#319 – Botez Sisters: Chess, Streaming, and Fame

Alexandra and Andrea Botez are chess players, commentators, educators, entertainers, and streamers. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: – Calm: https://calm.com/lex to get 40% off premium – Weights & Biases: https://lexfridman.com/wnb – BiOptimizers: http://www.magbreakthrough.com/lex to get 10% off – InsideTracker: https://insidetracker.com/lex to get 20% off – Indeed: https://indeed.com/lex to get $75 credit EPISODE LINKS: BotezLive Twitch: https://twitch.tv/botezlive BotezLive YouTube: https://youtube.com/c/BotezLive BotezLive Instagram: https://instagram.com/botezlive Alexandra’s Instagram: https://instagram.com/missbotez Andrea’s Instagram: https://instagram.com/itsandreabotez Alexandra’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/alexandravbotez Andrea’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/itsandreabotez ChessBase: https://chessbase.com/post/the-carlsen-niemann-affair PODCAST INFO: Podcast website: https://lexfridman.com/podcast Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8 RSS: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/ YouTube Full Episodes: https://youtube.com/lexfridman YouTube Clips: https://youtube.com/lexclips SUPPORT & CONNECT: – Check out the sponsors above, it’s the best way to support this podcast – Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/lexfridman – Twitter: https://twitter.com/lexfridman – Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lexfridman – LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lexfridman – Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lexfridman – Medium: https://medium.com/@lexfridman OUTLINE: Here’s the timestamps for the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time. (00:00) – Introduction (10:15) – Trip to Italy (17:16) – Chess tournaments (22:03) – Streaming (34:07) – Chess strategies (54:33) – King’s Indian Defense (1:12:33) – Chess training (1:16:59) – Losing (1:20:18) – Street chess and trash talk (1:25:07) – Passion and study (1:43:00) – Loneliness and depression (2:07:49) – Andrew Tate (2:16:32) – Greatest chess player of all time (2:19:07) – Magnus Carlsen (2:28:17) – Advice for young people (2:30:10) – Chess boxing (2:39:04) – Meaning of life (2:40:09) – Love

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Lex Fridman?

  The following is a conversation with Alexandra and Andrea Botez. They're sisters, professional chess players, commentators, educators, entertainers, and streamers. Their channel is called Botez Live on Twitch and YouTube. I highly recommend you check it out. A small side note about the currently ongoing controversy in the chess world, where the 19-year-old grandmaster Hans Niemann beat Magnus Carlsen at the Sinkfield Cup. After this, Magnus, for the first time ever, withdrew from the tournament, implying with a tweet that there may have been cheating, or at least something shady going on. Folks like the grandmaster Hikaru Nakamura fanned the flames of cheating accusations,

• 0:42Lex Fridman?

  and the internet made a bunch of proposals on how the cheating could have been done, and it ranged from the ridiculous to the hilarious, often both. Hans himself came out and said that he has cheated before when he was 12 and 16 on random online games to jack up his rating. But he said that he has never cheated in person over the board. Danny Wrench from chess.com, who I've spoken with, may make a statement in response to Hans's claims soon. Folks like grandmaster Yakub Luga spoke to his experience training Hans Niemann, and has said that his memory and intuition were quite brilliant. So as you see, there's a lot of perspectives on this.

• 1:26Lex Fridman?

  Chessbase has a good summary of the saga that I'll link in the description. Also note that this is so quickly moving that new stuff might come out between me recording this and publishing the episode. But I thought I'd mention this anyway, since the episode with the Botez sisters is a conversation about chess and was recorded shortly before the controversy, so we didn't talk about it. I'm considering having Hans on this podcast, and also Magnus back on the podcast, and maybe others like Hikaru, or folks from chess.com's anti-cheat staff to discuss their really interesting cheating detection algorithms. But I may also just stay out of it.

• 2:07Lex Fridman?

  I find chess to be a beautiful game, and the chess community full of fascinating, brilliant people. And so I'll keep having conversations like these about chess. It's fun. My goal with this podcast and in general as a human being is to increase the amount of love in the world. Sometimes that involves celebrating brilliance and beauty, in science, in art, in chess. Sometimes it involves empathetic conversations with controversial figures that seek to understand, not deride. Sometimes it involves standing against the internet lynch mob, as the chessbase article calls it, to hear the story of a human being

• 2:48Lex Fridman?

  who is under attack, even if it means I get attacked in the process as well. And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. We've got Calm for meditation, Weights and Biases for machine learning, Bi, Optimizers for health, Insight Tracker for longevity, and indeed for hiring. Choose wisely, my friends. And now on to the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle. I try to make this interesting, but if you skip them, please still check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too.

• 3:26Lex Fridman?

  This show is brought to you by Calm, a meditation and mental wellness app. Over 100 million people around the world use Calm to take care of their minds. I recently talked to John Varveki on this podcast, and we talked quite a lot on mic and off mic about meditation and mindfulness. And just in general, the relationship between the mind and the environment, nature, the universe. Calming the mind opens you up to experience this world in a deeper way. Ability to control the mind such that you can focus in your breath, focus on the

• 4:08Lex Fridman?

  simplicity of a stream of thoughts, allows you to then direct that focus to anything you want and filter out anything you don't want. You can get a discount on Palm's premium subscription, which includes hundreds of hours of programming. I love it frankly, and you might want to check it out at calm.com/lex, spelled by the way, C-A-L-M.com/lex.

• 4:37Lex Fridman?

  This show is also brought to you by one of my favorite sponsors, Weights and Biases, the company helping machine learning teams build better models faster. I think they also sponsor a few really amazing people in the machine learning community. I think, I might be wrong on this, but I think they sponsor the Two Minute Papers channel on YouTube, which if you don't know about, I highly recommend. Also, machine learning street talk, I think they sponsor. If they don't, they should. Whether they sponsor them or not, it doesn't matter. They're amazing. And Weights and Biases is amazing for that exact reason. They really support the community. But the reason I love them, the reason the community loves them, is that they create amazing tools for the task of machine learning.

• 5:19Lex Fridman?

  So you can debug, compare, reproduce models and architectures, hyperparameters. You can do version control on all aspects of that, including the weights of the model. Looking at the GPU usage, compute usage, you can do data sets and predictions and collaborate with teammates on all aspects of that. So it's your own personal place for all things machine learning, but more importantly, it's for collaboration and team approach to collaborative research and development in the machine learning space. And they don't just support the machine learning research community spiritually. They walk the talk. Their tools are free for personal use and their Teams feature is available for free for academic

• 6:03Lex Fridman?

  researchers. Companies like OpenAI, Nvidia, iRobot, now acquired by Amazon, and more use Weights and Biases tools every day to build their models. Join over 200,000 machine learning engineers and data scientists when you sign up at lexfridman.com/wnb. The next sponsor is by Optimizers, that have a new magnesium supplement. When I fast or I'm doing keto or carnivore, all the electrolytes, sodium, potassium, magnesium are essential. And magnesium is, at least to me, the tricky one to get right, especially when I'm doing long fasts. That was the one. That if I don't get right, I feel kind of shitty.

• 6:46Lex Fridman?

  So I like it when supplements make it easy to make sure you don't screw things up. Their magnesium breakthrough supplement contains seven different forms of magnesium. I listen to my body and I study what diets work, what don't in terms of physical performance, mental performance, all that kind of stuff. I think that's really important to learn because we all are different in very interesting ways. When you fast or you're doing keto, I think some people can have a really poor experience if they don't do it well. I think water and electrolytes is a big part of doing it well. In the early days, trying it seriously, I think that's really important.

• 7:25Lex Fridman?

  Get a special discount at www.magbreakthrough.com/lex. This show is also brought to you by InsideTracker, a service I use to track biological data, as I mentioned. And one of the things I'm really excited about in the application of machine learning in the 21st century is that we would be collecting data from our body and mind and using that data in combination with machine learning algorithms to give recommendations for how we should live life. Now, if that concerns you in terms of privacy questions and so on, it should and you should hold anyone that has any access to your data highly responsible in terms of respecting your privacy.

• 8:09Lex Fridman?

  And I think that's one of the things we'll do in the 21st century is promote and only give our money to companies that respect your privacy and give you control over your data. But that data does hold the key to better understanding yourself, especially when you're talking about biological data and InsideTracker is at the cutting edge of doing just that. So I'm really excited about just the very idea of it and of course their implementation of it. I get special savings for a limited time when you go to inside tracker.com/lex. This show is brought to you by Indeed, a hiring website. I've used them a bunch of times. Basically, for every single effort I've ever done for the teams I've led in the past,

• 8:53Lex Fridman?

  the teams I currently lead or I'm a part of, or so on, I use them. You gotta use the best tools for the job. It's really the most, one of the most important things in this life is the people you surround yourself with. And I'm currently actually looking for all kinds of different people. If you're interested in that kind of thing, by the way, go to lexfridman.com/hiring. And that's mostly for the podcast, the creative efforts we're doing. Anyway, outside of actually getting anything done, just surrounding yourself with cool people, with people that make you excited to get up in the morning and face the day, the people that give your life meaning and happiness. And that's so, so, so important. So use whatever tools you can and the best tools you can.

• 9:37Lex Fridman?

  And Indeed is one of them. I highly recommend it. They have a special offer only available for a limited time. Check it out at indeed.com/lex. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Alexandra and Andrea Botes.

• 10:15Lex Fridman?

  You just got back from Italy. What's the most memorable thing? I was just there recently as well.

• 10:20Speaker 01

  It was very chaotic because we went out on a whim and we only had our first hotel booked. And then we rented a car and drove around all of the cities and went to like five different cities in about a week and a bit. So I think it was just the variety of seeing so many different places when we're used to being at home all the time. And Andrea, is yours, your luggage?

• 10:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, I would say it was the most stressful vacation we've been in, in our life. And it was a valuable learning lesson because now I know how to be prepared for trips. But we lost our bags and I never got them back. And like Lex said, we didn't know where we'd be sleeping every night. And we're just driving through a new city with a giant van in the most narrowest streets with, and getting in many, many fights with Italian men. So it wasn't really a vacation.

• 11:07Speaker 01

  I saw this motion so many times.

• 11:10Lex Fridman?

  Wasn't it liberating to lose your baggage?

• 11:12Speaker 02

  Actually, it was liberating. My entire life, I've always had the issue of overpacking.

• 11:18Speaker 01

  And I told her before the trip, Andrea, you're gonna pack light, right? Yeah, Alex, yeah. And then I see her stuffing her overweight suitcase.

• 11:25Speaker 02

  We both had giant, big, extra baggage that we didn't need. And I'm actually very glad we lost it because for Venice, hauling that around on all the boats and through the tiny streets and there's no Ubers. And now it's the first time where I can travel without checking in a bag, which I've never done before. So now I've learned what it means to pack light because I saw that I could survive off of just my, it sounds very dramatic, but it was really a big learning lesson for me.

• 11:50Lex Fridman?

  The driving must have been crazy because driving in Italy is rough.

• 11:54Speaker 01

  The driving was crazy. I did most of it and it would be really interesting driving through places like Florence or even through the beach areas that were super windy. Because there are two-way streets that should really only be one-way. So you'd be driving this huge van and then another car comes on a cliff and you're just waiting for it to slowly pass. So it took all of my focus and concentration to drive well in Italy. But it was actually really relaxing because the hardest thing about making a lot of videos online is you're always thinking about it, what's coming next? And when we were in Italy, it was so chaotic that I did not think about work for a good week and a bit.

• 12:35Lex Fridman?

  Oh, because you're just.

• 12:36Speaker 02

  We were stressed.

• 12:37Speaker 01

  I was just trying to keep us alive. It seemed a higher priority.

• 12:40Lex Fridman?

  And that was kind of fun.

• 12:41Speaker 01

  It was kind of fun.

• 12:43Lex Fridman?

  No planning, nothing.

• 12:44Speaker 02

  I wouldn't recommend it or ever do that again, but.

• 12:49Lex Fridman?

  It sounds, it sounds pretty awesome.

• 12:50Speaker 01

  And we even randomly ran into two friends of ours who were in the same city and we just traveled with them for about half of the trip.

• 12:57Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, so you just took on the chaos.

• 12:59Speaker 01

  Exactly, it was an adventure.

• 13:01Lex Fridman?

  Okay, and I see like, because you were using your hands a lot, you gotten, you picked up some of the Italian hand gestures.

• 13:07Speaker 01

  I did, we did get yelled at by a lot of Italians. The old Italian grandmas would come to us after breakfast because we'd leave something on the plate and she'd be like, you could feed an entire village with that. Tell your friends and we'd be, we'd feel so ashamed.

• 13:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, we got cursed out a lot, but it really reminded me of where we grew up.

• 13:24Speaker 01

  That's true.

• 13:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, bring back those.

• 13:26Lex Fridman?

  Where'd you grow up?

• 13:27Speaker 02

  Oh, we're Romanian, but it was like an immigrant neighborhood.

• 13:31Speaker 01

  In Canada.

• 13:32Speaker 02

  So, you know, same, if you don't finish your plate, that's disrespectful to the people who made the food.

• 13:38Lex Fridman?

  How's the food in Italy? I feel like the carbs thing is too intense.

• 13:42Speaker 02

  Very, yeah, I think very overrated, in my opinion.

• 13:44Speaker 01

  So I'm actually not supposed to eat gluten because I have an allergy.

• 13:48Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 13:49Speaker 01

  But I was in Italy and it's, you know, gluten galore. So I was actually eating a lot of it and it was very interesting because I didn't get sick while I was in Italy, but I do while I'm in the US. So somehow the food was actually maybe more okay for me to digest, which I appreciated, but I didn't like it as much as I thought. Did you like the food there?

• 14:09Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, no, I did, I did, I love carbs, but it's, um,

• 14:16Lex Fridman?

  it's, it feels like Vegas when I, when I go there for the food is like, if I stay here too long, I'm going to do things I regret. That's what it feels like with the food.

• 14:26Speaker 01

  Right.

• 14:26Lex Fridman?

  Because I don't know how to moderate and everybody is pushing very large portions and wild kind of eating things on you. Pasta, pizza and it's so, and bread.

• 14:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:37Lex Fridman?

  So delicious, so, yeah, I, I love it, but I regret everything. So it's like, I don't want to, I don't want to go to a place where I'm going to regret everything I do.

• 14:47Speaker 01

  That's reasonable.

• 14:48Lex Fridman?

  For too long of a time.

• 14:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, surprisingly, the people there though are still very fit and everyone stays in good shape, but that's probably because you're walking around all day and you're much more active than in the US.

• 14:58Lex Fridman?

  And they also just know how to moderate food. I think I've gotten used to the US way of eating.

• 15:03Speaker 01

  The US portions.

• 15:04Speaker 02

  What is that?

• 15:05Lex Fridman?

  Just a lot, never, always a lot.

• 15:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:09Lex Fridman?

  And more.

• 15:10Speaker 01

  And I feel in the US, food advertisements are also much more in your face and you're more often reminded of junk food than we were in Italy. So even though we were eating less healthy things, I think we were getting cravings and being pushed towards junk food less often.

• 15:27Lex Fridman?

  All right, I gotta ask you a hard question. So the romance languages, so I think French is up there as like number one.

• 15:34Speaker 01

  Number one in terms of.

• 15:36Lex Fridman?

  I don't know.

• 15:37Speaker 02

  Who's ranking them?

• 15:40Lex Fridman?

  You guys speak Italian or no?

• 15:41Speaker 01

  Not Italian, but we studied French and Spanish in school. And Romanian.

• 15:46Lex Fridman?

  I feel like every country calls their language a romance language.

• 15:49Speaker 01

  No, but it's Romanian, French, Spanish, Portuguese. And I think there was one more that was like this dialect, but those are considered the romance languages.

• 15:59Lex Fridman?

  Okay, so where would you put Italian?

• 16:01Speaker 01

  I think we got yelled at so much in Italian that it's not gonna be allowed.

• 16:07Lex Fridman?

  So it wasn't working.

• 16:07Speaker 02

  It's on the bottom of the list because people did not use it nicely to us.

• 16:11Speaker 01

  But I always really liked how French sounds.

• 16:16Speaker 01

  I think something about it where maybe Spanish actually sounds nicer to the ears, but French has more character and it feels more sultry. So I like French.

• 16:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, that was my answer too.

• 16:26Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 16:27Lex Fridman?

  Sultry, okay.

• 16:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:30Lex Fridman?

  I feel like French in France, I feel like I'm always being judged. Like they're better than me. That's what French.

• 16:37Speaker 01

  They are better than us.

• 16:40Lex Fridman?

  This is so true.

• 16:42Lex Fridman?

  Which is why, you know, yeah, I long to belong to that. I like the British accent.

• 16:48Speaker 01

  The British accent?

• 16:49Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 16:49Speaker 01

  Actually, one thing we did on our Italian trip is we just picked up British accents for the entire trip for fun. And we forgot we were doing them to the point where we talked to British people and they'd ask us, why are you talking like that? We just couldn't stop.

• 17:03Speaker 02

  I did feel much more elegant and mature.

• 17:06Speaker 01

  That's true.

• 17:07Speaker 02

  People like, you know, I don't know if they felt the same way about us, but it was more of, you know, the confidence.

• 17:12Speaker 01

  You do feel like you're more poised for sure.

• 17:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 17:16Lex Fridman?

  So how'd you guys get into chess? When, when did you first, let's say, when did you first fall in love with chess?

• 17:24Speaker 01

  So we both started playing when we were pretty young, around six years old. That's when our dad taught us. And I enjoyed playing chess because I had good results early on. But a lot of it was being pushed from my dad to play chess. And I only really started loving it when we moved from Canada and we started moving a lot. And chess was the one stable thing that I had. And it was also where all of my friends were. So it was kind of that foundational thing for me. And that's when I started studying chess very intensely. And when I started putting in the hours out of my own will and not because I was being pushed by my dad, that's when I started really loving it. And I even wanted to take time off college to just focus on chess.

• 18:05Lex Fridman?

  So training and competing?

• 18:07Speaker 01

  Training and competing, yeah. It was when I was doing it for myself that I started getting my best results.

• 18:13Lex Fridman?

  And actually enjoying the thing?

• 18:15Speaker 01

  And really enjoying it, yeah. I would spend summer vacation studying for tournaments and my mom would come and say, "You need to make friends, go leave the house." And I'd be like, "No, I need to play chess." And I remember those moments.

• 18:28Lex Fridman?

  That you rebelled by playing chess?

• 18:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 18:31Lex Fridman?

  How did you get into it?

• 18:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, my experience with loving in high school is very opposite from Alex's. But right, my sister was playing and my dad taught me when I was also six.

• 18:40Speaker 01

  Andrea was cool in high school, unlike me.

• 18:42Lex Fridman?

  You were.

• 18:43Speaker 02

  I wouldn't say cool, I'd say more balance and I was interested in other hobbies. In my childhood, if I ever really did love chess, there's certainly moments about like traveling and being together with my family and spending those moments together. But those were more the social and the experiences. But funny enough, like I think my happiest moment where I really played the game for my own enjoyment was probably my most recent tournament. Because this was after, obviously, we've been streaming and I'm no longer in high school. But when I was in school, I was always playing for college and for the results, trying to build a resume. So I was too stressed out about the pressure to really enjoy the game. Whereas when I just played my first tournament, so it was like after like a two-year break because of the pandemic.

• 19:28Speaker 02

  And it was also all live on Twitch, so there was some pressure. But it was the first time that like I was really eager to study for the game, sitting and focusing since we've been streaming and not getting distracted by something else in years, like I said. And the tournament experience, I hit my highest rating and it was my best tournament ever. And I think most of that is because it came from my own enjoyment.

• 19:50Lex Fridman?

  So you didn't enjoy the domination because I think you like did really well, right? This is like a couple of months ago.

• 19:56Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, yeah, the tournament. Well, of course, I think the results came from enjoying the tournament. Because I would be in high school, like studying double, triple the amount of time, like six hours every day compared to this tournament. I didn't even prepare for it. And for three years, I wouldn't be able to pass one rating. Whereas in this one tournament, I passed it by like seventy points without even any preparation. So it was, I think, as soon as you stop worrying about the competition is when the games get much better.

• 20:21Lex Fridman?

  What does it mean to pass a rating?

• 20:22Speaker 02

  So I was stuck at nineteen hundred.

• 20:24Speaker 01

  Nineteen hundred is a hundred points off of expert.

• 20:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 20:28Speaker 01

  Usually when you reach two thousand, you're considered an expert, which is the rating Andrea was going for.

• 20:33Lex Fridman?

  Okay, expert, that's a good technical term or that's like a talking trash?

• 20:37Speaker 01

  It's more of a colloquial term where if somebody's around a two thousand, you're playing them in a tournament. They won't have the actual title next to their name, but you say, I'm playing an expert.

• 20:45Lex Fridman?

  What about like the more official things like master? Does that have to do with rating or something?

• 20:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, so national master in the US is when you're twenty two hundred.

• 20:54Lex Fridman?

  Okay, and what's international master?

• 20:56Speaker 01

  International master is based off of a different system, the FIDE system, which is international. To be an international master, it's twenty four hundred and you have to have three international master norms.

• 21:08Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I think Magnus said he's twenty eight, six, something.

• 21:12Speaker 01

  That was, yeah.

• 21:13Lex Fridman?

  And then he said, that's pretty decent.

• 21:15Speaker 01

  Well, he always talks.

• 21:17Lex Fridman?

  But see, the thing is, I think what he meant is that's a decent rating because it accurately captures his actual level. So it's, it's not overinflated or underinflated and so on. And so the discussion there was how do you get to, can a human being get to twenty nine hundred? And then he says, because my current rating is pretty decent, representing my skill level, it's gonna be a long road to actually get there.

• 21:42Speaker 01

  Right.

• 21:42Lex Fridman?

  Because it's like, so you have to beat people at your same level. That's how the number increases.

• 21:46Speaker 02

  Exactly. Yeah.

• 21:48Lex Fridman?

  And you beat a bunch of people in the tournament, right? That are higher than your level.

• 21:52Speaker 02

  I got very lucky. I was playing, I was really nervous because my category was like two hundred points above my rating. And of course, I was very rusty and I didn't play in a tournament in a while, but it went pretty well.

• 22:04Lex Fridman?

  Do you feel the pressure when you're actually recording it, like the streaming?

• 22:07Speaker 02

  It was definitely, so before every round, I was vlogging and I was doing meet and greets and doing other things for the

• 22:15Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I saw you doing a meet and greet. You didn't know what the hell you're doing. It's great.

• 22:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 22:20Lex Fridman?

  Like, what am I, how do I do this?

• 22:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, I see.

• 22:22Lex Fridman?

  What do I do?

• 22:23Speaker 02

  It was actually really wholesome. The beginning was very silly because I was just not expecting that it was going to be more of a seminar. I thought it was like, oh, you pose and take pictures. But they actually asked really nice, meaningful questions. But unfortunately, it's bad for YouTube retention and we cut them all out, so.

• 22:39Lex Fridman?

  Bad for YouTube? The good, long-form conversations. So it was like questions, Q and A type of thing?

• 22:44Speaker 02

  Exactly. You have to have very fast-paced for YouTube and that seminar was not fast-paced.

• 22:50Lex Fridman?

  Okay. Well, not everything in life needs to be on YouTube, right?

• 22:53Speaker 02

  That's true.

• 22:53Lex Fridman?

  There's like two parallel things, stuff that's fun for YouTube.

• 22:56Speaker 02

  Yes. One day we'll post that Q and A.

• 22:59Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, when you guys like, when you become like ultra-famous, you're currently just regular famous.

• 23:04Speaker 02

  And then they'll appreciate the long, slow content, yes.

• 23:08Lex Fridman?

  And that, the YouTube aspect, the creation aspect, does that add to the fun ultimately of chess, of like your love of chess?

• 23:16Speaker 02

  Oh, for the love of chess in general or just for competing in that one tournament?

• 23:20Lex Fridman?

  No, love of chess in general. I, I think you said that for competing for that tournament is adding pressure.

• 23:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, but actually I would say like a good pressure. But yeah, this is where I differed to Alex because when I was just competitive and I was younger, I don't think I loved chess as much as when I started doing it for content because unlike her, who a lot of her friends and social circle were other chess players, I never really traveled and built really solid friendships through chess until I started streaming and meeting other chess streamers and actually playing and talking to people for fun rather than just always being alone in the game and never really meeting other people my age or people with similar interests. So I would say Twitch was the thing that really changed how I approached the game.

• 24:03Lex Fridman?

  I think with, uh, with some YouTubers, there's a pressure to be almost somebody else. You create a persona and you're stuck in that persona. I think, um, I'm too

• 24:14Lex Fridman?

  I'm too much of a boomer to know what the hell Twitch is anyway. But it feels like when you're actually live streaming, you can't help but be who you really are.

• 24:22Speaker 02

  I think it's, oh, well, I think when you're live streaming, and I've talked to a lot of other streamers about this, you kind of just over-exaggerate one side of your personality. And of course, it's kind of like being on all the time. Like, you're trying to be more entertaining. And sometimes you're being sillier at moments or more, you take what character traits like people know you for. And for me, one is being like ADHD and the younger sibling who's very energetic and causes trouble, even though sometimes it's a little sweet.

• 24:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm sure you cause trouble just for the camera.

• 24:52Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, right?

• 24:53Speaker 02

  I think, yeah, I think, and of course, once you're live streaming for like four or five hours, there's gonna be moments in the stream where it's more chill. But especially when you're editing that content or you're doing bigger streams that are shorter, you are kind of playing up a side of yourself. Because of course, there's a lot of parts of me that I don't show to the camera because they're not as entertaining to watch. Like, the more serious part.

• 25:16Speaker 01

  And also, there's things that you are really interested in about what you do. Like, I love competitive chess where I could sit and really think about it. But I know that that is not gonna be as entertaining for a stream. I know that's not gonna be as entertaining for YouTube. So you kind of have to take what you like, but then really adapt it for whatever the format is. And sometimes that feels inauthentic. But other times, it just feels like repackaging what you love for people in a more general audience to enjoy.

• 25:45Lex Fridman?

  Do you feel like it's a trap a little bit as you evolve? Like, uh...

• 25:49Speaker 01

  Oh, I think social media is, oh, sorry, go ahead.

• 25:52Lex Fridman?

  Social media in general is a trap of that, of that kind?

• 25:55Speaker 01

  Well, so we've been trying to switch to learn how to make YouTube videos recently. And so much of learning YouTube school is kind of the beastification of content, where you try to get to the point of the video within like the first 10 seconds to not lose people.

• 26:11Lex Fridman?

  Beastification, you mean like Mr. Beast?

• 26:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:13Lex Fridman?

  Okay.

• 26:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, where it's so fast-paced, there's a reason to wait, there's high stakes. And everything is created to keep people watching the video and keep people on the platform. And in some ways, it is a trap because it's harder to do the kind of content you like because you really have to squeeze it to be like, okay, well, do we have a good thumbnail for this? Do we have a good title for this? And that's something that we're trying to figure out how to... Keep true to what we want to do.

• 26:42Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, see, the way I think about it is, yeah, there's a lot of stuff you can create. And yeah, the Mr. Bestification process. But also, I think about what are the videos, conversations, or things I will create in this life that will be the best thing I do? And I try not to do things in my life that will prevent me from getting there. I feel like if you're always focusing on doing kind of optimizing the thumbnail and the 10 seconds and so on, you'll never do the thing that's truly you're known for and remembered for. So finding that balance is tricky.

• 27:21Speaker 01

  I get that, but at the same time, this might be my own copium, which I know is a word you know now.

• 27:27Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I'm slowly learning the full complexity of the term, yes.

• 27:31Speaker 01

  But the other way I think about it is, it is a skill to learn how to communicate with large audiences. And first I started streaming chess, which is something I just did and really loved. But now I have to learn how to translate that format. And if that's a skill set we could build, then we could use it to do really important things. And I've seen a lot of YouTubers who have done interviews about how, you know, they didn't love the kind of content they did at first, but what they're doing right now is really meaningful. So I like to think of it maybe like skill development, because not everybody hits off podcasts where they can talk to super interesting people right off the bat.

• 28:10Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, you can be slow and boring in a podcast. You don't have to worry about the first 10 seconds. I mean, people like keep pushing me for, because the first 10 seconds of the videos I do is, well, I know it's most important for YouTube, but I don't give a damn. I wrote a Chrome extension that hides all the views and likes. I don't look at the click.

• 28:31Speaker 01

  I don't look at Twitch views, Andrea does, so we also can relate.

• 28:35Lex Fridman?

  I love numbers too, but that's why I don't look at it, because it's become like, oh, you'll start to think that a conversation or a thing you did sucks because it doesn't get views. But that's just not the case. YouTube algorithm is this monster that figures stuff out. If you let it control your mind, I feel like it's going to destroy you creatively. So you have to find a nice balance.

• 28:57Speaker 02

  I have to say, I was laughing a little bit when I was listening to the Magnus episode, and the first 10 minutes, you guys are talking about soccer and football.

• 29:04Speaker 01

  Two robots seem human in the conversation.

• 29:09Lex Fridman?

  I was like, let's have some fun, make conversation about non-chess related topics.

• 29:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, talk about sports.

• 29:15Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, it was kind of hilarious. I was surprised that even at his level, I wasn't sure, but I was surprised how much he loves chess. It sounds cliche to say, but like the way he looked at a chessboard, you know, those memes like, I wish somebody looked at me the way. He's still like, the way he glanced down and he reached for the pieces with excitement to show me something. There was, that wasn't like, uh, okay, I'll show you. It was like, like there was still that fire.

• 29:45Speaker 02

  That, that's something that always shocks me about some of like super grandmasters, like one of my coaches was a person who also, his name's GM Hammer of Norway. He also coached Magnus. He was his second and he was helping me train for my tournament. And I was kind of putting off doing the homework. He's like, if you're putting it off, that means you're studying the wrong thing. Like you should be enjoying, even when you're practicing, which when I grew up, I thought to get to the top level, like practicing has to be hard and unpleasant. And when I was listening to Magnus episode, he was like, I didn't read books very much. Or it was one thing that you said that's like, very normal for studying classical chess that he didn't do just because it didn't interest him.

• 30:23Lex Fridman?

  He says, I suck at puzzles. I don't like puzzles.

• 30:26Speaker 02

  Yeah. And he, he doesn't do what he doesn't enjoy. And that's because it's, it's like purely driven out of passion.

• 30:31Lex Fridman?

  I think the internet was like, I suck at puzzles too.

• 30:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, they like that. They're related.

• 30:37Lex Fridman?

  I don't have to study at all. It's just, it's fun. And, uh, but I think the lesson there that's really powerful is he spends most of the day thinking about chess because he wants to.

• 30:47Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 30:47Lex Fridman?

  So do whatever, if, if you're into getting better chess, do whatever it takes.

• 30:51Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 30:52Lex Fridman?

  To actually just the number of hours you spend a day thinking about chess, maximize that. If you're like super serious about it.

• 30:58Speaker 01

  I actually get very addicted whenever I start studying chess, which is why I don't do it as seriously when I'm focused on content. Uh, cause I go through these rabbit holes where if I'm focusing on chess, I want to be as good as I possibly can at the game. Otherwise it's hard for me to enjoy it because it's such a competitive thing. And I remember training for. Tournaments and when you're training for tournaments, you even start dreaming about chess and you can't stop thinking about it. And it's as if you're flipped into this completely different world, which is also what I like best about the game, that it's a completely different living experience.

• 31:34Lex Fridman?

  And then you take some drugs and now you start to see things on the ceiling. Is there some factual hallucination like to the Queen's Gambit, like those scenes?

• 31:44Speaker 01

  Uh, I think it's.

• 31:46Lex Fridman?

  Is that based on your life story?

• 31:47Speaker 01

  From, well, can't say that on camera. No, just kidding. Actually chess players are very careful to not take drugs. They drink a lot.

• 31:56Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 31:56Speaker 01

  They drink so much. It's actually crazy for how good they're able to play chess when they do. But when it comes to things like psychedelics or other things, they usually stay away from those because they don't want to mess anything up in their brain.

• 32:08Lex Fridman?

  So this is actually intervention. I've, I saw that you mentioned somewhere, I think it was the lie detector test where you have a drinking problem. Is that actual?

• 32:18Speaker 01

  I, I think, I think that's actually a meme that we like to joke about on stream because occasionally we'd have like a white claw on stream or something like that. And then people meme about it. It goes back to Andrea's point of amplifying a part of your personality to make yourself a little bit

• 32:34Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 32:34Speaker 01

  more entertaining.

• 32:35Lex Fridman?

  I'm gonna use that as an excuse from now on. This podcast is just amplifying a part of that personality. I'm not really like this. But have you played drunk? Like Magnus has played drunk. He says it helps him with the creativity. Is there, is there any truth to that?

• 32:50Speaker 01

  Well, Andrea is under 21, so she's obviously

• 32:52Lex Fridman?

  Would never do.

• 32:53Speaker 01

  Would never do that. But I have played while drinking. Actually, I enjoy playing chess and drinking more than pre-gaming or going out to a club and drinking, which sounds really silly. And I'll usually play against opponents who are also, you know, having some beer. And it does make you feel like you're seeing the game from a fresher perspective where it can sometimes make you feel more confident, liquid confidence. And it does help with creativity. You just feel like you could pull things off. But there's also a limit. It's more like you've had one drink or two drink, but then it goes beyond that and then you just start missing tactics and it's not worth it.

• 33:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think it only helps players in very short time controls. One time I was challenging this grandmaster on stream and we were playing. Bullet chess, which is one-minute chess. And I was giving him handicaps and I said, okay, you have to take four shots before the next game. And he just got like 10 times stronger and transformed into like the Hulk and destroyed me more than last game. So, but of course, if you're playing like a three-hour game, it's gonna get old, but I think in short time controls, it's amazing.

• 33:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, definitely has to be blitz. It has to be where it's more intuition rather than sitting and calculating.

• 34:02Lex Fridman?

  This is probably like negatively affecting your ability to calculate.

• 34:05Speaker 01

  Absolutely, yeah.

• 34:06Lex Fridman?

  How much, when you guys play, when you look at the chessboard, how much of it is calculation? How much of it is intuition? How much of it is memorized openings?

• 34:18Speaker 01

  It really depends between short-form chess, so five minutes, three minutes, one minute, and classical chess.

• 34:25Lex Fridman?

  What's your favorite to play?

• 34:26Speaker 01

  I love playing blitz now because that's most of what I do. And that's actually how I got into chess streaming because I couldn't spend entire weekends or weeks playing tournaments. So I would just, while I was in college, log on and play these long blitz or bullet sessions. And it's very fast, so you don't have time to go calculate as deeply. You basically have to calculate short lines pretty quickly. And a lot of it is pattern recognition and intuition.

• 34:51Lex Fridman?

  That's three minutes, you said?

• 34:52Speaker 01

  Three minutes, yeah.

• 34:53Lex Fridman?

  Okay, cool. And so for that, it's just, it's basically intuition?

• 34:57Speaker 01

  A lot of it is intuition, yeah.

• 34:59Lex Fridman?

  See, I saw on streams you actually keep talking while playing chess. It seems really difficult.

• 35:02Speaker 01

  That helps my result. That doesn't help my results.

• 35:04Lex Fridman?

  It doesn't? It hurts?

• 35:05Speaker 02

  It helps content, not the game.

• 35:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 35:07Lex Fridman?

  But you can still do it. Because I, it feels like, how can you possibly concentrate while talking?

• 35:13Speaker 01

  It's because so much of it is intuition. You're not, while you're talking, you're thinking about that topic, but then you just come to the board and you just understand what you should be doing here. And then sometimes you get in trouble because you're talking and you have now lost half of your time. You have a minute and a half, your opponent has three, and you're kind of at a disadvantage. But that kind of goes to show that that's how blitz chess usually works, whereas classical is very different.

• 35:36Lex Fridman?

  Which of you is better at chess? I mean, let's do it this way. Can you? Andrea, can you say what in which way is Alex stronger than you? Which way is she weaker than you? Not physically in terms of chess.

• 35:52Speaker 02

  Well, yes, of course, she is higher rated. But when we do play, I think her strengths against me, where she really gets me is the endgame. She has stronger endgame. So she can, and I actually have a stronger opening. But as soon as she's able to simplify.

• 36:06Speaker 01

  I'm supposed to say what is good about you, not you.

• 36:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, I'm getting there. Well, see, this is the same because don't worry, it's related. Okay. Because if I can, I can get an advantage in the beginning of the game. But as soon as she starts trading pieces down, like my confidence drops because I know that the endgame is the hardest part of the game and the longest. And that's where she ends up beating me. So her endgame is her, I think, really what makes the difference. And she has.

• 36:29Lex Fridman?

  It sounds like her psychological warfare is better, too.

• 36:32Speaker 02

  That.

• 36:33Lex Fridman?

  Because if you're getting nervous.

• 36:34Speaker 02

  That is.

• 36:35Speaker 01

  But it's harder to play against higher rated players. Same how, you know, Magnus and former world championship champions have that psychological edge. So I think it's always going to be different for Andrea because she knows statistically she should be winning something like one in four games, but she usually does better than that because she's very distracting and talks a lot.

• 36:54Speaker 02

  That does help.

• 36:55Lex Fridman?

  What does it feel like to play a higher rated player? What's the experience of that?

• 37:01Lex Fridman?

  In like playing somebody like Magnus?

• 37:05Speaker 01

  So it depends on how much higher rated than you they are. If it's someone who's like between me and Andrea, let's say it's a 200 point difference. You know, they should win, but at least you still feel like you have a chance. I was playing in Title Tuesday, which is this tournament chess.com has every Tuesday. And I got really lucky, beat a GM, drew an international master, and then I got paired against Hikaru Nakamura. And my brain just went blank because I just know that I'm so unlikely to win that I couldn't even play the game properly when it's that much of a difference where they should be winning like 99% of the time.

• 37:38Lex Fridman?

  But that's like psychological. So you're saying that's the biggest experience is like actually knowing the numbers and statistically thinking there's no way I can win. But I meant like, is there a suffocating feeling like positionally, you feel like you're constantly under attack?

• 37:54Speaker 01

  You just feel like you're slowly getting outsmarted and the worst is when you don't even know what you're doing wrong. You come out of that, you're like, I thought I was doing great and I got slowly squeezed. I didn't understand what was going on and you're just kind of baffled. It's kind of like watching AlphaZero beat up Stockfish. And you don't really understand why it's making certain moves or how it thought of the plan. You just see it slowly getting the position better and that's what it feels like.

• 38:20Speaker 02

  I would add, it's kind of different for me if they're someone who's significantly higher rated. So let's say more than like 300 points or you're playing Magnus. What I notice is I just feel lost straight as soon as I don't know my preparation. Because they know so many opening lines that they're going to know the best line to beat you that you haven't studied. So then on move 10, you're like, he already has a maybe plus point five advantage, which is really small. But for someone with such a significant skill level, you know, you already lost at that point. And it's like a third of the game.

• 38:53Lex Fridman?

  What are the strengths and weaknesses of Andrea?

• 38:57Speaker 01

  Andrea is very good at opening preparation.

• 39:00Lex Fridman?

  As she said.

• 39:01Speaker 01

  As she said. She likes bringing that up. I mean, she's very meticulous about it where she'll really go in and learn her lines. And having that initial starting confidence isn't just helpful for the opening, but it helps develop your plans for the middle game. So I think she's very good at that. I think she's actually pretty good at tactical combinations.

• 39:25Lex Fridman?

  What is tactics?

• 39:26Speaker 01

  Tactics is like solving puzzles or basically finding lines that are forced. Where if you find them, you're going to win.

• 39:35Lex Fridman?

  So that's like puzzles within a position.

• 39:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. Whereas strategic chess is making slow moves. And over the process of like 20 moves, you get a slightly better position based on an understanding of the overall strategy.

• 39:50Lex Fridman?

  So in my extensive research of you on Wikipedia. It says your most played opening is the King's Indian Defense, in which, quote, "Black allows white to advance their pawns to the center of the board in the first two moves." Is there any truth to this?

• 40:07Speaker 01

  So, the King's Indian-

• 40:09Lex Fridman?

  And what is it?

• 40:09Speaker 01

  Probably is my most played opening.

• 40:13Speaker 01

  And it's one where even when my coach, who is a grandmaster, taught me, he's like, "So you know, I've been playing the King's Indian for 10 years and I still don't understand it." And it's one of those openings that computers really don't like because you do-

• 40:25Speaker 02

  They hate it.

• 40:26Speaker 01

  Or at least Stockfish doesn't like it. Maybe AlphaZero would change their mind. I forgot to look at what-

• 40:30Lex Fridman?

  Can you show me, by the way, what it is?

• 40:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:32Lex Fridman?

  Is it, uh, is it white's opening or black's opening?

• 40:36Speaker 01

  Black responds to, uh, the d4 queen's pawn push. And you take your knight out to f6. I'll just put in the, you know, stereotypical, classical King's Indian more so to say.

• 40:51Speaker 02

  We actually have a very famous King's Indian game in the notes that we prepared-

• 40:55Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 40:55Speaker 02

  For hours.

• 40:56Lex Fridman?

  For the record, I asked you guys for one, some games that you find pretty cool and well, maybe to get a chance to talk about some-

• 41:03Speaker 01

  Yeah. Um, so this is the King's Indian. As you can see, white has much more control over the center. White has three pawns in the center, while black has none past the fifth rank. And you just have this pawn on d6. And one of the ideas in chess is if you're not taking the center, then your plan revolves around trying to continually challenge it. But what is really fun about the King's Indian is that black sometimes gets these crazy king side attacks, while white gets queen side attacks. And even though it's a little bit suspicious for black and the computer could usually break it, it's hard to defend as a human when you're being attacked.

• 41:45Speaker 01

  But if you don't pull off the attack as black, then you're just gonna end up being lost in the endgame.

• 41:50Lex Fridman?

  So it's like a very asymmetrical position?

• 41:52Speaker 01

  It's very asymmetrical, although a lot of people now stop playing into the classical King's Indian, even though computers give it a big advantage. And they play these slower lines in the King's Indian, which are less fun to play.

• 42:06Lex Fridman?

  What's slower mean? It takes a longer time to like- Do something interesting with?

• 42:11Speaker 01

  Um, they basically don't let you get as much of a king side attack because they try opening up the center and then you have no weaknesses, but you're just slowly improving the position of your pieces instead of being able to go for that king side attack.

• 42:25Lex Fridman?

  So for people just listening, there is a, the, the white pawns are all on, on the fourth row, in a row together. That feels like a bad position.

• 42:33Speaker 01

  For black?

• 42:34Lex Fridman?

  For white.

• 42:35Speaker 01

  Oh, you don't like taking the center?

• 42:37Lex Fridman?

  No, I like taking the center. This, now you're talking trash already.

• 42:41Speaker 01

  Oh, sorry.

• 42:41Lex Fridman?

  But like, it's just like, they're like, feel vulnerable. They're in a row together. Like, it's like, uh, like, you know, cause they're like, who's gonna defend them? I guess the knight defends it and the queen defends it.

• 42:53Speaker 01

  That, you're actually talking about a theme that you do see sometimes, which is called hanging pawns. And when you have two pawns right next to each other with no other pawns to defend them.

• 43:02Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 43:03Speaker 01

  Um, so it, it is a value, valid point. And actually as black, you're trying to break apart these pawns or get them to push and create some holes into the position. But it's a trade off and that's a lot of what chess openings are about. You get more space, but you'll also end up having to protect your pawns potentially or move them forward to the point where they're overextended.

• 43:23Lex Fridman?

  And plus, pawns being vulnerable is kind of fun. This, it's like, there's more stuff in danger. They're not, cause if it's, if it's like this, everything is like trapped. Like you can't do anything.

• 43:33Speaker 02

  Everything's blocked. Yeah.

• 43:34Lex Fridman?

  Blocked off. Yeah. You can't have fun.

• 43:38Speaker 02

  Yeah. Uh, the, the, one of the most, one of the opening principles for white is get your pawns in the center. So I'd say, like, this is actually preferable for white.

• 43:47Lex Fridman?

  Go, let's go over some opening principles.

• 43:49Speaker 02

  There we go. Cause this is a very good learned lesson for any chess beginners in the, in the audience.

• 43:58Speaker 02

  Okay. So first thing you want to do is control the center. There you go, e4, the more aggressive one.

• 44:03Lex Fridman?

  Isn't that like the, the basic vanilla move? I didn't, uh, somebody told me that's the most popular opening move in chess.

• 44:10Speaker 02

  It is.

• 44:11Lex Fridman?

  Why is that considered aggressive?

• 44:12Speaker 01

  So the, it's e4 and d4, and the king's pawn is known as being for more tactical players, whereas d4 is known for more positional players. So that's why it's considered more aggressive.

• 44:24Lex Fridman?

  Tactical.

• 44:25Speaker 02

  More gambits with e4, I think.

• 44:27Lex Fridman?

  So tactical means I'm, I'm gonna try to attack you.

• 44:31Speaker 01

  Or you're gonna try to go for puzzles and rely more on your, um, combination abilities. Uh, whereas if it's something positional, you usually have like three to four moves that are all good in the position. Whereas tactics, you need to see this one line. So it's more precise.

• 44:48Lex Fridman?

  So this, this is always cool because he can like, you know, the queen can come out, the bishop can come out.

• 44:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, and that's, uh, one of the most popular checkmates. And usually what you teach new students to try to cheese their friends because then they feel really excited that they know this new trap where you bring the bishop and the queen out and you try to checkmate on f7.

• 45:05Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 45:06Speaker 02

  It's the trap that, uh, Queen's Gambit Beth Harmon falls for in their like first game versus the janitor. She gets all mad because she gets checkmated very early.

• 45:15Lex Fridman?

  That's the one she gets checkmated with?

• 45:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 45:17Lex Fridman?

  Okay. I love how you guys were actually paying attention to the games carefully. Uh, which is pretty cool that they did a good job of like improving, evolving her game throughout the show to actually represent an actual growth of a chess player.

• 45:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, they, they really took every detail into consideration, which was cool.

• 45:34Lex Fridman?

  Okay, so what, what else? That's, that's, I brought stuff into the center.

• 45:38Speaker 02

  We'll do the same.

• 45:38Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 45:39Speaker 02

  So then you want to develop your pieces. So in the beginning of the game, you want to take out the bishops and knights first because you don't want to start with the most valuable piece like the queen. Um, because then it'll become a vulnerability and it'll get attacked very early on. And the reason you're taking out these two pieces first is because you want to castle your king. So you can move a knight move or a bishop move and that's considered developing.

• 46:03Lex Fridman?

  So if, at the, at this stage, not like even before getting a few pawns out?

• 46:08Speaker 01

  You usually want to start with getting a pawn because you want to get space in the center. But also when you push pawns, it helps free up some of your pieces. Um, so usually start with one pawn first and then you could start taking out your minor pieces, which is the bishop and the knight.

• 46:24Lex Fridman?

  I have anxiety about a pawn just floating out there, defenseless.

• 46:29Speaker 02

  But it's not attacked yet. It's like, see, those are what you call ghost threats. So you're scared of something that hasn't happened yet. So if I were to attack it.

• 46:36Lex Fridman?

  I feel like there's a deeper thing going on here.

• 46:39Speaker 02

  Actually, let's say.

• 46:41Speaker 01

  Yeah. So you're attacking the pawn in the center here and it is vulnerable. But as soon as you do that, I can develop my own knight and defend it as well.

• 46:50Lex Fridman?

  Okay. And for people just listening, there's two pawns that just came out to meet each other and a couple of knights.

• 46:56Speaker 02

  You love the chess.

• 46:59Speaker 02

  The pawns met after midnight.

• 47:01Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, yeah. We gotta romanticize the game a bit.

• 47:04Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 47:05Lex Fridman?

  Uh, okay, cool. So, so like there's, uh, if you bring out the bishops with the knights, you're matching that with the other, uh, the black is going to match it, whatever you're attacking with.

• 47:16Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 47:16Lex Fridman?

  It's gonna defend it.

• 47:17Speaker 02

  I could develop your bishop or your knight, whatever you'd like.

• 47:21Speaker 01

  Oh no, now you gave him options.

• 47:23Lex Fridman?

  Oh, right. Yeah. There you go.

• 47:26Speaker 01

  Now I am attacking the pawn in the center, which is what you were afraid about before. But let's see how you defend it here.

• 47:37Lex Fridman?

  By doing this symmetrical thing, bringing out the knight on the other side.

• 47:41Speaker 01

  And actually, your other move was good as well, defending with the pawn, because then you're freeing up space for your bishop. So you're basically trying to develop your pieces as quickly as possible, put your pawns in the center and then get your king to safety. And that's usually the basic opening tips that you get.

• 47:59Lex Fridman?

  And it is kind of counterintuitive that safety is in the corner of the board for a king.

• 48:04Speaker 02

  True.

• 48:05Lex Fridman?

  That was always confusing to me, but you know.

• 48:07Speaker 02

  Three pawns in front, though you typically don't push those. Maybe like one, maybe it'll go one square, but these will be like the wall of defense that keep him safe.

• 48:18Speaker 01

  But another way to also think about it is your pieces usually wanna point towards the center. If you have a knight closer to the center than closer to the side, it actually has more squares it can go to. So a huge part of it is just wanting to have flexibility for where your pieces go. So more pieces are going to be able to make threats in the center or even open up the position. So since that's where it's most likely to open, you want your king somewhere where the position will stay closed so that you have the pawns to defend.

• 48:49Lex Fridman?

  You know, there is like rules like this, but I always wonder, because I've built chess engines. But then you start to wonder like, why is it that positionally these things are good? Like you've built up an intuition about it, but I wish, and that's the thing that would be amazing if engines could explain. Why is this kind of thing better than this kind of thing? You start to build up an intuition, but if I'm just like, know nothing about chess, it feels confusing that cornering your king. Like getting him like trapped here, like it feels like you could get checkmated easier there. If I was just to use like dumb intuition, but it seems like that's not the case.

• 49:29Speaker 01

  I imagine maybe, because AlphaZero learned by playing games against itself, right? And I imagine if you have a lot of games and you do build intuition, because if you were to keep your king in the center, you just see that in those games. You're dealing with threats a lot more often. But yeah, there's shortcut rules and this doesn't even mean it's the best way to play chess. As we've seen with AlphaZero kind of changing the rules of the game a little bit. But as a human, to learn it from scratch is a lot more difficult than to start with principles. So that's why beginners usually learn chess this way.

• 50:03Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, but we're in, because you're playing other humans and the other humans have also operated under different principles. And that's why people that come up now that are training with engines. Are just going to be much better than the people of the past because they're gonna have, they're gonna try out weirder ideas that go against the principles of old.

• 50:23Speaker 01

  Right.

• 50:23Lex Fridman?

  And they're gonna do like weird stuff, including sacrifices and stuff like that.

• 50:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I also think that's why AlphaZero was so shocking because Stockfish was using an opening database, so it was already based off of knowledge that humans have from playing chess for years that we just thought is how you're supposed to play, whereas AlphaZero just learned from playing the game so many times and came up with very novel opening ideas.

• 50:46Lex Fridman?

  Were you impressed by AlphaZero? Have you, have you seen some of the games?

• 50:49Speaker 01

  I have seen some of the games. I think impressed, bewildered, and motivated were the three things I experienced.

• 50:57Lex Fridman?

  Like I think Magnus said, he was also impressed that it could easily be mistaken for creativity. That's his trash talk towards the AI.

• 51:07Speaker 01

  That was a beautiful sentence. I was listening to the podcast.

• 51:10Lex Fridman?

  I mean, as a human, I agree with him because you don't want to give the machine the, the power of creativity, but if it looks creative, give it, give it a compliment.

• 51:22Speaker 01

  That's, that's fair. I, I know that you're being nice to the machines in case they are ever looking back through this.

• 51:28Lex Fridman?

  What, what else is there? What other principles are there for the, um, the opening?

• 51:33Speaker 01

  You can go a little bit more forward, let's say. And we can finish full development. Positions like this, and let's just say you developed all of your pieces.

• 51:43Lex Fridman?

  So that's like a really nice, like nobody, nobody took any pieces and we're just in a nice positional thing.

• 51:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, so it, it's not actually a very accurate one. Yes. So I'm actually, I could put a different one on the board, but usually after you've developed all of your pieces, um, you want to get your queen out a little bit to connect your rooks and you also start thinking about certain pawn pushes and getting more space. But another good tip is just can you improve the position of your pieces? Think about timing. So if you've already moved a piece once and there's a piece that hasn't moved at all, then you want to focus on the piece that hasn't moved at all to be able to have it more likely to jump into the game.

• 52:23Lex Fridman?

  Right. So don't move pieces multiple times.

• 52:24Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 52:25Lex Fridman?

  Like try to move it to the most optimal position.

• 52:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:28Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, that makes sense. What uh, so what's the Indian? So I think we kind of went over it, but why, did you ever say why you like it so much? Cause it's weird, cause it's king side?

• 52:39Speaker 01

  I liked it because it's a very fun, aggressive defense where you're just throwing your pieces towards white. And there's so many sacrificing opportunities. And for some reason, tactical games always feel like the most beautiful, the most satisfying. And that's what I liked about the King's Indian, but I also suffered a lot from this, this love because I would play things that are not necessarily correct. Then my attack wouldn't pan out and I would just struggle the rest of the game, having no play and just trying to defend.

• 53:10Lex Fridman?

  So if you're always, Wikipedia also says that, that you're known for your attacking play.

• 53:16Speaker 02

  It's also known for losses, according to Stanford.

• 53:18Speaker 01

  Okay, let's not bring that up.

• 53:20Lex Fridman?

  See, Wikipedia doesn't talk trash.

• 53:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, Wikipedia is a lot nicer. Um, I actually played a lot of positional chess in classic because I really like the slow squeeze. But when I transitioned to playing a lot of online chess, it's almost as if I was looking for more instant gratification. Cause it feels so much better to beat someone with an attack. And even if sometimes it doesn't pan out, I was okay with it because you get so many games in. So I think my style in online chess really changed from my classical chess.

• 53:52Lex Fridman?

  What about you, Andrea? Do you have a style? Are you attacking? Are you more like conservative defensive player? Are you chaotic?

• 54:00Speaker 02

  Opening wise, I like to play more positionally, like I like to push T4 and just slowly improve my pieces and slowly get an attack. But like Alex said, if you're playing bullet chess or blitz against viewers, you often like want to play riskier moves that may not be as good. And then that's kind of when I would play more aggressive. But I do enjoy tournaments for that reason, because then Like, once her 15 moves in, which as soon as you're out of your prep, I like sitting and thinking in more positional, um, yeah, positional middle games.

• 54:33Lex Fridman?

  One of the games you've found to be pretty cool is the, uh, Hikaru Nakamura versus Golfon in 2009. And that one, I think, includes the King's Indian Defense?

• 54:43Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 54:44Lex Fridman?

  Um, what's, what's, why is that an interesting one to you?

• 54:48Speaker 02

  I also play the King's Indian as black and I love this model game, but, and as Alex was saying, like all these advantages for the King's Indian, but now there's this one line that like every higher rated player just destroys my King's Indian. And you see these beautiful games and like, ah, yes, I want to play for these ideas, but now no one plays into it anymore and you just get demolished. So that's why I don't play the King's Indian anymore, but not to ruin the funner.

• 55:12Speaker 01

  It's a love hate relationship, truly.

• 55:14Speaker 02

  The reality.

• 55:15Lex Fridman?

  But that's like the higher level players do, or does everybody?

• 55:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, if you're studying openings and you know this line as white, you just, you automatically get the upper edge.

• 55:24Speaker 01

  And that's kind of how openings develop. You start having players trying new lines and then you see ones and then everybody adopts it if they think it's the best one. But yeah, so Hikaru is really known for his aggressive style of play.

• 55:37Lex Fridman?

  Is Hikaru a black hero?

• 55:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, Hikaru is black here, so he's playing the King's Indian. And as you can see in this position, white already has a lot, a huge center advantage. But what Hikaru is going to start doing, even with the next move, is bringing all of his pieces towards the white king's side, because his plan is to start pushing his pawns towards the white king and ignore the attack that goes on in the queen side.

• 56:00Speaker 02

  This is a great example of the dream attack with the King's Indian.

• 56:03Lex Fridman?

  So there's a complete asymmetry towards the king's side on the left side of the board is a ton of pieces.

• 56:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. Um.

• 56:11Lex Fridman?

  Wow, he moved the knight like three times in a row.

• 56:13Speaker 01

  Yep, and that's what you need to do, because you have to move the knight in order to make space for your pawn. So again, this is why it's so counterintuitive and Stockfish doesn't like it. You're putting almost most of your pieces on the back rank and you're pushing your king's side pawns and you're blocking your own dark squared bishop. So none of it makes sense.

• 56:31Lex Fridman?

  You're mimicking it. That's awesome.

• 56:33Speaker 01

  Um, okay, so yeah, here you see white going for a queenside attack, black going for the king's side attack, and you can keep going a little bit and I'll wait to where he starts with the pretty sacrifices.

• 56:44Speaker 02

  It's more fun to analyze games in person than on the computer, I think.

• 56:47Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 56:48Speaker 02

  Okay. There we go.

• 56:50Speaker 01

  Okay, so here Hikaru is preparing the attack. And what I really like about this game is that he finds these tactics that are not necessarily what a computer would go for, but it's very hard to face as a human. And that's why a lot of people play the king's Indian, because in practice, it's hard to defend against. So we can keep moving a little bit forward.

• 57:13Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 57:15Speaker 01

  Yep, so White is just continuing the king's side plan.

• 57:18Lex Fridman?

  No, is that like the first piece, I think, that's taken in the game?

• 57:21Speaker 01

  Yep, that's the first trade.

• 57:22Lex Fridman?

  Attack begins.

• 57:24Speaker 01

  Exactly. Hikaru had to pause his attack for a little bit to just make sure that White didn't have two dire threats on the queen's side.

• 57:31Lex Fridman?

  So cool to see the asymmetry of this thing.

• 57:33Speaker 01

  Exactly. That's what's beautiful about the king's Indian.

• 57:36Speaker 02

  And just one thing to highlight, because his rook move here is very bizarre and typically, like, a computer probably didn't like this, but the ideas are very interesting, because this is a major weakness for Black, that they're coming to attack. And he's also making room for his bishop to come backwards and challenge. So this is like a human-like maneuver that computers don't like.

• 57:55Speaker 01

  I think computers would like this, though, because you'd have to move it regardless, because he takes the pawn here and his rook would be under attack.

• 58:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, having looked at it, when I actually studied this as a line, and this right away isn't the best move for a computer.

• 58:08Lex Fridman?

  So actually, that's a good question. So you guys, when you study games, use your own mind, but do you also use computers to build up your intuition of like, looking at a position like this, and what would a computer do? And then try to understand why it wants to do that?

• 58:21Speaker 01

  When I was studying seriously, I would try to use my own mind, because you're never going to get the exact same position, so you really need to notice trends. And often, computers will give you moves that are only specific to that position because of a certain tactic. But I do use computers to check what I did and make sure I didn't make any obvious blunder that I might have missed.

• 58:42Lex Fridman?

  What does a computer tell you? Just like, what is the best move? Or does it give you any kind of explanation of why?

• 58:48Speaker 01

  It doesn't tell you why, but it gives you the different valuations of the position, like, Black is down a half pawn here, or something like that. But it hints you towards what the right move is, and then it's on you to figure out why. And you could usually figure out why, if not right away, then just by going through a few moves and being like, oh, okay, that makes sense.

• 59:09Lex Fridman?

  I feel like a computer will take you down with some weird lines, potentially. Like, sacrifice, like, why the hell am I sacrificing this?

• 59:17Speaker 01

  Well, we'll get to the pretty sacrifice soon. So we could just keep playing.

• 59:22Lex Fridman?

  The balls are being pushed forward?

• 59:23Speaker 01

  Yeah. And Hikaru is kind of ignoring the queen side attack here. They basically both only reply to each other's plan when they have to.

• 59:35Speaker 02

  This is where you convert all the podcast viewers to YouTube.

• 59:39Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 59:40Speaker 02

  They have no idea what we're talking about right now.

• 59:42Lex Fridman?

  There is a zen like experience of just like listening and imagining.

• 59:46Speaker 02

  The board.

• 59:47Speaker 01

  Imagine the pieces on the ceiling.

• 59:49Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, you should. We should be calling them out and then people will be freaking out even more. Am I supposed to keep track of what the position is?

• 59:58Lex Fridman?

  How hard is blindfold chess? Have you tried? Like, are you able to keep the?

• 1:00:01Speaker 01

  I've played blindfold chess before. For me, it's pretty hard. It's not a muscle that I've trained as much and I'm very visual when it comes to chess.

• 1:00:11Speaker 01

  But it is one as a top player that starts becoming very second nature for you.

• 1:00:16Lex Fridman?

  Actually, this is what I talked to Magnus about this. Maybe I was, again, influenced by Queen's Gambit. What do you actually visualize when it's in your head? So for Magnus, it was a boring 2D board.

• 1:00:27Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:00:28Lex Fridman?

  Are you? Do you have some kind of?

• 1:00:29Speaker 02

  That's every chess player know.

• 1:00:31Lex Fridman?

  You don't have like, because you know some chess, like, uh, computer games, you can do all kinds of skins and like,

• 1:00:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:37Lex Fridman?

  like fancy stuff. You don't have any?

• 1:00:38Speaker 01

  Sadly, I don't have like a cool 3D warrior mode on. It's just the basic.

• 1:00:43Speaker 02

  Chess baseboard in my head. Because you don't, yeah, you can't use your brain power for adding colors to it because you already have to keep track of the pieces.

• 1:00:51Lex Fridman?

  As one board at a time?

• 1:00:53Speaker 01

  Yes. The current position.

• 1:00:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, I bet every chess. I wonder if there's any who.

• 1:00:58Speaker 01

  There's certain players who are really good and they can even play blindfold chess and play multiple games at the same time.

• 1:01:06Speaker 01

  So I would be curious how they do it, but usually when you're thinking of one game, that's the only one in your mind.

• 1:01:11Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, but you have to do this operation where you move one piece.

• 1:01:16Lex Fridman?

  You're doing like the branch analysis like.

• 1:01:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:20Lex Fridman?

  And so you still have to somehow visualize the branching process and not forget stuff. Maybe that's like constant memory recall or something. You're always looking at one board at a time, but.

• 1:01:32Speaker 01

  And you're also, oh, because you're also looking in the future.

• 1:01:35Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:35Lex Fridman?

  Then you have to backtrack.

• 1:01:37Speaker 01

  I guess you're keeping the position in your memory. So you're remembering where all the pieces are and then you're playing it out on one board. And then you can come back to the initial one that you started with that you kind of just keep in your brain. And it's also easier to come back to it once you've played a position from it.

• 1:01:53Lex Fridman?

  I feel like it's that memory recall that gets you to blunder. So I'll like see that I'm being attacked by certain things. But then because I get so exhausted thinking about a different thing, I forget. I actually forget about an entire branch of things that I was supposed to be worried about.

• 1:02:14Speaker 02

  It happens very often. Yeah. If you spend a bunch of time calculating in a position, let's say, like when you're really in trouble and you're spending 15, 20 minutes calculating, you'll forget about something that you spotted. Like, oh, if I do these two, three moves, I'll walk into a trap because you've looked at so many lines. And then you play it and then you see it and you're like, oh, I, I looked at it and I saw it, but I forgot about it.

• 1:02:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:02:34Speaker 02

  So you're.

• 1:02:35Speaker 01

  It's often called tunneling where you're just looking so deeply on one thing. You forget about the rest of the board.

• 1:02:41Lex Fridman?

  And it's the worst when, at least in a beginner level, there's like a, I don't know, bishop just sitting there, obviously attacking your like queen or something. And then you just forget that bishop exists.

• 1:02:53Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:02:53Lex Fridman?

  Because if they just sit there for a few moves and don't move, you just forget their existence. And then it's just, yeah, that's, that's definitely very embarrassing.

• 1:03:02Speaker 01

  Well, it happens to everyone, so.

• 1:03:04Lex Fridman?

  Yes. Okay, cool.

• 1:03:07Speaker 01

  Okay, so. We see a few trades happening on the queen side where he had to go for those, otherwise he's in trouble. And this is where the game of sorry.

• 1:03:18Speaker 02

  This is where it gets exciting.

• 1:03:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, so knight h4 is really when the sacrifice starts. And here, the two important pawns are the ones in front of the king because they're helping with the entire defense. And Yikaru is actually preparing to sacrifice his knight for a pawn, just so that he can continue his attack and open up the position. Because if you don't do that here as black and don't get some kind of attack, you are completely lost on the queen side. And also, you've pushed all of your own king side pawns, so you're going to be in danger. So it's one of those do or die moments.

• 1:03:52Lex Fridman?

  Oh, okay. So that's what makes it all in because the king is wide open.

• 1:03:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. The king is wide open and you, all of white's pieces are pointed towards the queen side too, where you're also cramped.

• 1:04:02Lex Fridman?

  So is the attack primarily by black done by the two pawns and the knight?

• 1:04:06Speaker 01

  And the light squared bishop is always extremely important. So you don't want to trade this in the king's Indian because it's very helpful for a lot of attacks.

• 1:04:14Lex Fridman?

  Even though it's on the other side of the board, I guess it can go all the way across in. Like, I don't, I'm not sure what it's doing here, but probably threatening.

• 1:04:22Speaker 01

  Like, for example, if, if it was another move black could have played would be something like bishop h3, where if you take the bishop, you actually get mated on g2.

• 1:04:31Lex Fridman?

  With what?

• 1:04:32Speaker 01

  So let's say you take here and then you could push the pawn and then it would be checkmate. So you're kind of using your bishop to sacrifice against white's king side pawns.

• 1:04:43Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I'll be freaking out if the bishop did that. What are they up to?

• 1:04:48Speaker 01

  Right. And that's the thing. This position looks very scary as white because all of black's pawns are starting to come towards you. And it's one of those things where humans do start to worry in these positions, whereas computers obviously can just calculate the best line and maybe the attack doesn't go through.

• 1:05:03Lex Fridman?

  So you're saying a computer might say that the white is actually a slight favorite here?

• 1:05:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's possible.

• 1:05:10Lex Fridman?

  Okay, so then. White makes a little bit of room by moving the rook.

• 1:05:14Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:05:14Lex Fridman?

  And the attack begins.

• 1:05:16Speaker 01

  I like, I like the commentary here.

• 1:05:19Lex Fridman?

  Then the knight, um, the knight is hugging the king.

• 1:05:22Speaker 01

  And actually, white can't even take the king here because then h4 and h3 is coming in.

• 1:05:27Speaker 02

  White can't take the knight.

• 1:05:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, oh, did I say king? Yes, thank you, the knight.

• 1:05:31Lex Fridman?

  White can't take the knight because why?

• 1:05:33Speaker 01

  Um, so if white takes the knight here, then black starts pushing his pawn to h4 with h3 incoming. And the idea of trying to defend against this is, it, it looks very difficult. So white just chooses.

• 1:05:47Speaker 02

  It'd be cool to watch a chess game, to experience watching it without understanding it, just for a day. I feel like I could use that to make better content.

• 1:05:55Speaker 01

  True. Um, okay.

• 1:05:57Lex Fridman?

  I mean, that's what getting drunk does.

• 1:06:00Speaker 02

  Unfortunately, for chess players, it never leaves your brain. Doesn't matter how.

• 1:06:05Speaker 01

  But this is actually a very cute move because black's queen is under attack. But the king is so cramped that he can't actually take it, or he's gonna get checkmated by a pawn, which is a sad way to go, truly.

• 1:06:17Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, those pawns are doing a lot of work here.

• 1:06:19Speaker 02

  That is the king's Indian.

• 1:06:21Speaker 01

  This is the king's Indian players.

• 1:06:22Speaker 02

  The attack of the king's side pawns.

• 1:06:25Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, these pawns are like, uh, right. So they're the ones that are doing a lot of the threatening.

• 1:06:30Speaker 01

  Right. And they're also opening up the position to bring more of the pieces in. But that, the, the, the pawns kind of help break open the king's side, but they can't checkmate by themselves. So after the pawns come in, that's when you need to start bringing in pieces as well, which you will see, uh, he carded do here. Okay.

• 1:06:45Lex Fridman?

  There you go. He puts.

• 1:06:46Speaker 02

  One more sacrifice.

• 1:06:48Speaker 01

  So this was actually another beautiful sacrifice in the game. Um.

• 1:06:52Lex Fridman?

  And but then puts the king in check with a pawn.

• 1:06:55Speaker 01

  Right. That, and the pawn is going to be given here for free. But the idea is you're giving your own piece because you want to have more space and open up the king. Which is what you're always trying to do when you have a king's side. You're trying to remove as many of the king's defenders as you can without giving up too much of.

• 1:07:10Lex Fridman?

  And then you have a ton of pieces on the king's side for black, just waiting to.

• 1:07:16Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:07:17Lex Fridman?

  To do harm. And then, uh.

• 1:07:19Speaker 02

  And, and notice how every single move white is getting attacked. Like they're just never getting a break. Black just keeps throwing all their.

• 1:07:26Speaker 01

  So it's funny that black's queen has been hanging for like three moves now and white still can't do anything about it.

• 1:07:31Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. So rook puts the king in check.

• 1:07:34Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:07:34Lex Fridman?

  The king runs.

• 1:07:36Speaker 01

  And then, again, we leave the queen hanging, and you develop a piece, this light squared bishop, that's so important, and you're once again threatening checkmate on g2.

• 1:07:47Lex Fridman?

  And then bishop's coming to...

• 1:07:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, once again, the queen hanging.

• 1:07:51Speaker 01

  And I mean, the game is just so beautiful, the amount of calculation Hikaru put into this position.

• 1:07:58Lex Fridman?

  It feels like so much is in danger.

• 1:08:00Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:08:01Lex Fridman?

  It's so interesting.

• 1:08:03Lex Fridman?

  And knight takes what? Up on's.

• 1:08:06Speaker 01

  So now his queen is attacked twice, and he doesn't care. He takes the bishop and he's still threatening the checkmate on g2.

• 1:08:15Lex Fridman?

  And then the queen takes the bishop.

• 1:08:17Speaker 01

  Yep. So now he's defending against g2, and black just goes and grabs some material back here.

• 1:08:26Lex Fridman?

  So here, black is already is winning.

• 1:08:28Speaker 01

  Well, he ends up winning a knight here because black had to be so much on the defensive.

• 1:08:34Lex Fridman?

  He's just taking pieces.

• 1:08:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, at this point, you're up two whole pieces, so you would resign here.

• 1:08:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:08:40Speaker 02

  But...

• 1:08:42Lex Fridman?

  And queen.

• 1:08:44Speaker 01

  Queen. And then you take, and then the rook takes. And there's not as much of an attack on the king anymore, but Hikaru is up a knight here, which is GG.

• 1:08:58Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, what's the correct way of saying that? Because I played Demis Asabas, I played him in chess, and then I quickly realized, like, from his facial expressions, that I should have, like, stopped playing.

• 1:09:12Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 1:09:13Lex Fridman?

  It was like, it's already set.

• 1:09:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, when it's...

• 1:09:16Lex Fridman?

  And then he's like, like, this is the good time to, like, give up.

• 1:09:20Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:09:21Lex Fridman?

  You're not going to get the checkmate. Where, like, there's, you know, he could see, like, the checkmate is like five or seven moves away or something. And what's the play?

• 1:09:31Speaker 01

  Usually, you have to resign if you're in a position, or you should, through chess etiquette, resign when you're in a position where... Your opponent is definitely going to win out of respect, like if you're a piece down. And obviously, all top grandmasters do that. The only people who don't do that is kids, because their coaches, their coaches always tell them never resign. And they'll be in hopelessly lost positions, playing against like two rooks, a king, and they only have their sole king, but they're still playing on. So that's a position where it's obvious they can't win.

• 1:10:04Lex Fridman?

  Because the kids might make errors.

• 1:10:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:10:06Lex Fridman?

  And so might as well. That was the interesting thing about, I think, game six of the previous world championship with Magnus.

• 1:10:13Speaker 01

  Was it the one where he beat Nepo?

• 1:10:14Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, the first time he beat him, where it was like, he said that, I don't know how often you come across this kind of situation. He said, the engines predict a draw.

• 1:10:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:10:26Lex Fridman?

  But that doesn't mean that it's going to be a draw. So you play on, hoping that you take a person into, I mean, this is, I guess, an endgame thing. You take them to deep water and they make a positional mistake or something. I don't, I don't know when, like, he, from his gut, knows that this is supposed to be a draw, but he still plays on.

• 1:10:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, that is one where it could theoretically be a draw, but it could be very hard to defend because it's a hard technique to know as a human. And especially in that game, I know that Nepo was also in time pressure, which makes it even harder. So in situations like that, you should always continue. It's more where an engine would give you something like plus 10 or something, where it's not just clearly a win, but anybody would know how to win, and that's where you're usually supposed to resign.

• 1:11:15Lex Fridman?

  So what do you find beautiful about this game? Is it the, the attacking chess and just the asymmetry of it?

• 1:11:23Speaker 01

  It's the asymmetry, and it's the fact that this is the dream for the King's Indian, where you're able to get a beautiful attack. And there's also those two really nice sacrifices, where Black just continuously kept putting pressure on White's king to the point where he was able to win material. And the best part of it is that if the attack didn't work out, Black would have been completely lost.

• 1:11:49Lex Fridman?

  How often does that happen, by the way? Like, as an attacking player, you, like, how often do you put yourself in the position of like, "I'm screwed unless this works out"?

• 1:11:57Speaker 01

  In online chess, more than I should. And it's usually when I sacrifice, I know it's either gonna work, or I'm lost. And those are the most fun positions to play, usually.

• 1:12:09Speaker 02

  But in tournaments, if you're doing a sacrifice, you're playing it with 100% confidence, because you're taking the time to calculate it. But yeah, when you have three minutes, you don't have time. So you take a whim and you follow your intuition. And then you find out later.

• 1:12:23Speaker 01

  Or you're very confident it'll work, and you haven't calculated all the way until the end. But you've calculated to the point where you have enough in exchange for the stack, and you think you could play that position.

• 1:12:33Lex Fridman?

  How do you train chess these days? What's, um... Do you practice? Do you do deliberate practice? I mean, you're in this tough position, because you're also a creator, an educator, an entertainer. So do you try to put in time of, like, daily practice?

• 1:12:51Speaker 01

  I don't train chess anymore when I'm focusing on creating. I do if I'm preparing for a tournament. But back in the day, I would train very tournament, very seriously for tournaments. And the way it would work is I'd do opening preparation for a specific tournament, because that's when you really need to have those lines memorized, and you could also prepare for specific opponents. And I would do tactics to make sure I stay sharp. So those were the two things I would do every single day for a tournament, and then mix up the rest with, like, maybe some end games, maybe some positional chess.

• 1:13:24Lex Fridman?

  So what does tactics preparation looks like? Do you do like a puzzle? Like, uh, like a random puzzle thing?

• 1:13:31Speaker 01

  Yeah. I would just train puzzles for at least like 30 to 60 minutes, or books. And sometimes you were, a- and there's different kinds of puzzles. One, you could train for pattern recognition, where you're supposed to go through them very quickly. And that's just so that when you're playing the game, if your mind is tired, it's still keeping track of things a little bit more easily. And then there's where you're practicing your combination, and those sometimes take like 20 minutes to find, because you have to just calculate a lot. And it's more like making sure that you trained with that muscle. But Andrea's actually very good at finding ways to balance and still study while also doing content.

• 1:14:05Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, so what, you're able to do both?

• 1:14:07Speaker 02

  That's the hard thing. I was getting very irritated with content because I'm very competitive. I don't like playing chess if I'm losing. And if you're talking and entertaining, you're gonna be losing more games than winning. So then I started doing more training streams where I'd bring on my coach. And one of the things that I wanted to add to Alex's training repertoire, so I would do daily puzzles every time I'm streaming, which helped me a lot, even if it's like, there's this thing on chess.com called Puzzle Rush, where you have three minutes and you just do puzzle after puzzle where they get incrementally harder. And it's just a really good way to build your pattern recognition, especially when you're rusty. So I would do that till I hit a high score and I wouldn't play any blitz until I hit the score that I want.

• 1:14:51Speaker 02

  But that's kind of more like the fun part of chess studying. The very important one is actually analyzing your losses in your tournament games. And first you sit and you look through your mistake yourself and try to see if you can find the better moves. And then that's when you would check over with the computer to see if you're right. So game analysis is also very important, which I try to do.

• 1:15:13Lex Fridman?

  I remember to give a shout out, I listened to a couple of episodes of the Perpetual Chess Podcast, which is pretty good, but whatever I listened to, I remember it's, I think they really focus on like teaching people.

• 1:15:30Speaker 02

  How to train?

• 1:15:31Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, how to play, how to train, all that kind of stuff. They do like, yeah, I'm looking now, Adult Improver. So basically, like, how do regular noobs get better at chess?

• 1:15:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:15:43Lex Fridman?

  One of the things, one of the person that said, I think he was the Grandmaster, but he said, to maximize the amount of time you spend every day of like, basically as you were saying, like suffering. So like, you, it's not about the, like, you should be thinking, you should be doing calculating. So it's the opposite of what Magnus said, like. You should be doing a lot of time. It doesn't matter what the puzzle is or whatever the hell you're doing, but you should be like doing that difficult calculation. That's how you get better.

• 1:16:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, it really depends what you're training because I used to think the same, but it depends what your weaker at because if you're doing the really difficult puzzles, you're training for like visualization and calculating more moves ahead than you typically would, which maybe you wouldn't get into that as often in a regular game because typically you run into like three to four tactics, which are actually the easier and more fun ones to solve. So it really depends.

• 1:16:35Speaker 01

  And on top of that, as a hobbyist, your motivation is very different than when you're playing from a young age and have pretty high competitive ambition. And a lot of people who are new to chess, you could basically work on anything and still improve.

• 1:16:51Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 1:16:51Speaker 01

  So if you're focusing on something you like, you're probably going to stick to it more and be more consistent, which I think is more helpful long term.

• 1:16:59Lex Fridman?

  What was the most embarrassing loss of your career?

• 1:17:04Speaker 01

  I had so many flashbacks, but I'm so glad it's a question for Andrea.

• 1:17:08Speaker 02

  I like that you specified. You know, it's funny because.

• 1:17:13Lex Fridman?

  I mean, because you said you're so competitive and like.

• 1:17:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, no.

• 1:17:16Lex Fridman?

  I could tell just even from the way you said it that it like you hate losing.

• 1:17:20Speaker 02

  I, yeah, I mean, that was the reason I hated chess in high school because it'd always be like, but, but okay, there's many traumatizing losses where it's feel like you're top three, you're running for first and then you throw a game you shouldn't. But and this shouldn't hurt my ego as much as it does. But it's always kids or when I was a high school girl, it's the younger boys who are really cocky and when they win, they start rubbing it in your face and they're yawning and looking around when like 90% of the game you were destroying them and you had this one tiny mistake and now their ego is huge. But I'll never forget, I was playing like for a chess scholarship and I was, it was tiebreaker for first and I think I lost to a 12 year old girl who couldn't even use the scholarship, but she beat me in one first place

• 1:18:05Speaker 02

  and she got some other prize. So yeah, I was losing to that little girl who's literally like twenty three hundred now. So makes sense.

• 1:18:13Lex Fridman?

  Right. You keep telling yourself that. What do you think? What do you, what do you, do you think Kasparov was feeling that when he was playing thirteen year old Magnus? Like, why?

• 1:18:22Speaker 02

  As much as it's a beauty of the sport that any age can be brilliant, any demographic, anything. I feel like when you're adults and you're paired against the kid, it's just hard not to let it get to you. And it depends. Maybe if they're a really sweet kid, but most times I play kids, they're just really arrogant. And but I don't think they do it intentionally because they're kids.

• 1:18:43Lex Fridman?

  I mean, there is a certain etiquette thing where, like you say, yawning and in general, like it's not.

• 1:18:48Speaker 02

  Your kids, there's no etiquette.

• 1:18:49Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:50Speaker 02

  They don't care.

• 1:18:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, the kids traumatized me too. I was playing in Vegas and it was not even my opponent. It was the board next to me and the kid was at least ten years old, made twelve max. And he was playing against an adult and he takes out his hand and he starts doing a fake phone to which the kid studying, sitting across diagonally, picks up their banana and starts talking like it's a phone. And they're just mouthing words while their two adult opponents are thinking intensely at the game. And then I see the adult look up, look at the kid, just making banana phone and the despair in his eyes as he sighs.

• 1:19:27Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. And they're not even doing for trash talk.

• 1:19:29Speaker 01

  No, no, no, they're just bored. Bored kids.

• 1:19:31Speaker 02

  Yes, exactly.

• 1:19:33Lex Fridman?

  What was the, because you, you play a bunch of people for, for your channel. What was the most like memorable? What's the most fun, most intense? There's a bunch of fun ones. You've played kids before, some trash talking kids.

• 1:19:47Speaker 02

  That sounds great. They trash talk kids.

• 1:19:50Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:50Speaker 01

  Nothing like losing to a twelve year old who then starts doing a Fortnite dance.

• 1:19:55Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. So that, that actually happened?

• 1:19:57Speaker 01

  That did happen. He, he is, you know, a very young master. I think he became master when he was like nine years old or something. And he's very good at chess and doing a lot of training, but he's also incredibly good at trash talking. And he beat me one game and he stood up and he started doing the Fortnite dance.

• 1:20:15Speaker 01

  So you know, you gotta just swallow your pride in those moments.

• 1:20:18Lex Fridman?

  What is that culture of like, street chess players? It seems, it seems pretty interesting. Like, um, I don't know, that seems to be celebrating the beauty of the game. It's the trash talking, but also having fun with it, but also taking it seriously. And you've done a few of those. Did you go to New York?

• 1:20:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, in Union Square Park, Washington Square.

• 1:20:38Lex Fridman?

  What was that like?

• 1:20:40Speaker 01

  It's such a unique place. I haven't seen it anywhere else in the U.S. Where people are just professional chess hustlers, even if they're not necessarily, you know, a top player, but they play chess every single day. And so many of them learn chess by themselves and never had a professional coach. So they are quite good at it. They're also very tight knit. They all know each other and it's a very social thing where you're not just playing chess. It's the experience of getting to know this person who's very much a personality and they talk to you. They could either give you tips or they could be really chatty and talk to you during. So it's a chess experience rather than just playing a game.

• 1:21:20Lex Fridman?

  Do you tell them like what your rating is? Or do you just let people just like, both ways? Do you discover how good the actual, the person actually is?

• 1:21:28Speaker 01

  Initially, I loved going and not telling people my rating and just surprising them and, and winning games. But now we've gone so many times that they just know us. So we can't get away with it anymore sadly.

• 1:21:39Speaker 02

  One time, actually, I don't know if I should share this, but one time we dressed up as grandmothers and we had prosthetics on our face.

• 1:21:47Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:48Speaker 02

  And I think they still recognized us.

• 1:21:50Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, it's probably the, there's other components, like probably the trash talk and all that kind of stuff.

• 1:21:55Speaker 02

  It was actually, no, it was funny. We were talking like grandmothers, but it was the way I held, it was the way I.

• 1:22:00Lex Fridman?

  Grandmother talk like.

• 1:22:02Speaker 02

  You don't want to.

• 1:22:02Lex Fridman?

  Back in my day.

• 1:22:04Speaker 01

  No, no, no, we're not bringing. If you want some bon bon.

• 1:22:06Speaker 02

  We're not bringing this back.

• 1:22:07Lex Fridman?

  Bon bon. Okay, what were your names? What were the code names?

• 1:22:10Speaker 02

  Oh my God.

• 1:22:11Speaker 01

  I think it was Edna.

• 1:22:12Speaker 02

  Edna and I had a really, uh, can't remember the other one.

• 1:22:16Speaker 01

  But it was embarrassing because we were walking so slowly and Andrea dropped her cane or something at one point, then people in the park came to help her. We felt so embarrassed.

• 1:22:26Speaker 02

  But, but yeah, it was funny because they didn't know it was us until he saw the way I reached for my pawn. And he said, the way you held your pawn, I knew it was you. It was like such a niche thing. That was what blew the grandma cover.

• 1:22:40Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, do you have a style of how you play physically? Is that recognizable?

• 1:22:44Speaker 02

  I didn't think we did until grandma went to play chess, but.

• 1:22:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, I've never thought about that.

• 1:22:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think our style is just trash talking now. Like, it's style is very, if you're talking about style on, and YouTube and Twitch, we definitely have a distinctive style.

• 1:23:00Lex Fridman?

  What's that? What's your distinctive? Just talking shit?

• 1:23:03Speaker 01

  Yes. But not going too far.

• 1:23:05Speaker 02

  No, no, definitely. That's, that definitely going to, if it's us two against each other.

• 1:23:10Speaker 01

  Oh, we, we trash talk each other so hard.

• 1:23:13Speaker 02

  So brutally.

• 1:23:13Speaker 01

  And I love looking at Andrea and watching her little nose scrunch up as she's annoyed and the satisfaction I get when that happens.

• 1:23:21Lex Fridman?

  How many times do you play against each other on, online, publicly? I think I've seen a couple of games.

• 1:23:26Speaker 01

  We've played a lot of times. We try not to do it too often because it's repetitive, but every now and then when we haven't done it for a while, we'll go at it again.

• 1:23:33Lex Fridman?

  What do you mean repetitive? Is like, is that implied trash talk right there?

• 1:23:36Speaker 01

  No, it just, we, we play similar openings, so you just start seeing the same position too often.

• 1:23:41Speaker 02

  The same opening against each other every time.

• 1:23:43Speaker 01

  Andrea's really good at opening, so I just start playing bad openings to get her out of her preparation because I don't like opening theory very much. I just like playing the game and getting into middle games and end games, but.

• 1:23:53Speaker 02

  But yeah, typically the only time we're playing each other is when we're setting up in the park and we don't have opponents yet and we need content, so we just play each other till people show up.

• 1:24:02Speaker 01

  But we always put stakes on the line, which makes it very interesting.

• 1:24:05Speaker 02

  Because otherwise it wouldn't be fun to play each other if there's no stakes.

• 1:24:08Lex Fridman?

  Where's, where's the most fun place you've, you've played? Is it New York?

• 1:24:11Speaker 01

  I think so. And it was actually when we set up in Times Square one night, we just brought a table with us and chess. And it's not even where people usually play chess, but it was so lively. There were all of the lights out and so many people just kept stopping by to play chess. And it was really one of my favorite streams.

• 1:24:30Speaker 02

  It's just the opposite of like the classical chess world. It's super loud. There's music, there's cars, there's street dancers, even some naked people walking around who we had to be careful not to get banned.

• 1:24:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:24:40Speaker 02

  But I honestly really like the chaotic environments for chess games because I think it's a good way to break more into the mainstream culture and make it entertaining and appealing to anyone who doesn't know anything about chess. So that's what I

• 1:24:52Speaker 01

  And also in an authentic way, because it's what we really like about chess, when you're just enjoying the game, but also the atmosphere and the people who you're playing with. And that's one of the things that I think you see less when you're just thinking of chess as a competitive thing.

• 1:25:08Lex Fridman?

  You've, you mentioned a few other games, like the Bobby Fischer games, the Candidates Match, the Game of the Century, which I feel like is a weird game to call the Game of the Century when there's still like a few decades left in the century. But yeah.

• 1:25:21Speaker 01

  I mean, it wasn't an official thing. It was just the chess journalist.

• 1:25:24Speaker 02

  It's just clickbait on a chess article.

• 1:25:26Lex Fridman?

  But it's stuck if you look on

• 1:25:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, it did stick.

• 1:25:29Lex Fridman?

  Again, Wikipedia. This is all I do research wise. Because there's, so that particular one was a 13 year old Fisher and he did a queen sacrifice. I wonder, is, there's that movie Searching for Bobby Fischer. Was that related? Because didn't they have a young, somebody who's supposed to be kind of like Bobby Fischer played by Josh Waitzkin?

• 1:25:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think he ended up being an international master. It wasn't based on Bobby Fischer. It was based on another player, but I liked how they told it through the lens of being inspired by Bobby Fischer.

• 1:26:01Lex Fridman?

  Do you remember that game? Like, why, why do you think it was dubbed the Game of the Century? It was just journalists being like?

• 1:26:06Speaker 01

  I, I think part of it was the atmosphere where you have the US junior champion who's this 13 year old nobody. And it's the first time he's playing in a very competitive landscape against some of the top American players. And he goes up against an international master. So somebody who's a lot stronger than he is, who's played in, you know, Olympiads for the American team. He's having a bad tournament, but then he has this one game where he just shows off his tactical prowess and plays incredibly well. And I don't know if this is true, but in the paper clippings of it, they'd say things like grandmasters were by the board and they would say things like, oh, Bobby is lost in this position. What is he doing? But there's this 13 year old kid who's just playing incredibly well.

• 1:26:51Speaker 01

  And then that also happened before Bobby's started really rapidly improving at chess. Not that people knew that, but he kind of seemed like a rising star. So I think the game was beautiful, but I also think the idea of a 13 year old kid coming out from nowhere and beating a top American player was very fascinating.

• 1:27:08Lex Fridman?

  And there was aggressive chess and it was, and the interesting ideas.

• 1:27:12Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:27:13Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, taking big risks. It's cool to see a 13 year old do that.

• 1:27:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:27:17Lex Fridman?

  What about the, you, you mentioned that his match against Mark Taimana from their 71 Candidates match was interesting in some way. Why is it interesting to you?

• 1:27:30Lex Fridman?

  Move 45. I'm, I'm looking at some notes.

• 1:27:32Speaker 02

  Also, this is with the bishop e3. I think I know which one you're talking about. It's, I wouldn't say, a lot of these games on these lists, I think are really great combinations that, that when tactics come into play, which is what we're talking about. But they're very good at exemplifying lessons. This is why you study famous games, so you can apply these lessons to your own games. And I think the main takeaway for this one was they're punishing their opponent from steering away from opening principles, which is something that we learned, learned a little earlier, where he delayed the development of his king and put his queen out a little bit too exposed. So Bobby Fischer immediately punished that.

• 1:28:16Speaker 02

  And then there was just like a beautiful combination where it was like a 12 in a row perfect moves, which was a tactic just winning the game. But it only came from punishing those mistakes.

• 1:28:26Lex Fridman?

  The mistake being bringing the queen out?

• 1:28:28Speaker 02

  Uh, bringing the queen out and yeah, not castling your king right away. And these were just like opening principles that now they're written in books, but, but for books, you would study these principles by studying games.

• 1:28:41Lex Fridman?

  And also, I'm looking at some notes. His dominance during the Kennedy's turn was unprecedented. He swept two top grandmasters. I mean, that guy's meteoric rise is incredible. Sad that, I think, at whatever, in his twenties, he then quit chess. One has to wonder what, where he could have gone.

• 1:29:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, it is sad that we lost such a brilliant mind so early on. And it's also sad, I think, kind of what ended up happening in his life and the slowly going crazier.

• 1:29:14Lex Fridman?

  Is there some aspect of chess that opens the door to crazy? Like, like how challenging it is on you, the stress, the anxiety of it, the...

• 1:29:26Speaker 02

  The isolation and being alone.

• 1:29:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:29:28Speaker 02

  It's a very lonely sport.

• 1:29:30Lex Fridman?

  It is. Even you guys, since you both play it, it's still lonely, the experience of it?

• 1:29:35Speaker 01

  It was when I was competing a lot. I think the crazy part of it for me was how obsessed you can get about a board game where you're optimizing your entire life to beat another person at, you know, pushing wooden pieces across a board. And it doesn't necessarily translate to other things. And the fact that so many people spend so much of their life on it, but you can also spend so much of your life because it's so deep and so interesting. And I mean, I've definitely experienced moments where I didn't want to do anything but chess. And I had that before I went to college, where I just wanted to take a gap year and focus on chess. Because I still, I went to high school, we moved a lot. There was always other things going on.

• 1:30:19Speaker 01

  So I felt like I could never really focus on chess. And the one time I could, by taking a gap year, I ended up not doing, because my parents really wanted me to go to university right away. But I think maybe if I had taken that gap year, I don't know if I would have gone back to school. So maybe it wasn't a bad thing.

• 1:30:35Speaker 02

  I'd also say that's pretty universal. I think if you want to be that, the best at anything you do or any sport, you have to be that level of obsessed. So I don't know if that's only chess.

• 1:30:44Lex Fridman?

  Well, some things, some obsessions are more transferable to a balanced, social life.

• 1:30:50Speaker 02

  That is true.

• 1:30:50Lex Fridman?

  Like healthy development than other things.

• 1:30:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, chess is a lot less social than most other sports.

• 1:30:54Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, there's something deeply isolating about this game. I mean, the great chess players I've met, I mean, they, it's like, it's really competitive, too. And there's...

• 1:31:06Lex Fridman?

  Something that you're almost nonstop paranoid about blundering at every level. And that develops a person who's really anxious about losing versus someone who like deeply enjoys perfection or winning and so on. It's just this constant paranoia about losing. Maybe I'm like misinterpreting it, but that gets that that creates huge amount of stress over like thousands of games. Especially in a young person.

• 1:31:38Speaker 01

  And that blundering is such a painful experience because you could be playing a game that you've played for five, six hours. And you have one lapse in focus and you blunder and you throw the entire game away. And sometimes not just the entire game, but the entire tournament. Now you can't place or do anything anymore. So you just feel those mistakes so strongly.

• 1:32:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's no one to blame but yourself.

• 1:32:03Lex Fridman?

  Are you, are you guys hard on yourself? Have you, have you been about losing like before you became super famous for streaming? Where you could be like, well, fuck this at least I can.

• 1:32:14Speaker 01

  So I was really hard on myself and I went to play a tournament in Canada to try to qualify for the Olympiad team. And I was like, well, I'm an adult now. I'm not going to feel emotional if I lose. And then I got there on the first day. I think I was ranked like fourth in Canada for, for females. And I.

• 1:32:36Lex Fridman?

  How long ago was this?

• 1:32:37Speaker 01

  This was like, uh, earlier in the year, actually. And I go and I lose to somebody lower rated on the first day. And I think it was because I had blundered and I went back to my room and I was like, I am not an adult. I'm not eating, I'm not leaving this room. I feel terrible and I know I shouldn't, but it just cuts so deep. And then I actually ended up qualifying for the Olympiad team, but I didn't want to play because I didn't have enough time to train. And the losses are so painful that I was like, it's not worth it.

• 1:33:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's in high school and growing up, I was, I just remember weekends. And I, I think being competitive in any sport, again, probably people relate to this, which is like spending weekends crying. And even like Alex said, like punishing yourself because you're disappointed in yourself because you fight so hard and you prepare and you study. And you're like, oh, I, eh, yeah, but that's once again, on, on the bright side, though, when.

• 1:33:30Speaker 02

  You're studying so hard and after like a four hour game and you actually are on the opposite end and you win, you feel like such a huge rush of dopamine and serotonin and you're like on a high from the win. So there's also plus sides or you can turn this around. But yeah, like Alex said, like losing after preparing for something and fighting on hours and hours is the worst feeling in the world. Did you ever get anything like that with martial arts?

• 1:33:54Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, so you know, wrestling, I wrestled all through high school and middle school. Definitely. So it's an individual sport. I did a lot of individual sport, tennis, those kinds of things. But I think even with wrestling and tennis, you're still on a team.

• 1:34:07Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:34:07Lex Fridman?

  You can still like, there's still a camaraderie there. I feel like with chess, especially you go on your own with the tournaments, like you really are alone. But I, I mean, I always personally just had a like a very self critical mind in general. I would not. This is one of the reasons I decided not to play chess. Because I think when I was really young, I met somebody who was able to play blindfold chess.

• 1:34:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:34:34Lex Fridman?

  They were teaching me, they were laying in there on the couch, trashed, drinking and smoking.

• 1:34:38Speaker 02

  Sounds like a Russian.

• 1:34:40Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, exactly. They're now a faculty somewhere in the United States. I forget where. But he making jokes, talking to others and he would move the pieces, like he would yell across the room. And I remember thinking that if a person is able to do that, then that kind of world you can live in, inside your mind, that becomes the chessboard. To me, that meant like the chessboard is not just out here. It could be in here and you could do these beaut-, you can create these beautiful patterns in your mind. I thought like, I had such a strong pull towards that, where I had to decide, either I'm gonna dedicate

• 1:35:22Lex Fridman?

  everything to this or not. You can't do half ass. And then I, that's when I decided

• 1:35:30Lex Fridman?

  to walk away from it because I had so much other beautiful things in my life. I loved mathematics. I loved, just everything was beautiful to me. I thought chess would pull me all in. And there was nothing like it, I think, in my whole life since then. I think it's such a dangerous addiction. It's such a beautiful addiction, but it's a dangerous one, depending on what your mind is like.

• 1:35:52Speaker 01

  It reminds me of something I thought of before I stopped competing as much. And I'd look at people and think, imagine being so intelligent that you could become a grandmaster and yet only spending the rest of your life being a grandmaster. Because it's one of those things where it does require a lot of mental power, but by doing chess, you're not going to be able to explore other subjects deeply.

• 1:36:16Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:17Speaker 01

  And not in a way that is bad necessarily, more in admiration and wondering what else could have been, because I've just seen people get to these levels of obsession where it's all they want to do. And they're grandmasters, but they're not even top players. So they're never going to make a living out of it. They'll make like maybe thirty, forty K a year max. They can't even focus on their competitive chess because they have to supplement it by, you know, teaching and doing things they don't like. And it's just because of how strong of an obsession it can be, because it truly is very intellectually rewarding. And I think that's what people are addicted to in the self-improvement, but you can get that from a lot of other things as well.

• 1:36:54Lex Fridman?

  Well, I think for me, what I was inspired by that stuck with me is that a human being could be so good at one thing. But to me, that person on the couch drinking and so on, I assumed he was the best chess player in the world. Like, to be able to play inside your head.

• 1:37:14Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:37:15Lex Fridman?

  It just felt like a feat that's incredible. And so I fell in love with the idea that I hope to be something like that in my life at something. It would be pretty cool to be really good at one thing. And like, life in some sense is a search for the things that you could be that good at. I didn't even think about like, how much money does it make or any of that? Is, can I fall in love with something? And make it a life pursuit where I can be damn good at it. And the being damn good at it is the source of enjoyment, not not like um not to win because you want to win a tournament or win because uh like you just want to be better than somebody else. No, it's for the beauty of the game itself or the beauty of the activity itself.

• 1:37:59Lex Fridman?

  And then you realize that that's one of the compelling things about chess. It is a game with rules and you can win. If you want to be really damn good in some aspect of life like that, it's it's it's harder. It's a harder and weirder pursuit.

• 1:38:15Speaker 02

  Don't you feel like you kind of did that with computer science or AI related things? Like getting that level of damn good?

• 1:38:23Lex Fridman?

  That's one of the cool things about AI and robotics or intellectual pursuits or scientific pursuits is you can spend until you're 80 doing it. So I'm in the early days of that. One of the things, reasons I came to Texas, one of the reasons I didn't want to pursue an academic career at MIT is I want to build a company. And so that's I'm in the early days of that AI company. And so it's an open world to see if I'm actually going to be good at it. But the thing that's there that I've been cognizant of my whole life is that I have a passion for it. Something within me draws me to that thing and you have to listen to that to that voice.

• 1:39:05Lex Fridman?

  So with chess, you're fucked unless you like early on are really training really hard. I think life is more forgiving. You can be you can be world class at a thing after after making a lot of mistakes and after spending the first few decades of your life doing something completely different. In chess, it's like um it's like an Olympic sport. Like there's no perfection is a requirement, is a necessity.

• 1:39:36Lex Fridman?

  What do you think is that pursuit for you? Like, why did you decide to stream? What drew you?

• 1:39:43Speaker 02

  I like these questions now are really getting deep.

• 1:39:46Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, this is like a therapy session. I mean, what, um, isn't it terrifying to be in front of a camera?

• 1:39:52Speaker 01

  Well, it's terrifying to be in front of five cameras.

• 1:39:55Lex Fridman?

  Corrections, six.

• 1:39:56Speaker 01

  Six, okay.

• 1:39:57Lex Fridman?

  It's more terrifying for me to try to remember if I actually turned them all. Um, like I mentioned to you off mic, I'm still suffering from a bit of PTSD after, uh, screwing up a recording of Magnus. I, uh, he had to console me because that was the thing is I felt, okay, you wanna, you wanna build robots. If you can't get a camera to even run correctly, how are you gonna do anything else in life?

• 1:40:26Speaker 01

  Oh, no, don't let it spiral like that.

• 1:40:29Lex Fridman?

  It was, it was spiraling hard.

• 1:40:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:40:31Lex Fridman?

  And I was just laying there and just, just feeling sorry for myself. But I think that feeling, by the way, and a small tangent is really useful. Like, I feel like a lot of growing happens when you feel shitty as long, as long as you can get out of it. Like, don't let it spiral like indefinitely, but just feeling really, really shitty about everything in my life. Like, I was having an existential crisis, like, how I, how will I be able to do anything at all? Like, this, you're a giant failure, all those kinds of negative voices. Um, but I think I made some good decisions in the, in the week after that.

• 1:41:07Speaker 01

  Do you think you couldn't have made those decisions if you were less hard on yourself?

• 1:41:12Lex Fridman?

  Me personally, no, I'm too lazy.

• 1:41:15Speaker 01

  Okay, so you really need to be angry at yourself enough to go and do what?

• 1:41:20Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, it's not even angry, it's just upset of being self-critical, like, also for me personally, because I don't have proclivities for depression.

• 1:41:31Lex Fridman?

  I have a lot more room to feel extremely shitty about myself. So if you, if you're somebody that can get stuck in that place, like clinically depressed, you have to be really, really careful. You have to notice the triggers. You don't want to get into that place. But for me, just looking empirically, feeling shitty has always been productive. Like, it makes me long-term happier. Ultimately, it makes me more grateful to be alive. It helps me grow, all those kinds of things. So I kind of embrace it. Otherwise, I feel like I will never do anything. I have to feel shitty. But that's not a thing I prescribe to others. There's a, there's a famous professor at MIT.

• 1:42:16Lex Fridman?

  His name is Marvin Minsky. And when he was giving advice about, like, to the students, he said, "The secret to my success was that I always hated everything I did in the, in the past." So always sort of being self-critical about everything you've accomplished. Never really take a moment of gratitude. And I think for a lot of people that hear that, that's not good. You should be, you should like take a pause and be grateful. But it really worked for him. So it's, you know, it's a choice you have to make.

• 1:42:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, it reminds me of the quote, "Be happy but never satisfied." Where you can have a positive spin and still want to improve yourself.

• 1:42:56Lex Fridman?

  But yeah, um, like, when did you decide to take a step in the spotlight? That terrifying spotlight of the internet?

• 1:43:07Speaker 01

  It was actually my senior year of college and I was really busy with work and school. And chess was kind of like this lost love. And the interesting thing is that the longer I don't play chess, the more I kind of miss playing it casually and enjoy it more. Cause then I start looking at it with fresh eyes. But I didn't have time to play tournaments. So I started streaming online because it was more social than just playing strangers on the internet without knowing anything about who they are. And I started slowly growing a community and got in touch with chess.com pretty quickly, too. So then it was this hobby that I would do once a week, every Thursday at 8:00 PM. And it was one of the things that brought me a lot of joy.

• 1:43:52Speaker 01

  And actually, I, speaking of depression, did struggle for, was, you know, at least 10 years of my life. And it was one of those things where chess and streaming was such a distraction and it brought me such great joy that I just kept doing it because I really, really liked it. And then I was working on something that didn't pan out and decided to go and take a risk and just stream full time, which, you know, seemed a little bit weird at the moment, but.

• 1:44:22Lex Fridman?

  Was that terrifying, that leap?

• 1:44:25Speaker 01

  It was terrifying, but I had taken so many terrifying leaps in the past and they didn't, and, you know, the last two hadn't worked out, but I was like, well, I'll get it eventually. So somehow having failed before and going through failure and knowing that it'll be okay, made me more likely to just try something that was a very, very weird job.

• 1:44:47Lex Fridman?

  Goodbye, camera.

• 1:44:48Speaker 01

  I saw it die.

• 1:44:49Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, the camera, we don't need it.

• 1:44:51Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:44:52Lex Fridman?

  But one of the cameras.

• 1:44:52Speaker 01

  Luckily, we have another five.

• 1:44:54Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I know.

• 1:44:55Speaker 01

  Like, this is where this triggers the spiral, Lex is gonna go, you just stand up.

• 1:45:00Lex Fridman?

  It's still, it's still somehow awake. Is there advice you can give about the dark places you've gone in your mind, the depression you suffered from, how to get out from your own, from your own story?

• 1:45:14Speaker 01

  Whenever I go to those really dark places, the scariest thing is that it feels like I will never get rid of this feeling and it is very overwhelming. And I just have to kind of look back over time spans and remember that every single time I have got through it and remind myself that it is just temporary. And that has been the most helpful thing for me because I just try to combat the scariest thing about it.

• 1:45:46Lex Fridman?

  And then believe, have faith that it's gonna, like, this will go away.

• 1:45:50Speaker 01

  And take action, obviously, to make sure it goes away. And I've also tried to spin it as depression is one of the hardest things I've had to deal with, but also one of the biggest motivators. Because if I just am left with my own brain, I get very depressed. Then I really like working or focusing on things. So it actually pushed me to, you know, try to focus on school, try to focus on chess, focus on whatever I'm doing. And also, if I'm feeling really bad, then there's probably something a little bit off. And I use it as a signal and try to think of it as, okay, this is just a sign that there's things that could be improved for long term.

• 1:46:24Lex Fridman?

  What about you, Andrea? Have you gone to dark places in your mind?

• 1:46:27Speaker 02

  I'd say I, my family, like, like, I see Alex going through this. My mom also has very serious depression. Luckily, I got the genes where I don't go through that serious level of depression that they do. I'd say mine is much more temporarily.

• 1:46:43Lex Fridman?

  So it's more similar to what I was feeling when I was

• 1:46:46Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 1:46:47Lex Fridman?

  Feeling shitty about it.

• 1:46:48Speaker 02

  Yes, exactly. Where like, but I know that it's not something that's clinical and that's just a genetic thing or a mental thing, whereas I know is more serious for like my family members. And I did relate a lot with you where you're saying where that really pushes you. And I felt that a lot through content where you're just kind of feel hopeless and kind of like an existential crisis where I don't like the content I'm doing. And that's what pushes me to like, okay, you have no choice but to try something that now you're going to be passionate about because otherwise you're going to be stuck in this never ending cycle. So it does, it's short term and then it helps me come up with the things that I enjoy the most, content wise. And it also, long term, taught me just how to have a more balanced life,

• 1:47:30Speaker 02

  like doing small things that make me happier on a daily basis to like working out, to eating healthier, which I notice when I don't do for weeks, I just get a lot more depressed.

• 1:47:41Lex Fridman?

  What has playing chess taught you about life? Has it, has it made you better at life in any kind of way? Or has it made you worse? You know, a lot of people kind of romanticize the idea that chess is kind of like life or life is kind of like chess. And becoming better at making decisions on the chessboard is going to make you better at making decisions in life. Is there some truth to that?

• 1:48:05Speaker 01

  I always shy away from these comparisons with chess and life. Because yeah, it has both positives and negatives. So one thing it really helps develop from an early age is having an analytical mind. But then you could also get like paralysis of analysis where you've just thought of everything to death and you're moving too slowly when you just have to keep going forward because there's not a great path ahead. So it's more like exercising your brain and staying sharp and then also applying that to other things. Whereas if instead of playing chess, you're watching TV or something like that, you'd probably end up being less sharp.

• 1:48:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, I used to, in high school, I'd always preach like, ah, chess transfers life skills.

• 1:48:49Speaker 01

  College essays.

• 1:48:50Speaker 02

  I would teach. I taught chess for juvenile department for a special education school. I'd cite studies in prisons where like, oh, playing chess helped them with X. And for your kids, it helps with teamwork and thinking over life choices. And now that I'm older, I don't believe in any of that BS. But I do think that the process of working really hard at something which takes really long to see results and you have to be really dedicated. And like, I remember in high school and in middle school, well, all my friends, they were having fun on the weekends and I'd have to be there studying to hours of chess a day and knowing one day will pay off, but for like two, three years, nothing paid off. Kind of learning that type of patience with anything. It's like, you know, like getting a real job.

• 1:49:34Speaker 02

  I can't say I ever really worked a real job in my life since I went straight into streaming and I got to work for myself. But I'd say it's what people go to college for, like they learn how to live in the real world. And I'd say that that's what chess taught me as a kid.

• 1:49:47Lex Fridman?

  When you're streaming, when you're, when you're doing the creative work, do you feel lonely? So a bunch of creators talk about sort of the, it's, it's counterintuitive because you're famous now. You know?

• 1:50:01Speaker 02

  Sort of, not quite, but. We're very lucky to have each other.

• 1:50:07Lex Fridman?

  So is that the source of the, the comfort and the? Like, is there some sense where it's isolating to have these personalities? They have to always be having fun, being wild and so on? Or is it actually the opposite? Like, is it a source of comfort to know that there's so many cool people out there? They are giving you their love and?

• 1:50:27Speaker 01

  It started as a source of comfort because it started with a very small community who would be something, it would be around 200 to 300 viewers. And, you know, only like 30 to 40 of them would actually chat actively. So you felt like it was a community, not an audience.

• 1:50:44Lex Fridman?

  So you like knew them personally almost?

• 1:50:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. And it was people who were interested in chess and I would really enjoy that. And then as, you know, we started growing bigger, the audience kind of changed where they're not there for you personally. They're there while you're entertaining. And it changed for me. And I ended up being a lot more self-conscious of things online and started even thinking of myself more like a product than a human being when I'm online. Because I had to.

• 1:51:14Lex Fridman?

  Brand.

• 1:51:15Speaker 01

  Yes, exactly. Otherwise, you just start taking everything personally that people comment about you and it's based off a very small.

• 1:51:22Lex Fridman?

  I see. So it was almost a kind of a defense mechanism?

• 1:51:25Speaker 01

  Exactly. And it took time to get enough. Because even if you have tough skin, eventually it gets to you when you're online every single day, listening to, you know, thousands of people's feedback on you.

• 1:51:37Speaker 02

  I think the loneliest part of being creator is going through burnout, which everyone is just bound to happen. Which is why I think we're very lucky that we have each other because, right? It's a numbers game and you're viral and trendy at one point and then you have to fall. And then there's months where you're just grinding.

• 1:51:56Speaker 01

  And I just come into Andrea's room, I'm like, Andrea, we're irrelevant.

• 1:51:59Speaker 02

  That's why I'm glad, that's, that's really like the worst part of being creator and figuring out how to get over that hump. But it makes me very grateful that I have my sister because I know that I'm not the only person going through it. And yeah, I know that most of my creator friends feel very lonely in that process because they don't have someone who's their family and their business partner and they're working by each other's side by side.

• 1:52:20Speaker 01

  You kind of tie in your self-worth to your job and your content and maybe even more extremely than other jobs because you also are. The entire company and the entire product. So when things are going well or when things are not, you just need to be careful to not reflect it like, oh, I am doing bad. I am bad rather than the trends have now changed. There's outside things we're going to keep going. And this is just the normal waves, which is how we think about it now. And also just about, are we enjoying this? Is this what we want to make? But we were stuck in the camp for a while when we ten X'd our viewership after the pandemic because people were home and playing chess. And then, of course, that dropped by like 70%. And then you see that and you're trying your best. And you just kind of have to deal with it and be like,

• 1:53:05Speaker 01

  OK, I'm just going to keep persevering and maybe it'll get better.

• 1:53:09Lex Fridman?

  That's so fascinating. I mean, this is a struggle of sorts in the 21st century of like, how to be an artist, how to be a creator, how to be an interesting mind in response to this algorithm. I'm telling you, turning off views and likes is really good.

• 1:53:26Speaker 01

  I don't look at Twitch views for that reason. And I get obsessed with the numbers too. And I know Andrea does. But for me, what I try now is to be more focused in the moment. But Andrea somehow can do it even with the views.

• 1:53:38Lex Fridman?

  So you just, you get, you have fun with it? Like, ooh, number one.

• 1:53:41Speaker 02

  I'm too much of like a given to the temporary satisfaction. Like, I like seeing, I like knowing that if something happens right now, viewership is going to boost by a couple hundred and seeing that I'm right, of course.

• 1:53:53Speaker 01

  But what about when the viewers start dropping?

• 1:53:55Speaker 02

  Well, and I always, like, you just have this intuition now. And but I think also the reason that it doesn't affect me so much is when we first started our content journey, we were only Twitch streamers. And we, our livelihood, were based on Twitch viewers. But now, like, I've learned how to recycle that content into like YouTube and shorts and other things where I know like, OK, if this stream does badly, there's so many more things you can do that also just have a much larger output. So it doesn't get to me as much as it did.

• 1:54:24Speaker 01

  Do you ever feel that with your podcasts? Or do you feel like it's been authentic since the start?

• 1:54:28Lex Fridman?

  No, so there's a million things to say there. So one is, there's a reason I stopped taking a salary at MIT.

• 1:54:38Lex Fridman?

  And move to Texas is I wanted my bank account to go to zero because I do my best with my back against the wall. So one of the comforts I have is I don't care if this podcast is popular or not. I want it to not be popular. So I don't want it to make money.

• 1:54:52Speaker 01

  Failing Lex.

• 1:54:53Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I want, I want to, I mean, I just do best when I'm um more desperate. That's like one thing to say.

• 1:55:00Speaker 02

  Seems like a reoccurring theme with how you build up your greatest work, which is honestly very respectable.

• 1:55:07Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, so uh. I thank you. This is like a.

• 1:55:11Speaker 02

  I wouldn't recommend.

• 1:55:13Lex Fridman?

  Right. Thank you for finding.

• 1:55:15Speaker 01

  Don't try it at home.

• 1:55:15Lex Fridman?

  Silver lining for not healthy um mental state. But the other thing is I was very conscious, just like with chess and those kinds of things. That I love numbers and I would be, if I paid attention, if I tried to be somebody at their best, like a Mr. Beast, who really pays attention to numbers, I would just not, I'd be, become destroyed by it. The highs and the lows of it. And I just don't think I would be creating the best work possible. But one of the, I mean, there, one of the big benefits of a podcast is listeners.

• 1:55:57Lex Fridman?

  And there's an intimacy with the voice. And I think that is much more stable. And a deeper and a more meaningful connection than YouTube. YouTube is a fickle mistress. So it's like, it's a weird drug that like, it really wants you.

• 1:56:14Speaker 01

  Very addicting feedback loops. When you have a video that's number one out of 10. Oh, my God, the adrenaline you get.

• 1:56:22Lex Fridman?

  And then the thing I really don't like also is the world uh like will introduce you as a person that has a video on YouTube with some X number of views. Like, the world wants you to be addicted to these numbers.

• 1:56:39Speaker 01

  Because they associate it with having done a good job.

• 1:56:41Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:41Speaker 01

  Because that's what people think views are, even if it's not.

• 1:56:44Lex Fridman?

  Right. And because, and primarily because they don't have any other signal of what's a good job. I think the much better signal is people that are close to you, your family, your colleagues. That say, wow, that was cool. I listened to that. That was really, I didn't know this. This was really powerful. This is really moving and so on. But definitely, I'm terrified of numbers because I feel like, just like I said, I'd rather be, I'd rather be a Stanley Kubrick, right? You'd rather create great art, not to be pretentious, but the best possible thing you can create. Whatever the beauty, that's the capacity for creating beauty that's in you, I would like to maximize that.

• 1:57:26Lex Fridman?

  And I feel like for some people like Mr. Beast, I think those are perfectly aligned. Because he just loves the most epic thing possible, but not for everybody. I think there's a lot of people for whom that's not perfectly aligned. And so I'm definitely one of those. And I'm still really confused why anybody listens to this.

• 1:57:45Lex Fridman?

  But that's also something I guess you're trying to find, trying to figure out.

• 1:57:50Speaker 01

  I get very afraid of ever becoming someone who just makes junk food content, where you can't stop while you're in the moment and it has all of your attention. But when you're done, it didn't really bring any value to your life, which is something that I think the algorithm still does really reward. And making sure that as we are learning how to create better content, it's still something that is going to be meaningful long term.

• 1:58:17Lex Fridman?

  Well, ultimately, you know, you inspire a lot of young people.

• 1:58:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, those are the best. When I get messages from people who are like, I played you a year ago and my rating was 1400 and now I'm 1900. I'd like to challenge you again. And it's a 14 year old writing a former email. Those things are always very, very fun to get.

• 1:58:37Lex Fridman?

  And even just outside of chess is just empowering to see, like for young women too, to see that kind of thing. I mean, you guys are being yourself and making money for being yourself and having fun and like growing as human beings, which I think is really inspiring for people to see. So in that sense, it's really rewarding. And then like the way I think about it is there is some benefit of doing entertaining type of stuff so that you get the, kind of like Mr. Beast does with philanthropy, right? The bigger Mr. Beast becomes, the more effective he is at actually doing positive impact on the world. So those things are tied, tied together.

• 1:59:18Lex Fridman?

  But of course, with podcasts, you guys, well, maybe you have these kinds of tense things. But what kind of ideas, what kind of people do you platform? What kind of person?

• 1:59:31Lex Fridman?

  What kind of human being do you want to be? Because you're actually are becoming a person and

• 1:59:41Lex Fridman?

  a set of ideas in front of the public eye and you have to ask yourself that question really hard, like really seriously, because if you're doing stuff in private, you have the complete luxury to try shit out.

• 1:59:53Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:59:54Lex Fridman?

  I think you have less of a luxury to try shit out because the internet can be vicious and punishing you for trying shit out.

• 2:00:01Speaker 01

  And do you think that's sometimes a bad thing where you have less freedom to make mistakes?

• 2:00:08Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, you have two choices. So one, you put up a wall and say, I don't give a shit what people think. I don't like doing that because I like being fragile to the world, keeping my sort of wearing my heart on my sleeve. Or the other one, yeah, you have to be, you have to, you have to actually think through what you're gonna say. You have to think of like, what do I believe? You have to be more serious about

• 2:00:33Lex Fridman?

  what you put out there. It's annoying, but it's also actually, you should have always been doing that. You should be deliberate with your actions and your words.

• 2:00:45Lex Fridman?

  But I don't know, it's a

• 2:00:48Lex Fridman?

  but some of it, it's such a balance because some of my favorite people are brilliant people that allow themselves to act ridiculous and be silly. Elon Musk, who's become a good friend, is the silliest human of all. I mean, he's incredibly brilliant and productive and so on, but allows himself to be silly. And that, that's also inspiring to people. Like, you don't have to be perfect. You don't have to, you can be a weird, a giant weird mess and it's okay. So it's a, it's a balance. I think when you start to delve into political topics, into topics that really get tense for people, then you have to be a little bit more careful and deliberate. But it's also wise to stay, stay the hell away from those topics in general.

• 2:01:31Lex Fridman?

  Like I mentioned to you offline, somebody I have been debating whether I want to talk to or not is Karyakin on the chessboard because You know chess is just a game, but throughout the history of the 20th century, it was played between the Russians and the Americans and so on, where they were at war, cold or hot war. And those are interesting. Those are interesting conversations to be had at the Olympics and so on. It's not just a game in some sense. It's like a mini war. And so I have to decide whether I want to talk to him or not. And those kinds of things, you have to make those kinds of decisions. For now, you guys are not playing chess with Donald Trump or Obama or so on.

• 2:02:15Speaker 01

  We are not right now, no.

• 2:02:17Lex Fridman?

  How long is a stream? Like a few hours, right?

• 2:02:19Speaker 01

  Now they're two to three hours. When I was first streaming, I'd stream for like six hours a day.

• 2:02:24Lex Fridman?

  A day?

• 2:02:25Speaker 01

  At least usually, yeah, for like seven, six to seven days a week.

• 2:02:29Lex Fridman?

  Are you doing just like a talking one?

• 2:02:31Speaker 01

  No, I'd be playing chess the entire time while talking. And when I started streaming, that's kind of how everybody blows up on Twitch. You're just putting in crazy hours and you're always there. It's not about making the best content. It's about letting people feel like they're hanging out with you and just being on as much as you can. But I ended up feeling very burnt out because it's hard to be your best self when you're in front of a camera for that long, because you do get scared of going into places where you want to learn, but you might not be the best in, because it's harder to learn in public than do something that like, yeah, we're better than 99% of our viewers at chess. So that's a lot less scary than trying to play a game that you're bad at

• 2:03:15Speaker 01

  or discuss topics that you're interested in.

• 2:03:18Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, be, have the beginner's mind and be dumb at something.

• 2:03:23Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:03:23Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, which is where the fun is and you get to learn together, but people punish you for it on the internet. What about you? Andrea.

• 2:03:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think like Alex said at the beginning, when we were grinding a lot, you don't really even have time for much of a private life because you're streaming every hour of your life. And people want it like the appeal of streamers. It's called like being parasocial, where you feel like they're your friend and they like it because they want you to share everything about your life. Really, the main challenge for me at first, when trying to prioritize quantity over quality, which we're not doing anymore, was realizing that I can't turn everything I'm interested in and every passion into content. Before, I'm like, well, I must stream more, but I like music and I like playing piano and I like reading into these topics and I like fitness.

• 2:04:16Speaker 02

  And then I try to livestream all of it. And that's just, at some point, it's like just enjoy your time off for those hobbies and prioritize what you're good at because that's just going to be better for the channel overall. So that was a learning lesson for sure. It's nice because there are some intersections. When I have tried new things that I really enjoy and it pays off, but that's more less often.

• 2:04:38Speaker 01

  So it's more like you can be yourself, but only specific parts of yourself online. And the rest, sometimes it's nice to just keep private and feel that you could just give it your 100% freedom.

• 2:04:53Lex Fridman?

  See, I feel like I try to be the exact same person on podcasts and in private life. I really don't like hiding anything.

• 2:05:03Speaker 01

  But you're also a generalist, right? Where you have people with all topics. For us, we built our audience off of very specific things. So people sometimes feel like, even at the start, when we started playing less chess, they're like, I subbed for chess. Why are you not playing chess?

• 2:05:17Speaker 02

  Exactly. People are tuning in for an interesting conversation on a bunch of topics. So like, the more you are yourself, the better it is. But it is very hard when you build your brand on like one type of gaming content.

• 2:05:28Lex Fridman?

  Build your brand? But yeah, the way you become a journalist is you slowly expand. It's like, expand to checkers.

• 2:05:41Lex Fridman?

  I guess that's like a downward.

• 2:05:43Speaker 01

  Maybe poker.

• 2:05:44Lex Fridman?

  Poker, yeah, exactly poker, but also just the ideas, the space of ideas. And then one of the cool things about chess is when you're talking over the chessboard, you're, it's a kind of podcast, you know?

• 2:05:56Speaker 01

  That is actually an idea we've had with playing chess while also doing a podcast and talking with people. It's kind of like an icebreaker where you're also focusing on the game at the same time. But, you know, we are slowly evolving and we're doing more things. Like, one thing we wanted to do is spend less time in front of the computer. So now we're doing a chess travel show where we go to different countries and look at the chess culture. So it actually feels like we're doing things that we would want to do and explore anyway. And maybe it's not as much in the idea space, which we both enjoy and do a lot in our own free time, but in the sharing it cool experiences with our audience that we actually want to do.

• 2:06:32Lex Fridman?

  What do you look forward to going?

• 2:06:33Speaker 01

  We're going to Romania on September 9th. And I think this is the most exciting for me because we're going back to, you know, the country where our entire family is from, where our grandmother taught our dad, who taught us how to play chess. It has a very strong chess culture. So it'll be very unique to go back and see how everything is when we haven't been back for a very long time.

• 2:06:57Speaker 02

  And for Romanians, like, it's very rare when there's like a famous Romanian who accomplishes something, which is why like right now Andrew Tate's the most famous Romanian.

• 2:07:07Speaker 01

  But he's banned, so we're.

• 2:07:08Speaker 02

  For a bad reason, exactly. And there's like something very special about Romanian pride. And when we meet fellow Romanians in the US, like, it's just an amazing connection. And like, I hear the way my dad talk about like, for example, Nadia, who was a famous Romanian gymnast. And he's like, yeah, like Romania, we sucked at everything. But when she won the Olympics for gymnast, every kid on the street was doing gymnastics because it's very rare that they make it to that level of success. And I was saying that we're super successful, super famous, but it is really cool to meet other Romanians through chess because it's a very special bond.

• 2:07:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, you, you feel like it's a community and like you belong.

• 2:07:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, you can't get that anywhere else.

• 2:07:49Lex Fridman?

  Let me ask your opinion, since you mentioned him, Andrew Tate. You're both women, successful women, you're both creators. So Andrew Tate is an example of somebody that has become exceptionally successful at. Galvanizing public attention, but he's also, from many perspectives, a misogynist. So let me ask a personal question. Do you think I should talk to him on this podcast? How would you feel as a fan, somebody, I'm talking to the great Alex and Andrea Botez, and the next episode is with Andrew Tate.

• 2:08:27Speaker 01

  I think it's a double edged sword, and most of these things are not as black and white as they seem, you know, because on one hand, I don't agree with his beliefs, and I think he's said a lot of things that are very hurtful and that influence people's opinions. At the same time, talking to someone through that and trying to get to the root of it and how much of it he used just as a social media tactic to maybe change the opinion of people who have been so influenced by him towards something that is maybe more understanding towards women or things like that could do some good.

• 2:09:08Speaker 01

  But at the same time, platforming someone like that and giving them more attention also signals to other people who have a platform that it's okay. So it's kind of weighing the pluses and the minuses. It's a very tough decision because it's not clear.

• 2:09:21Lex Fridman?

  And the thing about the internet, you make the wrong decision, you're going to pay for it.

• 2:09:26Speaker 02

  Right. That's the thing, like personally, and it is, it is funny, like I think the whole way he rose to fame is just a growth hack, and I've seen other people do it where like you just say kind of, I don't, honestly, I don't really listen to his content because I just find it so dumb, but I think he knows that by saying the dumbest, most controversial things, that's like a quick rise to fame. And I think surface level, like, he can really hold it up, but that's why I would honestly enjoy tuning into a conversation where you're really breaking down to the core of those beliefs. And I think like the young kids who look up to him, and when you actually hear someone challenging it, could actually be helpful for people. But at the same time, it's a lot of bad publicity.

• 2:10:08Speaker 02

  People see your podcast, they see, wow, like, they don't, if they don't know you and they don't know why you're interviewing him and they don't listen, they'll see that and then 100% think it's for the other reason.

• 2:10:18Speaker 01

  But I'm also afraid of a society where you can't have discourse with people you don't disagree with. And even though I don't like Andrew Tate, I think the fact that he got banned from all the platforms is kind of scary because it sets a precedent. And you always have to ask yourself, would this be ethical if I was on the other side? And even things with a president like Trump, even if, let's say, you're somebody who was on the left. If that would have happened to a leftist president, how would you feel? Would you think that's morally ethical? So that is something that I think is important. We try to find ways to have conversations and reach some mutual understanding and try, instead of just amplifying the worst about every human being.

• 2:11:00Lex Fridman?

  Well, so one of the major reasons I'm struggling with is because I really enjoy talking to brilliant women. I think it's also a lot of women reached out to me saying like,

• 2:11:13Lex Fridman?

  it is what it is, but they're inspired when a female guest is on.

• 2:11:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:11:16Lex Fridman?

  And to me, if I talk to somebody like Andrew Tate, even if I have a really hard hitting, I think it could be a very good conversation. That lessens the likelihood that a brilliant, powerful female will go on the show. Because they'll never, they'll never watch it, but the thing we do in the society is we put labels on each other. Well, Lex is the person that platforms misogynist.

• 2:11:43Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 2:11:44Lex Fridman?

  I did a thing where Joe Rogan got in trouble over an N-word controversy earlier in the year. And Joe's a good friend of mine. And I said that I stand with Joe, that he's not a racist, or something like that. And within certain communities, I'm now somebody who's an apologist for racists, right? Or a racist myself, that kind of thing. And we put labels without ever listening to the content, without ever sort of, actually, just even the very simple step, or it seems to be difficult of like,

• 2:12:21Lex Fridman?

  Taking on the best possible interpretation of what a person said and giving him the benefit of the doubt and having empathy for another person. So you have to play in this field where people assign labels to each other and it's difficult. But ultimately, I believe, I hope that good conversations is a way to like a greater understanding of for people to grow together as a society and improve and learn the lessons, the mistakes of the past. But you also have to play this game where people just like putting labels on each other and canceling each other over those. Where that guy said one thing nice about Donald Trump, he must be a far right Nazi. Or the opposite, that this person said something nice about

• 2:13:06Lex Fridman?

  the vaccine, he must be a far left, whatever, because apologist for whatever, for Fauci. Where most of us, I think, are ultimately in the middle. So it's a weird, it's a weird thing. But I think, and it's also painful on a personal level, like people, people have written to me about things like single words, half sentences that I've said about either Putin or Zelensky, where they have hate towards me because of what I said. Either both directions, I have now accumulated very passionate people that some call me a Putin

• 2:13:47Lex Fridman?

  apologist, some call me a Zelensky apologist. And it hurts to, given how much I have family there, how much I've seen of suffering there, and to carry that burden over time and not let it destroy you is tough. So like, do you want to take on another thing like that when you have conversations?

• 2:14:05Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:14:06Lex Fridman?

  Or can I just talk to awesome people like you two? Where it's not that

• 2:14:10Speaker 01

  We're not controversial.

• 2:14:12Lex Fridman?

  Or you're interesting, you're fascinating, you're inspiring, you're like fun, you know, not all those difficult things that come with more difficult conversations.

• 2:14:22Speaker 01

  Right. But somebody has to be making those difficult decisions and challenging the notions that we should cancel someone just for slightly disagreeing with us. And it's very hard to take that on personally. And I think that's a huge part of it. When you know, it's something you're doing for the right reasons, and you're getting a lot of people coming and misinterpreting it, it's very painful.

• 2:14:48Speaker 01

  But I think you have to ask yourself long term, if when you made that decision, you ultimately thought it would be better or worse for your listeners to know that conversation. And then if you can sleep with it at night, take the risk.

• 2:15:02Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, when actually, when I talk to people that, especially like astrophysicists and you realize how tiny we are.

• 2:15:08Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:15:08Lex Fridman?

  How incredible, like how huge the universe is. Like you don't, it doesn't matter. You can do anything. You could like,

• 2:15:15Lex Fridman?

  you can walk around naked, talk shit to people, do whatever the hell. And actually, in modern social media, people will just like, forget. It's like, it's ultimately liberating. Just try to do, at least from my perspective, the best possible thing for the world you can. Take big risks. It doesn't matter.

• 2:15:33Speaker 01

  And that's the other thing with being canceled nowadays. Because everyone's attention is much more short sighted. You can get canceled and then it'll blow over in three days. And you actually see things like this on Twitch very often, where people just have bursts of outrage and they come into your chat and they're all spamming and saying mean things. And then three days after. And of course, they're not actually ever serious things. They're usually like things clipped of any streamers in like their worst moments. But then people forget about it pretty soon after.

• 2:16:01Lex Fridman?

  So you're able to accept that? Like when, when somebody's being shitty to you for a day?

• 2:16:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I still get sometimes emotional about it, especially when I'm like, oh, wow. Like, these things are being said are not true. Or like, this is clearly taken out of context. But I've just accepted that it's part of the job. And if I am trying my best and I am trying things with as good intentions as possible, then I just try to learn every time that happens and be like, okay, what could I do better? And what is just part of the job?

• 2:16:32Lex Fridman?

  Well, let's start some controversy. Who's the greatest chess player of all time? Is it Magnus Carlsen? Is it Garry Kasparov? Is it somebody else? Bobby Fischer? Do you have a favorite, Alex?

• 2:16:44Speaker 01

  So whenever I hear this question, I interpret it in a very specific way where it's not, who was the most talented chess player? Or who had the most impact on the chess world? But who is the greatest at playing chess? Where if you were putting all of these players at their peak, who would be the best? And, you know, we're kind of living in a world where obviously humans are becoming more like cyborgs and they're tools. Like them a lot more powerful.

• 2:17:13Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 2:17:14Speaker 01

  And the computer is the most powerful tool for chess that we've ever witnessed. And the top players now, someone like Magnus Carlsen or Garry Kasparov, if they were go to go towards people like, you know, even Lasker or Bobby Fischer back in the day. Lasker, he was world champion for 27 years. He was the best in his field by far. But would he be able to stand up to someone like Magnus Carlsen who has had these tools? I don't think so. So most chess players have said Garry Kasparov. And I think even Magnus has said that in the past. But I like to think of it as Magnus in his peak and Garry at his peak. And because Magnus was able to live more in a computer era, I feel like so far he's the greatest of all time.

• 2:17:58Speaker 01

  And some studies say things like how there's rating inflation. But I looked into some of them and they basically calculated people's play in over the years. And it seems that there hasn't been inflation. People are just getting better. And I think it's because you have better tools at chess.

• 2:18:14Lex Fridman?

  And also, one of the cases, what's your?

• 2:18:17Speaker 02

  I was gonna say, I actually, I disagree with that.

• 2:18:20Speaker 01

  Good, make it interesting.

• 2:18:22Speaker 02

  I think I would judge the greatest, like, greatest player of all time in relative to the time that they lived in in Magnus. Although he is technically the strongest chess player in history. That is because he had computers to study chess with. And of course, if you compare him to like Garry Kasparov, he plays most like stockfish. But Garry Kasparov, at his time, he beat more players of his skill level than Magnus did. And Magnus loses more often. He also, of course, held the belt for 20 years more. So I'd say actually, because Garry lacked the help of computers to study chess and overall performed better against players of his skill level, I think he would be number one.

• 2:19:05Lex Fridman?

  Nice. Yeah, but I mean, the case that people make for Magnus on many, I mean, what Alex said, but but also Magnus plays a lot and he doesn't, he plays a lot blitz, bullet and like he puts, he gets drunk and like he's really putting himself out there and in all kinds of conditions and he's able to dominate in a lot of them. We get to see many of the like losses or blunders and all that kind of stuff because he just puts himself out there. And I think Kasparov was much more like.

• 2:19:38Speaker 02

  Never saw him play drunk.

• 2:19:40Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, and it's very focused on world championship. It's very like very limited number of games and very focused on winning. And so there's some aspect to the versatility, the aggressive play, the fun, the all of that, that I think you have to give credit to.

• 2:19:58Speaker 02

  Oh, 100%.

• 2:19:59Lex Fridman?

  In terms of just the the the scope, the scale of the variety of genius exhibited by Magnus.

• 2:20:07Speaker 01

  And he might not even be done yet. I don't know if he'll ever hit 2900, but we can't judge yet because he's not at the peak of his career potentially.

• 2:20:15Lex Fridman?

  What do you think about him not playing world championship? Isn't that like, isn't that wild? The entirety of the history of chess in the 20th century going like meh. It's walking away from this one tournament that this seems to be at the center of chess. What do you think about that decision?

• 2:20:33Speaker 01

  I mean, you can't help but be disappointed as a chess fan who wants to see the best player in the world defend his title. But I also understand it on a personal level and not feeling as satisfied when you're going to the world championship and have having to defend against people who are less strong than you. And also imagine winning world championships and not feeling a joy out of that.

• 2:20:58Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:58Speaker 01

  So maybe by not doing that and focusing instead on a goal like 2900, he'll be more likely to accomplish it because he's focusing on what actually motivates him to play chess. But I do think that it will hurt how we judge the next world champion.

• 2:21:17Speaker 02

  I think it won't change him being the best player in the world. And for someone to replace him, even let's say like Nepo versus Sting, even if one of them win and right on some stance, it does lower the merit. Because now who has the world chess championship title isn't actually the best player in the world. And that has happened before in the past, but still gonna take them the same effort to prove when they would pass him like 10, 20 years to become stronger than Magnus. So I don't think it changes the skill level that it takes to become the best chess player in the world. I think for chess fans, it's very disappointing. But I think in the overall like grand scheme of like the public view to people who don't really to like, you know, what breaks the popular culture.

• 2:22:01Speaker 02

  And you think of what names people know who don't play chess, like Bobby Fischer did it. Most people know Kasparov or Magnus. It takes the same ability and talent and that doesn't change.

• 2:22:11Speaker 01

  I think it does change though, if you're playing a player who's not as strong. But I see your point as well, and I know we differ on this. Lex, I heard you asked Magnus, but what is your take on it?

• 2:22:26Lex Fridman?

  Well, listen, his answer is kind of brilliant. Which he's not saying he's bored of the world championship. He's bored of a process that doesn't determine the best player. Like, and it's too anxiety inducing to him to have a small number of games. He doesn't mind losing, which is really fascinating, to a better player.

• 2:22:52Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:22:53Lex Fridman?

  Or somebody who is his level. He's more anxious about losing to.

• 2:22:59Speaker 01

  A weaker player?

• 2:23:00Lex Fridman?

  The weaker player because of the small sample size. Now, if like poker players had that anxiety, they would never play at all. Right? That's the World Series of Poker. You get to lose against weaker players all the time. That's the throw all the dice. But that's an interesting perspective that he would love to play 20, 30, 40 games in the world championship, and then he would enjoy it much more. And also play shorter games because they emphasize the like pure chess, actually being able to.

• 2:23:35Lex Fridman?

  Like much more variety in the middle game, just to see a bunch of chaos and see how you're able to compute, calculate and intuition, all that kind of stuff. And yeah, that's beautiful. I wish the chess world would step up and meet him in a place that makes sense.

• 2:23:51Lex Fridman?

  You know, change the world championship. So if he had changing it somehow, that a loss for that, or having other really respected tournaments that become like an annual thing that step up to that. Or more kind of online YouTube type of competitions, which I think they're trying to do more and more, like the Crypto Cup and all those kinds of things.

• 2:24:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, and the grand tour.

• 2:24:14Lex Fridman?

  The grand tour.

• 2:24:14Speaker 01

  Does play in, which takes a lot of the top players and they do it online in shorter formats.

• 2:24:20Lex Fridman?

  But there's, you know, and so that's his perspective. My

• 2:24:25Lex Fridman?

  perhaps narrow perspective is I romanticize the Olympic Games and those are every four years and and the world championships, because they're rare, because the sample size is so small, that's where the magic happens. Everything's on the line for, you know, for people that spend their whole life, 20 years of dedication, everything you have, every minute of the day is spent for that moment. You know, you think about like gymnastics at the Olympic Games, there's certain sports where a single mistake and you're fucked. And that stress, that pressure, it can, it can, it can break people or it can create magic. Like a person that's the underdog, has the best night

• 2:25:10Lex Fridman?

  of their life, or the person that's been dominating for years, all of a sudden slips up. That drama from a human perspective is beautiful. So I still like the world championships, but then again, looking at all the draws, looking at like, well, the, the magic isn't quite there. So to me, when I see faster games of chess, that's much more, that's much more beautiful. So, but that, I don't understand the game of chess deeply enough to know. Like, does it have to be so?

• 2:25:43Lex Fridman?

  So many draws. Like, is there a way to create a more dynamic chess? And he talked about random chess with a random starting position. That's really interesting. But then, of course, that's like, then you do have to play hundreds of games and that kind of stuff.

• 2:25:58Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:25:58Lex Fridman?

  So I, but I think it's great that the world number one is struggling with these questions. Because he's in the position, he has the leverage to actually change the game of chess. As is publicly seen, as is publicly played. So it's, it's interesting. He's still young enough to dominate for quite a long time if he wants. So I don't know. I, you know, I, with Kasparov, the, the, the fight between nations. I, I hope they have the world championship. And I hope there's a, I hope he's still a part of it somehow. I hope he changes his mind.

• 2:26:36Speaker 02

  And comes back.

• 2:26:37Lex Fridman?

  Comes back, some kind of dramatic thing. I don't know. But it is, it is, his heart is not in it. And then, and then that's not beautiful to see, right?

• 2:26:54Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, it is beautiful that the thing he wants is a great game of chess against an opponent that's his level or better. And that's, that's great that he's coming from that place. But I hope he comes back somehow. Because the, the world championship is a, is a special thing in any sport.

• 2:27:13Speaker 02

  So you do wish that the person who wins the world championship is the best player in the world?

• 2:27:19Lex Fridman?

  No. I hope that the best people in the world, the two best people in the world are the ones that sit down. But the person that wins is the person that, that, that's the magic of it. Nobody knows who's going to win. I think Magnus is so, he, he really wants the best person to win. Like, the, That's why he wants the large sample size. But to me, there's some magic to it. The, the stress of it, the, the drama of it. That's all part of the game. Like, it's not just about the purity of the game, like, the, the calculation, the pure chess of it. It's also like the drama. Like, the, yeah, the, the pressure, the drama, all of it.

• 2:28:04Lex Fridman?

  The shit talking, if it gets to you, the mind games, you know?

• 2:28:07Speaker 01

  This is the part that's fun to watch, but less fun to be playing.

• 2:28:10Lex Fridman?

  To be, but that's why it's great. Who can melt, who can rise under that pressure and, and who melts under that pressure? Uh, what, there's a lot of people that look up to you, like, they're inspired by you because you've taken a kind of nonlinear path through life. Is there any advice you have for people, like, in high school today? They're trying to figure out what they want to do? Do they want to go to Stanford? Do they want to pursue a career, um, in, I don't know, uh, in industry? Or, or go kind of the path you guys have taken, which is have the ability to do all of that and still choose to make the thing that you're passionate about, your, your life?

• 2:28:49Speaker 01

  I always liked the calculated risks approach where, when you're younger, it's okay to take more risks because you have a lot more time. But there has to be a reason why you're doing that particular risk. Is it something that you've spent a lot of time already really passionate and working on? Or is it just something that's trendy and you want to do it because you don't have a better option? And that's actually similar to what Andrea did when she decided to go into streaming instead of school.

• 2:29:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was, the reason I got into streaming, because I was initially going to go to college, but the pandemics, it was right at the beginning of the pandemic. And all my classes were online. And I never thought, ever since I was 12, like, my dream was school. And I saw myself nowhere else than going to university. Um, and I just, I thought of it and kind of weighed out the risk. I'm like, well, if I take a gap year and I try streaming with my sister, um, what do I have to lose? I gained some experience working with someone who has a lot more experience than I do. Um, and then I can go back to school after. Um, and if I go to school right now, I do online classes for a year, and that's something that I could do at any time. So that's why it made a lot of sense for me to go into this. Um, but of course, this is also a very unique opportunity.

• 2:30:00Speaker 02

  So I don't know how applicable, but I do think overall the calculated risk is a really good.

• 2:30:04Lex Fridman?

  So life is like chess.

• 2:30:07Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 2:30:08Speaker 01

  Maybe sometime.

• 2:30:09Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 2:30:09Lex Fridman?

  You're also, have you considered a career in professional fighting? I saw you did a self-defense class, you did a little jiu-jitsu.

• 2:30:16Speaker 01

  Did you see the ten-year-old kid who?

• 2:30:19Lex Fridman?

  Throwing her?

• 2:30:19Speaker 01

  Threw her.

• 2:30:20Speaker 02

  Yes, and apparently I could have broken a leg. But it's actually funny, like chessboxing is a thing and I have been doing a lot of boxing. Like, I, physical activity is like, honestly, one of my favorite things to do. And I have been testing it out on content and we have a creator friend who's hosting a chessboxing tournament. But there's no woman who's, could match me, unfortunately, because all the opponents are male.

• 2:30:43Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:44Speaker 02

  And I can't fight a guy.

• 2:30:46Lex Fridman?

  How does chessboxing work?

• 2:30:48Speaker 02

  So you do a round of chess and a round of boxing. And we actually did a training camp for it before. And of course, like, after you go into the ring.

• 2:30:55Lex Fridman?

  Is this real? This serious?

• 2:30:56Speaker 01

  It's actually, we went to London Chess Boxing Club.

• 2:30:59Speaker 02

  And like, after you get.

• 2:31:00Lex Fridman?

  I've seen like videos, I thought it's something you do in Russia or something.

• 2:31:03Speaker 02

  No, it's a real sport.

• 2:31:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:31:04Lex Fridman?

  It's a real sport.

• 2:31:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, it's very cool.

• 2:31:06Speaker 01

  But after you get really tired, you're more likely to make a mistake and they call them jaffers or something.

• 2:31:12Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, that's probably good strategies, like what do you want to? Because some of it is a cardio thing. Do you want to work on your chest or your box?

• 2:31:20Speaker 02

  They do both, it's very fun.

• 2:31:21Lex Fridman?

  But yeah, from a content perspective, I'm sure there's a lot of people that like.

• 2:31:25Speaker 02

  And it's also very entertaining.

• 2:31:26Lex Fridman?

  Would love to see, love to see.

• 2:31:28Speaker 01

  I don't want to see Andrea getting hit, that would be rough.

• 2:31:30Speaker 02

  I would love to.

• 2:31:31Lex Fridman?

  Unless she doesn't get hit.

• 2:31:32Speaker 02

  I would get.

• 2:31:33Speaker 01

  Our roommate fought in a fight and she did end up winning, but seeing her get hit, I thought I was gonna throw up.

• 2:31:40Speaker 02

  I just think it was so cool, she had no experience in boxing whatsoever. And then, coming from someone in the content world where you start like waking up six days a week at 6:00 a.m. And she's training every day, like, you know, like a real professional athlete. I think like it's such a unique experience and also like a really test of how much you can really commit to this and progress. And I think that's really rewarding.

• 2:32:01Speaker 01

  Did you ever end up doing the marathon with David Goggins that you were training?

• 2:32:05Lex Fridman?

  Oh no, I got injured, but we're gonna do it soon. That's on my bucket list, just to see where your limits are.

• 2:32:11Speaker 01

  You're ready to do it?

• 2:32:12Speaker 02

  What did you do leading up to this?

• 2:32:15Lex Fridman?

  Nothing.

• 2:32:16Speaker 02

  You're just gonna go into it.

• 2:32:16Lex Fridman?

  It's mental. It's mental anyway.

• 2:32:18Speaker 02

  Oh, you don't.

• 2:32:18Lex Fridman?

  But I do run a lot to make sure like there's no um like, you know, you have to be have a base level of fitness to make sure your body doesn't completely freak out. But other than that, you know, fifty plus miles is just about like uh taking it one step at a time and just being able to deal with the suffering and all the voices, the little voices that tell you all the excuses like, why are you doing this? This blister is bleeding, uh whatever, whatever the uh the thing that makes you want to stop, just just shut it off.

• 2:32:50Speaker 02

  Sometimes it feels like you like pain.

• 2:32:53Lex Fridman?

  No, well, uh huh. No, no. But the pain does seem to show the way to progress. So what?

• 2:33:02Speaker 02

  In your terms of.

• 2:33:03Lex Fridman?

  In my, in my, in my world, something that's really hard and I don't want to do, that's usually the right thing to do. And I, I'm not saying that's a, that's like a universal truth, it's just, uh you know, if there's a few doors to go into, the one that I want to go into least, that's the one that usually is the right one. Afterwards, I will learn something from it. Uh the David Goggins thing, I don't know, that's, listen, I uh, we're, we're talking offline, the different, the conversation with Liv. She has a very numerics, calculated risk. Everything is planned. I, I go with the heart. I just, I just go whatever the hell. I think two years ago, I woke up. It was summer. I, I decided to tweet, I will do as many pushups.

• 2:33:49Lex Fridman?

  I don't know why I did this. But I, I will do as many pushups and pullups as this tweet gets likes, something like that.

• 2:33:56Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 2:33:57Lex Fridman?

  Right? And then uh that it got like thirty thousand.

• 2:34:03Speaker 02

  Now, once you put it out on the internet, you're held accountable.

• 2:34:05Lex Fridman?

  Well, for myself, I mean, it's in some sense. And then that's when I already was connected to David at that point, but that's when he called me. And then have to do it. And then I did it. And it was one of the hardest things.

• 2:34:17Speaker 01

  How long did you take?

• 2:34:19Lex Fridman?

  I got it. I did it for seven days and I got injured. So I did about a few thousand.

• 2:34:24Speaker 01

  So this is what got you be injured?

• 2:34:26Speaker 02

  This tweet?

• 2:34:26Speaker 01

  This challenge?

• 2:34:27Lex Fridman?

  No, it's different. I keep getting injured. I keep getting injured doing some stuff. But this particular thing, I started doing the, you don't realize that you have to really ramp up. So I got like overuse injury tendonitis on the, shoulder all the way down to the elbow. So I took like eight or nine days off and then started again. And then it took about thirty one days to do.

• 2:34:52Speaker 02

  Thirty thousand?

• 2:34:53Lex Fridman?

  I, the number was like twenty six, twenty seven thousand. Yeah.

• 2:34:58Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 2:34:59Lex Fridman?

  And I, it took like three, four hours a day.

• 2:35:02Speaker 02

  Oh, God.

• 2:35:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:35:04Speaker 02

  Sounds like torture.

• 2:35:05Lex Fridman?

  And not, you know, and constantly asking myself, what am I doing in my life? This is why you're single, was the voice in my head. This, this is what are you doing? It's like face down on the carpet. Like exhausted, like what, what? Because of a tweet? What is this?

• 2:35:23Speaker 01

  Did you record it or are you just?

• 2:35:24Lex Fridman?

  I did. I did record it for myself.

• 2:35:26Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 2:35:26Speaker 02

  Now, imagine doing this every day and that's what it's like to be a Twitch streamer. Just kidding.

• 2:35:31Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 2:35:32Speaker 01

  Doing stupid things.

• 2:35:33Speaker 02

  Thanks for content.

• 2:35:33Lex Fridman?

  That was really important to me, actually, to not make it into content. You know, I recorded everything. So maybe one day I could publish it. I recorded it mostly because it's really hard to count.

• 2:35:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:35:44Lex Fridman?

  When you get exhausted.

• 2:35:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:35:47Lex Fridman?

  Like I just, so you actually enter this zen place where with pushups, where it's just like, it's almost like, like breathing. You get into a rhythm and you could do quite a lot. But I wanted to make sure like, if I actually get this done, I want there to be evidence that I got it done for myself. So I can count it. I had this idea that I would use machine learning to like, automatically process the video to count it. But then, like after like ten days, I didn't even give a shit what anyone thought. It was about me versus me. I didn't even care.

• 2:36:18Speaker 01

  Lex versus Lex.

• 2:36:19Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. And then, uh, yeah. And David was extremely supportive. But that's when I realized like I really want to go head to head with him. Yeah, those kinds of people are beautiful. They really challenge you to your limits, whatever that is. It's like, the thing is, physical exercise is such an easy way to push yourself to your limit. There's, in all other walks of life, it's trickier to configure. Like, how do you push yourself to your limits in chess? It's hard to figure out, but like in physical-

• 2:36:47Speaker 01

  Do you think it's ever dangerous?

• 2:36:49Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, and that's what, that's why it's beautiful. The danger you-

• 2:36:53Speaker 02

  She just likes the pain.

• 2:36:53Speaker 01

  I don't like that your eyes lit up as I said that.

• 2:36:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:36:57Lex Fridman?

  Like, if you don't know how you're gonna get out of it, you're gonna have to figure out something profound about yourself. And, I mean, one of the reasons I went to Ukraine is I really wanted to

• 2:37:12Lex Fridman?

  experience the hardship and the intensity of war that people are experiencing, so I can understand myself better, I can understand them better. So the words that are leaving my mouth are grounded in a better understanding of who they are. And, I mean, the, running a lot with David Goggins is a much simpler thing to do. Simpler way to understand something about yourself, about like the limits of human nature. I think most growth happens with voluntary suffering or struggle. Involuntary stuff, that's, that's where the dark trauma is created. But, I don't know, now, maybe, maybe it is, maybe I'm just attracted to torture.

• 2:37:54Speaker 02

  And what is it that your mind does when you're going through this involuntary suffering?

• 2:37:59Lex Fridman?

  I think, uh,

• 2:38:07Lex Fridman?

  it's,

• 2:38:11Lex Fridman?

  there's like stages. First, all the excuses start coming, like, why are you doing this? And then, you start to wonder, like, what, what kind of person do you want to be? So all the dreams you had, all the promises you made to yourself and to others, all the ambitions you had that haven't come yet realized, somehow that all becomes really intensely visceral as, as the struggle is happening. And then, when all of that-

• 2:38:41Lex Fridman?

  Is allowed to pass from your mind. You have this clear appreciation of what you really love in life, which is just like, just living. Just the moment, the like, the step at a time. It's, I think what meditation does is most effective. It's just that pain is a catalyst for the meditative process, I think. For me, for me. I don't know. Magnus said, there's no meaning to life. Do you guys agree?

• 2:39:09Lex Fridman?

  Or no? Why are we here?

• 2:39:13Speaker 01

  I do not know why we're here. But I do know that

• 2:39:20Speaker 01

  having some kind of meaning that I give my own life makes it a lot more motivating every day. So I just try to focus on finding meaning within my own life, even if I know it's just self-imposed.

• 2:39:34Lex Fridman?

  And then chess is a part of that?

• 2:39:38Speaker 01

  Chess is a part of it. Maybe it was more so when I was younger, because it was easier to just feel like I want to improve as a person and to use chess to kind of measure some kind of self-improvement. And now it's more different than that. And I think I need to once again find what that, you know, northern star is. Basically, I need to have a why for why I'm doing things. And then I feel like I could do very hard things.

• 2:40:09Lex Fridman?

  What role does love play in the human condition? Alex and Andrea.

• 2:40:16Speaker 01

  I'll let Andrea start this one, since I took the last.

• 2:40:19Speaker 02

  Sure. And yeah, just to add my answer for the last one. I also kind of think, well, life is meaningless, but I like the Stoic idea where that's something that you live to revolt against. But for the second question.

• 2:40:34Lex Fridman?

  The revolt against the fundamental meaninglessness of life.

• 2:40:37Speaker 02

  Yes, exactly.

• 2:40:39Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:40:40Speaker 02

  It was what does love play? What role does love play?

• 2:40:43Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, in the human condition.

• 2:40:46Speaker 02

  The way I see it.

• 2:40:50Speaker 02

  Love is a reason you want to share experiences with other people. That's how I see it, like the people you really love. You want to share the things you're going through with them.

• 2:41:01Lex Fridman?

  The good and the bad.

• 2:41:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. That's my simple take on love.

• 2:41:08Speaker 01

  My take on it is that part of what it is to be human is to be somebody who feels things emotionally. And love is one of the most intense feelings you can have. Obviously, there's the opposite of that, and there's things like hate. But I think the love you feel for people like your parents and your friends and romantic love in that moment is much more intense than in other situations. And I think it's also just very unique to humans, and that's what I appreciate about it.

• 2:41:43Lex Fridman?

  Maybe that's the meaning of life. Maybe that's what the Stoics are searching for. Andrea, Alex, thank you so much for this, and thank you for an amazing conversation. Thank you for creating, keep creating, and thank you for putting knowledge and love out there in the world.

• 2:41:59Speaker 01

  Thank you for having us, Lex.

• 2:42:00Speaker 02

  It was a pleasure.

• 2:42:02Speaker 01

  And we're both big fans of your podcast, so this was really exciting for us.

• 2:42:07Lex Fridman?

  Thanks for listening to this conversation with Alexandra and Andrea Botes. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, let me leave you with some words from Bobby Fischer. Chess is life.

• 2:42:22Lex Fridman?

  Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.