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dot-com forward slash Tim for your free travel pack with any purchase while hello boys and girls ladies and germs this is Tim Ferriss welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferriss show or it is my job to deconstruct world-class performers to tease out the thought processes the best practices the influences and so on
that you can hopefully copy and paste into your own life in some fashion to test out the toolkits of people who are the best of what they do my guest this episode is a return guest Josh Waitzkin he was in fact the second ever guest in episode two of this podcast we've known each other a long time Josh Waitzkin is
author of the art of learning he is an eighth time u.s. national chess champion a two-time world champion Taichi push hands and the first Brazilian Jujitsu black belt under nine time world champion marcelo garcia widely believed to be the greatest grappler who has ever lived at least in the world of BJJ for the past 12 years maybe 13 maybe 14 now
josh has been channeling his passion for the outer limits of the learning process towards training elite mental performers and Business and Finance or the finance if you prefer and to revolutionising the education system through his nonprofit foundation the art of learning project josh is currently in the process of
taking on his fourth and fifth disciplines paddle surfing and foiling which we will discussed some length in this episode josh is always a fantastic a thought partner he is constantly pushing back at anything that I say which reflects sloppy thinking or imprecise thinking or consensus thinking
and he's a lovely guy so without further ado please enjoy this wide-ranging conversation with none other than Josh Waitzkin Joshua good day sir Timbo good to see you yet again and we've had a chance to spend a bunch of time together and all sorts of questions have come to mind that I've wanted to ask you and all sorts of discussions
have come up over meals and wine and cold plunges that I've wanted to explore with you let's talk about if you're open with open to rather starting here some some recent explorations of learning and specifically some insights related to someone you introduced me to quite a few years ago Maurice Ashley Yemen Maurice
it was a me as a dear friend and we became very close when I was 11 years old playing chess and between the ages of around 11 and 2324 we studied chess five six hours a week together sparred together traveled around the world competing together against one another and as a team training partners and it was actually really cool he came to
visit us a couple weeks ago and it was a really unusual life opportunity because Maurice and I haven't talked about chess in about 20 years so imagine going it's all in just deep dive with someone for 13 or 14 years in an art not talking about that art for 20 years growing in different directions and then coming
together and a lot of what we were exploring were questions around for example what were our assumptions or our shared constructs 20 years ago things that we agreed to be true that we now don't believe to be true and for context I mean Maurice was a high-level chess player oh yeah how would you how would you for people who
don't know the chess world how would you describe he's a stronger and master and we I mean we grew up they kind of came up the ranks together he was he's older than me he's about I think 10 11 years older than me and he's a beautiful soul and we were I mean back in the day we were just brothers very similar to my relationship with Dan Caulfield that I
have today and in martial arts and now foiling Maurice was my sparring partner in in the chess world and I think that they I think what you're referring to in terms of what we were exploring was was fascinating because I mean a lot of what I think about today is the emptiness of mental models or the the relativity the
non absolute nature of any kind of ideas or constructs or networks of ideas that we have things that we believe today will likely see as somewhat flawed five years from now and so I work on seeing them as flawed today and seeing their the holes in them and so what was really interesting to explore with Maurice for
what were the things that we believed as pretty strong chess players back in the day that we just no longer believed to be true individually and collectively and what came up a lot came up what came up for you well but what one of the the direction of thought that I found most interesting it's not just what were our
false constructs twenty years ago but what are the common root structures to my current constructs and my false constructs twenty years ago I say so in other words what did what do you now disagree with in terms of beliefs you held twenty years ago that nonetheless sprouted from sort of roots or seeds that current beliefs
share that I may or may not be present - yeah no you may not and then part of the challenge is to be present to them and then examine their emptiness today mm-hmm one of the interesting differences between Maurice and me twenty years ago is that when Murray studied chests he was extremely idealistic fanciful it's so much
somewhat to a fault competitively so there were moments where for example Maurice to be playing a beautiful chess game and he would make a mistake as we all do and he would kind of lose interest in the game because it's like the poetic perfection or something of what he'd been creating had been marred and and
his idealism was obviously so beautiful to me but also was sometimes a little bit a little bit frustrating when we were training together and that frustration you know we both learned from and it was really an explorer so it was an example that came to mind for me where there was a moment I recall viscerally when I was probably 22 years
old we were studying a variation of the NIDA of Sicilian and we saw a there was this position that would come after three incorrect decisions so in other words in this complex opening that we were study there would be three mistakes that we made and led to this fascinating position and maurice was like we should
study that position and I thought that was completely impractical I was like dude what are we gonna study this for its imprecise all right we should spend our time studying a position we might actually see and it was an example of of me feeling that maurice was being kind of overly fanciful or idealistic in the
training in the moment of training and Maurice just being fascinated by something and seeing it would be cool and interesting to learn from potentially so in that moment I had a lot of confidence that he was barking up the wrong tree and when I think about that now 20 years later I was absolutely wrong I think that studying that
position so much of what learning is at a high level to me today is conceptual learning the Matic learning it's not about anything local and so that position had so much dynamism to it so like the convergence of different kinds of dimensions and it would we would have learned so much from sitting we actually
did end up setting it we didn't learn learn so much from it but when I think about it today like that was a massive blind spot for me so there was so then how do i deconstruct that into a common root structure today well I think that I have if you look at the way my buddy Dan and I studied martial arts together for
a lot of years we took on Tai Chi push ends together starting in 2000 in training camps for the 2002 and 2004 World Championships and then we transitioned to Brazilian jiu-jitsu reached high levels in that art and then took on now we're taking on surfing and foiling together really all in on foiling and one of the differences between the way Dan and I
learning is that I would argue that he's a much more gifted athlete than me and I'm much more of a deconstructive learner than Dennis so I tend to deccan early in the learning process around something Alton the deconstructed down to the component parts which might be technical or often will be thematic and then I'll internalize those component
parts and then I'm ready just to go all in on chaos Dan likes to just throw himself off a cliff and then he reaches his technical clarity by just jumping right into like the chaos and so we have different paths to a similar place and we've learned to navigate that together so the interesting thing is that there's
a little bit of a of an identity or a stiffness in my approach there so there's something about the early stages of learning a new part for example of foiling for example we've recently started dialing in to-- foiling whipping on a jet ski whipping someone in on like the lightest possible high-performance
foil board and riding big waves can you describe for people who may not have heard our last conversation together what a foil board is so foiling is you're on a surfboard and then beneath the surfboard is a two and a half to three foot mast which is sort of like a big guillotine you know and then beneath that as a wing which can be a big or
giant razor blade yes exactly it's a really safe heart and the wing it wants you're in a way of the wing is what you're riding so the wing is interacting with underwater way of energy so you get lifted off the board is lifted off of the surface of the water for the wings in the water and you're standing on a
surface which is a few feet above the water and it's crazy because it's frictionless it's incredibly fast it's so dynamic it's awesome I mean I've never been more in love with an art my life and the purpose if I am getting this right of using a foil aside from the different kinesthetic experience and aesthetic experience is to be able to
move faster on bigger waves or to is is that how foiling came about as a as a technology well there's lots of yes I guess maybe that's that's a part of what came out I mean you're above the surface chop so when it can be choppy weather and your fear on a foil you're just above it all so you're frictionless so
conditions that are Unser 'full or foil able because the surf will be chattering on all surface texture in the foil is above it I think that you know so much of how I personally relate to it is it's frictionless Ness I think of learning as unobstructed self-expression so friction is a form of obstruction and what's
fascinating is foiling you're you're just it's such a powerful physical embodiment of that principle and I know we're gonna hop around both had a lot of coffee but so we were talking about these sort of labels and in flexibilities we may come back to that but one thing that is really impressed me that you and Dan share in common is I
suppose you probably focus on this perhaps more you correct me but the use of technology and training to really accumulate focused repetitions right so for instance you have a foil board then you have an e file right so so how would you use an e flow so we we took on four so the way I took on foiling was I got
an e foil and I spent about two months flying around two thousand miles on flat water so I learned foil dynamics just first of all working on on flight on with a motor Sony foil is a foil with a prop on it with a lithium battery and and I was flying in flat water at between 15 and 25 miles an hour just getting used to flight dynamics because
it's being on a foil board it's really it's micro micro recalibration if you back wait you fly up if your front weight you go down if you overweight you crash into the floor into the water or fly or the if the wing comes out of the water your your catapulting so I worked on flight dynamics and I worked on break
Falls which is a hugely important part of it which I don't see a lot of Foilers do which is really training in the art of falling which something the Dan and I did of course for many many years in the martial arts and it's not just learning how to fall when you want to fall it's actually turning a fall that's out of
control into a break fall so it's it's really learning how to prepare for the moments you haven't prepared for and and being good at break falls opens like when I took on one wheeling right which is an electronic skateboard with big wheel one wheel in the middle around New York City you know I had a lot of
falls at 25 miles an hour into New York City pavement and if you don't have a break fall you're gonna get hurt but if you do you can just roll out of it and be fine so I think that being comfortable falling it's a really important principle I would say and we could talk about designing the learning process around principles as opposed to
around techniques so it's like the technical arsenal of brake falls like it would fall into the principle of just being comfortable falling and then you can take a lot more risk than you can take otherwise because the fall will be something that's part of your domain well let's let's take an example of
practice that I've never heard anyone else discuss maybe this is common practice I suspect it is not but you've achieved the world-class levels and multiple arts that in and of itself is very uncommon with foiling specifically and we won't spend an hour talking about only foiling but I think it's I want to
highlight for people that this is a discussion of learning and principles using the example of foiling using an E foil to go through boils over and over and over again is that principle based is that technique and perhaps you could you could just paint a picture of what a Boyle is and why that why you chose to
practice in that way right okay so zooming out for a moment the way I think about taking on these arts it's understanding what are the component parts and doing lots of reps in them so that you're comfortable with them then putting them all together so my learning process won't look great in the first couple days or a couple weeks and I'm
not concerned about that and I think that one of the interesting parts of it is like people I think that a lot of what's happening in surf culture or oil cultures people have these Instagram accounts and there are always posting videos of what they're doing and they have to look cool and so there's this
groupthink that I observe around what looks cool and what the micro culture will approve of and so you can't really do things outside of that and so for example going through boils when you're on big wave faces on a reef sometimes there's an upwelling of water that that were like you know if the water interacts with a
shallow spot or a ledge or a big you'll have a boil that is just like a big shooting up of water pressure in the lungs like boiling water it looks like boiling water and when the wing hits that or when a court on piece of a wing hits that foil wing you just can get thrown so you have to learn to absorb it so you have to learn how to
what was either weave around it weave through the boils or absorb them and so one of the things the e foil opened up was the ability to to really seek out boils and learn how to you know lowering level little bit sooner at the top of your wing when of your mast when you enter it and then there's learning what
the boil does if you hit it if you hit the wings straight on on the corners lots of falling but for example putting on a helmet putting on an impact vest those things don't look cool on Instagram and so you can't do those things if you're gonna be posting on Instagram every day right but if you're living kind of a bizarre hermit life
like I guess I do and not doing that kind of thing you guess I can confirm you can look I mean embracing looking absurd in certain moments is a very interesting hack to what others might not be sees taking advantage of in the learning process and so I spent I mean I went over hundreds and hundreds of oils on the e-file and learned how to absorb
them and had incredible crashes but then I learned how to dial in those crashes and I learned how to hit the boils at different speeds and absorb some times I mean I got thrown off that mid thirties miles an hour after then whipped me and on a on a off of the jet ski on a four pound foil board the other day and this
boil just erupted me and I went flying I mean it's an ongoing process at different speeds but but yeah I was just gonna say I remember the first time we spoke about this because it coincided with a week later and we talked about this me going to volunteer at something called zendo at a a festival called
lightning in a bottle which I wanted to attend specifically not because I'm a concert or festival goer but because it's effectively like a mini Burning Man that skews to younger ages and for people who don't know zendo is a peer supported a harm reduction volunteer outfit that helps people who are going through difficult drug
experiences generally or oftentimes psychedelic experiences that do not require medical intervention so there's medical triage for people who have done something that could be physiologically dangerous but otherwise for me it was the equivalent of you going through boils because if for instance and I'm not a facilitator I do
not I do not work too hard I have not chosen as a career supporting people going through psychedelic experiences but I wanted to develop a level of confidence that if I were in an environment where I was called upon to handle the worst case scenario that I would at least have a certain degree of comfort and exposure to that but it's
really uncommon that you would get a lot of repetitions with that that would in fact mean that you would in some way be manufacturing these terrible conditions oh so one of the few ways to do it was to volunteer at zendo where you get these kind of redline cases and you get put in the crisis tent over and over and
over and over and over again and we had a really rich conversation about that about this type of deliberate practice with the edge cases that are nonetheless really important to develop a degree of comfort around and I think that you can do it matically or non-locally you don't have to do it specifically in the thing
so for example one of the beautiful things that the e4l opened up to me and Dan was the ability to just wear one wave that we fell in love with this offshore reef and we just it would just mound up into this super steep ramp that is kept on going and it was actually two converging ramps and we called it ramps
and this wave was it was sort of like the drop that you'd make surfing that would last a second it would that drop would last 45 to 60 seconds and a buddy who who served at said we should call it aneurysms because it felt like an aneurysm that lasts for 60 seconds but we did so many thousands of those waves
then it's like you get used to the aneurysm and then the aneurysm becomes mellow then it was just a mellow place to be and then that then you translate that over to foiling in unlike the lightest most high performance board possible the drop you might down you make down a steep face before a bottom turn we've just done so many of those
that lasted for so long these sections that would have felt super critical to us before just don't anymore similar you can do cold plunges so if you do if you're cold plunging in 33 degree water your body's gonna go into that same freakout fight-or-flight place and then learning to breathe through that come on the
other side I mean cold plunges are in a non-local way a great way to train at making steep drops surfing or foiling you know it's controlling it or control it may not even be controlling a panic response but becoming familiar with the physiological response to panic right on some level and those people listening
obviously can't see what's going on here but you have a you have a richness a smorgasbord of cold plunge options here and 33 degrees is is not a grand exaggeration because I unplugged one of the cold plunges a few days ago because turning into an entire ice block so for the last few days we've been getting inside and being surrounded by ice and
the sea I think the idea of kind of non-local practice applies also to what what I was mentioning right because I've done I've accompanied doctors on ER rounds for similar reasons right to become more comfortable with an environment that seems out of control or unpredictable and another option within the realm of say psychedelic harm
reduction would be engaging or facilitating in large breath workgroups where you will have people whether it's holotropic or something else respond and really exaggerated outwardly expressive ways in these groups you have to keep them from safe flailing and hurting themselves or hurting someone else how
do you what types of practice have become more important to you if you're looking back at your say competitive career in chess and where your practice of jujitsu what types of practice or thematic practice have become more important have you learned to value more or less does anything come to mind conceptual
practice thematic practice I think that that for example building on what you just said I would say that the tension one feels as a chess player the buildup of tension with both psychologically and technically on what's happening between the chess pieces is very similar to it might be difficult for people of visualizing people sitting on a chess
board and compared to like dropping down big waves but it's very similar to the feeling one has dropping down big waves you feel it's the it you feel the desperate urge to release the tension and similar in cold water right and so the the the path that I've worked with so initially it's pain it's red alert get me out of here then it's becoming at
peace in that pain and it's learning how to enjoy it and so like the great chess players like someone like Magnus Carlsen one thing that's unique that fairly unique about him is he seems to really enjoy tension right and I've trained in my I never got there as a chess player but I have gotten there another thing
just learning to just completely love chaos so the tension isn't isn't grinding on you you're not a tectonic plate moving toward eruption you're you're getting stronger as the tension builds and and that's something that I think is beautiful to Train at something like cold water is just something you can replicate every day to do it the e4
will open that up and drops boiling right so I think to answer your question conceptual learning has been when you learn a technique you're learning one thing when you're learning a principle that embodies a technique you might be learning a thousand things and so designing a learning process around the
meta this is part of the reason why I think my approach into surfing and foiling has looked so strange to somebody's who are lifetime surfers because I'm not approaching it technically the tech I'm approaching I'm working on internalizing certain core concepts principles the techniques fall within the tree beneath the principle
but so meta training I think would be the most important answer to that question you're also coming into foiling with a huge disadvantage / advantage which is you have not spent decades surfing right right so you're looking at things very differently and just to give one example and as background before we
began recording this you let me you encouraged me to read through a slack channel that you have with your team where you're bouncing different ideas off of one another and their stress testing your ideas also ask you to clarify things define things and you mentioned at one point frontside turns not to get too deep in the weeds but
frontside turn different from backside turn and then realizing that you could practice that on an equal by just effectively with correct me if I'm wrong but what I read was kind of going in circles yes spinning in super tight sir and you're doing just hundreds and thousands of repetitions that would be
impossible to replicate except over an extremely law I mean weeks months whole years years on a surfboard and so you you were able to see that where I think perhaps others might not certainly some would but that struck me is a huge advantage that you have that you're seeing things with beginners eyes and you're already technologically enabled
so you have just a greater buffet of options I think it's really important for me to be clear I'm just a beginner in the surf and for worlds right I mean most of the people who are foiling I've been surfing for twenty or thirty years their whole lives because foiling is is super hard it's surfing much faster with
an extra vertical dimension it the interesting thing about it is is I'm learning how to surf and paddle surf through foiling the lines that I can draw foiling are much better than lines that can draw paddle surfing and what's fascinating is I went out surfing I'm right now foiling you know six days a week maybe in surfing paddle surfing one
day a week I went out paddle surfing yesterday because the foil that the swell dissipate a little bit it wasn't great foil conditions where we go and I am I was Mays the breakthroughs I've made surfing just from the for long breakthroughs I've made over the past couple weeks it's really interesting so I'm coming at
this in every ways in every way backwards I approached I'm taking on the art of surfing and paddle surfing I started in my late 30s not as a six year old kid and so that also speaks to some of the things that Dan and I who this is relate to Dan as well things we need to do like we haven't gone sideways forward like
been in a surf stance moving forward at high speed sideways a very simple idea right if you're a skateboarding or you're surfing or snowboarding you're like in a sideways posture you're going forward very fast we haven't done that a lot in our lives so things like the one wheel which Dan and I both did and then
the e Foyle like that just gave us a huge amount of reps and then the amount of waves we've been able to take efiling we've been learning about surfing waves through those reps and so in your right I think it's a disadvantage in a lot of ways that we're coming on it so late but it's also a wonderful advantage because
we're not socialized by any of the assumptions that a lifetime surfer would make similarly in like the Chinese martial arts taking on the Chinese martial arts there's lots of things that Chinese martial artists who are lifetime aficionados will not consider that coming at it as an outsider from the
chess world I could take advantage of similar in the Brazilian jiu-jitsu world we could have conversations about those I think we actually have spoken with over the years but but all of these arts have their blind spots let me just go back just just finish the circle one time because we began speaking about
this exploration I was doing with Maurice roll over the chest in the common root structure right between false constructs so just to close that loop I think that so what I'm exploring now is that like so what was the the essence of that that thing I was too tight about with Maurice I was being a bit a little bit to local and too tight
in the early stages of the learning process of something which in that moment was a chess opening a branch of the knight of Sicilian I am explore I was what about that word just a spell for people Najdorf that night or from mEagle naidu was it was a brilliant chess player and a JD ORF and there's a very Sicilian defense is a chess opening
this was a night or variation of the Sicilian defense it was just sounds of something from The Princess Bride continued okay um yes jazz openings have have funny names sometimes but yeah so I was so the interesting question is is that tightness is is there a shared root structure it relative to that tightness
in the learning process today and it for you for me mm-hmm right and I mean there was a moment where Dan and I were whipping into a big a big wave called called MA we called mobs here where it's a left on Foyle he was on a jet ski I was behind it and he came you know he was whipping into it and there's a big bear rock that bear
that just it gets sucked out and is basically a big dry rock on the wippen and it was interesting because this was the in the first few days of us taking on toast Oh foiling and in that moment like I there was a tightness in me right now we come close to that rock all the time efore ly we I think will be very
comfortable playing right there soon Toph oily but in that moment I was in the early stages of a learning process and it was very similar because in that moment there was an improvisational nature to that moment it was playful it was actually not such a big risk relatives to what we do all the time but there was there was a tightness in me
because I we were learning something new technically in that moment I wanted to work on the deconstruct of component parts of tow foiling and then work on like that kind of thing so I do think that it's interesting for me to explore is there some identity in the idea that I need to deconstruct first similarly
questions like parallel learning lateralization I would say one of my biggest strengths as a learner has been the ability to translate from previous arts into current arts it's interesting to invert that are there ways that might be holding me back is the idea of lateral izing or parallel learning
impeding my learning process in any way so these are these are assumptions that I might have that I might hold tightly I don't know it's very interesting to take our assumptions and examine them flip them upside down rip them apart may I ask you about one potentially backwards approach that I want to know more about yeah
specific to your notes in the slack Channel and that is a quote that also one of your team members asked you about so the internal spirit is the teacher or myself 20 years from now I'm most interested in the last part of that we could talk about the whole thing but what does that mean or myself 20 years
from now yeah that came out of me a few months ago and I was trying to explain to a buddy of mine in the surf world this bizarre way that that I'm approaching this stuff because it looks really strange to people sometimes and and what I was saying was sort of in a in a thematic way it's as if myself 20 years from now as my teacher and and
what I mean it first there's two ways of looking at it one is that I know myself decades into arts I don't know myself decades into chess and into the martial arts and so I have a feeling for what I am like when I'm in the realm of virtuosity within an art and so in a sense that person is like that's a beacon that I'm moving toward right and
I'm nowhere near that realm as a surfer in a foiler I'm but but I've been there and so so so qualitatively in terms of some like abstract platonic realm of quality there's that beacon for me and there's the other part of it which is that no one will know me better than myself twenty years from now and if my
goal is unobstructed self expression or self actualization within an art then the person who is teaching me should be the person who knows me most deeply and that's my person twenty years from now the person twenty years to now is also a helpful visualization in in being the person who would understand what my
false constructs are today and yesterday and a year from now and it's very easy to get stuck in the mindset we I didn't know before but I I know today it reminds me there was this funny moment years ago when I was first studying Tai Chi and I was in William CC Chen's Tai Chi studio this was back in I think I think it was 1988 1998 1999 and there
was this guy had been studying for decades and he was telling a story and he was sort of holding court within his knowledge of wisdom within this domain and he said you know when I studied cha Chi for a year I thought I knew what I was doing and I thought I would really start to understand it but after two years I
realized everything I thought after a year it was wrong it was just wrong but now I understood and then after four years I realized everything I thought after two years was wrong and he went on with this story in this pattern but now I understood then when after eight years the same thing everything I thought that
for is was wrong and now I've been training for 16 years and everything I thought after eight eight years was wrong but now I finally understand I remember thinking at the time man you got it but you didn't get it like the point is you don't know now either right after 16 years you've been going through the repetition what about
after 32 years so I so for that visualization is designed to help me know that I don't know yeah right and and which is so important it's so easy to think that we were in the dark yesterday but we're in the light today but we're [ __ ] in the in the in the dark today too so I have a question
about the self twenty years from now because a follow-up question part of what I enjoy about these these conversations with the mics is that with you know we get to hopefully edge into some stuff that we haven't talked about because we talk all the time and I don't think I've ever told you about the piece
of writing I lost that came to me the most and the piece of writing that I lost was the following I was for some reason maybe feeling under the weather or had an injury something like that I was unable to join some friends skiing and I was very upset about this I love skiing and I was sitting in a lodge loved ski lodges so that's the upside
and there's beautiful fire so on got some hot chocolate cuz that's what I do when I'm feeling Moody and want to stuff my emotions and a ski lodge and I had paper and I wrote this this long story about a guy aka young young Tim wandering into ski lodge sitting down and having this older gentleman 20 years older gonna sit across the
a table near the fire by him and striking up a conversation and I only realized later this that this is very close to a story by I think it's jorge luis borges but ended up being this surreal interaction between my younger self and my older self and asking my older self for advice on all these various topics
over the course of a few hours of sitting there in the ski lodge and I looked at the advice after I had been writing all this for five to ten pages and the advice made sense a lot of the advice seemed like very probably it could be the advice that a 20 year older self would give me with some detachment from the emotions of the current
situation and somehow someway I ended up losing it and that we ate bothers me to this day because I thought it was there was so much there that I felt was really insightful and actionable and it's wild that it came from the same head that had created so much confusion around the same situations so beautiful so you
rewrite it man I so I have actually not rewritten it in exactly that same way but I've asked myself for instance there are a bunch of decisions that I'm trying to make right now what would my I'm 42 right now 47 year old or 50 year old self tell me to do right now as it relates to these decisions there's a lot less turbulence
right around a lot less kind of cloud cover when looking at it with a bit of detachment that way I'm curious if you ever kind of take it that literally or have tried to look at your current decisions or situations through the lens of an older self in that fashion you know just quick aside before I go
there I think it's a really interesting question to ask people what what like how would your 20 year older self guide you today because it gives you a window into somebody's ability to perspective take and to think conceptually in other words like you think about the old David Foster Wallace this is water
story of you know two fish are swimming in the water and two young fish and an older fish comeback comes by and says how's the water boys and they look at one another as they swim by and like what the hell are you talking about water right most people can't see the water because they're just used to the water but it's very different to
actually be able to see our mental models our frame so people are usually looking at the world through their frames they're you know we can also cultivate the ability to look through the frame but also see the frame and and I spend a lot of my life working on examining the frame itself right I think
that you know years ago we did one of these these chats together and I described the drowning experience I had where I made some errors in um in breath-hold works one way to put it right we've already gone there we don't see this a lot but just just give that give the the 30-second version oh you can you the 30-second version is that I
was doing some wim HOF inspired breath-hold work I made the mistake of doing it during multiple lots of reps of under water swims 50 metre swims at a pool in New York City and on my like 8th or 10th rep I blacked out in a bliss state and I spent 4 minutes in the bottom of the pool after blacking out from oxygen deprivation
this old guy pulled me out and and which I'm eternally grateful for and I basically drowned all the doctors said after 45 to 60 seconds I should have been brain dead or dead but it was four minutes on the bottom of the pool and then my training saved me like also you could say put me there but that's a whole other conversation
there was a so that we've discussed that whole experience at length we don't think oh they're in depth but but I think that that that inspired a version of this this thinking and it led to a lot of the life decisions that that I've made and our family has made living life with it today which is very much off the
grid because I emerge from that experience just with I mean I I was someone who filled with a lot of love and an appreciation for doing what one loves but that went into overdrive and I just decided that I would devote my life to living as fully and deeply and beautiful as I possibly can helping loved ones live is fully and deeply and
beautifully as they could and making as large a positive impact in the world as I could and that was just all that mattered and I am and we have rooted our life and changed everything so I think that that that mortality experience and and I am I mean that that was the most powerful catalyst for that kind of
thinking and and I should just note that thankfully I have not had that experience but about a year ago at a retreat group retreat there were a number of writing exercises that we were instructed to do and one of them was to respond to a prompt and the prompt was pretend as though or imagine that you are going to die exactly two years from
today you will die in perfect health just clock will run out two years from today you will die what will you do in the next two years what are the things that you would do and I realize that's somewhat different from having a near-death experience and then reprioritizing but it does apply a certain pressure and a certain sense of
urgency that I think you would get from either situation and that that prompt and what I wrote afterwards gave me a tremendous amount of clarity about certain things that I want to do and another prompt was if you were going to die in two years in perfect health what left undone what would you most regret
not doing so so similar question but slightly different wording that also provided me with a tremendous amount of clarity about certain things that I followed through so it can be simulated in that way absolutely yeah I think that you know I weave over the years discussed this term firewalking that I use for physiologically embodying
something we're trying to learn so for example if you're training in the martial arts and you overextend your arm and you get armboard and you're like elbow gets broken or your shoulder gets ripped up for example in a World Championship you're less likely to overextend your arm next time all right to say the least
but if you watch someone else do it on a video it's hard to learn that lesson but if you like if you learn how to physiologically embody the experience that you're watching someone else go through or that you're thinking about the abstract right then we can save ourselves a huge amount of how does it
how does one do that or how might one do that how have you or how have you coached someone to do that effectively whether it's chess jujitsu investing otherwise well I think intense visualization get it it's really training at visualization which one can do through meditative experience I think biofeedback training is really useful to
help learn how to put yourself in a different physiological States at will because you can actually use biofeedback to observe what state you're in if you just don't sense it so quickly introspectively harnessing triggers for antenna I was with my with my wife and a bunch of friends the other day and um I
haven't watched the Oscars and years but the Oscars was on and Eminem's performance of lose yourself came on and I it's funny lose yourself was the song that I used in the to my training camp for the 2004 World Championships in so for the three months of the last of every day of training I listened to it before every fight of the World
Championship in 2004 in between the semies and the finals and in between the finals in the sudden-death playoff when I've been in the wild this state of my life that song is such a deeply [ __ ] burned in trigger I was Mel I had my my eight-year-old son in my lap we were watching the Oscars my three-year-old was sleeping on my other shoulder and
lose herself came on and my body was ready to fight 15 dudes it was unbelievable what happened to me I had to just leave and I took a walk for 10 minutes like unbelievable how powerful triggers are whether it's all factory triggers with smell or music connecting triggers different physiological things I'm not suggesting
that what one should should have something that I mean that's that's a pretty intense ones like the vaquita is like yeah maturing candidate stuff yeah exactly the guy I mean I was it was kind of amazing to feel how powerful that was so many years later just just right there so I think that that learning how to put your I mean learning
how to put yourself into an attained intense physiological state through visualization for example cold plunging your body will go into an intense physical physiological state you can attach a trigger to that then you can go into that kind of fight-or-flight state if you choose to so for example one of
the things you do cold plunging is you get into say freezing water and then you learn to breathe yourself it takes a while initially but then pretty quickly into a state of calm like your heart rate goes very fast you're hyperventilating a little then you just chill it out and then you're in a calm state you can also choose not to go
there you can choose to get in the water and not breathe to that state of calm and then you can exit in that state of alarm and that can become a state that you could use as a trigger for certain kinds of visualization so there's lots of things that you can do if you're creative about firewalking what are some
of the ways that you build outside of foiling because I know that's a main focus so I have to kind of grab you by the hair to pull you out of foiling but and you do follow a lot what are other ways that you've built feedback loops into your life well feedback loops are are everything I mean you you can it's
funny I was talking whoa one of the funny things about my conversations with Maurice because I really left the chess world behind and it was fascinating just talking to him about how it's evolved so much and one of the questions that I was asking him is how present our world-class chess players today to the networks of
cognitive biases and he said that that what's interesting is that many of the great chess players today actually don't even know what cognitive biases are and one of the reasons that they're able to do that is because chess today you just have such unlimited accurate feedback loops because you've got computers that
are much stronger than humans analyzing the position by your side so any decisions you make you can look over and see if it's right or wrong and the computers are so strong that they're gonna be right and so you can basically have a feedback loop whenever you want and so you just if you have unlimited feedback loops and you're training six
eight hours a day you just learn to feel when your thinking is good and when it's bad so just to clarify it in other words cognitive bias is right this is a we won't go too broad but an example of that would be something like sunk cost fallacy right so players back in the day would have some conceptual understanding
of how to define sunk cost fallacy what that means but today it's more a intuition built upon thousands and tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of near immediate feedback loops right so the way sunk cost fallacy could operate consciously for a chess player is that you're studying a chess position
you've invested twenty minutes into it and you're starting to sense it might you might be barking up the wrong tree but you put so much time into it you want to keep on going right or that could just manifest without any consciousness of the bias in just that your thinking doesn't feel good or you're in the moment you're thinking
starts to feel a little bit less present or less on it then you just go the other way right or like you can have a confirmation bias where you're you you can think okay right now am i or am I not searching for proof of something that I've for a decision I've already reached right or you can just not be
subject to confirmation bias because you've had it burned out of you by so many reps of feedback loops just beating the [ __ ] out of you whenever you get it wrong right so in arts where you have massive amounts of natural accurate feedback loops you don't have to be as conscious about these things on the other inspection of something like
investing it's very very hard to have accurate feedback loops because the decisions you make today if you're a long-term investor the students you make today you might not actually see the result of that decision for many years and you could have had good process and still a bad outcome where you could have
bad process still a good outcome so you have to so it might not be an accurate feedback loop even if you do have the feedback loop and so in realms like that you have to be really creative and I would argue that a lot of what defines the learning curve of someone in a field like investing where accurate feedback
loops are few and far between is how creative you are in creative in in manifesting them for example you can have somatic feedback loops you can use biofeedback to understand when your performance state is at a high-level quality or a lower level of quality what does it correlate to physiologically exactly so when
you're thinking well what does that mean what is the biofeedback saying and then you're going to see a physical signature what's the signature of those good decisions right which we use biofeedback for initially then we learn to learn from about feedback had a sense how to feel it right so a lot of what I you know when I'm training people and like
elite mental performers a lot of what we're doing is being extremely creative in designing accurate feedback loops in places where it's not so so I'm reeling so you asked me about myself oh it's it's I mean you told me not to speak about foiling because but but it's difficult was like that's what I'm going on now
so like I'm training in paddle surfing and foiling and so I mean I'm gonna kind of swat that deflection side I mean because that's what I'm all-in on yeah right and so what I so I mean I have I've learned that feedback works for me sometimes and other times I don't want it so for example I have a buddy who who
does drone footage of us once or twice a week on a cadence relative to the swell but also relative to where we are in the learning process usually I all study video very closely and then I'll spend four or five days training without video feedback at the thing that I'm working on and then I'll then I'll have drone footage again so I will have video
feedback at a pace that feels appropriate to my learning process be there sometimes you want I find that you you want to internalize you want to work on what you're feeling internally without an external I then sometimes you want the external I and I honor that I really trust that similar to in for
example the in let's just say you're training Brazilian jiu-jitsu and you've got a tournament coming up your repertory tightens right you it condenses down to what you're best at but then you have a period of time where after the tournament where may say you're not gonna compete for two months you might have an experimental repertory
you're playing with things that by definition you're not very you're not as good at but that you're expanding your you're investing in loss a little bit you're getting beaten up by some people who you couldn't beat up with your best repertoire but you're working on things so in that moment if you're studying
video in that period you might reject what you're doing because it's not as good as you can be you know so that's an interesting period just work on somatically dialing in something and feeling your way into something I think I just want to underscore that because I think it's really important and that is it's not
always true that more feedback is better absolutely and if I look at a lot of the best teachers in gymnastics in skiing for instance they're very one of the terms or one of the phrases that that that I heard a lot in gymnastics was like the first three wraps don't count right because if someone's trying
something brand new their first few reps you're gonna suck they're gonna be terrible right but they're going if they have a bit of awareness and other techniques or other practices they're going to be getting a feel for it over those first few repetitions and if you're just hitting them with 20 different sets of instructions every rep
it's gonna be counterproductive right and I think that there's feedback that you're internally generating based on how you feel and how you observe you look on video and then this feedback that a coach or trainer might be giving you for a coach or trainer to give you a feedback they have to like for you to let that feedback in in my view they
have to know you very deeply so there's a lot of trainers for example who can't get outside of their own conceptual scheme so they tell you what you should do based on what they would do or what would work for them or they would want to do if they were in your shoes in that moment but that's very different for
what you need to do in your learning process or you're ready to stretch for in your learning process when I'm working with people on a training capacity you know I have ways of observing my core partners in training like professionally you know through their journals through their brainstorms through their biometrics through lots of
different things and and I will eyes 99.9% observation and I will might see something that I would like to give feedback on or that I think I might make you know give some feedback I'm an all observe it sometimes for weeks or months or even years until the moment is right or I will have a hypothesis that I'll
test and then I'll think about what would be the way to explore this it would be most helpful and not lock somebody else up right so so much of what most coaches that I observe live with is their own ego pattern the ego pattern in they're stuck in their conceptual schemes but also they want to have the egoic satisfaction of telling
you you're doing something wrong or or or making you better but the great coaches will actually coach without someone even being aware that they've been coached question for you on stress testing your own thinking so I read the slack channel which is comprised of interactions mostly your sharing of
ideas and thoughts and then the asking for clarification by your teammates and who are employees how else do you stress test your thinking or positions on things do you have a proactive way of doing that does it just happen naturally in your interaction with various friends because you have you have physically
somewhat isolated yourself right how do you how do you think about stress testing the integrity of your thinking and positions yeah great question so I mean Isaac aliy isolated myself as you point out but also somewhat technologically isolate I mean I'm not on Instagram or Facebook or Twitter or any of them stay off going I said stay
off yeah that's the game plan but I have I have a really wonderful network of close friends and thought partners yourself included who I I am in dialog with and who I really trusts and I don't have a lot of dialogue with people who I don't think highly of and so I mean for example around what I'm working on actively in my training process Dan
Caulfield who I'm you know we're out there on the water for five hours a day together he knows me you know as intimately I mean our friendship was born in fighting one another for thousands of hours literally that's a hell of a way to begin a friendship as sparring partners and then we still spar quite a bit out
there on the water and and and so like I mean we're always stress testing things together Emily Kwok who is just an awesome woman who's been my right-hand human for about a decade she's a Brazilian jiu-jitsu blackbelt women's world champion two times over she's my chief of staff and runs our whole operation
she's the boss of our whole thing and she's I mean Emily one thing that Emily is really brilliant at is is I mean we have a shared consciousness she understands me very deeply and she is very good at pointing out to me when I'm speaking in a shorthand that other people aren't understanding so she pushes me to deconstruct quite a bit for
our dialogue within the team and you know more broadly is there a risk that if you are of the hive mind together that you have the same blind spots and therefore our risk of missing flaws and thinking worse yeah yeah I mean but I all have dialogue but I have dialogue with I mean I have I have I'm not sure
how many different channels of dialogue open with with um you know I have clients who I work with who are I think some of the best thinkers in the world when I'm talking about ideas with but I think just a dig in to dig into your point I think that absolutely yes and so you need to have people in your ecosystem who push against you and I in
our surf and foil ecosystem I mean it's dan and I have this kind of a abstract bizarre way of going about things and almost everybody else who were in dialog with we have a group of six of us who are doing this again I mean three of them think we're just completely crazy loop the Jackson Pollock's of the
foiling we're pushing back on everything we're doing relentlessly which is awesome and I'm sure some things they're absolutely right about III think that we need to build pushback against us resistance is a huge part of everything we do now the one thing that makes it a lot easier in a competitive discipline like jujitsu for example or chess is
that if you get something wrong you get your ass kicked yeah right these arts where it's not so iam the wave and kick your ass but but in terms of other thing it's much more abstract so there's a lot more room for people to [ __ ] themselves but to give a to give a current example for myself and some of the conversations we
had we don't and are having we don't have to get into the super specifics of positions and stuff but as it relates to investing right I would say something to you as I did yesterday like here's a statement I want to give you a statement and I want you to try to tear it apart right and I find that extremely helpful
right even if you happen to agree with it right just to say I want you to try to I'm gonna share my current approach or what I'm thinking and I want you to really try to tear it apart because as someone with very powerful CPU within your head I find that to be really valuable for me to proactively solicit that kind of feedback
I think cultivating a closed ecosystem of people who you can trust to be honest with you in their push back is really important because a lot of people a lot of people are surrounded by yes men and yes women who will not do that do you find and I mean this is such a maybe cliched example but it's a good example
nonetheless I mean if you look at the partnership between Buffett and Munger right the the a lot of the discussion I've seen about their partnership is how complimentary and different their thought processes are in some respects in the investing world do you find as an example that people who might self-identify as value investors tend to
just hang out with other value investors or are there people who are are some of the better performers you meet do they deliberately expose themselves to people who have a different playbook to push at the edges of their assumptions well first of all it's important to note that I don't spend time with like most with a
lot of investors like I spend time with a very small group of investors who I think are awesome people and who I think approach things in a very unusual way so I can talk about how these people who I know very deeply operate around this question but I don't but I think it's pretty unusual I mean in my observation
the people who are really operating in a world-class level who I'm aware of in the investment world are engaging surprisingly little with other investors hmm they're separating themselves so they're not susceptible to groupthink I mean often their interactions with other investors will be mostly as contra
indicators as opposed to indicators and just to push back a little bit on I'm in order to speak to the other side of what you just said I agree wholeheartedly that it's really important to stress that's what we're doing I think that is also something a little bit crazy and messianic about certain
people who become really really great at things and like I think about marcelo garcia for example who we've talked about a lot over the years who's my partner in the school we own together in New York the marcelo garcia jiu-jitsu Academy he's nine time BJJ world champion Abu Dhabi world champ I would argue maybe I mean pound for pound
probably the greatest grappler to ever live if he which is which is an opinion a lot of people hold yeah for sure if you just like YouTube or whatever look at marcelo garcia i mean you'll be check out the Marcelo team yeah he does a lot of amazing amazing [ __ ] and what's interesting is if you when Marcelo was
competing if you went with him to competition and you felt him in training camps you know I've been in a lot of training camps with him and we've sparred a lot in training camps and I felt him in that in that physiological state which is like you're fighting an ape it's a really simple intelligent just wild I mean his lats are like hands in the
precision of how they close around your neck it's pretty amazing but there's a confidence that he goes into things and it's the kind of thing where you can walk into a room where no one believes in you but yourself but your self belief is so profound that you're unstoppable and the way I relate
to that if you try to deconstruct it is that like that kind of sense of inevitability of success comes from self-expression knowing that you're playing your game you're playing your game better than anyone else in the world could and you build everything around the uniqueness of who you are and like but you there are moments I
remember when Marcelo was a zone when Marcelo was in a man jealous he was fighting on the sky Collison's is a just brilliant brilliant fighter in his own right and Carlos sounds went for a wristlock and Marcelo pulled out and then Marcelo put his hand right back into a wrist lock look hollow sounds right in the eye and let him try and
just stare them in the Iowa cross and try to close a room and he just so he didn't avoid the technique he just tried to break this man by putting himself into the thing and saying you will not like you can't break me and you can break someone by being unbreakable and there's something about that kind of
self belief that is really powerful and there's something about approaching things in really unorthodox ways that you don't really know if it's going to work until it plays out I mean I'll give you like a very basic much more simple two example of that the idea that Dan and me training in the e-file stuff was
going to translate over to the foil stuff was something I had tremendous confidence in but I mean pretty much everyone who I spoke to in the surf and foil world thought we were dead wrong and thought we were just barking up the wrong tree and if you look at the footage side by side of those two different tools I could see why someone
would conclude that for sure because evil is way heavier you're on like a 70 pound instrument and you're you know it's got a different dynamics but you're foiling and you're falling fast and you're getting tons of reps and the Evora I would argue is much harder to learn than a lighter foil and that it's
more high consequence if you could hit by it's bad you're dealing with a machine you can die lots of things but but the thing is that it's but it's an amazing creation and you get so many more reps so learning on the thing you just get I'm not sure if it would be early on 100 X 500 X to the reps and so if it might be harder to learn on some
level it's actually much easier to learn because you can dial it in but the belief that it will translate over comes from sort of a deeply intuitive thing so if I stress tested that with by talking to other people in the foil world I would have rejected it but I and and what's interesting is that when when we
translated it over to being whipped in on the lightest most high performance board possible on foil it all translated right over now I want to push back on one thing do it and that and that is if you had stress tested it you would have rejected it I'm going to I'm gonna offer that it's entirely possible for you get to get a lot of contra indicating
feedback and still hold your position oh for sure you're right and and I did yeah I was getting a lot of that yeah so I think you're right you just have to handle the stress testing correctly now the rest is I've I've read you put it in your private journal those were reps hidden in plain sight right where there
are reps hidden in plain sight like the front side turns just by going in circles as opposed to being on a wave at all I just think about that actually just like that front side turn think it's such a funny idea like a front side turn let's just say you're riding away if you drop down the face of a wave and then you do
turn so I mean you like turning on the bottom of a wave like you go into the flats in front of waving your bottom turning back up to back up into the wave like that we like a frontside turn you're turning on the side you're facing on the board right meaning like your belly button is facing away from the wave when you turn just for right now
your belly button is facing toward the way oh it is that's a frontside that's a frontside turn yeah that's confused so so like I realized that my my cut backs my backside turns on going on oh right on a frontside wave I know it's a little anyway my my frontside turns were lacking so what was a I was able to do
on oil it's so ridiculous I put on a big front wing and a very very small tail wing which allows you to small tailing allows you to maximize turn turn ability and I just started to spin in circles under power and I was using a folding prop so if a wave came I could enter the way of the proper folding into the wave
so in between sets I was spinning in circles so I would be spinning in these tight circles for two minutes at a time just countless I mean if you were to add up the amount of turn time that I got in that one session - how many front side turns you'd have to make I mean that I don't know thousands and thousands and
thousands of waves of frontside turns right then whenever a wave would come I would just drop into it and work on that same bottom account and then I go back to spinning in circles I looked like a total madman if anyone would have been watching me they would it was like the ultimate like like what the hell is this
you know doing Looney Tunes but I made such huge growth in that moment can you think of other places in other arts whether it's chess BJJ push hands investing anywhere where you might find reps hidden in plain sight or a way to do that type of deliberate practice that is uncommon well I think I think yes
everywhere so we could get into a technical discussion of reps hidden in plain sight like the frontside turn which is technical right which is I think fairly obvious one I think that where the really potent low-hanging fruit you know hanging in plain sight like lie are in the the thematic right or in like breaking down the learning
process into the core principles or themes we want to work on in doing reps of those those are just invisible to people in plain sight right so you mean it as an example maybe I'm pulling out the wrong example but the learning the macro from the micro say with the practicing of the endgame in chess with just a
handful of pieces on the board would that be an example where's that knob yeah so that that would be an example of that's a great example of Reps hidden in plain sight where you're you're basically setting King and pawn against King to get a feel for the essence of the King and the essence of the pond then you're setting rook and bondings
and learning about the essence of the rook so you're getting tons of reps of the rook of the pond then you set a chess tactics with rook and pawn tactics and you're getting tons of reps of those things so that's an example of of ways that you can get reps of individual pieces right so that's that's a great
example the way I would say of reps hidden in plain sight when I'm thinking about conceptual or thematic reps hidden in plain sight it's more around I mean for example one when we took on surfing and foiling one of the things that that we did that was strange was that you know I was much more comfortable in big
waves than small waves initially because I was comfortable with breath holds and I was comfortable with intensity and small waves in some ways a much more technical and I just simply like I hadn't and and so I made the decision early on to to surf and foil big wave bigger waves before I really took on smaller waves it might be a strange idea
but but the kind of rep that I had to get get was glide getting used to moving fast forward sideways right so for example the one wheel the e foil these were getting tons of reps in just the in in the idea of glide learn to feel what glide was like right and just as an example that might be parallel and I
please tell me if I'm not getting this right but in terms of deconstructing and taking one theme like that mmm so I am visiting you with my girlfriend and she's new to water in the in the capacity of surfing paddling etc and rather than take a bunch of surf lessons which was the kind of knee-jerk idea the both of us hands like oh yeah
that's what you do take some surf lessons and your recommendation was to consider taking out a boogie board and just getting used to the sort of force and dynamics of the wave movement yeah when I watch how people approach surf teaching I think for the most part it's crazy that people for the most surfers mostly teach people to surf bite is
going out and surfing like let's go out and surf you know and they get their ass kicked because you have to learn to read the water how to pop up on the board how to where to enter the where to enter a wave then how to turn where to stand on the board how to shift your weight on all this stuff I mean in my opinion like
okay what we did with with your girlfriend as we went out and pushed her into a bunch of waves boogie board and just learn to feel what glide was like on the water also not traumatize her and then learn to feel what different parts of the wave the energy and watch the wave in the last wave she got in her
first day was actually in the pocket of a wave I pushed her in right where it was breaking right Richard surfing and she was so stoked and she had a great positive first experience since she felt glide and it was awesome as opposed to like just getting super frustrated in the beginning and I think the deconstructing it is really important
you know an interesting example of thematic deconstruction relative to reps hidden in plain sight would be for example this idea around being at peace and chaos or being learning to be okay internally or even to thrive internally when your body is in alarm alright cuz if you don't train at that then when your body goes into alarm you're just
alarmed but if you do train at that for example you can train at it like we discussed through cold plunging or different things that it controlled ways of putting your body into that state and breathing through it then you've trained at that meta theme right of being at peace in physiological alarm and then
working through it and then when you're in a in a for example a surf moment where you're in a total [ __ ] show then you've trained at that most important part of it how to breathe through it right you've learned how to literally technically breathe through the alarm right as opposed to trying to do that when you're also trying to read the
water and figure out if your body and you're in the middle of a hold down and you know you you've got one breath you could take between the next set and everything's freaked out you don't know what the hell's going on right so I think that that that's an example of how to deconstruct things down to component
parts and work on them and I think it's actually it simplifies the learning process in a lot of ways because then when you put it all together you've learned the critical component parts the thematic component parts you know like reading the water I mean that's something that I think should be done independently just going
out to learn how to surf mm-hm but very few to some do but very few surf teachers actually work people with people on reading the water when they're not surfing yeah and the the best teachers I've run into on water for instance good friend of mine Kelly Starrett incredible performance coach physical therapists all-around hilarious
guy also former world class kayaker and we spent time on Grand Canyon together with his family and that's exactly what he did before attempting anything technical before learning any new skills he's like I just want you to move with me and I want you to watch the water and he would explain it once somebody gets a
next set of Rapids and he go okay what do you see where's the tongue where would you go right it's hypothetical before just throwing me in with 20 new skills to try to juggle simultaneously but that takes empathy as a coach yeah he's a he's a is it he's an exceptional exceptional coach yeah he's very good at
the Buddhist technique of expedient means or liberabit of technique depending on how its translated of teaching of being aware of what the student is ready to stretch for and going there that's taking yourself outside of your own conceptual scheme as a teacher and understanding what the student needs right I mean that's I
think that's at the various like principle 101 as a teacher very few people really internalize it yeah Kelly and you are both very good also at ensuring that the first few experiences are at the very least non-threatening right so that they may not be orgiastic celebrations of joy but at the very least they're not gonna be
traumatizing right he's very good at that whether it's Olympic weightlifting or kayaking on what can be very very scary Rapids at different points in assuring that the the first few experiences as you're just getting a toehold on the basic sensations of a new skill are non traumatizing I've learned that I think if some people in my past
might not say that was a core strength we can let that one go for now well we're uh we're coming up on a very exciting afternoon here so I know we we don't have too much too much time left but I'd love to ask you maybe in closing about Robert Keegan am I getting the pronunciation of that name correct yeah
who is Robert key and why is he interesting to you so our friend Graham Duncan first turned me on to the Keegan many years ago and I've read his work but I've been in the last couple years just becoming increasingly impressed with certain core points that he's zoned in on it he's just a brilliant adult developmental psychologist and a lot of
his work is around that the transitions in the human mind from an opportunistic to a socialized to herself authoring to a self transformative kind of mindset and and if we just owned in mostly around the transition between the socialized mind in the South authored mind which is yeah hold that thought may
I ask does Graham find this is he focused on this mostly in the context of talent acquisition or finding good talent is this is this sort of part of his filter and doing that yes mm-hmm I think that that was how he initially was drawn into it and I think now it's just you know part of his pistol lens yeah edge to lens it's one
of many very interesting lenses I don't tend to have like think that one lenses has got at all but I do well the thing that I'm intrigued with with Keegan's work which I have a huge amount of respect for is the exploration of the limitations of the socialized month sometimes weekend is will somebody to be
able to perspective take to release their perspective someone else's perspective or the ability to hold meant multiple mental models that are competing with one another and be at peace with that tension between them right we can just want people to do that but there are certain developmental hurdles to that
and I think that that's an area that Keegan has really explored brilliantly and I do encourage people to read Keegan's work how do you spell his last name ke gan i I think it's important to be empathically present to the developmental obstacles that we all might have around what we can and cannot do conceptually I mean it strikes me
that we're all blind it's just a matter of a accepting that we're blind and trying to figure out how we might be blind or what we might be blind to perhaps is a better way to put it Keegan yeah and I agree and for those interested Graham Graham and I had a really fun conversation on the podcast as well so I will create a short link to
that Graham's a brilliant dude dear friend I love them and and one of I mean he's the best mind I've ever run into in the world around the hunt for talent and the deconstruction of like potential world-class talent out there in the early stages best hair in the business also absolutely severe fall envy of
Graham so for those people interesting I'll create a short link to that interview that conversation at tim dot vlog ford / Graham gr aham Joshua anything else you would like to to mention discuss disabuse me of before we wrap up nope woodpecker is right now trying to put a hole in my office I think that's a great
place to close ok so Josh working people find you I feel like your answer is the same as Laird Hamilton in the Pacific Ocean yes well until next time thanks for hanging in thanks better and recording something for posterity to be continued hey man this was fun and everybody listening for show notes for links to everything Robert Keegan etc that we've
discussed there's also incredible video that I'll try down of Maurice Ashley with me playing chess hustlers which is just fantastic entertainment in New York City so I will link to that in the show notes just go to teamed up log forward slash podcast and until next time thank you listen hey guys this is Tim again just a few more
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