Josh Waitzkin — Chess prodigy depicted in the film Searching for Bobby Fischer, later a Brazilian jiu-jitsu black belt under Marcelo Garcia, author of The Art of Learning, and a performance coach who works with elite athletes, investors and the Boston Celtics. He now lives by the ocean and trains obsessively at hydrofoiling.
The gist
Waitzkin and Rogan trace a single thread across chess, jiu-jitsu, surfing and foiling: the real virtuosity lives in transitions and in the humility to take your weaknesses on. Josh recounts how the movie about his childhood threw him into self-consciousness, why he walked away from chess, and the back injury that ended his jiu-jitsu career. The back half turns to AI: Josh argues that just as AlphaZero crushed all human chess in three hours, super-intelligence will soon out-think humanity at everything, leaving us as 'the ant relative to the human.' He warns that the path to any AI utopia will be brutally disruptive, that social media already makes us trivially manipulable, and that the only defense is cultivating a beginner's mind, accountability, and a grounded feedback loop in some truth-telling arena.
Big reveals
- Waitzkin ruptured his L4-L5 disc during half-guard position sparring a week before his son was born, ending his all-in jiu-jitsu career.
- He recounts drowning in an NYU pool from shallow-water blackout after Wim Hof breathing, spending over four minutes unconscious at the bottom before an old man pulled him out blue.
- Says there was no near-death vision, just blackness then waking up, and that he got back in the water the next day to refuse a trauma response.
- Claims that years later, in breath-work 'DMT' journeys, he saw the entire drowning from above.
- Reveals DeepMind founder Demis Hassabis was his childhood chess friend, and that AlphaZero became stronger than any human or computer in three hours of self-play.
- Describes his coaching method as 99% listening, refusing to impose a formula because genius and dysfunction are entangled.
- Says he has no plan B and has never loved any art more than foiling.
- Recounts a 10-11 foot crocodile surfacing inches from him during a dawn surf, his skin lighting up with 'prehistoric danger' before he escaped.
Things worth remembering
- Lomachenko's father made him stop boxing for two years to study Ukrainian dance, building his legendary footwork.
- Searching for Bobby Fischer, the book, was written by Josh's father when Josh was 11; Josh hated the movie when it first came out.
- Marcelo Garcia never studied opponents' tape and is a 'low rep learner' who can master a technique from a single repetition.
- Marcelo Garcia rode fixed-gear bikes with no brakes all over New York City traffic.
- The strongest AI chess engine is rated about 3,700 ELO versus roughly 2,800 for the human world champion.
- Robert Epstein's research suggests curated search results can sway 30-50% of undecided voters.
- A spy once told Josh a strong AI armed with social-media data could convince 99% of Americans to move to Antarctica within two weeks.
- Crocodiles don't die of old age and keep growing, so historically 40-foot specimens may have been real.
- Josh's decision-making practice: write down each decision and your reasons, then review weeks later and let go if the reasons no longer hold.