YouSaid · the spoken record

Josh Waitzkin

lines on the record: 121
first: 2024-07-19
most recent: 2024-07-19
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“And so one of the interesting things about the dialogue, the academic dialogue of cognitive biases is that there's the idea that the biases have to operate completely separately from the intuitive process. We have an intuitive process and then we have to go through a checklist of cognitive biases. In my experience, really high-level thinkers have integrated cognitive biases or an awareness of cognitive biases into their intuitive process, right? So this is constant process. We've discussed this a couple years ago, actually, where you're deconstructing technical awareness into something that And so this process, for example, of building a pyramid of knowledge, we have a certain technical foundation. We have a high level intuitive leap. We can then deconstruct the intuitive leap into something that we can understand technically and replicate technically. And then raising our foundation have higher and higher level intuitive leaps, right? This is this pyramid of knowledge, which in my process is built upon by...”
2024-07-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #756: Anne Lamott and Josh Waitzkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so, when we think about, for example, cognitive biases, the academics who study cognitive biases who speak about them.”
2024-07-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #756: Anne Lamott and Josh Waitzkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, the people, philosophers are the term of Robert Persick, the author of Zen in the automobile motorcycle maintenance. He's one of my favorite books and thinkers. He's a friend of mine. The difference between the philosopher and the philosophologist is what Tim is referring to, or the writer in the literary critic, or the man in the arena and the armchair professor”
2024-07-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #756: Anne Lamott and Josh Waitzkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You need to have stilled your waters internally to feel the subtle changes inside of you that would be opportunity or the crystallization of complex ideas or danger or the onset of a cognitive bias, for example, which is hugely important as a chess player or as an investor or as anything else. You know, this is one of the areas where we've had this ongoing dialogue and our friendship around what I call armchair professors.”
2024-07-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #756: Anne Lamott and Josh Waitzkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Cartesian duality makes. Right. I mean, your way of life as well. But we intuitively can feel things way before we are consciously aware of them. The chess player always senses danger before he sees it. Just like the hunter will sense the shark or the jaguar before he'll see it. Then he'll look for it. So the chess player's process is often to be studying a position to sense opportunity or danger and then to start looking for it, deconstruct what it is, and then find what probably is and then start calculating, right? But that sense comes before. Or if you're a great decision maker, if you're an investor, you can sense danger, right? You can sense opportunity.”
2024-07-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #756: Anne Lamott and Josh Waitzkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it's hugely important in mental disciplines. So, for example, in chess and today a lot of what I do today is have this laboratory of training elite mental performers largely in finance investors. And a huge part of the training is in their physiological introspective sensitivity. That's their somatic awareness. That's the foundational training. Why? Well, first of all, we can't just separate our mind and our body.”
2024-07-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #756: Anne Lamott and Josh Waitzkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I've had a lot of different ways of playing this over the years. For me, I can describe it in terms of myself and we can go into how when I train people how I'd work with them. For me, love has been a huge part of flow. I fell in love with chess and I found flow in the self expression through an art form that I absolutely loved. And I think this is really important with children to find something that they feel connected to and that they can express themselves through. They can bring out the essence of their being through some art. And then there was tremendous competitive intensity. And of course stretching yourself to your limit is a huge part of, it's a very important precondition to flow. And I was always playing as people who are at my level or above. And so I was always stretched. And then I was integrating in my teenage years, sort of integrating meditation to my practice, right? So I got very good at increasing my somatic awareness, my physiological introspective sensitivity. I began to feel the subtle ripples of quality in my process. I could feel when I moved from a 9 or a 10 out of 10 down to a nine or an eight.”
2024-07-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #756: Anne Lamott and Josh Waitzkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But actually, it isn't life and death, right? And then when you're a professional fighter or martial artist, you can break arms and legs in a second if you're not in deep focus, or you can break your neck. But again, the stakes are, it's you out there. And then when you're a dad, it's a little bit different, right? And like when you're surfing or when you're rock climbing or whatever you're doing that's in an extreme state. So it's very important for me to be clear about the distinction between Felt like life and death as a chess player and what actually is life and death today.”
2024-07-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #756: Anne Lamott and Josh Waitzkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To put myself into a flow state. And this is an element of risk that I've been thinking about. It's different when you're 20 and 25 and 30 years old as a professional competitor or professional fighter. And then now I'm 39 years old, dad, which is the most important thing I've ever done in my life being a father, and I'm so committed to it. So I have to be quite cognizant of the distinction, for example, between Between risk competitively and risk mortally, when you're playing chess it feels like life and death. It really does feel like life and death. When you lose a chess game, it feels like you've been shattered on the most fundamental level. And so I was quite comfortable mixing it up profoundly, creating chaos, and I'd be willing to take those risks”
2024-07-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #756: Anne Lamott and Josh Waitzkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, right, attacking chess. And most players, you know, when they have a lot of pressure on them in the scholastic chess world, for example, it's true in many fields, they learn how to memorize their way to victory, right? They find shortcuts to getting good fast and controlling the game all the way. They're thinking about rating points. They think about rankings. They think about winning. They have parental pressures. They have school pressures. They have sometimes publicity pressures if they're doing well. So they want to control their way. I had a different approach. I like to mix it up. I grew up playing in Washington Square Park with the hustlers who taught me to battle. It fit my personality. And it was a core part of my competitive style to create chaos and find hidden harmonies and find flow in chaos. And as I've reflected on this in recent years, a big part of how I've dealt with stresses has been”
2024-07-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #756: Anne Lamott and Josh Waitzkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But I've been really sitting with this since I was a really young boy. I started playing chess when I was six years old. By the time I was seven, I was the top ranked player, so I had in the country. So I had all this pressure on me. And a big part of the way that I found my therapy was flow. Yeah, like when I was under huge pressure, external pressure for his little boy, you know, my style as a chess player was to create chaos. I loved the game. I loved the Battle of Chess.”
2024-07-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #756: Anne Lamott and Josh Waitzkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Risk. But of course, it's very important for me to be cognizant in a group risk, as we've discussed, it's important to be present at your own level and the level of everyone else around you. We can get into some of those.”
2024-07-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #756: Anne Lamott and Josh Waitzkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“First of all, how it's influenced my life in general is I've never lived with such a consistent sense of gratitude, beauty, and love in my life. It's just flowing through my body, presence to the exquisite little ripples of beauty and everything I do. And a sense of gratitude for the little things. It sounds cliched, but it's embodied, and I really feel it. And in terms of that's something I'm really grateful for, it's exquisite. You know, my little boy, my wife is pregnant, another son coming in June, and it's made me rethink these questions of risk. But on the other hand, it's been very important not to oversteer. I mean, one of the most important learning lessons that I've learned for myself and the training elite mental performers is people overseer all the time. They overcalibrate. And so I've been very careful to sit with this and try to draw the right lessons out of it and not the wrong, and not too big a lesson, and not too small a lesson. So, for example, this was a huge technical oversight I had. I didn't realize I was taking a big risk.”
2024-07-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #756: Anne Lamott and Josh Waitzkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I didn't take it in. I didn't take any water into my lungs, which is hugely fortunate because fresh water in the lungs can be terrible. So my lungs had no water in it pretty much. After they pulled me out, I was unconscious for 25 minutes. I was sort of breathing on my own, though. When I came to 25 minutes later, I was blue everywhere else. My body sent all the blood to my brain and my heart saved my life. And I'm here. And it was a life changer on a lot of levels. The idea of my four-year-old boy, four blocks away sitting on the rug waiting for daddy to come home and me on unconscious in the bottom of a pool blew. Just that's the kind of experience that is shattering.”
2024-07-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #756: Anne Lamott and Josh Waitzkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I think it was on my fourth 50 underwater. And this was after a long workout. And I went from this ecstatic state to unconsciousness. And I was actually on the bottom of the pool after blacking out from shallow water blackout for three minutes before someone pulled me out. And, you know, the doctors have told me usually it's 40 seconds to a minute to perhaps permanent brain damage death. I got very lucky. My body saved my life. And they said that if it hadn't been all the training I've done for so many years, I would have been gone.”
2024-07-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #756: Anne Lamott and Josh Waitzkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Training in moving meditation for ten, fifteen, twenty years, and then being an hour-long into a session. And you have this feeling of energetic flow inside your body. With the Wim Hoff, you do a few rounds of his breath method, and you're experiencing these things. And it was incredible. The gains in strength were mind-woggling, the length of the breath holds were fascinating. But then I made a big technical error. I ignored all the signs on Wim's site and that you spoke about do not do this in water, which is they were all over the place, but I thought free diving is a way of life for me, no problem. And the major technical error was not realizing, which is absurd after our lifetime of free diving, that it's carbon dioxide buildup that gives you the urge to breathe and not oxygen deprivation. Hugely important thing. Please everyone burn that in. And so I did the, after a long swim at the NYU pool a few months ago, I started doing that wim breathing and did a series of underwater swims. I did about eight, twenty-five”
2024-07-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #756: Anne Lamott and Josh Waitzkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It used to be three months when I was younger. Now it's about diving, usually about a month of the year, but I spent a lot of time now, as we know, surfing, sandupaddle surfing, swimming, diving. I mean, oceans are a huge part of my life. We got to talk about our stand-up paddle adventure, which are pretty hilarious. We'll definitely come to that. Timbo and I have been having some fun with that. But I started playing with the Wim Hoff method, and I thought it was incredibly powerful. The intensity that you're experiencing internally, it's very similar to”
2024-07-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #756: Anne Lamott and Josh Waitzkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I tend to, although I've had a lot of close calls in life. When I heard you speak to Wim, I was extremely intrigued. Actually, when I heard someone mention Wim to you on your podcast, and then we spoke about it and then you spoke to Wim, I thought he sounded like a fascinating guy. I started digging into his work. So powerful. And I started doing, he's going through his course, his online course. I loved it. I mean, the energetic feeling, the electric surging through the body. I'm also a lifetime free diver since I was four or five years old. I've been free diving. And so it just”
2024-07-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #756: Anne Lamott and Josh Waitzkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Wow, yeah, well had an extremely scary experience. So my lifetime meditator and kind of experimental subject like yourself around all these things, I”
2024-07-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #756: Anne Lamott and Josh Waitzkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, absolutely. I've loved, I've had some fun on your Slack line on Long Island too. I love right now I'm in the period I kind of oscillate between these and my son Jack who's four and a half we have a great time I'm on the Indo board rocking he's on the Bosu Ball we're having a catch back and forth while on these things we're always integrating these interesting kinds of physiological awareness training”
2024-07-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #756: Anne Lamott and Josh Waitzkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I didn't think we're going to begin here. It's a book that I explored a couple years ago. 20 years ago, I started studying Tibetan dream yoga and lucid dreaming. Not deeply, but exploring. And this was during the period where I was first getting involved with my study of East Asian philosophy. And then a dear friend of mine recommended this book. It's actually funny. We kind of made a mistake together. I recommended another book that he texted back confirming that it was the name. He texted me back that name that I didn't intend, but then I picked up and read, and it was extraordinary. It's just a phenomenal discussion, a very systematic discussion of the art of lucid dreaming, in this way that fuses East Asian philosophy with Western science.”
2024-07-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #756: Anne Lamott and Josh Waitzkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT