"Medium Raw", Josh Waitzkin, "Zero to One" - Thursday, September 12, 2019 2:53 PM
Subject: RE: The Maiyah-Don "Shoot the Sh*t" General Thread
If you guys know anybody else who’d like to join this fun thread full of musings and brain dead intellect, let me know.
Don’t worry, I’m aware nobody reads my afternoon emails on this thread. This thus allows me to ramble like a trash disposal.
HEY HEY HEY HAPPY HAPPY THURSDAY!!!
Finished Medium Raw. It was okay. 3/5 stars. I got bored three-quarters of the way through but I finished it. Nothing like Kitchen Confidential though.
This morning on my drive to work (to which I was late) had a certain feeling of emptiness, one where I realized I’m not listening to a book (because reading is for chumps ladies and gentlemen).
So I listened to the Tim Ferriss Show. I listened to an old episode that I’ve probably listened to about half a dozen times. He interviews Josh Waitzkin on How to Cram 2 Months of Learning Into 1 Day.
“From my perspective, the goal is unobstructed self-expression.”
— Josh Waitzkin
Josh Waitzkin, author of The Art of Learning, is an eight-time US National Chess Champion, a two-time World Champion in Tai Chi Chuan Push Hands, and the first Brazilian Jiu Jitsu Black Belt under nine-time World Champion Marcelo Garcia.
Below is the youtube link for the whole interview .
https://youtu.be/4r6gr7uytQA
Below is a chunk of the interview about getting into --THE ZONE—
Josh Waitzkin: I have experimented with a lot over the past decade. What I’ve come to focus on most deeply is heart rate variability. I have a brilliant HRV specialist, Dr. Leah Lagos on my team who works really closely with all of my teams. She does HRV training — if I’m working with a team of top decision makers, for example — with everyone on the team, ideally.
HRV is a really powerful way of training someone to get into a state of deep concentration, relax, deep concentration away from stress very quickly. And then tracking people’s HRV, tracking people’s sleep patterns. We, of course, also track nutritional patterns, physical training patterns.
For me, it’s really interesting to just — I don’t like bringing technology out into the water very much, but from time to time I do and just track wave time, heart rate in different situations. I had a really interesting period a month and a half ago where I was foiling this big wave that I’ve discovered an offshore reef break. It’s sort of like a non-stop drop. It just keeps on going. It mounts up and then you’re just accelerating for 30 seconds straight.
Your body has this innate physiological…it feels like an evolutionary response to bail out, because you’re going so fast, you’re accelerating and your body wants to jump out. I started doing HRV breathing to my resonant frequency while accelerating down this wave.
Tim Ferriss: Can you just explain what that means to your resonant frequency, what does that mean?
Josh Waitzkin: Everyone has a unique resonant frequency. If you’re doing heart rate variability breathing, and you’re breathing to your resonant frequency, it’ll maximum to your unique frequency in your physiology. It will have the biggest impact in raising alpha waves, relaxing your body, moving you from a stress state to a deep state of relaxation.
The ideal way to train HRV is to work with a brilliant specialist and find out what your frequency is and then do breath work 20 minutes twice a day at that rhythm. Over time, it’s incredible what it can do. You get to a place where you can just take a breath and be in resonance. I did a lot of meditation work for years before this, and lot of trigger work before this. With HRV, I found that —
Tim Ferriss: What was that?
Josh Waitzkin: Trigger work.
Tim Ferriss: Trigger work, what’s that?
Josh Waitzkin: Trigger work would be essentially using something like a song, like Lose Yourself, Eminem song. One thing I started doing decades ago would be getting myself into a peak performance state and then attaching a trigger to it, like a song or a scent. So then ultimately, I could, as I was doing a 30-minute or 40-minute routine, which I might have had to do back in the chess days, being able to listen to a couple of beats of a song or smell something or take a breath and enter into a peak performance state.
I learned this lesson from a lot of years in competition where you can’t predict when you’re actually going to have to fight. I remember going to a world championship in 2000 when I knew I was going to — long story we have not discussed before. But long story short, I thought I would have a 30-minute warning before I competed, and then — this is in a world championship in Taiwan — everything changed. I was eating lunch and then they changed the rhythm and I had to compete like one minute later.
It really taught me I had to learn how to enter a peak performance state with a breath, instantly. HRV is really powerful. I’ve been playing with it in this steep wave. It’s fascinating how quickly it takes me from the state of needing to bail to just complete calm while making that steep drop. Then your baseline rises and then you can keep on just getting acclimatized in more intense conditions.
Tim Ferriss: What type of tools do you use for tracking these days — HRV, that is? Do you have a preferred tool for —
Josh Waitzkin: Dr. Lagos has experimented with a lot of things. That’s her terrain. I’ve played with a lot of different tools. I haven’t actually found it to be perfectly frank, the software that I think is A++. I’m thinking about building some of my own. But I don’t at this point feel like there’s the ideal peak performance training HRV software out there, for a bunch of reasons. Nothing has exactly what I want.
Below are all the links he references in the whole interview:
The Art of Learning: An Inner Journey to Optimal Performance by Josh Waitzkin
David Geffen Hall at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, New York City
Macho Duck, Mickey Mouse Disco
Lose Yourself by Eminem
Josh Waitzkin’s Push Hands Videos, Content Galaxy
Learning How to SUP Surf, Adventure Sports Network
eFoil, Lift
Heart Rate Variability: A New Way to Track Well-Being, Harvard Health Publishing
Resonant Frequency Training in Elite Sport: A Case Study Example, Journal of Sport Psychology in Action
Building Your Trigger, The Art of Learning Project
The Relationship Between Mental and Somatic Practices and Wisdom, PLoS One
Dom D’Agostino on Fasting, Ketosis, and the End of Cancer, The Tim Ferriss Show #117
Molar Concentration, Wikipedia
A New Theory of Distraction, The New Yorker
Daniel Pink — How to Make Better Decisions and Be More Creative, The Tim Ferriss Show #305
Making Smaller Circles, The Art of Learning Project
Seven Tips From Ernest Hemingway on How to Write Fiction, Open Culture
Marcelo Garcia Academy, New York City
20 Years of Mundial, BJJ Heroes
This is Water by David Foster Wallace
I started listening to this morning Zero to One by Peter Thiel, founder of Paypal and first investor of Facebook, Google, SpaceX, etc.
Below is a small excerpt on a very important question. Enjoy:
THE CHALLENGE OF THE FUTURE
WHENEVER I INTERVIEW someone for a job, I like to ask this question: “What important truth do very few people agree with you on?”
This question sounds easy because it’s straightforward. Actually, it’s very hard to answer. It’s intellectually difficult because the knowledge that everyone is taught in school is by definition agreed upon. And it’s psychologically difficult because anyone trying to answer must say something she knows to be unpopular. Brilliant thinking is rare, but courage is in even shorter supply than genius.
Most commonly, I hear answers like the following:
“Our educational system is broken and urgently needs to be fixed.”
“America is exceptional.”
“There is no God.”
Those are bad answers. The first and the second statements might be true, but many people already agree with them. The third statement simply takes one side in a familiar debate. A good answer takes the following form: “Most people believe in x, but the truth is the opposite of x.” I’ll give my own answer later in this chapter.
What does this contrarian question have to do with the future? In the most minimal sense, the future is simply the set of all moments yet to come. But what makes the future distinctive and important isn’t that it hasn’t happened yet, but rather that it will be a time when the world looks different from today. In this sense, if nothing about our society changes for the next 100 years, then the future is over 100 years away. If things change radically in the next decade, then the future is nearly at hand. No one can predict the future exactly, but we know two things: it’s going to be different, and it must be rooted in today’s world. Most answers to the contrarian question are different ways of seeing the present; good answers are as close as we can come to looking into the future.
Best,
Don Rutledge | Accounts Payable | LIONSGATE