#73: A Chess Prodigy on Mastering Martial Arts, Chess, and Life

Tim Ferriss (0:06)

Can I ask you a personal question?

Josh Waitzkin (0:08)

Now is the inappropriate time.

Tim Ferriss (0:24)

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You'll receive up to a year's supply of vitamin D and five free travel packs with your subscription. Again, that's athleticgreens.com/tfs, as in Tim Ferris Show, athleticgreens.com/tfs. This episode is brought to you by Five Bullet Friday, my very own email newsletter. It's become one of the most popular email newsletters in the world with millions of subscribers. And it's super, super simple. It does not clog up your inbox. Every Friday, I send out five bullet points, super short of the coolest things I found that week, which sometimes includes apps, books, documentaries, supplements, gadgets, new self experiments, hacks, tricks, and all sorts of weird stuff that I dig up from around the world. You guys, podcast listeners and book readers, have asked me for something short and action packed for a very long time, because after all the podcasts, the books, they can be quite long. And that's why I created Five Bullet Friday.

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And thanks for checking it out. If the spirit moves you. Hello, you sexy little munchkins. This is Tim Ferris and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show where I deconstruct world-class performers, whether they are billionaire investors, celebrities like Arnold Schwarzenegger, musicians or for instance, chess prodigies.

And this episode is a much-awaited, much-requested follow-up to my second podcast, the number two of The Tim Ferris Show with Josh Waitzkin, who is a close friend of mine. He was the basis for the book and the movie, Searching for Bobby Fischer. He is considered a chess prodigy, but I don't think that word prodigy applies to him very well. Because it's not a mutation, he doesn't have alien genetics. He has perfected instead learning strategies and frameworks that can be applied to anything, including some of his other loves, like Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, in which he's a black belt under the phenom Marcelo Garcia, considered the Michael Jordan of the sport, and oftentimes called the best grappler to ever walk the planet.