:57.000 They... they become successful and then they develop a mental model to replicate the success.

02:19:03.000 So they figure out a mental model become a groove that they can follow.

02:19:06.000 But then the groove becomes a rut they get stuck in and then it starts to collect water and it's stagnant water.

02:19:11.000 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.

02:19:17.000 It happens again and again in every field, right?

02:19:20.000 Some early success creates, you make a framework, you make a modality, you create a mental model, You replicate the success.

02:19:26.000 It's not working, but you stick to it because your identity gets connected to that mental model.

02:19:29.000 And you're not living with dynamic quality.

02:19:31.000 Your qualities become static.

02:19:35.000 Yeah, it's so hard for people to recognize when that's happening as well.

02:19:39.000 Because, you know, once people get success, then the fear of losing that success overwhelms them.

02:19:45.000 And then sometimes it's easier to control a person who's been successful because they don't want to let this go.

02:19:52.000 They don't want to go back.

02:19:53.000 They want to move forward.

02:19:54.000 They want to continue.

02:19:55.000 So what do I have to do to make sure that I'm, I mean, you see this in Hollywood.

02:19:59.000 It's a big thing in Hollywood.

02:20:00.000 People panic.

02:20:01.000 When they start doing well, and then they align themselves with other people doing well, and it kind of changes the way they think and the way they behave because everything is dependent upon you being chosen for things.

02:20:12.000 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?

02:20:20.000 What should I tweet today?

02:20:20.000 To make sure everybody knows I'm on the right side and Then you're playing not to lose.

02:20:24.000 You're not playing to win.

02:20:25.000 It happens all the time in sports.

02:20:26.000 Like if you're a basketball team and you've been dominating the game and you're up eight or ten in the fourth quarter, then you start to protect the lead.

02:20:32.000 Yes. No, you didn't get the lead because you were protecting the fucking lead.

02:20:35.000 You were dominating with aggression.

02:20:36.000 Right. The moment, it's like the prevent defense, in my opinion, is the worst thing.

02:20:39.000 ever created in sports strategy.

02:20:42.000 Right? Like, you know what?

02:20:43.000 Prevent defense?

02:20:44.000 I've heard of it, but I don't know exactly.

02:20:45.000 If you're a football team and you have a 14-point lead in the fourth quarter or an eight-point leave in the fourth quarter, and you stop doing the dominant things that got you the lead, but you start protecting the lead.

02:20:57.000 So your defense back, sit back, You start allowing 8 or 10 or 12-yard completions.

02:21:02.000 It is now you're protecting the lead versus dominating the opponent.

02:21:05.000 But then you let the opponent feel their strength, feel their greatness.

02:21:07.000 They're not dominated anymore.

02:21:09.000 A moment a fighter stops feeling dominated and starts to tap into their greatness.

02:21:13.000 Then your fucking opponent's a beast again.

02:21:15.000 Right. Right.

02:21:16.000 We see it all the time.

02:21:17.000 All the time.

02:21:17.000 Right. So don't protect the fucking lead.

02:21:19.000 Dominate. Yeah.

02:21:20.000 Right? Do it brought you to the dance.

02:21:23.000 Yeah, exactly.

02:21:24.000 It's just...

02:21:26.000 In life.

02:21:27.000 I think that thing that you're talking about is very critical, that fear of losing once you've won.

02:21:32.000 Yeah. Yeah.

02:21:33.000 It's very interesting in the surf world.

02:21:35.000 So many people I've observed who are great surfers, they want to learn to foil because foiling opens up so much.

02:21:40.000 Yeah. You can foil all the time in different conditions and sloppy conditions and ocean, big, big waves, small wave.

02:21:47.000 It's just so abundant.

02:21:48.000 And they can see how epic it is, but then they try once and they get their ass kicked.

02:21:53.000 It doesn't matter how good a surfer you are, not talking about wave foiling on a high-performance gear.

02:21:58.000 You're going to have two, three months of ass kicking as part of it.

02:22:01.000 It doesn't matter how good you are as a surfer.

02:22:03.000 But now you have to look like a beginner again.

02:22:08.000 You have to go from being like the coolest guy in the lineup and 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. 0.98

02:22:16.000 Right? And they don't want to do that.

02:22:17.000 So their ego of the excellent surfer prevents them from learning this art.

02:22:21.000 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.

02:22:27.000 Right. They're so used to being cool.

02:22:29.000 So the foilers are people who, it's a very interesting micro culture inside of surfing.

02:22:33.000 Is it foilers have been people who learned how to, had a foil because they were willing to get their ass kicked and look bad.

02:22:39.000 Are there any other things that are exciting to you like that that you think of?

02:22:42.000 Like if one day you can't foil any longer?

02:22:44.000 Do you have like an escape strategy?

02:22:48.000 I don't have an escape strategy.

02:22:49.000 I never did.

02:22:49.000 I never had like, this is going to be Plan B. I've never been a Plan B guy.

02:22:54.000 I know I could recreate myself, but I love this art profoundly, and I love being in the ocean.

02:23:00.000 Like, there's something about this.

02:23:02.000 This is, like, to me also, this is not about destroying anything.

02:23:05.000 It's not about beating anybody.

02:23:06.000 It's about self-discovery, pushing my limits in the ocean, which is an element.

02:23:10.000 And the foil taps into ocean energy so fucking potently.

02:23:14.000 And the other thing is that the art is at such an early stage of technological growth that foil gear is progressing so quickly.

02:23:21.000 And the people who are actually at the bleeding edge of foil performance-wise can ride this gear, which is increasingly difficult to ride.

02:23:28.000 But the hardest gear to ride is the gear, which can do the most epic shit.

02:23:32.000 And so the sensitivity is like, as the gear requires more and more sensitivity, the sensitivity is cultivated.

02:23:39.000 And very few people in the world can do it on this gear, and it's just so sublime.

02:23:44.000 So I'm so fucking in love with this art.

02:23:48.000 I do not have a plan B. But you know, fuck, who knows what happens?

02:23:51.000 I love when people love things.

02:23:53.000 Oh, me too.

02:23:53.000 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.

02:24:01.000 and on the journey.

02:24:02.000 It's very addictive.

02:24:03.000 It's very inspirational.

02:24:05.000 It gives you something.

02:24:06.000 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.

02:24:13.000 I've never loved an art more.

02:24:14.000 Like, I've loved some arts really fucking deeply in my life, you know?

02:24:17.000 Foiling is number one.

02:24:18.000 I've never loved an art more.

02:24:20.000 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.

02:24:28.000 But in terms of like the day-to-day experience of it, oh yeah, man, I'm a lunatic.

02:24:33.000 I fucking just love it.

02:24:36.000 Yeah. Yeah, so you have to live by the ocean.

02:24:38.000 You're fine.

02:24:38.000 I do.

02:24:40.000 That's beautiful.

02:24:40.000 I live right where the jungle meets the ocean.

02:24:43.000 You were telling me before we wrap this up, you were telling me about a crocodile encounter.

02:24:48.000 Oh yeah, that was before I started, um, before I started foiling, I was surfing.

02:24:55.000 Um, and I, it was like 5 a.m. and I was, um, I was flying back to New York that day, so I went out for like a just pre-sunrise, right at sunrise surf, and I was on this glassy, like, head-high wave, and this gnarled log came up in front of me, this piece of fucking wood.

02:25:13.000 And I saw it, and I hit it and jumped off.

02:25:15.000 It just emerged right in front of me.

02:25:16.000 I didn't know how I didn't see it.

02:25:17.000 Like, I thought it was a big tree.

02:25:18.000 And when I hit the water, my brain was still thinking log.

02:25:21.000 But it was so interesting.

02:25:22.000 My skin lit up goosebumps and I just realized like red alert, like prehistoric danger.

02:25:29.000 And I'd jump back on my board and this like a 10-11 foot crock came swimming just a few feet away from me. 1.00

02:25:35.000 It was so interesting.

02:25:36.000 Whoa. 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.

02:25:45.000 Like I spent tens of thousands of sharks, but this was so different.

02:25:50.000 Like, crock energy, and I haven't, I don't know crocs, like I know sharks, I don't know crocs.

02:25:54.000 Well, crocs are actively trying to eat you.

02:25:58.000 Sharks, a lot, I mean, there's a lot of people that believe the sharks are attacking people because the people are where the sharks are and they don't want the people there.

02:26:05.000 Yeah. You know, like when they're interfering with their hunting grounds and they attack people in that regard.

02:26:10.000 I've heard people say that and I'm like, ooh, that kind of resonates.

02:26:13.000 That makes sense.

02:26:14.000 But crocodiles are different.

02:26:15.000 They're just hunting everything.

02:26:17.000 And if you're there, you're on the menu.

02:26:19.000 They're hyper aggressive.

02:26:21.000 They're very different than alligators, which are also very dangerous.

02:26:23.000 But crocodiles are significantly more dangerous and more aggressive.

02:26:28.000 It was interesting.

02:26:29.000 When I hit the water, my body lit up like...

02:26:32.000 Like I was in the water with a dinosaur.

02:26:34.000 And then it came up, and it's interesting that my body, this speaks to the nature of the intuition, right?

02:26:37.000 Because my mind still thought it was a log.

02:26:39.000 I hit the water.

02:26:40.000 Something energetically told me something, get the fuck out.

02:26:44.000 And then it came swimming up up next to me.

02:26:47.000 And like the feeling of the snout, the eyes, like it just came.

02:26:50.000 And then a big, another wave was coming in.

02:26:53.000 I managed just pop up and ride the next wave to the beach.

02:26:56.000 God damn.

02:26:56.000 That would have been the last day I foiled.

02:26:58.000 Yeah. Well, maybe, like, if I knew the language of Crocs, like I know language of sharks.

02:27:03.000 What's the language?

02:27:04.000 Murder, kill, eat. 0.98

02:27:05.000 That's the language.

02:27:06.000 Maybe there's an internal language.

02:27:07.000 I do not believe that's true.

02:27:10.000 I think they are the waste management of the ocean and of the ground.

02:27:17.000 They are there to make sure that anything that slips, anything that gets too close, anything that fucks up, it doesn't pay attention to the ripples in the water, that's a meal.

02:27:26.000 They clean up.

02:27:27.000 They're the cleaning crew. 0.83

02:27:28.000 They make sure that there's no weakness in the system.

02:27:31.000 And they devour and they live forever.

02:27:35.000 That's the crazy thing.

02:27:36.000 It's like the ones that they spotted in the early journeys when they were talking about, like there's talks of 40, 40 foot plus crocodiles probably were real because crocodiles don't die of old age.

02:27:49.000 They don't have like a 20 year lifespan.

02:27:51.000 They just keep growing.

02:27:53.000 And if a crocodile lived before people had guns and, you know, they weren't on the menu.

02:28:00.000 And you've got to imagine they could live hundreds of years.

02:28:03.000 Hundreds of years eating deer and wildebeest and anything that fucked up, antelopes, anything that fucked up, anything they can get a hold of.

02:28:10.000 And they just keep growing.

02:28:13.000 They could be enormous, enormous.

02:28:16.000 enormous super predator dinosaurs that live amongst people.

02:28:20.000 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.

02:28:32.000 So they hired hunters to hunt these crocodiles.

02:28:36.000 And while he was there, he said, everyone you would meet had a chunk taken out of them.

02:28:41.000 People were missing hands.

02:28:42.000 Some people were missing feet.

02:28:44.000 And while he was there, one of the women in the village got taken.

02:28:48.000 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.

02:28:58.000 The crocodiles had figured this out.

02:28:59.000 So they went onto the shore and then they would go into the water where the posts are and wait for them.

02:29:05.000 Oof. Oof. 0.99

02:29:08.000 Yeah. So the feeling of humility and danger that you have relative to Crocs? 0.99

02:29:12.000 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.

02:29:23.000 Like I feel it like that much in my skin.

02:29:26.000 I think you're correct.

02:29:28.000 Yeah, I think you're correct.

02:29:29.000 I think it's going to be an incredibly, incredibly challenging time in history.

02:29:34.000 And one that I don't think the brightest amongst us can truly predict the outcome.

02:29:40.000 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.

02:29:50.000 It matters that you're on the road, you're on the journey.

02:29:52.000 So let's just say people started to play chess.

02:29:54.000 It doesn't matter how strong a chess player you are, if you're good or if you suck, that doesn't matter.

02:29:58.000 It's a journey, right?

02:29:59.000 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 jihitsu 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.

02:30:20.000 Then you're on the road to like being grounded in a way that we're not today.

02:30:29.000 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.

02:30:42.000 But we have to have, like, when 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?

02:30:50.000 You have a sense for where it is.

02:30:53.000 Right? We need to cultivate that sense in an increasingly chaotic world.

02:30:57.000 And I do feel that being involved in some kind of truth-telling arena, whatever it is, is a hugely important practice.

02:31:07.000 And then taking on the art of training as a way of life is...

02:31:13.000 I feel like it's one of our, and like that combined with getting the fuck off social media.

02:31:17.000 Really, yeah.

02:31:18.000 Amazing advice.

02:31:20.000 Yeah, that's my...

02:31:21.000 Thank you, Josh.

02:31:21.000 That's my pitch.

02:31:21.000 It was a lot of fun.

02:31:22.000 I really appreciate it.

02:31:23.000 Thank you.

02:31:24.000 Yeah, I was really excited to do this and really happy to beat you.

02:31:27.000 So, yeah.

02:31:28.000 Really appreciate you.

02:31:29.000 Awesome, Jim.

02:31:29.000 Thanks for you now.

02:31:30.000 My pleasure.

02:31:31.000 All right.

02:31:31.000 Bye, everybody.

02:31:31.000 Can't find out on social media.

The Joe Rogan Experience - March 19, 2025

Joe Rogan Experience #2292 - Josh Waitzkin

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