EVERY SPOKEN WORD
155 min read · 30,560 words- 0:00 – 3:21
Josh Waitzkin
- AHAndrew Huberman
Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Josh Waitzkin. Josh Waitzkin is a former child prodigy who began playing the game of chess at six years old, and by the time he was 16 years old, had become a national champion many times over, as well as an international champion. In fact, he achieved the level of international master, which is one of the highest levels of achievement in the game of chess for anyone of any age. His early life achievements were the topic and focus of the book and movie, Searching for Bobby Fischer. He then quit playing the game of chess and moved on to martial arts, the study of philosophy at Columbia University in New York, and eventually foiling, which is essentially surfing over the water. Josh is not only a high performer, he has now become perhaps the most sought-after professional coach in the domains of finance, in the domains of creative endeavors, professional sports, and military. Today's episode is one of my favorite Huberman Lab podcast episodes ever. I know as a podcast host you're not supposed to say that, but it's absolutely true, because not only is Josh Waitzkin so highly accomplished, but he is an exceptional teacher of the learning process. He took what he learned in chess and about learning chess and applied that to martial arts, to foiling, et cetera. And from participating in all those endeavors, he was able to distill out the essential elements of learning and how to tailor one's learning process to one's own unique personality and style, flaws and tendency to make mistakes, and how to leverage all of that in order to be able to learn better. In fact, throughout today's episode, I promise that you will constantly be reflecting on where you experience things like tension and fear, both in your personal life, your professional life, your educational life. Whatever it is that you're trying to learn and pursue in life, today's conversation, thanks to Josh, will allow you to look at that, understand it better, and know where to apply work, when to relax, when to push forward, and in effect, how to become a better learner, both of yourself and whatever it is that you happen to be pursuing in life. We have a saying in science, which is that sometimes you encounter somebody who is truly N-of-one, meaning a sample size of one, in a category all by themselves. Josh Waitzkin is truly an N-of-one. I know of no other person like him or even close to him in terms of his ability to live a unique life path and to take what he learns and to put it out into the world so that others may benefit. He lives with a tremendous amount of intentionality for the people he loves, for the things he loves, and with the intention of helping others learn how to learn better. I must say, it was a true honor to sit down with Josh. I've been a huge fan of his work for a very long time. You'll also learn that he's a really nice person. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero-cost-to-consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, this podcast episode does include sponsors. And now for my discussion with Josh Waitzkin.
- 3:21 – 10:50
Chess, Competition & Performance
- AHAndrew Huberman
Josh Waitzkin, welcome.
- JWJosh Waitzkin
Thank you, man. Great to be here.
- AHAndrew Huberman
I feel like I've known you a long time because I saw The Search for Bobby Fischer, and I learned about the real human that was about you, and I read The Art of Learning. And I must say, I'm a fan and somewhat obsessed with the uniqueness of your arc and the choices you've made and your understanding of learning as a process and its universal properties, its specific properties in different contexts. So, I'm excited to dive in. I think for people that perhaps are not familiar with you, maybe you could just give us a broad overview of your backstory. Like, the things that you've really focused on in kind of chunks, if you will, um, just for a couple of minutes so that people can get familiar with the incredible things you've done, and I think that reflects the uniqueness of your choice-making process, which then we'll get into.
- JWJosh Waitzkin
Yeah, sure. Well, thank you, man. It's, it's an honor. I appreciate what you said. Um, yeah, so I started playing chess... I grew up in New York City, Downtown Manhattan. I started playing chess when I was six years old, and I, I discovered chess walking through Washington Square Park with my mom, and I remember watching a day or two, and then at one point I broke away from her. I was going to play on monkey bars, and I ran over and I asked an old man if I could play, and he said yes, and my mom was surprised, and we started playing. I played my first game of chess, and it... I remember the very distinct feeling of... It was as if I was dis- discovering or rediscovering a lost memory. It, it wasn't like I was learning something new. It was like I was wiping away the, the dust or the cobwebs between something... Between me and something I had known very deeply at one point. Very strange feeling for a six-year-old boy, and I just fell in love with the game. I got really intensely into it. My first teachers were the hustlers in Washington Square, so it was just, like, a raucous crowd of guys who took me under their wing, started teaching me the tactical street side of the game, and, um, I was just unhindered as a learner, which is interesting from my perspective now as a dad, 'cause I... My, my little boy Charlie is, is taking on surfing with that same kind of freedom, just that liberated, uncomplicated, out of his own way kind of vibe. Yeah, and then by the time I was seven, I started competing, and then I was the top-rated player for my age in the country from my... For most of the years from age seven to 23, my whole chess career. So, it was a very strange upbringing in some ways, which has led to some quirky elements in my psychology, which was that I was living in, in a pressure cooker of competition from age six on, and my whole childhood was spent... Was spent as the target.And so, like, if you're, if you're competing in national championships, and, you know, I would compete in, in youth national and world championships. Then otherwise, I'd be com- competing against adults everything else. But then, you're the target, so any mistake you make... And kids make mistakes all the time, we all do. My rivals and their coaches, who are strong masters and international masters and grandmasters would be able to study, and adult strong players can see very easily the weaknesses in a child, and so they would be prepared for them. So, if I didn't take on a weakness, it would be exploited and I would experience pain. And so, from a very young age, not taking on my weaknesses became outside of m- was outside of my conceptual scheme, which is a really interesting thing to grow up with. And it, it's in many ways, like, laid the foundation for, um, a lot of what I've done since. And there are lots of things about that upbringing which could be unhealthy.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Mm-hmm.
- JWJosh Waitzkin
I think-
- AHAndrew Huberman
Being in the public eye.
- JWJosh Waitzkin
Yeah, so then-
- AHAndrew Huberman
Must have been very bizarre. Luckily, it was before social media.
- JWJosh Waitzkin
Yeah. Super, yeah.
- AHAndrew Huberman
I'm sorry.
- JWJosh Waitzkin
And I have never been on social media in any way, which has been a choice. So yeah, so when I was 11, the, the book Searching for Robbie Fischer came out, and then when I was 15, the movie came out. And at that point, I was, you know, completely in love with chess, it was my first love. I was an unobstructed learner. I was... loved competition. A lot of my opponents were trying to control the game, memorize openings, figure out how to win by force. But I loved the battle. My style was to create chaos, like, like in Washington Square Park, um, find hidden harmonies in chaos, and I loved that. So, as the game went on and they moved away from their opening preparation and controlling things, we moved into my power zone, which was the fight. I loved the fight. And then, a lo- my chess life, in many ways, was, was free-flowing, and then the movie came out when I was 15, and then you can imagine what that was like as, as a, you know, a young teenager, all the attention, the media, cameras everywhere, groupies, all the temptations, and I didn't ask for it. And, and it was a really... it was an alienating period for me relative to chess. And around the same time, I started training with a Russian chess trainer who started urging me to move away from my self-expression as a chess player, and to study the, the players who were the opposite of me. I was a attacking player, aggressive. I played kind of in the style, not at the level, but in the style of, like, Bobby Fischer or Garry Kasparov or Mikhail Tal, world champions who were, like, hot-blooded. And I was being urged to study the more cold-blooded prophylactic side of chess, Petrosian, Karpov, more conservative defensive players. And so I was being told instead of saying, like, "What, what does Josh feel here? What would Karpov play here? Who's the opposite of me?" And so the combination of that public eye and then the movement away from my self-expression led to a period of obstructedness and self-consciousness. And, well, an interesting theme we could talk about at one point is that passage from a pre-conscious to a post-conscious competitor. In many ways, I went from, like, that freedom of pre-conscious com- competition into the tunnel of existential crisis, and, um, and I grappled with it for a lo- for a lot of years. And when I was 18, e- when I graduated high school, I... And, and during that grappling, I was still the top-rated player in the country. I was winning national championships every year, so, like, from the outside, it looked good, but from the inside, I was in turmoil. I was fighting with myself. I had all these demons. And then I left the US. I spent a number of years after high school studying East Asian philosophy, meditating, reflecting, um, and then my study of chess in those years, and I was deeply in love with chess still, it became much more of, of an introspective process. It became... I was competing as intensely as ever, but chess became connected to life, and then when I was 19 years old, I started training at the Human Performance Institute. At the time, it was called LGE, um, Loehr, Groppel, and Etcheber- and Etcheberry. It was a, um, it was a performance training, cross-disciplinary performance training center that Jim Loehr opened up, and now it... then it became the HPI later on, and it w- I'll never forget the moment that I was w- I was working with these performance psychologists, and I was, and I was at the gym, and I was working with nutritionists, and I was on the... I was doing this intense workout, and I look next to me, and there was Jim Harbaugh, who was the head coach at the time of the... uh, who was the, um, quarterback at the time of, of the Colts NFL team. And we got into this amazing dialogue about performance, and it was a real eye-opening moment for me 'cause I realized that we spoke the same language. It's like, "Holy shit, this guy's a, he, he, he's an NFL quarterback and I'm this crazy chess player, but we're doing the same thing." And it was this crystallization moment where I realized that all of these arts are fundamentally connected at the highest levels, and what we're doing is much more similar. Like, if you're at the... Like, I, I observe that people who are at the pinnacles of different arts are often doing things that are much more similar than people who are in the same art from them, but at lower levels. There's something in that qualitative experience, and then the, then I began studying the principles that connected these things, and then,
- 10:50 – 14:41
Martial Arts, Tai Chi, Jiu-Jitsu, Foiling, Training Others
- JWJosh Waitzkin
then I had this interesting experience. I'm, I'm gonna... I'm kind of compressing a life into a minute or two, but I, um... In my early 20s, when I mo- I, I ultimately moved away from chess, and I'm happy to talk about why and that journey, and then I, I moved into the martial arts. The, my study of East Asian philosophy moved me into the study of Daoism and Tai chi and then into the, into, into, um, Tai chi push hands, and I had this really interesting experience where... At that point I'd been... the introspective process of studying chess had become much more about studying life. And so I was des- I was, I was in my exploration of interconnectedness, but I was, I was not playing chess anymore, and I was all in on the martial arts, but I was giving a simultaneous chess exhibition, which I did every year for many years for Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy research, and I was playing 50 chess games at once, and I was walking around this, this big square playing against 50, you know, young up-and-coming strong players at the same time, and I realized at one point, like, I wasn't playing chess. I was moving chess pieces, but I was thinking in Tai chi language. I was f- you know, feeling flow, filling space left behind, riding energetic waves of the game, and it was like I was winning all these chess games, but I hadn't played chess in a long time and I wasn't playing chess.And, and, and it became, like... And then my study of Tai Chi became extremely accelerated. Then I started winning, competing, and then I won in the fighting application, and I started winning national championships. And then, and then I began to think about, like, like... Or become more and more deeply involved in the study and the exploration of thematic interconnectedness, which has really become a life's work. Um, and then my martial arts life ended up ending, you know, end- taking me all over the world, and I won some world championships. Then I moved into Brazilian jiu-jitsu and, um, com- trained in that art for many years. And, um, was training for the world championship for Brazilian jiu-jitsu, it was after winning, um, worlds in the s- in the Tai Chi Chuan, and I broke my back in a, in a training camp. I own a school with Marcelo Garcia, who is a dear friend, who's nine-time world champion, perhaps the greatest grappler pound-for-pound to ever live. And I was training at a really high level, and I, um... And I was thinking about this, like, I was getting ready to run, begin my surge toward black belt world championships in jiu-jitsu, and I ruptured my L4-L5 disc. And, um, and it was the first time I'd been moved away from an art not on my own terms. And it was a, um, it was a, you know, brutal injury. Then I ended up, as we do when we're madmen, you know, coming back and training for a year and a half on the, with the broken, the busted-up back, and then the doctors told me I had to, I had to let this one go, um, or I'd be crippled for life. And around that period is where I started to go all-in on the art of training others, and I said, "Okay, if I can't be all-in training as a competitor, as an athlete myself..." I, I'd been train- I'd been training elite competitors in mental and physical performance for some time then, but I wanted to take on the challenge of loving training others with the same intensity that I loved training myself. And I, I, I went all-in on, on that art, and I'm still all-in on that art, but I never actually got to the place where I love not being in the arena myself as much as being in the arena myself. And, and then in this chapter of my life now, I, I, I fall in love with the ocean arts, initially surfing, and now foiling. And for the last, um, eight years, I've been living in the jungles of Costa Rica with my family, um, and I train three to five hours a day, uh, in foiling. And so I've, I'm in my, my, you know, really intense training lifestyle myself, and, and I train elite mental and physical competitors around the world in, um, in, in finance, in science, technology, and in sports. I've been doing some amazing work with the Boston Celtics for the last few years. Um, and so that's a nutsh- the journey in a nutshell. Happy to dig into any of it.
- 14:41 – 17:43
Sponsors: Wealthfront & Our Place
- JWJosh Waitzkin
- AHAndrew Huberman
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- 17:43 – 26:39
Theory of Mind, Chess, Strategy & Mindset
- AHAndrew Huberman
Yeah, thank you. We'll definitely revisit, um, certain time points and themes there. I can imagine as a young boy playing chess, y- you have your own strategies, you're, um, developing an understanding of what works for you, but of course, you, as a young kid, are also getting into the mind of the other player. You actually described that your, your coach or coaches were encouraging you to get into a different mindset, one that was not your default or trained-up mindset, less focused on chaos and aggression, um, uh, and more in this, uh...... this other mode of playing by thinking about these other types of chess players and ways to play chess. So, I can imagine that, you know, most kids are not weaned... Their brain isn't developing around a game, right? It seems that your brain was built, the developmental neuroplasticity that's so robust in early childhood was built around this game that we call chess. And it seems to me that you were encouraged to develop a theory of mind that wasn't just your own, which is itself, I think is really unique, right? I mean most 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 12-year-olds might be told, "Hey, listen. You know, the reason they were mean to you at school is like, they just hate themselves," or, "You know, they just didn't think about whether or not to pick you, you know, first or last for the game," or whatever it is, right, you know, that you get told to do that. But for you, it became a... It seems an intense practice of trying to learn to get into the mind of another while holding onto your own sense of what's you versus them. And so as a developmental neurobiologist, I understand this is like perhaps one of the most important events in our... The development of our brain. Seems that your brain was built up around that dynamic. And so now, you coach peak performers and so much of coaching and teaching or being a parent is to get into the mind of another. The difference is when you're a parent, you can think back to being a child and at least get some general sense of what that's like. Stepping back from what I just said, and I realize that there's a lot of words there, but do you think that what you're doing when you approach a practice like Tai Chi or Brazilian jiu-jitsu or science or math or music from the perspective of a performer or a teacher is that you're getting into the mind of someone else? You're getting it... You're trying to... Or you're trying to stay in your own mindset? I'm sorry I'm not being more succinct with this, but I think that-
- JWJosh Waitzkin
No, you have... It's a great question.
- AHAndrew Huberman
... you know, as humans, we do this. Like, I'm sure our dogs look up at us and say, "Oh, like they... They're happy with me or they're sad with me or..." But they're... You know, the algorithms they're running are more simplistic, and we, as the most sophisticated old world primates, do this so spectacularly well. And it seems that much of your career and your life has been built around these kinds of dynamics. So put simply, what is your mindset when you approach a practice that's just you in the practice versus your mindset when you approach a practice when it's you and another, a competitor, versus when you're trying to teach something, you and a bunch of different minds, but there's a common goal? Okay, so there's really three big questions wrapped in there. And now-
- JWJosh Waitzkin
There's sort of like 15 really big questions wrapped in there. (laughs)
- AHAndrew Huberman
Fifteen really big questions. And my audience gets upset at the length of these questions, but I think for me, it's important to just kind of set this out there as a buffet from which you can select anything or discard anything that you like.
- JWJosh Waitzkin
There are some... Many delectable things to select there. Yeah, so, I mean, first of all, one-on-one competition is so interesting in mental and physical arenas. So if we think about Brazilian jiu-jitsu or chess as two of them. Let's zone in on chess because that's when I was a kid. You're thinking about what your plan is, and you're also thinking about what your opponent's plan is. And you have to... Every move your opponent makes, you have to think, "Why did he do that? What's his plan? What is his tactical and what is his strategic plan, short term and long term?"
- AHAndrew Huberman
So you're trying to unpack his strategy.
- JWJosh Waitzkin
Always.
- AHAndrew Huberman
And you're assuming that he has or she has a strategy.
- JWJosh Waitzkin
Well, if they don't have a strategy, then they're not going to be a good chess player. And so then very quickly, if you're evolving in that art, you're only playing against people who are at your level or better if you're growing. If you're always playing down, then you're not improving. And there's a beautiful filtration process in like the people who accelerate in their growth curve in the chess world are ones who are challenging themselves all the time, playing up, pushing their limits. And so like I spent my life against, you know, playing as strong players. Um, and I always played a little up. Except for when I was in youth competition, I always played up, which was important for me. And so people had a plan, and they had... And they were very deceptive about their plans, and they had layers to the plans. There's like... There's the tactics they're trying to set up. There's their long-term strategy, but then there's what they want me to think their strategy is, which it isn't. And in fact, their strategy is to be mis... To be... Have misdirection around what their strategy and their tactics are, and there are layers to it, and it can go many, many layers deep. Same thing in the martial arts, right? So obviously, you need to have a theory of mind to play that game, at least the way I play chess, at a high level, because you're con-... And there's this very interesting shared consciousness between players. Like you and I are sitting a little further apart than we would sit if we were playing chess. So if we were like half the distance we are from one another, and we're just sitting for six hours with like a three-foot chessboard at three feet between us, studying this thing, our minds become connected.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Mm-hmm.
- JWJosh Waitzkin
We often will share the same illusion. We'll... You might see something, and then I see it when you see it. If we have the same... Um, we might have the same blind spot. We might have the same insight. The connectedness of mind is fascinating, and it's through chess. It's directly like energetic. It's through eye contact. It's through body language. It's by seeing micro-expressions. It's everything. So you're always reading the opponent. And as you get really good, you learn like what your tells are, what your opponent's tells are. Then you also learn... Like I often would have tells on purpose and I'd have predictable tells that I would let people lean on for a long time until I didn't let them lean on it anymore. It's like in the martial arts where you give someone comfort in a lean, right? And you give them a rep of something, they can lean on you. They can lean here, then they can lean here very comfortably five or six or eight or ten times in a row until they can't, then they're on the floor, right? So you're... This is happening in chess. It's happening in all of these things and one-on-one competition is a relentless truth teller.... you know? If you have a weakness, it will be exposed. If your opponent has a weakness, you will expose it. If you go into a chess game and you've got huge opening repertoire that's extremely complex, but there's, like, one little place that I just hope he doesn't go there, he always goes there. (laughs) It's so bonkers. You can't hope your opponent's not gonna see it.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Mm-hmm.
- JWJosh Waitzkin
You can't make the second-best move because maybe he'll blunder and I'll win. That d- that never works if you're playing as real competition. And so, like, y- you need to understand your mind, you need to understand your opponent's mind, you need to understand your opponent's understanding of your mind, right?
- AHAndrew Huberman
That's a lot of plates to spin. And what I, I guess what I said before, not so clearly, um, is that for a young mind to be able to learn to spin all those plates is incredible. It's clearly possible. It's unique, but it's possible. You did that. But it takes a young mind or an adult mind out of its own unique experience. So this is e- eventually how we'll, uh, circle back to pre-consciousness versus post-consciousness. Um, but in the meantime, um, when was it that you first recall thinking, not, "Oh, I'm gonna beat this guy," but sensing, you know, "He's getting nervous," or, "He's confident," or, "He can sense that I'm nervous," or, "I'm gonna set a trap," and just, you know, feeling out, you know, whether or not they detect the trap? I mean, th- it's just a lot.
- JWJosh Waitzkin
Right away. When I was... I mean, o- o- just to keep in mind, my, my, my first teachers were hustlers, were chess hustlers from Washington Square. So they would m- they would mess with my mind all the time, and then they would teach me what they were doing, and they would do it again at a higher level, right? So you're distracting, they're distracting, they're setting traps, they're using Jedi mind tricks of every sort, you know-
- AHAndrew Huberman
They didn't kid gloves you at all?
- JWJosh Waitzkin
I wouldn't say at all. I mean, this was a, a rough-and-tumble crowd. You know, there were a lot of drugs in the park. There was a lot of, like, r- you know, fights in the park. I mean, they, these guys took me under their wing. I mean, there were moments where, like, some guy would be going off, and then a guy would say, "Hey, Josh is here." You know, "Cut that out." Like, they, I was their protege. So they did, they, they did, but they also, you know, did not wear thick gloves, and they w- the, the gloves were thinning out all the time, and I was getting better fast. Then we'd go to war. Um, they were my teachers. They were my friends. Um, I'm super grateful for, like, they... and then, and then what's interesting
- 26:39 – 32:30
Early Chess Training
- JWJosh Waitzkin
is that my first classical chess teacher, Bruce Pendolfini, saw me playing in the park and asked my father if I could work with him, and then we started training together. And, um, one of the things that, that, um, I feel really badly about is the way he was portrayed in the film Searching for Bobby Fischer 'cause Bruce is still a dear friend of mine. He's... Ben Kingsley played him as a, as a much more severe person than he was. He was a, he was a beautiful teacher, and he really, he wanted me to express myself, as did the guys in the park, but he was also filling in the holes and teaching me a classical chess foundation, and we were studying chess from the endgame first, principles, studying positions of reduced complexity to touch high-level principles and then learning to apply them to more and more complex positions. So my early chess education had both the classical study with Bruce, and it had the street smart game with the hustlers at the park. And, but to answer your question, right away. When I was six years old, like, my, my opponents would, would mess with my mind and trap me and trick me and make me think here, and then they'd go there, and then I would learn to do that, and then I remember there was one, like, youth competition where I made a, a move and set a trap and went, "Oh." I mean, it was, like, that obvious, right? (laughs) It gets, like, the worst, like... and then it gets increasingly subtle, right? But, like, if my opponent said, "Oh, he's unhappy. Take the pawn," then you, and then your opponents see it, and then you learn, you know, those things just keep on, the circles get smaller and smaller and tighter and tighter and more and more refined.
- AHAndrew Huberman
This is the opposite of Asperger's or autism, by the way. What you're describing is a, a hypertrophied set of circuits for theory of mind in a very young kid, so to be able to understand what's happening around you. And I think for many people, the joys of childhood are really about not being aware of what's going on around you. Uh, the psychologists would refer to, uh, the, you know, this is like, um, a lack of impingement. Impingement is when, like, a kid is playing, and they're really enjoying something, and then suddenly they decide they, they don't wanna play anymore, and the par- and the parent doesn't want to be bothered, so they say, "No, no, no, no. Like, keep playing." You know, they're, like, impinging on the kid's reflexive desire to do something or not do something. This isn't about keeping them safe. This is in the domain of safety. But, um, at least within the channel of chess, it seems that you developed your entire understanding of the psychology of human beings, except for, of course, you had a experience at home of, of family-
- JWJosh Waitzkin
Yeah.
- AHAndrew Huberman
... and friends, but chess certainly, um, cut a wide trough through, uh, through your, your development.
- JWJosh Waitzkin
Well, I'm, I'm really grateful for my early chess life, and I also would never choose to put that on my children. I mean, I, it worked out really well for me. I mean, I'm m- I have my wounds, right? I mean, there's lots of things that I've had to grapple with, um, but I think if you put a lot of children through the pressures that I, that I went through, it wouldn't work out well. And I watched a lot of my young, I mean, almost all my young rivals, uh, or, I mean, like, very close to all of my young rivals ended up quitting and falling into crisis and, and, um... You know, then you, you have parents and coaches who are expressing their own egoic needs through the children, and the children are shouldering that, and then that becomes very difficult to deal with, and then, um, you're dealing with heartbreak, and you're putting e- everything on the line, and you're losing, and you're dealing with your own self-doubts and the, the heartbreak of your mother and your father and your coach and then your friends, and I mean, there's so many... And then as the pressures get more and more intense in chess, like, you really are putting your heart and soul on the line through that chess board, in, in casual games, let alone in, in national and world championships, and you're being shattered when you lose. I was shattered many times over. I mean, I lost last rounds of national championships and world championships m- multiple times over, and I ha- and those were the greatest moments of my life in retrospect. They taught me the most important lessons of my life. I would never take it back. It's been... and that's a pattern in my chess life, in my fight life, and everything I've gone through. Um-... the most heartbreaking, devastating moments ultimately were the ones that catalyzed the most growth, and they were beautiful. Um, and I really relate to them that way. But they also can be brutal for young minds, and they can destroy people.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Yeah, what do you think it is about, um, failure or missing the mark in some way that catalyzes change? I mean, I always say that, you know, your brain has no reason to change if you're just in, le- lear- trying to learn something and you're in flow, you're getting it, you know, most people associate being, quote-unquote, "in flow" with getting everything correct, doing everything correctly. Um, I don't think that was the original definition that Csikszentmihalyi intended. But, um, eh, the neuroscience of brain plasticity tells us that it's only under conditions in which there's some mismatch between what you're trying to do, like even, you know, like, this has been studied in terms of reaching for an object and there's a mirror displacement or a presumed displacement or something, you eventually can learn to error correct, um, because the cup is actually over there as opposed to where you see it. Um, but it is the deployment of these chemicals inside of us, adrenaline, noradrenaline, and dopamine, in particular, those three, their cousins, the catecholamines that tells the, yeah, at a neurochemical level, tells the synapses, "Wait, something needs to change." I mean, the brain doesn't have any reason to change unless there's frustration, agitation, or at least some neurochemical change associated with those things that we call frustration and agitation. So, do you think these big, what feel like cata- cataclysmic fails set, uh, like, a sort of window of plasticity in which we can change? I often think that, that it's only through, like, the devastation of a huge loss that the brain is now set up for a bunch of new learning. Certainly, we wouldn't want to design the system that way, but as I always joke, you know, I wasn't consulted at the design phase and, uh, you weren't either.
- JWJosh Waitzkin
(laughs)
- AHAndrew Huberman
We just have to work with what's there.
- JWJosh Waitzkin
Yeah.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Like, big failure. Why do, why do you think that sets a wave front of, of change?
- JWJosh Waitzkin
Yeah. It's, it's a great, it's a great question. Um...
- 32:30 – 43:22
Failure & Change, Chess, Tension, Power of Empty Space
- JWJosh Waitzkin
Well, I think, I think the, the study you sent me yesterday-
- AHAndrew Huberman
Mm-hmm.
- JWJosh Waitzkin
... speaks to this.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Well, yeah, maybe we should talk about that.
- JWJosh Waitzkin
Um-
- AHAndrew Huberman
Yeah.
- JWJosh Waitzkin
Yeah. Maybe I'll answer that question experientially. Maybe you could then talk about the study and we can refund a little bit. This is so much fun, by the way, because I've lived my life in, in the arena, just like pushing myself, like, I'm my own... I'm not a scientist, but I'm like my own laboratory. You said to me th- yesterday at the game, like...
- AHAndrew Huberman
You said, "I'm not a scientist, but I'm looking forward to tomorrow." And I said, "Trust me, you're a scientist."
- JWJosh Waitzkin
Yeah.
- AHAndrew Huberman
You know, so I, I do science through the lens of a certain understanding of mechanism and structure function and, uh, some processes and you do science through the, through the lens of experience and, uh, drawing, uh, core parallels and principles in different domains and at different levels of, uh, from unskilled all the way up to virtuosity.
- JWJosh Waitzkin
Yeah.
- AHAndrew Huberman
That's kind of how I see it.
- JWJosh Waitzkin
I think the way that I... Like, if I think about the most painful losses of my life, the most devastating injuries of my life, I think about dying drowning. I drowned at the bottom of, uh, doing hypoxic breath work in a pool-
- AHAndrew Huberman
Oh, I've-
- JWJosh Waitzkin
... so at the bottom of the pool-
- AHAndrew Huberman
... heard about that.
- JWJosh Waitzkin
... four and a half minutes after. That was, you know, led to the arguably the mo- the best decision of my life to move into the jungle. Um, I think about the losing the last round of the under-18 World Chess Championship on the first board. Um, like I, that's a very interesting story I could describe a little bit. Or I think about, like, my first national championship I lost when I was, I was, um, seven, eight, first board, last round, just unobstructed learning until then, and then I lost the last round of the, on the, um, you know, for the title. Found an opening trap. Like, that's the loss that was the greatest thing that ever happened to me.
- AHAndrew Huberman
You were how old?
- JWJosh Waitzkin
I think I'd just turned eight, or I was late seven. And like that was, it, it was... Because if I had won that game, I would, I, I easily could have associated winning with just no pain, no heart, just, just cruising up into the end. That was the moment that, like, I got my ass kicked. I had to go back, you know, deal with these demons, come back, train for the next year, and then I won the next year, and then it was off to the races. I, my life might look very different if I'd won that game. That, and actually, the kid who beat me in that game, David Arnett, became, two years later, we became best friends and we, for all of our childhood, we were on the same chess team and best friends, and I think he gave me the greatest gift o- of my competitive life by kicking my ass that game. The most devastating loss of my chess life was, so I was 17 years old. I was competing in the World Under 18 Chess Championship in Szeged, Hungary. Um, every, uh, so every year, there's an under-12, 14, 16, 18, 21 World Championship and I was always representing the US in those tournaments around the world and, you know, I, you know, travel to India or Brazil or Hungary or Germany or somewhere and compete in the World Championship. And under-18 Worlds, I played the tournament, I just was playing very inspired chess. I had just picked up, um, on the road three weeks before Jack Kerouac. I had become, I was just on fire with Kerouac's vision and I was just so, like, appreciating life with this freshness and intensity than I'd ever had, more than I'd ever had. I was, I was, like, totally on fire in chess, in life, in love, in everything. And I... I was paired against Peter Svidler, who was the Russian. We were on the, on the first board, last round, we were, we, co- you know, we were playing for the World Championship. Every country sends their national champion, so it's a long tournament to get there. Um, early in the game, I think it was move 12, he offered me a draw. So, if I'd accepted the draw offer, um, it would have been a tiebreaks. I didn't know exactly what was happening, but I thought that he was slightly favored in tiebreaks. I wasn't sure, but basically, the World Championship would be determined or the gold medal would be determined by how our opponents in previous rounds did in the last round. But I had a, but I, I hadn't calculated it out before but I had a feeling it- it- it was like, maybe it was, like-... 40-60 or 30-70 against me. But I, it was my style. I never accept a draw first. That wasn't my style. I always wanted to fight, so I declined, pushed for a win. Now, the beauty of his decision was also he offered me a draw in the critical position where I had to make a very specific decision, which is a trick that chess players play on one another, which is that, like, if you're... W- we should talk about tension at one point. It's a, it's a really beautiful theme to explore in different sports. So, one thing that happens in chess games is that you have this building tension between minds, and often the tension on the chessboard and the tension on the minds are mounting together. And the urge, the need to release psychological tension often leads to the decision to release chess tension in the chess, chess pieces. And when you release chess tension, uh, usually the person who releases the tension will be on the wrong side of tactics. So, a lot of chess, g- to the chess game, is about putting mental pressure on the opponent to force them to break the tension on the chessboard.
- NANarrator
Mm-hmm.
- JWJosh Waitzkin
So, in that game, he offered me a draw. So you think about it, I'm, we're 17 years old. We're 10 days into a world championship battle. We l- even, no matter how much we love the battle, some piece of ourselves wants a way out. Like, we wanna release the tension, right? It's just elemental to who we are when we're living with that much pressure. So, all I have to do then is, like, accept the draw, shake hands, and the tournament's over, and then it's out of our hands what happens. So, in that moment, I have to also make a critical chess position. So, the, the urge to release the tension is subtly entering into my chess pos- decision. And in that move, I declined the draw, and I made a slightly overaggressive move, which turned, and he ended up, um, playing a beautiful game, big attack, beating me. I lose the world championship. Just, like, this close to, to, like, your dream, and you're shattered, right? Um, I then went and hitchhiked across Eastern Europe to meet my girlfriend at the time in a little town in Slovenia, and we le- then we broke up and all thi- (laughs) ended up meeting again on a street corner in Brazil at the World Under 21 Championship three weeks later. L- lots of drama, you know, being a 17-year-old kid. I didn't study that chess loss for two and a half months, it was so painful to me. I always studied games immediately afterwards, and I alwa- it's, you might study a chess game for anywhere between three and 15 hours, studying one chess game, and that's, that, say, 10 hours is focused on the two or three critical positions of the game. And this was before chess computers were rampant and you had chess engines that could always just tell you the answer to, um, the move. That's also something we should talk about later, how chess engines and AI chess engines change the nature of who chess players are because you can have the answer right away versus having to sit in cognitive and emotional dissonance for sometimes weeks or months at a time without knowing the answer. But we'll come back to that, maybe. So I didn't study that loss for two and a half months 'cause it was so painful to me, and then I was... My family spent a lot of time at sea, um, which was an interesting part of my, my life and my chess life, living on a little boat, catching our own food, doing our own engine work. Um, and I was, I was at sea after competing in both of those world championships and some other things, and I sat down to study that game. And I spent, you know, a dozen-plus hours studying that one critical position of the game, and then I realized what the, like, the move I should have made was outside of my conceptual scheme in that critical position. I wasn't ready to make that m- the move I had to make, and he was also, I think, a slightly stronger chess player than me. I was a great fighter. I, I loved the battle, but I think if, objectively, he was a better... His name is Peter Svidler. He ended up becoming a world-class grandmaster and is, and is just an incredible chess player today. At the time, he was just amazingly brilliant, um, beautiful, fluid mind. But I was confident going into the game. So, I had to make this move that would essentially be... His attack was on the king's side. My expansion was on the queen's side. I had to remove my final defensive piece from in front of my king away from my king's side, which is super counterintuitive 'cause you think you want it to defend your king. What I didn't realize, it was like harnessing the power of empty space against aggression. His attack needed my defense like fire needs fuel to burn. Moving my last defensive piece, his attack couldn't break through. But that principle was something I didn't understand at all. And so, uh, it's not like I, I would have found that move, um, but it was a real pop in my mind, right? So then, I was 17, 18 years old, and then a year later, I started studying Tai Chi, started studying Daoist meditation, Daoist philosophy, the Tao Te Ching, Chuang Tse, Lao Tzu, the inner chapters. Um, and then I get into Tai Chi. I started moving meditation, and then I started doing Tai Chi Chuan push hands without making the connection. Push hands is the martial art which is the ess- which is like... The essence of push hands is learning to utilize empty space against aggression. But I hadn't connected it to that moment. Then you fast-forward to 2004 World Championship, which is what The Art of Learning ended with, the final chapter of that is the World Championship finals. I'm playing, I'm fighting this guy bigger than me, stronger than me, he's been training since childhood. Um, final fight in a big stadium, everyone wanting me to be destroyed in the biggest fight of my life, and w- I won that fight by harnessing the power of empty space, by letting him feel my weakness, by leaning on him, by letting him, um, by letting, by e- and then I just end and disappearing. So, it's, it's very interesting how there was no mental proc- there was no conscious processing of that connection. But the biggest loss of my chess life, and then the principle which I wasn't ready to understand yet, was how I won the world championship in the martial arts so many years later, and it's a completely different discipline, right? So it's an example of, like... And of course, that principle is manifested in every part of my life today. But, like, that's one of many stories in my life where, like, a loss spurs an insight which might consciously or often unconsciously lead to something incredible down the road.And I think that, uh, one of the biggest challenges that we have... And what's so interesting is that the loss of a world chess championship final is, leads to the win, direct lesson, leads to the win of a world championship in, in the fighting realm and how common that is. And one of the things that I, I think about, like, when you, when you sit down with great competitors, again and again, when you hear their inner journey, the, the most heartbreaking losses lead to the transformational change which leads to the biggest wins, uh, of their life. Um, whether it's in basketball, whether it's in, in fighting, whether it's in business, it's in finance, it's in, it's in, in writing.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Love.
- JWJosh Waitzkin
In, oh, and love. Oh my God, love. Yeah.
- AHAndrew Huberman
I mean, breakups are devastating. They're a, they're a death of sorts.
- JWJosh Waitzkin
Yeah.
- 43:22 – 48:06
Sponsors: AG1 & Joovv
- JWJosh Waitzkin
- AHAndrew Huberman
I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor, AG1. AG1 is a vitamin mineral probiotic drink that also includes prebiotics and adaptogens. AG1 is designed to cover all of your foundational nutritional needs, and it tastes great. Now, I've been drinking AG1 since 2012, and I started doing that at a time when my budget for supplements was really limited. In fact, I only had enough money back then to purchase one supplement, and I'm so glad that I made that supplement AG1. The reason for that is even though I strive to eat most of my foods from Whole Foods and minimally processed foods, it's very difficult for me to get enough fruits, vegetables, vitamins and minerals, micronutrients, and adaptogens from food alone. And I need to do that in order to ensure that I have enough energy throughout the day, I sleep well at night, and keep my immune system strong. But when I take AG1 daily, I find that all aspects of my health, my physical health, my mental health, and my performance, both cognitive and physical, are better. I know that because I've had lapses when I didn't take AG1, and I certainly felt the difference. I also notice, and this makes perfect sense given the relationship between the gut microbiome and the brain, that when I regularly take AG1, which for means means a serving in the morning or mid-morning and again later in the afternoon or evening, that I have more mental clarity and more mental energy. If you'd like to try AG1, you can go to drinkag1.com/huberman to claim a special offer. For this month only, January 2025, AG1 is giving away 10 free travel packs and a year's supply of vitamin D3K2. Again, go to drinkag1.com/huberman to claim the 10 free travel packs and a year's supply of vitamin D3K2. Again, go to drinkag1.com/huberman to claim the 10 free travel packs and a year's supply of vitamin D3K2. Today's episode is also brought to us by Joovv. Joovv makes medical grade red light therapy devices. Now, if there's one thing that I have consistently emphasized on this podcast, it's the incredible impact that light can have on our biology. Now, in addition to sunlight, red light and near infrared light have been shown to have positive effects on improving numerous aspects of cellular and organ health, including faster muscle recovery, improved skin health and wound healing, improvements in acne, meaning reductions in acne, reduced pain and inflammation, improved mitochondrial function, and even improving visual function itself. What sets Joovv lights apart and why they're my preferred red light therapy device is that they use clinically proven wavelengths, meaning specific wavelengths of red light and near infrared light in specific combinations to trigger the optimal cellular adaptations. Personally, I use the Joovv whole body panel about three to four times per week, typically in the morning, but sometimes in the afternoon. And I use the Joovv handheld light both at home and when I travel. If you'd like to try Joovv, you can go to Joovv, spelled J-O-O-V-V, .com/huberman. Joovv is offering an exclusive discount to all Huberman Lab listeners with up to $400 off select Joovv products. Again, that's Joovv, J-O-O-V-V, .com/huberman to get up to $400 off. I have a friend who's a, um, trauma therapist, addiction expert, and, you know, occasionally you'll hear these tragedies of, uh, typically it's young guys who, uh, their girlfriend breaks up with them, and they commit suicide. And for years, he would work with families of these people, these, these young guys. And he finally connected the dots, and he realized that in every case it was as if there was no future whatsoever because it was their first relationship.
- JWJosh Waitzkin
Yeah.
- AHAndrew Huberman
And it, it... When you hear it, you just go, "Oh, it makes so much sense." But, you know, the 16-year-old and 18-year-old brain, however old these kids were, it's, it's devastating. I, I want to make sure that I ask about devastation because you, you said that you were devastated. Uh, you experienced a tremendous amount of pain from these losses, in particular the one that you just described. If you don't mind, I'd like to kind of ask you about what that was like. Um, I don't want to spin off into a discussion about the, the science of grief, but I did an episode about grief. And it was really surprising to learn that most of what you hear about in pop culture that, you know, there are these, uh, very specific stages of grief, and you progress through them linearly. None of that is true. The... All of modern research says that it's not disbelief, anger, acceptance. It's like a hodgepodge of different emotions depending on time of day and middle of the night and... But the core feature, and I find this so interesting, is that grief, whether or not it's what I would consider kind of trivial grief like losing your favorite pen or a watch that you really love, okay, an object, versus somebody extremely close to you, a, a parent, a loved one, or child, God forbid, that the brain systems that map memory onto action are disrupted in grief such that, you know, you wake up each day
- 48:06 – 57:22
Grief, Competition Loss, Growth, Frustration Tolerance
- AHAndrew Huberman
and you want to go see the person or call them. And so it's a... Uh, what grief really represents is a remapping of your understanding about what you can do with your physical body to create action and interaction with this person that's now gone. And so the, the remapping is one of the... The nervous system having to do all this no-go. We talk in terms of inaction systems in the basal ganglia of the brain. It's you have go, go programs and no-go programs. There's some other stuff too, but it's mostly go or no-go. And basically, grief is this taking of a...... depending on how long and how deeply you knew the person, a tremendous amount of neural real estate and algorithms that were all go. You could text them. You could call them. You could hug them. You could kiss them. You could listen to them. You could smell them. And now, it's all no-go. And that we think is what we experience as, as grief. Now, in terms of losing a very important chess match, when you talk about being in pain and in grief, what was that like? Was it... Did that mean sleepless nights, disbelief? And at what point do you think you were able to say, "Okay, you know what? I'm gonna start thinking about this constructively. I'm gonna turn this into a go," as opposed to just trying to, you know, get in your time machine and travel back in time, which of course is impossible. What, what was, what was that early experience of, of devastation like and, and how did it transmute into growth?
- JWJosh Waitzkin
Yeah. Well, even think- even sitting with you now thinking about it, it seems ridiculous to, for a chess game to be... losing a chess game to be anywhere near, like, the absolute heartbreak of losing a loved one. Um, and yet we can make things very large in our minds and in our beings, right? I think that human... I mean, one thing I, I, I think about is how hard we fight to maintain our conceptual schemes, our identities, even if they're torturing us, right?
- AHAndrew Huberman
And loss isn't relative, you know? I mean, the fact that we're sitting right now, not far from, you know, hundreds if not thou- thousands of homes that have been, been wiped away doesn't change other losses. Like we, we sometimes will say, "Well, at least we're a-" you know, I know for- I have a lot of friends that lost their homes. They'll say, "Well, at least we have our health. We have our things, you know." Okay. And so we can do this, but it's, but it's, um, it's not how the human emotion system responds reflexively to our own losses. So, I don't think it's, like, um, dismissive or sociopathic to, to experience a big loss in one's life, um, as a big loss, even if it's not the worst possible loss.
- JWJosh Waitzkin
Right.
- AHAndrew Huberman
It's just not how we're wired.
- JWJosh Waitzkin
Right. And one of the things that I reflect on and that I've cultivated, it's very hard, um, but that I work to cultivate is when you're in those moments of rupture to both be in the rupture and have the perspective that we will have later about the rupture, which is not to say not being in the rupture. One of the things I feel badly about in, in... like when I wrote The Art of Learning, I spoke a lot about process and outcome, and it had a big impact in the chess world. And then what happened is there were generations of parents who were- had young kid chess players who their kids would go to compete and the parents would say, "It doesn't matter if you win or lose. All that matters is the process. It doesn't matter if you win or lose." And the kids are, like, putting on their armor to go to battle, mental battle, and chess is fucking intense. Like when you're playing chess, you're putting your mind, your body, your psyche, everything, like, on the line. And if you lose, you feel shattered, like that's just how you feel. If you're not trying your hardest, then we can't even... we shouldn't be talking about you. So let's say you, you are trying your hardest, you're putting it all on the line. It's on the line, and you lose and you're shattered. Like every part of you didn't, didn't... (laughs) you, you feel destroyed. So the kids are putting on their armor to go to battle and the parent tells them, "It doesn't matter if I win or lose." It's deeply confusing. And the kids actually usually know that the parents are full of shit. The parents actually care so much and they feel guilty about how much they care about their kid's result they're telling their kid that to feel less guilty about the fact that they're putting their own egoic needs on their child, and it's all, like... and the kids see it all. That's the hilarious thing is again, an eight, 10, 11-year-old, like they see it all and they're like, "Mom, give me a break." And the parents are just stuck in their guilt and absurdity seeing this so many times. So, like the discussion of process and outcome is so subtle, right? Because yes, it's about the process. It's about the journey. It's about the long-term process. But if we don't care about the results, the process won't work. So, we need to put ourselves on the line enough to be shattered and the process is what really matters. But it's not that we can liberate ourselves from caring enough to be shattered because then we're not engaged, and it is something about putting our egos on the line that is what leads to the growth surges that great competitors have, the ones who become virtuosos, right? And so then that stated, how can we ha- experience the simultaneity of being shattered and having the perspective that this is probably the greatest thing that ever happened to me?
- AHAndrew Huberman
You have to be, uh, in a mode of theory of mind with yourself about your future self somehow, and this is what I think losses are so beneficial for is that if you've had a couple of breakups, you realize that you can fall in love again. If you've only had breakups, perhaps you think, "Well, it always leads to a breakup." But you know that the process of moving forward is the only way to test that hypothesis again.
- JWJosh Waitzkin
Right.
- AHAndrew Huberman
And so I think repeated failure, um, is essential, right? Because with repeated failure means that there was a-
- JWJosh Waitzkin
(laughs) .
- AHAndrew Huberman
... also repeated fighting one ways back after failure. So it... Yeah, I think sometimes, uh, not to take us into a different course of story, but just very briefly, my- the, the first manuscript I ever submitted in graduate school took forever to get published, and it went from-
- JWJosh Waitzkin
(laughs) .
- AHAndrew Huberman
... the highest of journals down to a good journal, solid journal, but it took forever. And that was so beneficial. I was crushing at the time, but my reward circuitry is built up around very long latency between effort and final outcome. I'm just used to long waits between figuring out what's gonna happen. And, uh, actually one of the weirdest things about podcasting or social media is that I feel like you go to, quote unquote, to publication so fast. It's like, whoa. Like things used to... projects used to take two years-... and then you get reviews, and then there's, you know. So, I think, um, w- your early devastating failure, or failures, because you had a few of them in there-
- JWJosh Waitzkin
Oh, a lot more than a few.
- AHAndrew Huberman
... at least, right?
- JWJosh Waitzkin
I-
- AHAndrew Huberman
Probably set you up for tremendous frustration tolerance. Um, and this, not just hearing... I mean, the words "This too shall pass," th- they're helpful, but it, that's really something that needs to be experienced, in, in my view.
- JWJosh Waitzkin
It, it's a very interesting thing when you're talking about competitors, is what is the right balance between, like, playing up and playing down, right? Like, how much do you want to build the confidence of a young competitor or artist or person, or any of us, young, whatever age? When how much do you want to be stretched a little bit beyond your ability so that your weaknesses are exposed, you have to take them on, and you have to grow? And getting that balance right is hugely important. And, and I, and it's not simple. Like, a lot of boxing training camps are based around the boxer's confidence being everything, and you want them to feel invincible going into the ring. Right? And then from another perspective, it's something very powerful about having a training camp that's so intense that all your weaknesses are exposed and you have to take them on. If you're not sparring against people who can expose your weaknesses, then you don't know what they are. You don't have the chance to grow, right? I mean, I- I- I live at this point with a trying to be at max stretch, um, pre- without snapping, right? Like, for example, if, if I look at my foiling, like, if I'm not foiling enough during a- a foil session, then I'm not pushing my turns hard enough. Um, and if I'm... Yeah, if- if you're just, if you're just succeeding all the time, then you're not pushing yourself enough.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Do you believe in optimal, uh, levels of arousal for different aspects of practice or game? Um, autonomic arousal is something that I've worked on for many years, and- and one of the most impressive features I think of our brains as humans. First would be our ability to think into the past, present, or future, or combination of those two. If other animals do that, they don't do it nearly as well, and they certainly don't, um, create technologies to bridge those different time scales. That's number one. But the other one is our visual and, um, temporal aperture of focus. So, when we are in a state of elevated arousal, our visual aperture shrinks. I'm sure you're familiar with this. And we slice time more finely, much, uh, you know, it's like a higher frame rate-
- JWJosh Waitzkin
Right.
- AHAndrew Huberman
... which is why people who, for instance, see a- a devastating traumatic car crash report seeing, experiencing things in slow motion, right? Because their frame rate is high, like a slow-motion video.
- 57:22 – 1:06:17
Arousal, Frame Rates, Intense Moments
- AHAndrew Huberman
Um, whereas when we are relaxed, our frame rate is lar- larger bins of time. And I feel like so much of the discussion around things like flow and, um, uh, optimal states for learning have to do with assuming that there's one optimal state of arousal, but I feel like in every endeavor I've ever been involved in, an, um, it's about learning the transitions between the arousal states that allows us to, you know, pull back a little bit as things, as you said, like, get tense. Just relax just a little bit to be able to maybe see, see a different perspective or ratchet up our level of- of tension, or AKA arousal, in order to be able to fine slice the- the, you know, the micro-expressions of a competitor.
- JWJosh Waitzkin
Yeah.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Um, I mean, this, these two cameras on the fronts of our skull and the rest of our brain are really devoted to this process of- of, you know, shrinking or expanding the aperture of our consciousness. And it can be talked about in terms of space, just vision, like tunnel vision versus panoramic vision.
- JWJosh Waitzkin
Yep.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Could be talked about as spacetime, you know, tunnel vision, fine slice, panoramic vision, broader slice. But then, when you start getting into, like, the... then you map that onto the past, present, and future mapping, and that's where I feel like we're into the game of- of, uh, skill learning and chess and strategy. So, forgive me for the kind of, you know, top contour neuroscience description, but that's how I see the human primate as so different than all the other creatures in the world. That's- that's how we're different, because, uh, we can learn chess or ballet.
- JWJosh Waitzkin
(laughs)
- AHAndrew Huberman
Foil. You know, gibbons are pretty amazing at what gibbons do, but if they're trying to learn other stuff, they- they've been failing so far.
- JWJosh Waitzkin
I spend a lot of time, um, playing with frame rates, and I had this experience that I wrote about in that slowing down time chapter of The Art of Learning, where I... When I had these experiences, both in- in chess and in fighting, the, it, I was this one time I was- I was fighting in a, against a super heavyweight dude in a competition, and my hand shattered. And, like, my- I- I- I broke my hand right here. And it was, it was, it was interesting 'cause, like, the fight was- was very intense, reasonably hard, and my hand broke, and instantly, time slowed down. And he was, he was moving in slow motion, and I was able to just so easily play with someone with- with, like, a broken hand compared to what had been a war before.
- AHAndrew Huberman
We know what that is.
- JWJosh Waitzkin
Right. We do know what that is.
- AHAndrew Huberman
That's adrenaline.
- JWJosh Waitzkin
Adrenaline.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Yeah. That's a-
- JWJosh Waitzkin
Adrenaline and that- and that tunnel vision, and then the frames-
- AHAndrew Huberman
Yeah. Yeah.
- JWJosh Waitzkin
... are fast
- NANarrator
are so fast.
- AHAndrew Huberman
I mean, if I inject you with just a little bit of adrenaline, it- it stays in your periphery, but it activates systems in your brain in parallel to that. And, um, you're gonna experience an immediate dilation of your pupils. Your t- you'll have more tunnel vision. I- I mean, every process is sped up in the direction of higher frame rate.
- JWJosh Waitzkin
So then, the question then became, for me, and this would be fun to talk, I've never spoken to a scientist about this process, like, how do I learn to do that at will?
- AHAndrew Huberman
Mm-hmm.
- JWJosh Waitzkin
Right? And then how can I train? 'Cause I can't just pump myself with adrenaline all the time, although maybe I may- or maybe I can learn to have that physiological response.
- AHAndrew Huberman
You can, you can deploy it.
- JWJosh Waitzkin
Right. So then how- how can I deploy it, right? How, what are triggers for having that chemical change?
- AHAndrew Huberman
Mm-hmm.
- JWJosh Waitzkin
And then, also, how can I train so that, um-... I have the experience of more frames than my opponent.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Mm-hmm.
- JWJosh Waitzkin
And so, Marcelo Garcia, who I, he- he's known as the King of the Scramble. He spends his whole time in transition. So, if you're training jiu-jitsu with most people, they're always finding a position and holding it.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Mm-hmm.
- JWJosh Waitzkin
Marcelo, one of the unique things about his training life for most of his life was that he never held positions. He was always moving. He was always in the in-between. And i- it's true in most arts is that people think that the art is the positions that they see, but the real high-level art is the space in between the positions. So if we have this position, leads to this position, that's gonna be like, there's gonna be no frames in between for most people. For some people, there might be four frames. But if I have 100 frames, then I can play in pockets that you don't see. And so if you're living your life in the training process in the in-between, in the transition, if you're always... The way that manifests in the actual, like, for example, jiu-jitsu training or submission grappling training is if you're not holding positions and you're always moving, then you're spending all of your time in the in-between, while people who are holding position are always static. So if you go to a jiu-jitsu school and you sit and watch, it's interesting to look for this one thing. Notice the amount of time static versus in motion. Marcelo was always in motion. There's a beautiful clip of him that you gu- people can look up. It's c- and Arte Suave was an old documentary back in the day, like 25 years ago, I think it was. It's on YouTube. It's like an eight-minute clip of him training as an, I think, an 18-year-old. And you watch him just, like, in the early days of him learning this transitional approach, and he's just never stopping. He's always allowing the person... But you have to get past the egoic dynamics 'cause you can't, like, you're, you're giving up on dominating people all the time. 'Cause when you're in a dominant position in jiu-jitsu, you wanna hold it 'cause you've won. And there's all this bullshit passing between men who are fighting or women who are fighting each other. We wanna dominate. But if you release that and you're thinking about the learning process then, and you stop holding, then you're moving, and then you're getting nonstop ex- exposure to the in-between. So if you spend your life training in the in-between, then you have more frames wh- than other people do. That's what a lo- a lot of what illusionists are doing.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Mm-hmm.
- 1:06:17 – 1:13:12
Frame Rates & Pupil Size; Firewalking, Training
- AHAndrew Huberman
Um, it sounds like Marcelo and people that train, um, these different transition states as you're really, um, learning to access the, uh, the different frame rates, but from a place of, like, kind of like a little dimple in a, um, in a table-
- JWJosh Waitzkin
Mm-hmm.
- AHAndrew Huberman
... and then being able to move to the next one as a dimple and kind of moving from, from dimple to dimple, as opposed to, like, these trenches of, of brain states. And I think that, um... You know, I think about this a, a lot, a lot, because I feel like most bad decisions are made from a high frame rate, high arousal state. Most of the terrible things that humans have done to one another, uh-... you know, I suppose there's sociopathy and like, you know, pre- pre-planned things. But it tends to, they tend to be associated with, with high arousal states where people regret what they did, uh, all second-degree murder, for instance. (laughs)
- JWJosh Waitzkin
Yeah.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Um, in any event, I think the ability to move through these different arousal states at will is possible. Uh, you asked earlier, like, uh, how would one do that? Well, the beautiful thing about the visual system and these different frame rates and states of arousal is that it works in both directions. So when you're in a higher state of arousal, your visual aperture shrinks, you go to a higher frame rate. But it's also true that if you shrink your visual aperture, you go to a higher frame rate. The converse is also true. If you deliberately, for instance, as we're looking across one another right now, if I start to take in the fullness of the picture here, the walls, et cetera, there's a natural relaxation of the autonomic arousal systems, like parasympathetic activity goes up. And what's incredible is that any time we view a horizon, that naturally happens because you're not setting to a single fixation point. So any time you see a horizon, you relax, and it's not a coincidence. So the, the visual system can drive it inward and your autonomic arousal can drive it toward your, your, uh, visual system. The other thing is there's a really beautiful paper that came out about two years ago which showed that people who do a biofeedback game, where they're watching a little, you know, it's like a more, kind of like a sine wave, and they're deliberately trying to increase their level of arousal as the, as the curve goes up, for those that are just listening. Within a few days, they can learn to control their pupil size, which sets their arousal and their aperture for a segmenting time. So you can learn this through biofeedback, and I think the, the script for that is available online. I haven't tried it yet, but have you ever heard of these yogis that could control their pupil sizes even independently of one another? That's amazing because it's the, so- it's not supposed to be able to, uh, occur, but they, but you can. So you can learn to, you know, s- you know, I guess, the, the poor man's version of this would be look in the mirror, stare at yourself, and try and ramp up your level of autonomic arousal, watch your pupils get bigger, and then try and relax yourself and make them smaller. That practice, it seems, in biofeedback allows people to do it without staring into the mirror, so to speak. So it can be done. It's just that it hasn't been parsed by science that finely until recently.
- JWJosh Waitzkin
It's interesting. I, I, um ... So I have this term I use called firewalking, which for me, w- what it means is, is cultivating the ability to learn from, from experiences one doesn't have with the same somatic intensity that one learns from really intense experiences that we have. So for example, let's just say you're a jujitsu fighter and you overextend your arm, and you're in a f- world championship, and you get your arm broken or your shoulder ripped off or something. So you've lost the world championship and you got a shattered arm. You're not gonna overextend your arm that way again. You've learned that, that lesson is burned in. But, like, if you're watching a jujitsu fight and someone overextends their arm and gets arm barred and then taps out, then y- you, it, it's very, very different experience. How can we cultivate the ability to study other people's, like, worst, most heartbreaking blunders, worst moments, et cetera, and learn from that with the same somatic intensity that they learned from it, right? So much of that is physiological. So I've j- I spent a lot of time doing biofeedback and a lot of time doing visualization practices and doing very intense visualization practices and a lot, many, many years working with triggers for my own psychology and physiology in, so that I can get my physiology primed to have an intense learning experience while studying something that might otherwise just feel intellectual and then combining that with my own experience of things. And it's, it's, it's such a ... I mean if we can, we can 100X or 1,000X or 10,000X our learning curve by being able to learn from other things with the same intensity that we've learned from our own things, but people don't harness that.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Why do you think they, they don't? Is it ju- it takes time, and it doesn't seem as int- um, intuitive as go- going out and shooting free throws or something like that? (laughs)
- JWJosh Waitzkin
I think people are, are really amazingly unreflective about the training process. The, I, I, I told you, like, I'm, I'm working ... I, I haven't written a book since The Art of Learning, and I'm, I'm a couple years into this beautiful process of, of writing, um, my next book, which is gonna be called, I think, The Art of Training, which is really what I've been cultivating for the last decades. And, um, and I'm deconstructing my, you know, my approach to training in mental and physical disciplines. And it's, it's really interesting to go through that process myself. Like, w- what have I, what do I do? What have I done? And what have I helped others do? Um, I, I, and it's, it's a interesting thing. The Art of Learning kind of was a birthing process. That's what it felt like to me. I, I, I took notes to it for five years, and then after 2004 Worlds, I wrote it in nine months. It just kind of came out of me, and I'm kind of in that process now with this, so it feels really organic and intrinsic to the creative process. And I, I, I don't know. It's very interesting when you talk to people who are really playing at elite levels of different fields or who are just below, like, full self-expression or like, they're, they're just in the edge of virtuosity but not quite there, and you start to deconstruct what they do, there is so much low-hanging fruit that they can do. Why? I, I don't know. I think in many ways, people ... I mean there's lots of reasons. I think of one thing, people who are very, um, talented in arts don't have to be so deliberate about their training often to reach a certain level. Often people have other people building their training process and they're not reflective about their own training process because they have big s- teams of coaches who are creating it for them. Um, people haven't cultivated the art of deconstruction, um, which is an art that's very important. People haven't cultivated the art of loving training, which is a hugely important, like, meta skill to learn. Um, people haven't taken on, like, all of the skills around physiological triggers, around push, changing one's physiological state at will. People haven't practiced visualization very intensely. There are all of these, like-... these skills that we can put together in order to train at a world-class level. But it takes patience and, um, creativity and, you know, not just being subject to what everyone else does, but being able to look expansively at everything.
- 1:13:12 – 1:15:58
Sponsor: Function
- JWJosh Waitzkin
- AHAndrew Huberman
I'd like to take a quick break and thank one of our sponsors, Function. I recently became a Function member after searching for the most comprehensive approach to lab testing. While I've long been a fan of blood testing, I really wanted to find a more in-depth program for analyzing blood, urine, and saliva to get a full picture of my heart health, my hormone status, my immune system regulation, my metabolic function, my vitamin and mineral status, and other critical areas of my overall health and vitality. Function not only provides testing of over a hundred biomarkers key to physical and mental health, but it also analyzes these results and provides insights from top doctors on your results. For example, in one of my first tests with Function, I learned that I had too high levels of mercury in my blood. This was totally surprising to me. I had no idea prior to taking the test. Function not only helped me detect this, but offered medical doctor informed insights on how to best reduce those mercury levels, which included limiting my tuna consumption, because I had been eating a lot of tuna, while also making an effort to eat more leafy greens and supplementing with NAC, N-acetylcysteine, both of which can support glutathione production and detoxification, and worked to reduce my mercury levels. Comprehensive lab testing like this is so important for health, and while I've been doing it for years, I've always found it to be overly complicated and expensive. I've been so impressed by Function, both at the level of ease of use, that is getting the tests done, as well as how comprehensive and how actionable the tests are, that I recently joined their advisory board, and I'm thrilled that they're sponsoring the podcast. If you'd like to try Function, go to functionhealth.com/huberman. Function currently has a wait list of over 250,000 people, but they're offering early access to Huberman Lab listeners. Again, that's functionhealth.com/huberman to get early access to Function. We had a guest on this podcast, um, Jim Hollis, uh, he's a 84-year-old, probably 85-year-old Jungian analyst, um, on, and he, uh, just brilliant guy. He's written some really important books, um, Under Saturn's Shadow and, uh, et cetera, and he said, you know, so he has a real kind of like suit up, show up, you know, get to work kind of mentality, but he also, um, is a very reflective person, and he said, "You know, if, if there's one simple key to life, it's that one understand that most of our daily lives, our waking lives are in stimulus response, but that it's so critical to take 10 to 15 minutes each day to just get out of stimulus and response, and either to just let stuff geyser up out of our unconscious, subconscious mind, or to just put some real thought to something." That, you know, most everybody is in stimulus response. I- I- I wonder these days with social media
- 1:15:58 – 1:23:24
Stress & Recovery, Tools: Doing Less, Most Important Question (MIQ)
- AHAndrew Huberman
and so many things filling the space between walking to the car or with the, uh, you know, pro players that you work with, you know? I'm guessing the moment they- they're on the plane, they're on their phones and texting, and all these things are wonderful technologies, but they fill all the space with stimulus response.
Episode duration: 3:17:08
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