Pod Insights Lex Fridman Podcast #327 – GothamChess: Hans Niemann, Magnus Carlsen, Cheating Scandal & Chess Bots About this episode Levy Rozman, also known as GothamChess, is a professional chess player, streamer, and educator. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:
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GothamChess’s Website: https://gotham-chess.com
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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
(06:14) – Elo rating
(07:18) – Chess.com vs lichess.org
(18:09) – Teaching chess
(22:37) – Magnus Carlsen
(37:52) – Greatest chess player of all time
(42:35) – Hans Niemann cheating scandal
(44:04) – Pin of Shame
(58:12) – Bullying
(1:00:04) – Indonesia incident
(1:11:39) – Retiring from chess
(1:18:16) – Death
(1:21:58) – Streamers
(1:35:34) – Hans Niemann cheating scandal continued
(2:13:16) – Magnus Carlsen’s statement
(2:24:37) – Podcasts
(2:27:04) – Parasocial interaction
(2:30:53) – How to cheat in chess
(2:40:39) – Reddit questions
(2:47:03) – Chess boxing
(2:55:49) – Chess bots
(3:01:31) – AlphaZero
(3:07:18) – Did Hans Niemann cheat?
(3:14:34) – Chess openings
(3:19:14) – Magnus Carlsen’s poker game
(3:21:56) – Chess advice
(3:28:17) – Depression
Transcript 38,751 words · 2 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Lex Fridman? The following is a conversation with Levy Rozman, also known as Gotham Chess. He's a professional chess player and educator. I highly recommend you check out his YouTube channel called Gotham Chess.
0:15 Lex Fridman? 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 got Notion for team collaboration, Athletic Greens for daily multivitamins, Express VPN for internet security and Insight Tracker for bio monitoring. Choose wisely, my friends. And now onto the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle. I try to make them interesting, but if you must skip, please still check out the sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. This show is brought to you by Notion, a note taking and team collaboration tool. I think it's most popularly known for the note taking capabilities.
0:57 Lex Fridman? All the cool kids go to the productivity forums and subreddits and stack exchange. Notion comes up time and time again as like the stellar, the top tool to use for note taking. I use it for note taking on the individual basis. But the thing that you may not know
1:18 Lex Fridman? that Notion is also incredibly good at is the collaboration aspect of it. And not just any kind of collaboration, but collaboration for any kind of tasks. So we could even for startups, for businesses, for, I don't know, homework assignments, all of it. They provide a kind of full on operating system for running every aspect of a company or a team. You can learn more and get started for free at notion.com. This show is also brought to you by Athletic Greens and its AG1 Drink, which is an all in one day drink to support daily health and peak performance.
2:00 Lex Fridman? Where was it? Somebody sent me on Reddit in a daze. I remember seeing a kind of meme saying like, this is like the Lex Fridman podcast in a nutshell, or maybe the Lex Fridman experience in a nutshell. I don't know. The point is, there was some kind of crappy robot that has in Athletic Greens container and is doing the shaking and the mixing and all that kind of stuff for a drink. I mean, yes, but probably I would do a better job engineering the system and probably would not use it for that particular task. Like, why introduce a machine into a task that's deeply human, my friends? So yes, somehow, if this was the true Lex Fridman experience, you probably want to add a little bit of
2:44 Lex Fridman? love into the whole thing, which chemically and nutritionally speaking, is already built in. That's why I love Athletic Greens, not just because it's green and delicious, but because it's really good for you, provides you with a nutritional basis for your mental and physical excellence. So you can be a beautiful version of you that you already are. They'll give you one month's supply of fish oil when you sign up at athleticgreens.com/lex. This show is also brought to you by ExpressVPN. I use them and I have used them for many, many years to protect my privacy on the internet. ISPs collect your data, even if you're using Chrome and Cognito to go to the shady websites that you go to. And I'm
3:29 Lex Fridman? not judging. I'm not judging. I'm giving you all the respect and props you deserve, sir or madam, for all of the darkest, the shadiest places you go on the internet. But you should protect yourself when you do that. And a good VPN is a must. That's like the first and the most powerful layer of protection. ExpressVPN is my favorite. It's the one I've always used. So it's the one I really want to recommend. You can do all kinds of other stuff. Doesn't matter. What matters is it works fast. It works on any device, including, yes, on Linux, Android, anything, anything. You can go to expressvpn.com/lexpod to get an extra three months free.
4:16 Lex Fridman? This show is also brought to you by InsideTracker, a service I use to track biological data. They have a bunch of plans, most of which includes blood tests that give you information based on which machine learning algorithms will give you advice after analyzing your blood data, DNA data, fitness tracker data, all of that kind of stuff. They'll give you advice based on what's going on inside you and what you should do with your life. Maybe sort of diet and lifestyle changes, not like career changes, although that'd be pretty cool, where your DNA data could tell you, hey, maybe that career that you wanted as a chocolatier?
5:01 Lex Fridman? Is that the right way to say chocolatier? Like a person who makes chocolate, right? I'm not even gonna check. You know, I can look it up online, but I'm just gonna go with it. And then you can clip this out to embarrass me, as the internet seems to do with all the stupid things I say. I say so many stupid things and they accumulate over time. And all I can do is just laugh at myself and appreciate you, sir or madam, for laughing along with me. Anyway, InsideTracker is incredible because the best health advice, medical advice, all kinds of advice I think should be grounded based on the data that comes from you.
5:43 Lex Fridman? Get special savings for a limited time when you go to InsideTracker.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 Levy Rosman.
6:14 Lex Fridman? You're known for being able to guess people's Elo rating. So what do you think, just by looking at my face, deep into my eyes? What's my Elo rating? Here, I'll help you. I'll do E4 for the listener. I actually read that Stockfish prefers E4.
6:31 Speaker 01 Does it really? I actually didn't know that.
6:34 Lex Fridman? Because it maximizes the number of tactical options.
6:38 Speaker 01 That makes sense.
6:39 Lex Fridman? The right answer is 3,400, which is, I believe, Stockfish. You guess people's Elo chess rating. What's that take? How hard is it to do that? And like, how would you actually do that? Like, what are telltale signs or red flags about a person at different ratings? Is there something you look for?
6:56 Speaker 01 Yeah, I think you can separate it something like, the very first is 0 to about 8, 900. For simplicity's sake, I'm going to use the chess.com rating system because Leeches is slightly different. It tends to go 2, 300 points higher than chess.com, sometimes even 4, 500 points higher. But then it catches up. They catch up around 22, 2300, I would say.
7:18 Lex Fridman? What's chess.com? What's Leeches? Can you like, explain what the difference is and what they are?
7:25 Speaker 01 They're two chess websites.
7:29 Lex Fridman? Good starting point.
7:30 Speaker 01 Yes. Chess.com is, it has obviously the free option where you can play games. You get some sort of puzzles every single day. You get some sort of lessons every single day. But then they have tiered memberships where you can pay annually or per month, that you can unlock all the other features.
7:47 Lex Fridman? Like what? Like for training, for puzzles and all that kind of stuff?
7:51 Speaker 01 Yeah, they have unlimited puzzles, but they also have, their biggest selling point for sure is like a dedicated game review that, it's like very flashy and sophisticated and the coach will literally tell you what you did wrong. Every single moment, the computer evaluated a mistake. But the most important thing that they have is they offer international masters, grandmasters, the opportunity to make video lesson libraries, which hundreds of hours of anything. I can even learn some stuff on there, probably.
8:20 Lex Fridman? I have anal beads that are communicating with stockfish via Bluetooth. We'll get to that.
8:25 Speaker 01 Yes, we will get to that. It's epic. It's actually scary how many people think that's a real thing, by the way, which is the danger of the internet. But we will get into that.
8:34 Lex Fridman? But I tend to believe that people believing a thing that's hilarious at scale will make that thing a reality. I'm with Elon on this. I think people manifest the meme. The meme becomes real. So that, but that's in all walks of life. I think there is something about humor sort of being, why did I, I was gonna, what was I was going to say is I feel like humor becomes a lubricant for the trajectory of human civilization. And I don't know why the word lubricant went into my head, which.
9:08 Speaker 01 Beads?
9:09 Lex Fridman? I understand.
9:10 Speaker 01 Yeah.
9:11 Lex Fridman? But it's very Freudian. Anyway, so zero to 900, if you're a 1300 player, you were saying?
9:18 Speaker 01 If you're not good at endgames, you don't understand how to convert positions that have seven or eight pieces left on the board. You don't know when you're supposed to activate your king. You don't know how a bishop outplays a knight with just several pawns on the board. Those are all very important things because it's not just about knowing the theoretical endgames. Like, some positions in chess are literally solved. If I showed you a position, I asked, what's the evaluation and how do you win it? There's a technique. You're supposed to know that technique.
9:44 Lex Fridman? And the coaches on chess.com can help or no?
9:46 Speaker 01 Yeah, so these lesson libraries, it's not like a live lesson. It's pre-recorded training position, walk you through it. And then there's a dynamic factor as well where you can practice. You can practice the theoretical and you can practice a practical game where there's no set format to do something. It's just based on your previous experience. Basically, Leeches is, their entire thing is, it's an open source website that tries to be as free as possible and operates totally on donations. They don't have any advertisements, they don't have, which is weird because normally in big competitive settings, it's all capitalistic. You have one big entity and another big entity, and they're both for profit.
10:28 Speaker 01 But in this case, the big argument is, well, they offer a lot of things for free. You can analyze your games for free. You can, you can go into Leeches's lessons library and do things for free. The comparison that I always make is chess.com is basically like having a good personal trainer and having someone to help you at the gym. Leeches is, you have to do the, all the stuff yourself. So you can combine YouTube with Leeches, no one's gonna really point you in the right direction. You gotta go fully explore on your own. If you want to do it, you can. I also like to say, can I make a controversial joke?
10:59 Lex Fridman? Yes.
11:00 Speaker 01 Okay.
11:02 Speaker 01 Ardent Leeches supporters are like very angry, you know, only vegetarian or vegan folks. Because they will tear you apart and try to convert you as much as possible.
11:17 Lex Fridman? Did you just, did you just point a large number of haters onto this very podcast? Is this what just happened?
11:24 Speaker 01 No.
11:24 Lex Fridman? Is there like several people that were very upset at you right now?
11:27 Speaker 01 No.
11:28 Lex Fridman? And throwing things?
11:28 Speaker 01 Okay. No, that's always the joke that I've made because if people have chess.com, and I love all people, but I'm just saying chess.com patrons, do not try to actively convert folks on Leeches. Folks on Leeches are like, you know, there's a meme chess.com. Chess dot c.
11:48 Lex Fridman? It started at Leeches.
11:49 Speaker 01 It started somewhere in Reddit, Anarchy Chess, kind of a.
11:53 Lex Fridman? Oh, so Leeches is a little bit of an anarchist organization. Would you, would you go as far as to say they're a terrorist extremist organization? Are we going there?
12:03 Speaker 01 For legal reasons, that's a.
12:05 Lex Fridman? I thought Leeches has like really good analysis, like somebody. Does it have an engine for analysis of like games? Or is that, is that an open source thing that like?
12:14 Speaker 01 They both do. They both use Stockfish 15.
12:16 Lex Fridman? Okay, and then the rest is the interface around Stockfish that shows?
12:21 Speaker 01 It's tough. It's, it's the live, so Chess has a live server where you and I can play a game against each other. We just both seek and if we have the same rating, we have the same criteria.
12:30 Lex Fridman? Yep.
12:30 Speaker 01 We'll, we'll play a game, but there's also reviewing your own games. There's an opening database, so you can see what the most popular trends are. So Lee Chess is, is great. Like I'm, I'm sponsored by chess.com and I will openly say that. But you can't have-
12:44 Lex Fridman? So you're deeply biased?
12:45 Speaker 01 Yes.
12:46 Lex Fridman? Okay.
12:47 Speaker 01 But I'm also complimenting the competitor.
12:49 Lex Fridman? Okay.
12:50 Speaker 01 But uh-
12:50 Lex Fridman? But can you play games on Lee Chess? Or is it just for analysis?
12:54 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah, you can. Yeah.
12:55 Lex Fridman? So it's the same exact thing? So they're like legitimately competitors? Not exactly the same thing, but they have the, they're trying to match for features. But you're saying Lee Chess is more chaotic and then chess.com is more like professional?
13:10 Speaker 01 Yeah, I don't, I don't know. I don't know if it's chaotic. I just know that it's uh, you have to, no one's gonna hold your hand. If you, if, if you go to, to Lee Chess, you absolutely can. You can play games, you can analyze your games. But you have to discover it yourself. The whole point of chess.com is to make the journey as simple as possible.
13:30 Speaker 01 But I also firmly believe you can't have any sort of growth in chess without a chess.com or a chess24.
13:36 Lex Fridman? What's, oh, what's chess24?
13:38 Speaker 01 So chess24 was another live server with some lesson libraries and so on. But uh, they were, I think the process was they were bought by Play Magnus.
13:51 Speaker 01 So-
13:51 Lex Fridman? What's Play Magnus?
13:52 Speaker 01 Play Magnus-
13:54 Lex Fridman? That's Magnus Carlsen's-
13:55 Speaker 01 Yeah, he, he doesn't own it. He owns some stake in it, I think nine or 10%. They owned a bunch of chess companies, including chess24. But now it seems like they're either merging or basically getting acquired by chess.com.
14:07 Lex Fridman? Got it. And then Play Magnus, it's an app also where you can play Magnus at different levels, but there's also the educational stuff?
14:14 Speaker 01 Yes.
14:15 Lex Fridman? Okay.
14:16 Speaker 01 The for-profit chess companies make the option for grandmasters to make a living, to make chess an esport. Yeah, Lee Chess is great. It doesn't put on any events. There's no commentary. So you can have both in theory and probably some controversy is good.
14:30 Lex Fridman? Does chess.com like sponsor you? They help you out in some way? Like, what's the connection between your videos and streams and so on and chess.com? Like, are they supporting people in that way or no?
14:39 Speaker 01 My content, they don't necessarily, I just make whatever I want. Like, I don't have a not sense. Like, if they do something stupid, I will call out their leadership. It's not like, but I, to have the logo up, like in my YouTube videos or my, yeah, that's just.
14:54 Lex Fridman? That kind of stuff.
14:54 Speaker 01 Yeah.
14:55 Lex Fridman? So anyway, back to, I mean, that was really helpful. I was confused about all of that. The guessing people's rating. So the thing you mentioned about the endgame, if you don't know what the hell you're doing with the endgame, what does that mean about your rating? If you don't know how to finish with just a few pieces on the board?
15:14 Speaker 01 You could be my rating.
15:18 Speaker 01 Endgame is tough.
15:19 Lex Fridman? That's the self-deprecating humor we tuned in for.
15:23 Speaker 01 Endgames are hard, man. They're, they're tough. Yeah, you can't have, there's a reason Magnus is the best. It's because seven hours into a game, when everybody's given up, he's still squeezing juice out of the fruit. So that's the way I would describe it.
15:38 Lex Fridman? So that's not a good source of information if you.
15:41 Speaker 01 No, within the first 15 moves, generally, you can tell. Because you can tell how well they played the opening. So how well they knew what they were supposed to memorize, what they were supposed to play, and then how they react to piece interactions. So if they are faced with a move that a more advanced player would deal with very swiftly, because there's kind of a natural response, that gives you information. If they move their king when they're in check when they didn't have to, that's a massive giveaway. Some people just think, oh, I'm in check, so I have to move my king.
16:15 Lex Fridman? Okay. So it's like, how direct the response of your play is to the danger? So like, if you're more moving like multiple pieces at a time, meaning like, you're moving like, the pieces are like tied together in interesting ways and then. Okay, okay, like what about like, uh, what about the opening? Can you tell also? Because a lot of people can memorize openings, right?
16:41 Speaker 01 Yeah, but it takes two to tango. So you could memorize a bunch of stuff. But if you're nine hundred and I'm nine hundred, your rating is fluctuating all over the place in the, in, in this podcast. I feel twelve, thirteen, nine hundred. You can memorize things. I'm gonna play some crap and you can't play the way you memorized it because I have to respond to you in certain ways. So you will either respond the way you think you're supposed to respond and that will probably be incorrect. Or now you have to figure out how to deal with the fresh position.
17:12 Lex Fridman? Oh, so the nine hundred will reflect itself in both cases?
17:17 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
17:18 Lex Fridman? I wonder if actually, so, uh, do you know your current rating or no? Or your top rating? What was your top?
17:24 Speaker 01 I know both my current elo like over the board now is twenty three, twenty. My peak was twenty four, thirty.
17:31 Lex Fridman? Oh, cool. So can you play like a nine hundred player? Like, can you force yourself?
17:39 Speaker 01 Yeah.
17:40 Lex Fridman? So you can like, given that you've guessed a lot of elo ratings, can you kind of emulate that? It's kind of an interesting question.
17:48 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah, of course. Before I was doing YouTube and Twitch, I was teaching kids. So I had to, not only did I have to play at their rating, I also had to play and sometimes even behave and explain things in a way that a kid could understand. So absolutely, yeah, I think that's what contributed to the growth of the channel. Frankly, I kind of understood how beginners thought about the game.
18:09 Lex Fridman? So, yeah, you did, um, you taught people chess. You coached people for, for many years, I guess, in, in New York.
18:15 Speaker 01 Yeah, New York.
18:16 Lex Fridman? What, what did you learn about the way people learn from that? So like, how, how did people that were successful at getting good at chess quickly? What were the, some of the commonalities, some of the patterns that you saw?
18:33 Speaker 01 Obsession.
18:36 Speaker 01 Yeah.
18:36 Lex Fridman? What does obsession look like?
18:39 Speaker 01 I would say it's obsession and also and also love of the game. So if you're bored, you don't want to watch a show, you want to boot up chess.com or Lee Chess, just for, just so I don't get flamed by anyone in the audience. And you just play.
18:55 Lex Fridman? So you're saying Lee Chess people are the ones that would attack aggressively? They're the kind of.
18:59 Speaker 01 It's probably the Chess24 people.
19:01 Lex Fridman? Oh, that's another.
19:04 Lex Fridman? So there's not, I didn't know. I thought Chess24 was part of the chess.com.
19:08 Speaker 01 Well, now, yes.
19:10 Lex Fridman? Cult or tribe or whatever terms we want to use.
19:12 Speaker 01 I'm sure there's even more places to play live. There always have been more places to play live, but chess.com, Lee Chess dominate and well, Chess24 is, this is rough for live interface. Of course, they have good courses and everything, but.
19:27 Lex Fridman? I got it. I got it. And some are even good people or whatever.
19:31 Speaker 01 Yes.
19:32 Lex Fridman? That quote goes. Okay. Like obsession, that means the way they look at the board, when they're bored, how quickly do they return to the chessboard? That kind of stuff? Just like how many hours a day they want to spend?
19:48 Speaker 01 Yes.
19:49 Lex Fridman? They spend and want to spend.
19:50 Speaker 01 Some kids definitely have a talent. Of course, there's this eternal debate, talent versus hard work. I don't necessarily know if it's a talent for chess specifically, but it's a talent for, I'm sure there's some sort of spatial visualization in your mind, your, you start picking up what squares are controlled by your pieces and opponent's pieces faster. Your memory is much stronger. So you, you don't just learn openings. Like we discussed, you learn literal patterns, such as, oh, I remember this from two tournaments ago. I remember this from a game I played just yesterday. And you just keep playing and playing and playing. But I think the one commonality,
20:34 Speaker 01 I think I've seen in all kids, it's obsession. You have to play a lot. And I've seen kids who are brilliant kids, like if you give them a page of tactics, puzzles, they solve faster than anybody. They can pick things up here super fast. They're a pleasure to teach. They go to a tournament, disaster. They can't handle the anxiousness. They can't handle that silent face-to-face war with.
21:01 Speaker 01 Another six year old. They can't even handle, there's also trash talk. One sentence by a kid can throw off your prized student. And I've seen kids just totally disintegrate. I've seen also my students bully other kids. My student wasn't that strong. But they're verbal warfare, which is not allowed, but goes unnoticed.
21:19 Lex Fridman? It's not even verbal warfare, like just going like, like little, little like, like facial expressions you would make at the board. Hey, I didn't even think about that. There's pretty creepy. The intensity, not creepy, that's not the right word, but there's an intensity in that silence over the board. Like you can probably hear stuff like, just like, it's super quiet. It's like a library.
21:43 Speaker 01 Yep.
21:44 Lex Fridman? And then there's just a tension that builds. You can hear the breathing.
21:51 Speaker 01 Yeah. And at the highest level, both sides are involved in a battle that they both foresee 99% of the time. That's the scary part is that you both see the exact same thing. It's very rare you play a move and I didn't see it. It's that I misevaluated it. I saw the move could be played, but I missed something three or four moves deeper. You play that move and suddenly you're excited and I'm nervous. But all of a sudden you make an inaccuracy and now the tide shifts, right? We could be on totally different planes throughout the game, or we could be on the same plane throughout the game. So it's, it's really fascinating.
22:25 Lex Fridman? Yeah. So your thought is when you see a move that to you seems suboptimal, you start to think, what was that? You start to try and make sense of that. Did you miscalculate or did they miscalculate? What, isn't that what Magnus is really good at is taking people away from like making suboptimal moves? To take them away from the known openings? Or is that unfair to say?
22:52 Speaker 01 Yeah, he gets. Part of his really dominant reputation, I think, from not letting people get into ultra-theoretical positions. He just won this tournament, this online tournament, and he said he had a young player strategy. He had an anti, sorry, a anti-young-player strategy.
23:14 Lex Fridman? What's that mean?
23:15 Speaker 01 It means that by move seven or eight, you go to the database, no games.
23:19 Lex Fridman? Nice.
23:20 Speaker 01 Kid is on their own. They have to swim on their own.
23:22 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
23:23 Speaker 01 And they have to deal with the strategic complexities of the position, which he just, he gets. And he might get from just an enormous database within his brain of historical games that have similar structures, or just sheer genius. We won't know.
23:39 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
23:40 Speaker 01 It's a mix of the two, for sure. The younger you are, you can't remember a game played in 1951 in some bar in the Soviet Union, but he does. Because he read a book once, or a magazine once.
23:50 Lex Fridman? And he just remembers it.
23:51 Speaker 01 He just remembers. He remembers the structure, which it's just, it's not fair. It's crazy, right?
23:56 Lex Fridman? What do you think makes him, if we can sort of linger on it, what do you think makes him so good?
24:00 Speaker 01 I think it's the memory, and I think it's... He just seems to get the game better than anybody else. That's the best way I can describe it. In sports, you have reaction time, you have strength, you have... But also, as he's now evolving, it's stamina. So there have been games that, if you put two other 27, 50-rated players, or world top 10 players, they would have drawn the game. The game would have ended, the game, nobody would have won it. You put Magnus as one of the aggressors in that game, suddenly the chance of victory doubles from 5% to 10%.
24:40 Lex Fridman? Weird. What's that about? Because what is it, game six against Nepo?
24:44 Speaker 01 Right.
24:45 Lex Fridman? Isn't Stockfish say that it's supposed to be a draw?
24:48 Speaker 01 So 0.00 does mean a draw sometimes, but other times it means, and it's the joke I always make, it means that Stockfish is out for a smoke break. It can't...
24:58 Lex Fridman? Can you explain the joke?
24:59 Speaker 01 Yes.
25:00 Lex Fridman? Can you explain 0.00?
25:01 Speaker 01 Yes. So when, so Stockfish will show in evaluation, which determines whether the position is equal, slightly better for one side, slightly better for the other side, or completely winning. You can 0.0, 0.2, minus 0.2, that's all within a balance. You can say, okay, black has a little sprinkle of activity, something, white has that. But if it's 000, it could be literally a dead draw, meaning theoretically just impossible to win. But oftentimes, what that means is, the smoke break joke is, Stockfish doesn't know. There is so much complexity within the position, the combinations of different moves that are acceptable and okay. It cannot evaluate correctly.
25:46 Lex Fridman? Wow, so even the endgames are tough for Stockfish.
25:49 Speaker 01 Which is why Magnus won that game, because there was practical value remaining. It wasn't a dead draw. He continued to ask questions over the course of six or seven hours. He would sacrifice a pawn, he would sacrifice another pawn to damage the structure. Valuation stayed the same, because a machine could stop him, but not Jan. And that was one of my favorite, that game ruined my whole day, by the way. It destroyed, because I made, yeah, I made so many plans that day. It completely ruined my day, but it was a very worthy recap.
26:20 Lex Fridman? You were just all in, you watched that whole game?
26:23 Speaker 01 I watched the whole game, and the world championship was a crazy time, because I wanted to be first with the recap video. But I also wanted to be best with the recap video. So I spent all the hours of the games watching all the live broadcasts and getting all the information, all the variations, and trying to put that into the recap. It was a lot of fun, it was a huge adrenaline dump when it was all over.
26:44 Lex Fridman? So just for people who don't know, that's the most recent world championship.
26:50 Lex Fridman? So you had a, I mean, that was a draw after draw after draw after draw.
26:54 Speaker 01 Yeah.
26:55 Lex Fridman? And it was, it was kind of boring in that way. Or maybe our draws, is there like non-boring parts within the draw to you? When you were like just studying it carefully?
27:05 Speaker 01 For me, yes.
27:08 Speaker 01 For the average viewer, no, that's the truth, especially when the game itself is not that exciting. When Magnus plays a strange move on move nine or 10 that hasn't ever been played. And then Jan has to try to exploit it and he fails and no attack builds up and they shuffle their pieces for three hours.
27:28 Lex Fridman? My favorite thing is when the commentator is like, I don't know why he did that. I wonder why he did that.
27:32 Speaker 01 Yeah.
27:33 Lex Fridman? When the commentators are confused, that's my, as a, as a person who's just a spectator, just like, that's, that's interesting because then you, the most interesting part is about listening to the commentators who, I guess themselves might be grandmasters.
27:46 Speaker 01 All, yeah.
27:47 Lex Fridman? They are trying to, I guess, just like Nepo, just like Magnus, try to figure out, what's the idea here? What are you thinking? That's cool. That's, that's, that's an interesting part of the game, but other than that, it's, it seemed, um, yeah, I was sure this is just gonna keep being a draw, especially in that situation. So it's almost, it seems almost remarkable that his, Magnus was able to put, pull out a win in game six. And after that, at least Magnus said that, that, that ends it because now Nepo is gonna have to take more risks and that opens it up to pure chess and then,
28:28 Lex Fridman? it's, um, who was it? Steve Prefontaine said like, whenever it's, whenever this race is down to like pure guts, then that's when I win it.
28:38 Speaker 01 There was also a conversation about Jan's first half, second half in any tournament. In the first half, he's just brilliant, on fire. You could even say he was outplaying Magnus. But the entire conversation before the match was Jan slows down. And at the first sign of a loss or a setback, the match might fall apart and that was the worst way to lose. There was literally no worse way and it just got worse from there and there. I mean, it was one move mistakes and.
29:08 Speaker 01 But he's back. He's gonna, Jan has won the Candidates again. He's gonna play for the world championship, so.
29:13 Lex Fridman? Who you got? Who, who, who you got? What is, what is this slang terminology? Can, can we like somehow edit that into a more sophisticated with a British accent type of phraseology? Okay, who do you think will win that match?
29:29 Speaker 01 I think it's 55-45, but I don't know.
29:32 Lex Fridman? Totally.
29:34 Lex Fridman? So it's close?
29:35 Speaker 01 It's very close.
29:36 Lex Fridman? Okay.
29:36 Speaker 01 You can make both cases. You could say Ding, you could say Jan has been here before. You can say to the world championship stage, he knows what it's like to have a training camp and so on and so forth. His playing style is very, but you can also say Ding Liren is one of the most stable, unemotional chess players. And Ding oftentimes goes from down to up. So in the Candidates, he lost to Jan in the very first game. 14 round tournament, he got demolished in the first game. I'm sure he was suffering from jet lag, the flight. He, he came to Spain like two days before the games began, which was crazy to me. And he got second place by the end. His chances of finishing in the top two were like 2%.
30:19 Speaker 01 After that first round game, people wrote him off completely. So he doesn't go from top down. He goes the opposite way. And if he loses, he might come back. But the truth is, I don't know. The truth is, it's, it's gonna be an interesting match. And it's also disappointing, we're not gonna get Magnus in it.
30:34 Lex Fridman? Yeah, what do you think about him stepping away from the world championship? Are you a romantic about the world championship?
30:39 Speaker 01 No, I'm not a romantic about anything, I don't think. I, I can't imagine what.
30:43 Lex Fridman? It went dark. That went dark quickly.
30:46 Speaker 01 I don't think I'm sophisticated enough to be a romantic. I think I, you know, I, I taught chess and now I make YouTube videos. I'm not qualified on the subject of romanticism, but I.
30:57 Lex Fridman? You don't think it's a beautiful game?
30:58 Speaker 01 Chess?
30:59 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
30:59 Speaker 01 No, I think, I think it is a beautiful game.
31:01 Lex Fridman? There you go, I got you.
31:01 Speaker 01 Yeah. Is that, is that considered being a romantic?
31:04 Lex Fridman? Yeah, I was seeing the beauty in the, you can be like Bach and seeing the math in the music. Or you can see the beauty, the magic.
31:13 Speaker 01 I think I see beauty in, in certain types of chess for sure, not in all chess. So I'll partially romantic.
31:20 Lex Fridman? Part-time romantic.
31:20 Speaker 01 Yeah.
31:21 Lex Fridman? Yeah, so what I mean, what what do you feel about Magnus stepping away from the world championships?
31:29 Speaker 01 Disappointing, but understandable.
31:31 Lex Fridman? Can you still manage case? What what's understandable about it to you?
31:37 Speaker 01 I don't think it's as prestigious as it could be. I don't think.
31:41 Lex Fridman? The world championship?
31:42 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah.
31:43 Lex Fridman? Why does Magnus still sign everything as world champion then?
31:46 Speaker 01 That's a good point that that he did just put out a statement and he did.
31:50 Lex Fridman? And he but he does it everywhere else, too.
31:51 Speaker 01 Does he really?
31:52 Lex Fridman? Yeah, like world champion, right? World champion.
31:54 Speaker 01 I don't know.
31:54 Lex Fridman? World champion, world chess champion.
31:56 Speaker 01 Maybe it's just because he he he won it, but he thinks that the journey to the top once again to maintain the status quo has lost its appeal. You know what the example that I like to I like to make? I I'm a big fan of UFC. So we've never really seen, with the exception of George St Pierre, walking and and Khabib, but Khabib was kind of a different story, walking away from a belt at the absolute zenith of their career. But also in the UFC, champions are extremely well taken care of. I mean, champions have some of the best, some of the best lives. Of course, you can argue not all champions.
32:40 Speaker 01 You can say some of the lower weight divisions, yes. But what I'm saying is a lot of them get all the sponsors. They get massive, massive paydays. They're international celebrities. I don't think chess has that. In fact, the world championship of chess prize fund has not changed much in like 40 years.
32:56 Lex Fridman? So you could probably make more money on on YouTube.
33:00 Speaker 01 Yes.
33:01 Lex Fridman? Playing randos, not randos, but other having fun and playing challenging, really challenging games, playing other super grandmasters like in ad hoc events.
33:13 Lex Fridman? Or maybe a little bit organized events, but not the world championship.
33:16 Speaker 01 Yeah.
33:16 Lex Fridman? And still, and still have a lot of fun, make a lot of money. Get everybody excited, all that kind of stuff.
33:22 Speaker 01 Yeah. So for Magnus specifically, and we're using him because he's the world champion. If you tally, if he wins every tournament that he plays in over the course of a year, which is really not even that crazy of an estimate, because that's really how it seems sometimes.
33:36 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
33:36 Speaker 01 I don't know how much money that is. I haven't tallied, but if he dedicated an entire year to being managed on social media and doing various things and growing all his brands and getting sponsor deals, I think he would make five times more than being the world champion, which is crazy.
33:51 Lex Fridman? Yeah, but money isn't everything.
33:53 Speaker 01 I know. That's, that's totally fair.
33:55 Lex Fridman? People dedicate their whole life to winning the Olympics. The Olympics is a funny, is an interesting one, too, because like, I didn't even watch the Olympics as carefully as I usually do.
34:06 Speaker 01 This year, yeah, me neither.
34:07 Lex Fridman? It's, it's really strange. I'm not sure why that is. And during COVID, I'm not sure. That's, that was weird. I don't know if it's losing its magic. Part of it is also the people that own the Olympics and the way they distribute it. They make it a little bit more difficult to watch. Like, it should, in my opinion, it should all be just available on YouTube and easily accessible. It's like the difference between like SpaceX and, and some other, like even NASA. Just SpaceX is better at streaming their launches and, and commentating them. And they've made NASA better as well, but just like the ability, it sounds ridiculous,
34:48 Lex Fridman? but making it more frictionless for people to watch, get excited, to share, all that kind of stuff. Yeah, like, I'm not exactly sure where the magic like balances between the classy, traditional world championships and the kind of dramatic, exciting streamer world. And it feels like for, for the world championships to be relevant, they have to find that balance.
35:16 Speaker 01 Yeah. Well, this recent one had, I was.
35:20 Lex Fridman? It's pretty good commentating. Yeah.
35:21 Speaker 01 No, I'm not, I'm not even necessarily talking about myself. There was a lot of.
35:25 Lex Fridman? That was the worst part for me.
35:27 Speaker 01 No, there was.
35:29 Lex Fridman? No, you did amazing. Yeah.
35:31 Speaker 01 I appreciate that. It was a lot of, it was a big arms race. So every. Major chess platform tried to get one super grandmaster. Vishwanathan Anand, Fabiano Caruana, you name it, they were, they were basically involved. And to, to go back to that point, yeah, I, the big question is money and if, if Magnus is not motivated by money, if the prize fund for the next world championship was $10 million, would he play it? If he says no, then it must be something else. It must just be a matter of something's not worth it. It's not worth it.
36:05 Lex Fridman? You gotta take him at his word and his word is like, there's too much stress to the low sample play. Yeah. Like, I wanna play many more times.
36:14 Speaker 01 Yeah, he wants to play more. He wants to, he wants to make it more interesting. Yeah, exactly.
36:18 Lex Fridman? Yeah, more shorter games, like where you can increase the possibility of pure chess. Whatever the heck that means.
36:26 Speaker 01 But we can't go back to the first Karpov-Kasparov match, which they had to stop due to health concerns. I mean, the guy went down 5-0 and it was first to six wins and draws didn't count. So draws didn't amass to the total score. There was no best of system.
36:40 Lex Fridman? So what happened there?
36:42 Speaker 01 The match went something like seven, eight months. Kasparov started making a comeback after being down 5-0. He was 5-3 and they called it off. They called it off. They said both players are in poor health conditions. Kasparov stormed down, yelled that this is a farce and, but the match was 50 games long. It would, even more maybe. I made a video and I don't even remember how many games it was. It was so long. Can you imagine? Bobby Fischer wanted something almost as extreme. Draws don't count. It's first one to 10 wins. And if it's 9-9, the world champion retains his title. So you have to beat the world champion 10-8. That's the only way.
37:18 Lex Fridman? You don't like that?
37:20 Speaker 01 What?
37:21 Lex Fridman? It's just grueling?
37:22 Speaker 01 I don't know. Maybe I like it for the YouTube recaps, but do I like it for the players? Do I like it for general public? No.
37:27 Lex Fridman? Torture.
37:27 Speaker 01 Yeah, it's three, four hours, right? You imagine your favorite tennis match was six months long. What are we doing?
37:34 Lex Fridman? Yeah, yeah, there's still magic to the world championship. I wish they could make it some interesting. They make it work somehow. But I think Magnus is really challenging Fidé and everybody else to step up and try to figure that out, which is great ultimately. Who would you say is the greatest of all time? Can you, can you make the case? You mentioned Kasparov. Can you make the case for Kasparov? Can you make the case for Magnus Carlsen, Bobby Fischer, tall?
38:07 Speaker 01 In my opinion, you can make a case for Magnus, Garry and Bobby Fischer. I'm not one of the folks that's like, oh, I mean, Capa Blanca was brilliant. You can argue Steinitz was brilliant, but as, I think, I think it was, it's probably Kasparov and Magnus has a chance to overtake it.
38:27 Lex Fridman? So the longevity is really important to you when you're thinking about this?
38:30 Speaker 01 Yes, I think so. I think Magnus is very, very close. It's extremely close.
38:35 Lex Fridman? What will be the magic?
38:37 Speaker 01 You gotta get that sixth one.
38:39 Lex Fridman? Oh, so the...
38:40 Speaker 01 No, I'm just kidding.
38:41 Lex Fridman? So the world championships matter?
38:44 Speaker 01 It's kind of like basketball, right? Rings, it all comes down to how many rings did this person win?
38:49 Lex Fridman? What about, well, basketball doesn't have this. The number of years at number one, right? Like, rating, sorry.
38:56 Speaker 01 Yeah.
38:58 Lex Fridman? Like, there's a, there is a, which is what Magnus really likes. It's like, there is a nice system of rating of who is ranked number one. And it has to do, not with some championships or low sampled tournaments. It has to do with general, game after game after game helps estimate more accurately the Elo rating, so.
39:20 Speaker 01 Yeah, he's been world number one for, I think, 11 years, right?
39:23 Lex Fridman? Which is still less than...
39:24 Speaker 01 Garry was world number one for 20 years. Yeah, which is, which is quite wild.
39:29 Lex Fridman? But still lower rating, I think, than Magnus now, right?
39:32 Speaker 01 Yeah, I think rating in general has sort of...
39:34 Lex Fridman? Allegedly, it got inflated.
39:36 Speaker 01 Yeah.
39:37 Lex Fridman? Is that true? Is there truth to that?
39:38 Speaker 01 I think so. I don't, I can't speak to how exactly it happened, but it also happens online. If you go back just three or four years, I think some of the best blitz players on Let'sSayChess.com were 27, 2800, and now they're 3200. I think it's just sort of what happens, but I, I don't exactly know. I will mention that there was a very strange change, not exactly sure when the year was, in Fide, so over the board chess, where if you were under the age of 16 or 18 years old, one of those two, and you were below 2300, okay? Your rating change factor was three to four times higher. So just imagine what that means.
40:22 Speaker 01 Magnus has a rating change factor of, of, let's say, one.
40:27 Speaker 01 I have a rating change factor also of one. Anybody over the rating 2,400 has the same rating change factor.
40:33 Lex Fridman? What is the rating change factor? So if you win.
40:36 Speaker 01 Yeah, there's a formula. And basically, let's say at the very base level, five point change. If your rating change factor is one, you beat somebody, you gain five points. Those kids who were under 18 and under 2,300, their rating change factor was four. So their ratings were going up four times higher and four times like up and down compared to normal folks. And there was a, there was one teenager in the US in particular, who in one month played a bunch of tournaments with his rating change factor and became nearly rated 2,640, which is top 50 in the world. He was just a random teenager from the United States.
41:18 Speaker 01 He became a grandmaster ultimately, but he bled like 90 points down because his rating was so inflated. And this, the K40 exists now. I mean, you have many kids who out of nowhere, 2,100, 2,100, 2,400 after, you know, one good month. It's like, what?
41:36 Lex Fridman? So that's interesting. It's like, uh, similar to like how TikTok inflates your virality early on.
41:43 Speaker 01 Does it?
41:44 Lex Fridman? Well, yeah, like I, I, I, well, at least the rumor is like, they want you to get engaged. And I thought there was even artificial likes and so on, that they want you to get that dopamine addiction. So maybe they want to throw you, if you're really passionate about chess, they want you to throw you to the sharks by artificially inflating you, inflating your rating. And maybe that gets you into the game much more intensely.
42:11 Speaker 01 Maybe.
42:13 Lex Fridman? I don't know. I wonder how many like backdoor feed in meetings there are with cigars. And so that, that was the factors determined by who, who does the, the elo rating?
42:23 Speaker 01 Who changes this stuff?
42:24 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
42:26 Speaker 01 Who knows?
42:27 Lex Fridman? It's probably those leeches anarchists.
42:29 Speaker 01 Yeah, exactly. I think they wanna, I think they wanna, they wanna stay away from that stuff, but.
42:35 Lex Fridman? So there's a guy named Hans Niemann.
42:39 Speaker 01 Yep.
42:40 Lex Fridman? And he beat Magnus Carlsen recently.
42:45 Speaker 01 Yeah.
42:45 Lex Fridman? Has it been already, what is, was it August?
42:48 Speaker 01 September 4th.
42:49 Lex Fridman? Oh, it was September? So he beat him twice, right, recently? Once is the allegations the, by the internet that Hans Niemann cheated. And then the second time Magnus played a few moves and forfeited and resigned.
43:09 Speaker 01 There's actually, so there's three.
43:11 Lex Fridman? Okay, sorry.
43:12 Speaker 01 No, no, yeah.
43:12 Lex Fridman? Can we go through the stuff?
43:13 Speaker 01 Yes, yes, yes. So they play a live esports event in Miami, Miami Beach.
43:21 Lex Fridman? Yes.
43:21 Speaker 01 Eden Rock.
43:23 Lex Fridman? That's where I actually interviewed Magnus. Yeah.
43:25 Speaker 01 That's where that was? Oh.
43:28 Lex Fridman? By weird circumstance, I found myself in Miami, unrelated to the chess event. And yeah, it was a very dramatic event for me for various reasons. One of which the camera stopped working halfway through the conversation.
43:41 Speaker 01 I saw that, yeah, I saw that. Also, side note, I really respect how you write comments, pin them at the top, you add timestamps, you're like very true professional. I am the complete opposite on YouTube when I'm off the camera. So I dig in the mud.
43:59 Lex Fridman? What does that mean, dig in the mud?
44:01 Speaker 01 From when I started on YouTube in 2020, I, in June, like May, June 2020, I had no subscribers. So I got to a million in a year. I had a lot of people analyzing my every move, all of my small flaws. And I, I love getting hate comments.
44:22 Lex Fridman? Yeah, you pin, you pin, is it the comment of shame?
44:25 Speaker 01 Or that's what it was, it's been named over the years by, by folks. I never called it that. But yeah, it's, it's, it's pin of shame and.
44:32 Lex Fridman? Pin of shame, yes.
44:33 Speaker 01 It's been tough because now people pretend to write hate comments just to get attention. So like anything, the public ruin the good thing.
44:43 Speaker 01 But it started that way. It started with people just shredding me to bits, calling me spinoffs of this and that. And I think I'm a human more than I'm a creator, an influencer, an attention seeker. Like, I'm just a person. So to me, even at the size of 1.6 million subscribers now, September 2022, I don't understand that I've gotten big and that I shouldn't do this stuff and that I should be beyond it, or I shouldn't be checking my social media as much as I do and interacting one-on-one. I'm still very much a human being. And my guilty pleasure, my way of killing time if I'm not laying on the couch and playing some chess blitz games off-stream is I just interact with people
45:27 Speaker 01 who say nice things and who say horrible things. And I really like to get into the head of the people who say the terrible things. And sometimes you can't. Sometimes they are truly trolls, but sometimes people just, they just, they just really hate you.
45:39 Lex Fridman? What's a successful, what's a successful interaction with a person that's trolling you? What's, like, at the end of that hero journey that you were partaking in, what's, like, what's the top of the mountain look like? Is the troll conquered and broken mentally?
45:59 Speaker 01 Not, no, not mentally. I don't want to, I don't want to defeat. I honestly, sometimes, somebody writes a very long comment, I'll just, I'll respond with a question mark.
46:05 Lex Fridman? Yeah. Oh, so you're, you see each other as like a brother and sister. You're gonna travel together on this journey of deep meaning, like introspection of what does this mean?
46:17 Speaker 01 Yeah, I've had people write, I can't quote now, but something about my persona, my behavior, this and that. And I just, like, respond to them. And I say, hey, it sounds crazy that a large creator might do something like this. This kind of goes back to, you speak to folks on a very respectful way. If you make a mistake, you completely own up to it. So I have this, sometimes, these one-on-one interactions where I say, I think you're reading too much into this. I think you're kind of, you don't understand maybe some of my humor sarcasm as such. So you form this opinion that I'm this kind of a person, this and that. And now you're sort of, anything I do, you're trying to attach to that reasoning. And here you are, writing this lengthy essay of why nobody should watch my content. And sometimes people go, you know what? I think you have a point.
47:01 Speaker 01 Maybe I should relax a little bit.
47:03 Lex Fridman? Yeah, I would love, I would love to sort of interview and understand the lives of the folks that post that kind of stuff. I mean, they're, they're human beings. They have interesting journeys also. I think they often don't realize, I think they don't realize their comment will be read by anybody, especially you. They think like, and they also don't realize you're a human being. I feel like that's, it's so interesting to watch it.
47:33 Lex Fridman? Like some guy, cause I posted on Twitter for like a minute that I'm talking to you and asking for questions. I deleted that tweet because.
47:44 Speaker 01 Yeah, because you didn't like.
47:45 Lex Fridman? Ninety-five percent of the people were talk about cheating, talk about the cheating. All right, I got it. Thank you. This is not going to be helpful at all. So I was like, all right. But in that time, like there's one comment, which I'm, it's hilarious to me that you found that one comment. The one comment says like, this seems like a waste of time or something like, why?
48:04 Speaker 01 Lame guest.
48:05 Lex Fridman? Lame guest.
48:07 Speaker 01 Lame guest.
48:07 Lex Fridman? And then used, like responded something like with a question mark.
48:12 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah, I wrote, why am I a lame guest?
48:15 Lex Fridman? Why am I?
48:15 Speaker 01 I made a sad face.
48:16 Lex Fridman? Let's talk about this.
48:17 Speaker 01 Yeah, I was like, why am I a lame guest? And he responded, he responded even after you deleted the tweet.
48:20 Lex Fridman? What did he say?
48:21 Speaker 01 He said, he doesn't know what value I would bring because I just make videos about chess games. And that's true. You've had some absolutely brilliant people on. But I also looked at this gentleman's profile and he, his, he was one of the folks that put things about his family and God and his politics in his Twitter bio. And I started thinking, maybe I said something in some video and I made a joke about religion or something, just some offhand five second thing somewhere that someone.
48:55 Speaker 01 Turns me into just an absolute outcast in the household. They can no longer watch me. And that has happened. That has happened. I'll record a 30 minute video and I'll make a joke about something and some phrasing and that's it. I've lost a viewer forever and they will let me know. They will write me an email and I just don't think people should be that serious.
49:15 Lex Fridman? Yeah, there's some of that because I've seen people say that sometimes about me, but I see it more with others. They'll say, you know, I used to be like Joe Rogan guesses. I used to be a huge fan of Joe Rogan until he said this. Right. It's like one, first, I do wonder if you were ever really a big fan. That's one question mark I have. But the other is like, I think when you should be more lenient with each other in terms of how much stupid shit we say. And, and, you know, if you actually, I wish people were able to sort of introspect on their own, on the own, on the stupid shit they say themselves, like to have a little bit of empathy.
50:01 Lex Fridman? Like, I wish there was a way to read all the emails you've ever written. And just to see, or maybe do a search engine for all the stupid shit you've said in emails in the past. And like summarize it and to reveal it to yourself that like, you have bad days, you have good days, you have emotional days. You have stoic days. You have sometimes you have like, you take very different political views than you do on other days. And it's like, it's all over the place. And if you're a creator, if you're putting stuff out all the time, you're gonna have those and you're, you're still, you're still a full like, complex bag of emotions and thoughts and ideas and contradictions and all of that.
50:45 Lex Fridman? Like you shouldn't judge a person by a single statement. And even when you do, you should try to infer the best possible interpretation of that statement. I feel like that, that's just a healthier way to interact with the world and with other humans. It's like, I wonder what's the best possible. Interpretation of the thing they just tweeted or they said like what? Let's let's imagine that the person saying those words is actually a really good human being. And what did they mean when they said that thing about anal beads?
51:20 Speaker 01 So good for so long.
51:22 Lex Fridman? Yeah, right.
51:24 Lex Fridman? Or whatever it is like, you know, they didn't mean to be offensive to the sexuality of a certain group. They're just talking about they're talking shit about anal beads like they're not like sometimes it's humor. Sometimes it's actually genuinely embodying like a political viewpoint.
51:46 Lex Fridman? And like walking with it, thinking through it for a few days, like like taking it seriously, empathizing, not just for a brief moment, but for a time like walking with an idea. And allowing yourself to express it like playing devil's advocate. I do that all the time.
52:01 Speaker 01 With yourself or?
52:02 Lex Fridman? With myself. Yeah. In conversation I do too. And I find I have to say, I'm playing devil's advocate. Like you have to be very explicit, but with myself, I'll just do it in my head. Like I have different voices like, you know, obviously it just in I've been getting so much information, so many thoughts. In all the complexities of the war in Ukraine, for example, and all the different voices within Ukraine. I just interviewed hundreds of people and they have very different perspectives in nuanced ways about the war. Some are full of hate, some are full of love, like hate for the other, love for their own country, love for family and tradition.
52:45 Lex Fridman? All of it. It's a beautiful mix and I have to walk. I have to like carry those ideas in my head and empathize with them deeply. And then I have to listen to people that live elsewhere, that live in India, that have a very different perspective. There's a lot of people in India that have a very different perspective than the people in Ukraine. So I don't know. And some of that will bleed out into the thoughts I express publicly. And like when people judge you harshly for it, it first of all, me as a human being is psychologically difficult. But also it makes me less willing to be fragile. I still try to be strong enough to be fragile in front of the camera, just say.
53:32 Lex Fridman? Like say things that are on my mind, even if I know it's going to
53:37 Lex Fridman? create
53:40 Lex Fridman? people that are going to be like ruthlessly negative towards me. So I tried to wear my heart on my sleeve and still try to be fragile, but it's harder. You're going to pay a psychological cost. Like, like I'm, you know, in some sense, I try to be tough, but like I could be a softie in that in like certain, certain like attacks can get to me. So I'm surprised that they don't get, I mean, do, does some negativity get to you?
54:09 Lex Fridman? Or is this the way you deal with it by responding? Like that, that guy saying, like, what value does talking to add to the world?
54:18 Speaker 01 Yeah. No, but that was, I mean, that was so good. I was looking at, I was thinking at various moments. Went to jump in and I was, I was kind of letting, letting you speak. One of the things I wanted to mention was it's significantly simpler to talk about chess than it is to talk about some of the things you talk about and you have a big responsibility because you have to absorb information like a sponge. But you also then need to present it in a way where you potentially have an opinion while trying to be fair to everybody. And you're talking about things that will literally never please everybody, just literally. What else? You're going to talk about some issues that are going to get out there into the people are going to watch it.
55:02 Speaker 01 Ah, is right, the years of millions of people. And not everybody is going to be satisfied. And these are issues where people are going to be much more likely to speak up in all sorts of ways. Tremendous support or tremendous hatred, vitriol, and God knows what else. Yeah, you, you, it's one of the reasons I'm, I'm blown away to even be sitting here, frankly, because up until a few months ago, you weren't talking to, you know, you, I'm not saying you weren't talking to, but you hadn't spoken to chess players. You were speaking to people who are doing much more substantial things in the world.
55:34 Lex Fridman? I appreciate the humility there. Chess to me is incredible, is a beautiful game. But I think the reason comments hurt is not, I mean, they hurt no matter what to me, like.
55:48 Speaker 01 Not to me, because I'm in a simpler space. That's what you have to understand.
55:54 Lex Fridman? So if it's chess based criticism.
55:58 Lex Fridman? It doesn't hit as hard.
56:00 Speaker 01 No, if you had a podcast about anal beads, no, I'm just.
56:05 Lex Fridman? I'm launching.
56:06 Speaker 01 If you had a podcast.
56:07 Lex Fridman? I'm launching a new podcast.
56:08 Speaker 01 Photography, you gotta, you gotta realize like it wouldn't, it wouldn't be the same way. You talk about potentially existential things. You talk about cyber, you know, things, things in cybersecurity or, or AI or people who are massive heads of companies that are just inherently going to be a bit more controversial. So that I can't imagine being in your shoes because you have so many complex emotions about situations where you may not necessarily agree with everything that someone has said publicly, but you still invite them for a conversation because they're a human being. It's totally different likes.
56:44 Lex Fridman? I don't, I don't know. I, not the way I experience it. To me, I think what hurts is it's not even online because I'm super self critical, usually way more than the internet can be. It's that like human beings can be cruel to each other. So like, the reason it hurts for some reason, it's like, it's almost like disappointment in people. They don't give each other a chance. So in that sense, the negativity doesn't have to be about Ukraine or geopolitics. It could be about the silliest of things.
57:13 Speaker 01 I see.
57:14 Lex Fridman? And like, to me, it's like, why, why be mean to each other? In a context where the mean doesn't, like, it's out of place. Cause like, for example, there is like a gaming culture where they just talk shit to each other nonstop. I think it's more acceptable there. It seems to fit. It seems to be funnier there. And like when streamers talk shit to each other. I've been listening to several streamers recently and it's like, it somehow works a little better, even if they're just like cruel to each other.
57:48 Speaker 01 Yeah.
57:48 Lex Fridman? It makes more sense. But I think when people are genuinely trying to educate or to help and so on, and you still get the shitty comments, I don't know, it makes me sad.
57:59 Speaker 01 No, it doesn't, it, it doesn't make me.
58:04 Speaker 01 It doesn't make me sad. I think part of that is also the way I was brought up. So I was, I skipped kindergarten, so I was always the smallest kid. And
58:17 Lex Fridman? You were picked on?
58:18 Speaker 01 I was picked on and then I did picking. So I had kind of both in my life. I kind of know I went home from summer camp crying. And I also made a kid cry once in fourth grade.
58:29 Lex Fridman? Nice.
58:29 Speaker 01 So I had the balance and I
58:31 Lex Fridman? Physical or mental abuse or both?
58:34 Speaker 01 Verbal.
58:34 Lex Fridman? Verbal.
58:35 Speaker 01 No, I didn't beat anybody up. I was tiny. I think the kid in the younger grade was bigger than I was.
58:40 Lex Fridman? And you still broke him?
58:41 Speaker 01 Because I was, nah, I was, yeah, I, so I had to use my
58:46 Lex Fridman? Mental warfare.
58:47 Speaker 01 I had to use my words. I had to be, and growing up, I, my parents split when I was super young and I played chess. So all things that make you super self trustworthy. Like you believe your first instinct. You don't listen to what other people tell you. And if people give you advice, say, okay, I'm going to think about that. I'm not going to go and do that. I wasn't impressionable. You couldn't convince me to do something. That's stuck to this day. My wife has had to deconstruct some of my stubbornness. I didn't even realize was incredible stubbornness. It's just something that you brought up with. So to me, that stuff doesn't bother me. And it's
59:26 Lex Fridman? So the voices of others don't shake you quite, they can't mentally shake your like psychological stability.
59:36 Speaker 01 No, they, they haven't. I, I think when it got probably at its worst point was in combination with being unable to perform well and over the board play, but that was also self driven. I wasn't performing poorly because I was getting comments. But because I was performing poorly, the comments got to me more.
59:58 Speaker 01 The cycle was sort of in the opposite direction. And that that was probably the most frustrating out. People have said some vile things to me, you know, about my whole Indonesia thing.
1:00:08 Lex Fridman? Oh, this is good. This is gonna give the anarchists in Lee Chess some. Let's go to what's the Indonesia thing.
1:00:15 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:00:16 Lex Fridman? The way you said, okay, maybe we don't want to talk about it.
1:00:18 Speaker 01 No, no.
1:00:18 Lex Fridman? But let's, let's talk about it.
1:00:19 Speaker 01 No, it's, it's totally fine. I.
1:00:22 Lex Fridman? Who did you kill?
1:00:23 Speaker 01 I didn't, I, I was gonna say I wish, but I'm not even sure I can make a joke like that. I, uh, so the Indonesia thing was I was streaming chess. On chess.com, I might add.
1:00:37 Speaker 01 And I got booted up a 10 minute game. Just a random account from Indonesia. That was the flag. Now, mind you, on these websites, you can pick your flag. It can be from wherever you don't, it's not geo tracing. You can change it. I was like, okay, account from Indonesia. And as always, I looked at the account because it was a untitled, high rated account. And I looked through the games. Win rate was suspiciously high. Average accuracy was suspiciously high. Okay, I think this is a cheater. I said it out loud. It's not the first time I've played cheaters on stream. And I said, okay, I'm still gonna play. Let's see what happens. The game was not crazy suspicious, but definitely suspicious.
1:01:19 Speaker 01 A few critical moments where I just clearly thought I had a good position. And then the person or the bot played some move that just killed my hopes. And I lost. So, okay, I lost. And I wrote to the chess.com fair play team, like behind the scenes. I wasn't even saying anything publicly on stream and a guy got banned. It was cheater. So that night. Uh oh, right before I'm going to sleep, because Indonesia is 12 hours ahead of New York. Go on my Twitter. The hell is going on? I see hundreds of responses to my recent tweets. Levy, you gotta check Facebook, man. You gotta check Facebook. Like, so you got, here's a link.
1:01:58 Speaker 01 So allegedly that account belonged to an older gentleman. And his son made a Facebook post that said, my dad played a big streamer in chess, Gotham chess. And Gotham got mad. He lost to my dad. So his community mass reported my dad and he was banned for cheating.
1:02:19 Speaker 01 Oh, it went viral.
1:02:22 Lex Fridman? Oh, no.
1:02:23 Speaker 01 Did you know that Indonesia has the fourth largest population in the world? I didn't know. I learned it the hard way.
1:02:30 Lex Fridman? Interesting.
1:02:30 Speaker 01 Tens of thousands of DMs every second.
1:02:34 Lex Fridman? Wow.
1:02:36 Speaker 01 Instagram DMs, because I had my DMs open. I was never afraid of that stuff.
1:02:41 Speaker 01 My YouTube videos went from ninety-nine percent of vote, down vote to fifty, fifty-fifty.
1:02:48 Lex Fridman? Oh, wow.
1:02:48 Speaker 01 They swarmed my.
1:02:50 Lex Fridman? So all negative, all like.
1:02:52 Speaker 01 All, play him again. You, I mean, I don't know how much swearing there is on this podcast, but I mean, it was just all sorts of.
1:02:58 Lex Fridman? All the fucking swearing you want.
1:03:01 Speaker 01 They.
1:03:03 Lex Fridman? Just everything ruthless, the vicious.
1:03:05 Speaker 01 They were gonna kill me. They were going to rape my family. They were going to, they were contacting people I followed on Instagram. They were contacting them and telling them crazy things. It was, I'm not joking, it was tens of thousands of people every minute. It was unbelievable and I didn't know what to do because the guy cheated. I was in the right.
1:03:28 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
1:03:28 Speaker 01 People.
1:03:29 Lex Fridman? How certain were you that he cheated?
1:03:30 Speaker 01 Hundred percent.
1:03:31 Lex Fridman? Okay.
1:03:31 Speaker 01 One hundred percent. I'm okay. I don't know if you can say a hundred percent, but.
1:03:34 Lex Fridman? So just that com had also had a suspicion.
1:03:38 Speaker 01 They.
1:03:39 Lex Fridman? Because they have like good, they have the good detection algorithm.
1:03:42 Speaker 01 Yes. Danny Wrench would be able to, I legitimately know nothing about the behind the scenes because it's only kind of tech people, but one thing I did not realize was that this account, whether it was the son playing or the father playing, we will not know. We don't know who played. It could have been the son. It could have been the dad covering for him, whatever, but at some point that account won twenty-seven games in a row at ninety-five percent accuracy. I mean, even Magnus can't do that, even, you know.
1:04:10 Speaker 01 This took a month. This story took one month from start to finish. First, I had to work with a, like a media company to geo-block my content in Indonesia on YouTube. So Indonesians could not see my channel.
1:04:24 Lex Fridman? Oh, so you, you didn't wanna like lean into it? Go full Donald Trump?
1:04:29 Speaker 01 No, no.
1:04:29 Lex Fridman? Let's, let's, uh, cause you're in the right, you feel like you're in the right. You, as far as you know, you're in the right.
1:04:36 Speaker 01 Yeah, and I hated watching all my work burn to the ground, like.
1:04:39 Lex Fridman? Oh, you, you felt it was being.
1:04:42 Speaker 01 Yeah, and I'm, one thing I'm learning about myself is I'm not a good crisis actor. I need someone to like slap me so I don't do something emotional in the moment when crisis is ongoing.
1:04:52 Lex Fridman? What, what would be the emotional act that's not productive there?
1:04:57 Speaker 01 Partnering with an MCN that makes you give away a bunch of your revenue and then when you break with them, I wasn't monetized for a week. It was a very big decision to plug in, I think they're called MCNs, but.
1:05:10 Lex Fridman? What are they? Sorry, I don't, what are MCNs?
1:05:11 Speaker 01 They're like, we, there's, there's specialized agencies that work behind the scenes with YouTube.
1:05:16 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
1:05:16 Speaker 01 That if you connect your account, they say they can give you certain ad benefits. They can geo-block your content, they, which you can't do normally. They have certain perks that only YouTube allows behind the scenes. You pay them 10% of your monthly ad revenue, but they claim to do a handful of things for you. I just needed them to geo-block my content. I, I just didn't, I didn't care how much money I was, uh, going to give away per month, but.
1:05:41 Lex Fridman? Well, so why geo-block it? You just didn't like the, the downboarding?
1:05:46 Speaker 01 Yeah, I didn't want.
1:05:48 Lex Fridman? You wanted positivity, like you're being educational, you're, I mean, they're like, you do a bit of shit talking, but it's more like fun and easygoing. You didn't want this kind of viciousness.
1:05:58 Speaker 01 Yeah, my comment section was just being completely flooded, like they were destroying my channel. And to be honest, maybe all of the views and the downvotes out of, would have actually been beneficial. Maybe men, my videos would have actually started getting recommended to more people.
1:06:14 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
1:06:14 Speaker 01 But I'm a person. This is, it all goes back to the same thing.
1:06:17 Lex Fridman? So this got to you?
1:06:18 Speaker 01 Yeah, this was like, I was just watching and I'm like, this is not fair. This is, I don't, I don't know what to do. So I'm gonna stop this as much as I can. They still got through. They have VPN. And they were like, you asshole, you don't think we have VPN in Indonesia? It was this whole, you know, it was this whole thing.
1:06:34 Speaker 01 This father and son got invited to every major news network. I'm not joking. They got invited to the major podcasts. They like to say the Joe Rogan of Indonesia.
1:06:42 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
1:06:43 Speaker 01 Daddy Corbusier is this mentalist. He's a bald guy, very fun guy. He had them. And that's when the Indonesian Chess Federation stepped in. The thing is, nobody who was harassing me knows anything about chess. They just saw the story. And long story short, they brought in a sponsor. The guy played a strong, one of the strongest chess players in the country, who also happens to be a woman, Irene Sukandar. She's like 2,400 international master. She crushed him because his actual playing strength is 1,300, 1,400. You, something like that. He still got paid because there was a winning prize fund, a losing prize fund, and we never heard from him again. And that was the whole story.
1:07:25 Speaker 01 That was, that was why I had to shut down all of my social media to DMs and DM requests and even notifications. Like, I don't get notifications unless it's someone I follow.
1:07:35 Lex Fridman? But see, stuff like that doesn't often get resolved in this kind of clear way.
1:07:39 Speaker 01 No, it doesn't. Could have been.
1:07:40 Lex Fridman? So you got lucky there that there's a conclusion to this.
1:07:45 Speaker 01 Yeah, somebody got views, somebody got money.
1:07:51 Speaker 01 I never got, I never got many apologies.
1:07:53 Lex Fridman? What did you learn from that experience about yourself, about, about the internet?
1:07:58 Speaker 01 I think first and foremost, I learned that every moment you are live or broadcasting can be completely blown out of proportion. You have to be real careful. And I can't actively think about that, unfortunately, even when I'm streaming. I've had other instances where things come back to bite. I've even had these moments live on stream. I feel like I said something too sarcastically to somebody. And I don't know how their day is going. It might ruin their whole day, you know? God knows what. You have these moments of regret where you want your personality to shine through and you want to entertain. They're just thinking, at what cost? If I make a joke to a viewer that suddenly the whole chat is laughing at them?
1:08:43 Speaker 01 What if that puts them in a deep, dark place? And again, it all comes back to this one-on-one thing for me because I'm a human. I would hate to put another person into that situation. If I would much rather get a drink with somebody than than. But it's all kind of part of this act and you wanna make jokes. And I also learned I'm a horrible crisis actor. So I have no patience, but I think that's normal in 2022. Everything is immediate. We can barely sit, think, let time go by.
1:09:12 Lex Fridman? It makes me sad because I think that kind of stuff can destroy good people. That's what makes you sad.
1:09:16 Speaker 01 Yeah, well, one of the things we discussed just here before recording, which I'm also. I've talked about this on stream. I'm very open with this type of stuff is over the. I think for me, a lot of that comes down to just a lack of control of the of the narrative. That's that phrase is kind of messy. It can be used for political stuff, but I I hate when I say things and they get completely misconstrued or they are completely misinterpreted. And I can't imagine being in your shoes because again, I do chess. You cannot really, you can clip me saying something about a chess game out of context. And it's hilarious, you know, it's dumb. It's it's nothing. It's not an attack on on me or or or something that I said.
1:09:59 Speaker 01 It's not an attack on kind of more more similarly to to what you were describing.
1:10:06 Lex Fridman? You don't say you don't say stuff like that, like ridiculous. You don't say ridiculous shit about yourself.
1:10:11 Speaker 01 Oh, I do, I do, I do.
1:10:12 Lex Fridman? And you don't feel like that could be made? Isn't this the same guy that said X?
1:10:20 Speaker 01 Maybe maybe I I either haven't said enough of those things or there's no moments in. I don't have three, four hour open conversations with other humans. And I'm pretty sure if I did, there would be more of that that stuff out there. But that's probably what it is, is just a lack of. It's a lack of being able to kind of control what is actually reality. And that is very frustrating. And
1:10:44 Lex Fridman? Yeah, you're right. I mean, there is a sense that there's not enough motivation for people to attack you. You're ultimately adding a lot of positive stuff to the world. And when you get into more political topics, there's people that who are hurting, who have a lot of anger in their hearts, and they want to direct it towards you. So then they need ammunition and ammunition comes in the way of like clips from the past. So I'm sure that you I'm pretty sure you already have clips like that. It's just there's not people that really have anger to direct towards you. Ultimately, you're adding a lot of good stuff to the world. And so, yeah, but it's man, the viciousness of human beings under the veil of anonymity
1:11:29 Lex Fridman? at scale can be really painful. So that I guess that's the curse, the challenge of being a creator on YouTube and so on and Twitch.
1:11:40 Lex Fridman? When you talked about retiring, I think you tweeted about retiring from chess.
1:11:47 Speaker 01 I made a video, yeah, tweeted.
1:11:50 Speaker 01 It's my value to the world.
1:11:52 Lex Fridman? The tweet or the video?
1:11:53 Speaker 01 The both.
1:11:54 Lex Fridman? Yeah. I'm retiring from all competitive chess events. My preparation is outmatched. My calculation skills are too flawed. And most importantly, my anxiety is beyond repair. I physically and emotionally cannot do it anymore. What was the hardest thing? What was the hardest thing about competing? Like, can you elaborate on that?
1:12:18 Speaker 01 Yeah, I think it's separated into phases of my life. So after being a creator and coming back and playing over the board and making recaps of all my games, I think the constant feeling that I had at the board was a kid who hadn't studied enough for a test, which is a very unique type of anxiety. And during the game, it was just self hatred. Like, good moves did not feel as good as how bad, bad moves felt and bad moments.
1:12:54 Lex Fridman? And underneath that, you're saying there's a sense that I did not prepare well enough.
1:12:59 Speaker 01 Unquestionably. So my, I'm an international master, but there's international masters now who are 11. I got the title when I was 22, which is late. It might not sound like it's late, but it's really late and I quit chess multiple times when I was a teenager. If I hadn't, if one of my parents was like, sit down, this is the only thing that you're good at. Focus on it.
1:13:25 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
1:13:26 Speaker 01 Maybe I would have been a grand master, but that's, that's life, right? And I would come back to chess at various points in my life when I felt more mature. I felt more ready and I felt more motivated. It was all me. I never, I had one coach when I was maybe about 10. I never listened to the guy, great guy. He emailed me even recently, just wanting to catch up, which I thought was adorable. Cause I'm like, I don't even know if he knows that YouTube chess exists. He's in his seventies. He's just, he's just like a nice, older guy.
1:13:54 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
1:13:55 Speaker 01 And he would come to my house. We would have dinner and my grandma would make us food. And he would tell her that I'm brilliant, but I never work. And I have so much potential. If only I ever worked at all, one minute on anything. I just played speed games online and, and I-
1:14:11 Lex Fridman? Did he, did he speak the truth there? Like, could you have worked more?
1:14:15 Speaker 01 I could have worked more for sure. Yeah, absolutely.
1:14:17 Lex Fridman? When you listen to Magnus, who doesn't, he seems like he doesn't work either.
1:14:21 Speaker 01 He works. He might work in different ways, but I, I think for him, it's also obsession, again, love. It's, it's everything. It's, he might read a book. He doesn't consider it work. It's work. He's getting information in and he's learning something. It might just be easier for him to learn than, for me, for example, or for anybody. Just everybody learns and absorbs things differently. So I, I would come back to chess and the best run of my life that I had was in 2016, where I basically, while teaching a chess program, scholastic chess program, I told all the parents, hey, So for these four months, I want to stop doing private lessons and I'm gonna go travel and play tournaments because I want to become an international master finally.
1:15:06 Speaker 01 I'm 20 years old, this is in 2016, like can you help me raise some money? These are all managing directors, these are lawyers, these are seven-figure, eight-figure households and they contributed and I kept a blog and then I worked just six hours, seven hours every day, like studying all the opening trends, all of the new ideas, reading the books, analyzing my own games, playing my own speed games and analyzing them, training every day. And that year I went from 2240 over the board to 2404 with two of the three norms, as they call them, which are basically tournament performances. Like you perform at a certain level, not too complicated. So I got almost everything I needed to be an IM.
1:15:51 Speaker 01 But I just slipped up at the very end and 2017 I didn't play chess, but in 2018, I came back once again with a vengeance, I started playing in the summer once again and I went up, up, up to my peak. But then, something interesting happened. My life mission was accomplished. I never wanted or thought I could be a grandmaster.
1:16:12 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
1:16:13 Speaker 01 I wanted to be an international master and the adrenaline dump of hitting the IM title, I just stopped working completely, I just completely stopped working. I couldn't, and the second I started falling, I couldn't stop.
1:16:29 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
1:16:30 Speaker 01 And I spent the rest of the summer just tanking and I said, ah, fuck this, I made my IM, I'm gonna, I'm gonna fuck off someplace and whatever, I'll be IM, it doesn't matter. But when I play games online, I mean, I destroy grandmasters all the time. Like dynamically, dynamics in chess are just complex positions with all sorts of calculation, attacking, defending, like very forcing lines. I think it's my best strength, I think I'm easily grandmaster level.
1:17:00 Lex Fridman? So that you have the capacity to be grandmaster?
1:17:03 Speaker 01 Hundred percent, like if I-
1:17:05 Lex Fridman? If the work was put in?
1:17:07 Speaker 01 If the work was put in and I was not doing my current career, I just trained full-time. I think I could do it.
1:17:15 Lex Fridman? Do you have a desire to be Grandmaster? Did you have a desire? You said I didn't really want, like, the main goal was International Master, which, by the way, is a really interesting, just I've talked to Olympic athletes, the crash after the gold medal is fascinating.
1:17:31 Speaker 01 Yeah, I didn't get gold, but for me, that was my goal.
1:17:32 Lex Fridman? That was your goal. I mean, it doesn't matter, it's the goal.
1:17:35 Speaker 01 Yep.
1:17:37 Lex Fridman? It takes a very, very special person to not be destroyed by the gold and continue the dominance.
1:17:47 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:17:47 Lex Fridman? It's to continue growing, to continue, I mean, it's hard, that's why they talk about, it's hard to be a champion and defend your championships. Or whatever the goal is, to achieve the goal and stick to, like, yeah.
1:18:01 Speaker 01 Yeah, it broke me.
1:18:03 Lex Fridman? It broke you.
1:18:03 Speaker 01 Yep.
1:18:04 Lex Fridman? So you have the capacity to be a Grandmaster. Have you ever thought, by the way, is there still possible for you? Or you're fully dedicated now to the love of creating and analyzing this game?
1:18:16 Speaker 01 I don't think I'm going to do what I do right now forever, so.
1:18:21 Lex Fridman? Well, you're gonna die one day, just a heads up.
1:18:23 Speaker 01 Yes, yes, yes, yes. I once cried when I realized that. It was at a funeral. It was very sad. That's another entirely separate rabbit hole to go down.
1:18:32 Lex Fridman? Which is one.
1:18:34 Speaker 01 When did this happen?
1:18:34 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
1:18:35 Speaker 01 Just a couple of years ago. Yeah, it was rough.
1:18:37 Lex Fridman? So you really were able to, like, like that, the realization really hit you, like, fuck, this, this ends?
1:18:45 Speaker 01 Yeah, I'm the kind of person who, I have my active thoughts in my brain of things I have to get done. And the more of those, the better, because I'll, my brain will walk me off a cliff, not the physical body, the brain itself will walk off a cliff, spinning in circles. So I try to keep myself as active as possible on tasks I have to do. It's good, and I'm busy, it's good, I'm at the scale I am, because you can't really rest a whole lot. But, yes, that was, I have these moments in my life where I have realizations of past fuckups or things I have, like, I really have to do that I've been, like, really doing poorly, or things like this. Massive existential things that just hit me like a, just like a bus.
1:19:28 Lex Fridman? There's several things tricky about it, so, because I meditate on death a lot. Like, in this conversation, I imagine this is the last thing both you and I do. Just, we're gonna die after this. So you meditate on that.
1:19:41 Lex Fridman? But then you also have to, I think what hits people really hard is the realization that life moves on. Not only does it just end for you, but most people will be like, they'll, you know, in your case, they'll tweet, it's like, oh, he's so great. There'll be so much outpouring, there'll be outpouring of love and so on for a day and then it moves on.
1:20:06 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:20:06 Lex Fridman? And the, you know, the new trees grow, new bridges are built, and then eventually human civilization ends or moves over to Mars and so on, and you'll be forgotten completely. But that, that for most people will come right away. Like you, you get a cancer diagnosis or something like that. And it's like, doesn't anyone else know that I'm going to die? Does anyone else care? Like, nobody gives a shit. I mean, they do. I mean, there's love there, but like, not in, in a dramatic way that you would somehow deep inside hope for, that the world would stop because your life is facing this catastrophic event. So, but I think ultimately
1:20:50 Lex Fridman? what you could channel that realization into appreciation of the current moment. It's just the people you love and sharing love with them as intensely as possible, experiencing every moment as intensely as possible. Cause eventually there'll be a last moment and after that there'll be no more moments.
1:21:09 Speaker 01 That's sort of what I do. Yeah. I try to channel all of that into, sorry, I don't use these fancy microphones in, in my own.
1:21:18 Lex Fridman? You look uncomfortable. It's not your fault. It's not your fault, Levi.
1:21:21 Speaker 01 With this microphone?
1:21:22 Lex Fridman? No, with this quiet, with this line of conversation.
1:21:25 Speaker 01 Oh.
1:21:27 Lex Fridman? I'm playing therapist.
1:21:28 Speaker 01 I don't know if I'm uncomfortable. I just. I don't know if I have a lot to say. Sometimes I just listen.
1:21:35 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
1:21:36 Speaker 01 Like, sometimes I'm intimidated.
1:21:38 Lex Fridman? It's not your fault.
1:21:38 Speaker 01 You say a lot of good things and I'm like, shit, what am I gonna say like at the end of it?
1:21:42 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
1:21:44 Speaker 01 On this, on this subject especially, I'm like, that's sort of what I-
1:21:47 Lex Fridman? There's nothing. What do you think happens after we die?
1:21:51 Speaker 01 Oh, man.
1:21:52 Lex Fridman? No, that's a rhetorical question. What were we talking about? Grandmaster? Grandmaster. So, how hard is it to reach? What are the, what are the requirements for Grandmaster, by the way? Because, yeah, and what are the requirements for International Master? You mentioned a few requirements and so on.
1:22:08 Speaker 01 Yes. So, the first one is you have to know how to use a Shure mic and an arm. I'm slowly learning.
1:22:14 Lex Fridman? You were impressed by the Shure microphone, by the way. For the, for people listening, we're using this, uh, SM, Shure SM7B that a lot of podcasters use. I don't know why, and Michael Jackson on Thriller, which Grimes told me.
1:22:30 Speaker 01 Really?
1:22:31 Lex Fridman? That's what, I think it looked a little different, but it's the same.
1:22:34 Speaker 01 Wow.
1:22:34 Lex Fridman? Uh, underneath it. A few musicians used it in studio. I don't know where it became popular as a, as a podcasting microphone. Because I think most broadcasters use condenser mics that look like really fancy.
1:22:47 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:22:47 Lex Fridman? This looks a little-
1:22:48 Speaker 01 No, this one's great. It sounds really, really good. And I told you before that I wanted to use it, but it requires a external dashboard of some sort. And I'm way too lazy to learn how to do it. And my microphone doesn't sound that bad for YouTube and for Twitch, but this is a long-term-
1:23:06 Lex Fridman? I still have to figure out how to stream stuff. I haven't figured that out because-
1:23:09 Speaker 01 You want to go down into the world of Twitch?
1:23:12 Lex Fridman? No, I don't.
1:23:12 Speaker 01 Okay.
1:23:13 Lex Fridman? I don't.
1:23:13 Speaker 01 You just want to learn how to do it, just in case.
1:23:15 Lex Fridman? Uh, no, for, uh, no, not Twitch.
1:23:20 Speaker 01 Do you know what we have over there?
1:23:22 Lex Fridman? So, first of all, yes, it is, it's like, uh, I feel like The Hobbit going into like a mortar. Like, I, I, yeah, Twitch is, is a very intense world. But the, there is useful cases when you should have your microphone work with like the different, the processing chain work in real time. So you can do like interviews and also I play video, I try to play a video game once a month.
1:23:52 Lex Fridman? So I've done that like three times already. Uh, so stream that kind of stuff for like, like an hour. Um, like play Skyrim. I like, I love playing Skyrim. I actually love the idea. I haven't done that yet, but apparently in Skyrim, you can turn off the monsters. You could just walk around. So I love the idea of just walking around Skyrim for a couple of hours. And just like, cause it's beautiful nature.
1:24:16 Speaker 01 I see.
1:24:17 Lex Fridman? Have you, do you know anything about those?
1:24:19 Speaker 01 I know very, I know, I know a little about Skyrim. Uh, but.
1:24:24 Lex Fridman? So it's, it's kind of like chat, no. Yeah, it's, it's this beautiful world. So, um, there's games that are able to create this sense of, you know, the way you feel when you go hiking, the sense of nature.
1:24:38 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:24:39 Lex Fridman? There, it's not that they're ultra realistic, but they capture some majestic aspect of nature. I think some of it is also music, something peaceful. It's like old timey, uh, medieval type of music. And just the trees, like the wind, like, and you could, and then there's in, in the distance, there's the mountains. And you can like, you have a sense of history that the nature gives you. You have a sense of space like this. You're like this tiny little creature and there's this big world all around you. I don't know how video, that's like an art for a video game to create that. It's not just about the monsters in front of you.
1:25:17 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:25:18 Lex Fridman? It's about this world and this feeling of a world. So I can just walk around and enjoy it.
1:25:24 Speaker 01 I get asked this question a lot. Why don't, why don't I stream more video games?
1:25:27 Lex Fridman? Yes.
1:25:27 Speaker 01 And I didn't know that such video games, first of all, existed. I thought it was mostly just various sci-fi-ish characters and shooting and objective.
1:25:39 Lex Fridman? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
1:25:40 Speaker 01 I've played Overwatch on stream. It's the, it's the only video game I actually played a lot and got decent at. And I couldn't play it on stream anymore because my teammates would use racial slurs in the voice chat.
1:25:50 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
1:25:51 Speaker 01 So that is.
1:25:53 Lex Fridman? I will, uh, it's one of the, cause I've been thinking of talking to a few, uh, streamers and they do.
1:26:01 Lex Fridman? They're a little bit, I don't know, as far as they, that, that, that community broadly does use racial slurs and it seemed to make them okay. But for the ones I would talk to are a little bit, they're just harsh in general in, in the intensity of language. And I don't know what to feel, like, I don't want to be the guy who says, like, kids these days with their, with their mean language on the internet. Like, you want to kind of adapt to the different communities. But at the same time, there is, there's lines that you can cross, right? Like, if you make everything into a joke, because that's what they kind of do. Everything ends in LOL, everything is funny.
1:26:42 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:26:43 Lex Fridman? And that becomes, once again, a lubricant. That, it's like a slippery slope that takes you to a place where you actually make pretty mean ideas, even evil ideas, okay? Because it started as a joke. And so, I mean, you start getting into the territory of, I mean, because I've been reading a lot on Hitler and Stalin and so on, and you'll see those kinds of topics come up in that community. And it's like, oof, they have a very different perspective on that stuff. To them, it's just a fun, fun joke, fun time. And I, and I see that the contrast of that with Call of Duty where you're, where you're shooting.
1:27:26 Lex Fridman? And I, I love shooting and killing things in video games, but there's a slippery slope there too, because then, just having visited the front in Ukraine, you get to see the real killing of people. And you see how one can lead to another. It's non-obvious, but there's a, there's something that happens in video games where you're like, well, this is not reality. The same kind of thing happens in war. Well, the people on the other side aren't really human. It, it does become a kind of video game. And that, that same mechanism, I feel like I want to be cautious about our brain going down that road.
1:28:11 Lex Fridman? So, yeah, I, I, I do worry about that community.
1:28:17 Lex Fridman? But there are video games that don't have such communities around them. I think Skyrim, I don't think Skyrim is an online component.
1:28:24 Speaker 01 Minecraft, I think, is relatively civil, from what I've seen.
1:28:28 Lex Fridman? Interesting.
1:28:29 Speaker 01 Good community. I think it's a lot of, right now it's booming. It's a lot of young creators who are all seemingly quite close. And I think the community then extends to social media. Some of them are intense, but who isn't? And I think, I think they foster a more or less kind of good group of folks. But no, I completely agree. I think a lot of that stuff, and combined with the anonymity, stuff that we mentioned earlier, totally dehumanizes the way people interact with each other. And it's, it's scary. I don't, I don't know. Combine that with two years of some people barely going outside.
1:29:10 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
1:29:10 Speaker 01 It's not, it's not a good mix. It's not a good mix at all.
1:29:13 Lex Fridman? I mean, you'd like to think that folks, it's like in their teenage years, kind of go through those and they mature out of it and stuff. So like, they, they, they start to realize the weight of their words. Like, that's my hope. But we're all trying to figure that out, how the internet has changed youth.
1:29:31 Lex Fridman? Like, easy access to porn, easy access to like some dark communities.
1:29:35 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:29:36 Lex Fridman? Where dark ideas breed. I don't know. But then again, I trust in the goodness and the intelligence of people at the end of the day. And I think kids will, now I sound like an old man. But it's, it's good for kids to play with different ideas and then they grow out of it, hopefully. But then you have to have parents and good school and like good friends that kind of calm out and their bullshit. You need that. If you're stuck inside, under anonymity, maybe you don't have some of those signals. Kids these days with their internet.
1:30:08 Speaker 01 I had to go through this. It's kind of what I, what I mentioned. So I didn't have two divorced, my, my parents were divorced. I didn't have two households. I had three. So I had.
1:30:18 Lex Fridman? What was the third one?
1:30:19 Speaker 01 So I went to school most of my childhood in a town where my grandmother lived. And she was kind of like the Switzerland. So I would be with her and my mom would come with me there. Half the week. Dad would take me to his place for the other half of the school week. And then my parents would split weekends. My mom's weekends were in New York, where she, my stepdad was and that that family, so three houses.
1:30:48 Lex Fridman? So grandma, your dad and then mom.
1:30:51 Speaker 01 So step siblings, there and there, new people, there and there, extended family, there and there. And also at grandma's, where I would come anytime I had a conflict. And when I was 12 and 13 and being just a total lunatic, emotional manipulator of all folks in my family, I was just teenager rebelling and also having to deal with three different households. And I mean, I carried a backpack, the same backpack, literally that I, not the physical one, but what's inside of it that I carried.
1:31:21 Speaker 01 Like when I came here to record the episode and have my stuff in the hotel, a backpack with a laptop, a bunch of clothes, a bunch of other things that I need throughout the week, deodorant, things like that. I mean, of course, you start getting that stuff in all the houses. But that was the way I lived for some of the most important developmental years of my life. And who knows if I had too much of what we're describing, one sprinkle of this too much, one sprinkle of this too much, if I had someone influence me in a negative way. Luckily, I managed to steer clear a lot of a lot of it and.
1:31:54 Lex Fridman? Yeah. How did you not get into trouble with the internet? Meaning like, how did you?
1:31:59 Speaker 01 No.
1:32:00 Lex Fridman? What was your experience with the internet?
1:32:03 Speaker 01 So I, I was a.
1:32:04 Lex Fridman? Having to move a lot, having to have multiple households, just psychologically different, difficult upbringing.
1:32:11 Speaker 01 I, yeah, it was, it was extremely tough. I, it's hard to speak about it now because I'm in a completely different mental state. I don't even remember some of like those moments, but.
1:32:22 Lex Fridman? It's almost like a different person.
1:32:24 Speaker 01 Yeah, that's exactly how it feels. But I, I remember I had a big video game addiction, just like most teenagers. I want to say teenagers, but probably teenage boys, but I'm not, I don't know. I don't know how addicted teenage girls are to, to video games.
1:32:38 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
1:32:39 Speaker 01 I didn't.
1:32:39 Lex Fridman? Data on that.
1:32:40 Speaker 01 I definitely look back on things that I did in certain instances like.
1:32:47 Speaker 01 Well, I was a teenager. That was stupid. Oh, I scammed somebody in some video game. Oh, that was, you know, I was, oh, that's hilarious. Like, and just, I was, it was just an idiot teenager. Like, I didn't do anything unforgivable, luckily, and for the most part, just kind of went about my life. And I somehow got older and started getting more independent and stopped playing video games. And to be honest with you, I would love to sit here and say I have some sort of logical explanation of why I am the person I am today. But I think you need elements of the right upbringing and support system, as you said, and you also need luck.
1:33:27 Speaker 01 You just, I've been in some situations as a teenager where I almost got, I almost got killed by some gang members. That's a very exaggerated story, but I was in a park in New York City and I got into it with a kid whose brother was in a notorious gang of that neighborhood. And he told me his brother was gonna come and kill me, basically, over a stolen basketball. And I was, I was gonna fight this kid, because I was 14, you know, he stole my basketball. Of course, I'm gonna fight this kid. This kid was like 12, he had a pierced tongue.
1:33:57 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
1:33:58 Speaker 01 Like, this wasn't a joke.
1:34:00 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
1:34:01 Speaker 01 This kid was from a totally different way of life, and his brother did show up. But his brother was like, I'm not gonna, this kid's like, I was, I was a little teenager. I wasn't a big, now 14-year-olds are six feet tall, maybe something would have happened to me. But I was a little kid, and his brother was like, really? But looking back at that is crazy, because I definitely had some of these moments in New York City more than anywhere else, because it's such a big place, but luck, you need some, you need some luck.
1:34:25 Lex Fridman? Yeah, it's kind of funny that there's certain moments in life on which the entire trajectory of your life can turn.
1:34:32 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:34:32 Lex Fridman? And then they're all, like, in that case, nothing happened. But, you know, I most intensely feel this when I get almost run over by a car, kind of thing.
1:34:42 Speaker 01 How many times have you almost get run over?
1:34:44 Lex Fridman? I don't know, maybe it happened like twice in my life.
1:34:46 Speaker 01 Okay.
1:34:47 Lex Fridman? That kind of stuff, like when somebody runs a red light.
1:34:50 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:34:50 Lex Fridman? That happened to me here in Austin. You realize, oh shit, that was, like, your life flashes before your eyes.
1:35:00 Lex Fridman? And tho- those moments can turn. And then there's more meeting certain people where you meet them and for the positive, they're like, wow, this um this moment of inspiration like, wow, this is possible. Wow, this this kind of person can exist. Maybe I can be that kind of person too. So yeah, those things can like change the direction. But maybe not. Maybe they just reveal something that was already there and the momentum is always carrying you forward into a thing that you are always going to end up in. Yeah, I wonder about that.
1:35:31 Lex Fridman? Speaking of teens doing stupid things. Let's return to the Magnus Hans saga.
1:35:37 Speaker 01 I know. Yeah.
1:35:39 Lex Fridman? How did it start? Who is Hans Niemann? Who is Magnus Carlsen? How did it start? There's three games. It started in Miami.
1:35:47 Speaker 01 Yeah, a good a good background story is Magnus Carlsen is the arguable greatest player of all time. Very close, I would say, to to Garry Kasparov, world number one for now over 10 years.
1:35:58 Lex Fridman? At the top of his game, you think? Like, close to the top of his game right now?
1:36:03 Speaker 01 After the most recent thing, yes. I think he has the uncanny ability of top athletes to absorb the bullshit and show, oh, yeah, dad's home now. You know? Run. I was only trying 70% before that, you know, and and I think that's what he I think I really think that's what he showed. I was in awe. I if Magnus is playing in a tournament, yes, it's good for views to put him in my YouTube thumbnails and make the video title about him if he does something brilliant. But I was legitimately just blown away. It wasn't even wasn't farming him for content. It was, this is unbelievable what he's doing to people. And he has a point to prove. Hans is a, I believe he's 19 years old right now. He's an American.
1:36:48 Speaker 01 I don't know if prodigy is necessarily the right word. Prodigies, you you know, they're prodigies from very, very young. You don't in chess, you don't become a prodigy at 18. But he was always a good junior player. He was always a very unique character. Like, I met Hans when he was 11, 12 years old. This little kid, just trash talking folks at the Marshall Chess Club. And he already had a reputation, literally. Like, he had a reputation with counselors, with like, and the truth is, I was similar. I was kicked out of chess camp by one of the best chess grandmasters of all time, Artur Yushupov. I wasn't in chess camp when I was nine years old.
1:37:23 Lex Fridman? What'd you do?
1:37:24 Speaker 01 I was just an asshole.
1:37:25 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
1:37:25 Speaker 01 I was too strong, so I helped other people with all their work.
1:37:29 Lex Fridman? And you let your ego shine?
1:37:31 Speaker 01 I was a kid. I mean, I wouldn't.
1:37:33 Lex Fridman? Well, you don't, not every kid lets their ego shine, but some do.
1:37:35 Speaker 01 Oh, yes.
1:37:36 Lex Fridman? You did. Hans does, there's interviews when he's young.
1:37:40 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:37:40 Lex Fridman? Where like, he's kind of.
1:37:42 Speaker 01 Yes.
1:37:42 Lex Fridman? Talking shit, but it's entertaining.
1:37:44 Speaker 01 Yes. What I try to stay away from is just, yes, I let my ego shine, but I don't think I even knew what any of that was when I was. Yeah, so it's just sort of, I was just, I was just a loud, boisterous kid from a household where I wasn't paid attention to, because I had three of them.
1:37:59 Speaker 01 So I just was like, here's where I'm gonna show up and get my attention. And Artur Yushupov, I mean, he's a great, great man. I drove that man crazy. He was like, top five in the world at some point in the eighties and nineties. He said, it's either me or this kid.
1:38:12 Lex Fridman? Oh, wow. So you really got to.
1:38:13 Speaker 01 Yes. He said, I'm not gonna come back and teach camps unless it's me. And I remember like going through this. I have very vague, distant memories of this. My dad calling, apologizing.
1:38:21 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
1:38:22 Speaker 01 And.
1:38:22 Lex Fridman? Did it make you feel good that you got to a grandmaster?
1:38:25 Speaker 01 No, I felt horrible. I felt guilty. I felt guilty my whole life about it. I very rarely feel proud of bad things or I showed them.
1:38:32 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
1:38:32 Speaker 01 Even things, it gets to the point you feel guilty about things you didn't do. That's when, that's when your brain really goes crazy.
1:38:39 Lex Fridman? Yeah, I'm with you on that. So, okay, so you can relate to Hans.
1:38:45 Speaker 01 To Hans, to, yes, to young Hans, and he.
1:38:50 Speaker 01 Was like in and out of chess. This is what I remember. He was around the rating of 2300. And I remember looking at some of his games in a tournament in Philadelphia. And I was like, there was some game that he played and he didn't know the opening. It was like a London, which is a very popular opening, some theoretical line. I looked at him like, whoa, he didn't know that? Okay, that's crazy. And then I just kind of walked by. And I saw him in a tournament a few months later and he did something very rare where in an open tournament, not a tournament of 10 players where everybody plays everybody, open tournament randomized pairings, depending on how many points you have, he played nine grand masters, which is crazy. That means he was performing so well, so consistently. That was where he got his first IM norm. It's like, oh, here it is. Here comes that like boom
1:39:35 Speaker 01 of a young player where he gets mature, he gets back into the game and he gets stronger. I don't follow a whole lot. Pandemic happens and he starts streaming a bit and he's, he's boisterous, he's, he's kind of like loud, he's talking trash. And he's gaining rating constantly. He's just, but so are a lot of people. So you don't think much of it. And then now you can go play over the board again, live tournaments, face to face, as opposed to online events. And he's like, I'm gonna go to this tournament. I'm gonna win it. I'm gonna get my last GM norm. And he does. And then he's like, all right, my goal is this rating by the end of this year. He gets it. He just demolishes absolutely everybody. And you're like, this guy's for real. Over the board.
1:40:19 Speaker 01 Like this guy's for real. There's a lot of people like that. If you look at the top juniors of the world, it's crazy. Ali Rezaferouzja, 2800. Vincent Keimer, 2700. A bunch of kids from India, 2700.
1:40:30 Lex Fridman? Similar age or younger usually.
1:40:31 Speaker 01 One or two years younger, maybe, maybe a little older by a year. But it's just this wave and you're just hyped for the guy.
1:40:38 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
1:40:38 Speaker 01 Like this, this is fucking awesome. Like we got, we got a young American guy who shit talks every time he's on camera. And he beats everybody he plays. But then you start hearing sprinkles here and there, maybe in some stream. Oh, I think he doesn't, he doesn't get to play on chess.com anymore. Like chess.com doesn't put that badge there on the account sometimes. Sometimes they just tell the player, listen, we know. And the player's like, all right, you got me. And that's it. There's no conversation. So there's like these sprinkles, but people cheat online, especially when they're young. It's very, you know, it's very captivating. It's a very nice thing to do.
1:41:15 Lex Fridman? Just to be clear, I mean, just to make explicit that the accusation, and I think it's proven, but they're still being shady about it to the degree it's done is that he cheated on chess.com when he was 12.
1:41:28 Speaker 01 12 and 16.
1:41:29 Lex Fridman? And 16. That's what he said.
1:41:31 Speaker 01 That's what he admitted to. But right now chess.com put out a statement and now Magnus put out a statement as well saying, we think it's more than that.
1:41:40 Lex Fridman? Yeah, I've talked to Daniel because he wants to come on the podcast. Which I'm actually kind of interested in. I think he's a cool person.
1:41:51 Lex Fridman? And they're also doing some really interesting anti-cheating stuff, which to me from an algorithmic perspective is interesting. But he is also the man. Like there's always, in every field, there's the institution.
1:42:05 Lex Fridman? So he represents the institution because chess.com is the institution. It's like in the Olympics, it's the IOC. It's like, I'm, you know, I have to be, I have to be careful.
1:42:15 Speaker 01 Well, in chess, FIDE is the institution.
1:42:18 Lex Fridman? FIDE, okay.
1:42:18 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:42:19 Lex Fridman? But chess.com.
1:42:19 Speaker 01 They've outgrown way more people actually know chess.com. Way more people know me, way more people know Hikaru. It's one of the reasons.
1:42:27 Lex Fridman? It's interesting where the power lays. Who has the most power? Interesting.
1:42:30 Speaker 01 Yeah, chess.com has the most power, which probably.
1:42:34 Lex Fridman? I don't know. Maybe you and Hikaru would do.
1:42:36 Speaker 01 No.
1:42:37 Lex Fridman? To steer public opinion, you know?
1:42:41 Speaker 01 It's a very good question. I have to think with my evil cap now. What would happen if?
1:42:46 Lex Fridman? I'd rather you have the evil cap than Hikaru because I feel like he would really, you know, the power absolute. If the two of you ruled the world, it'd be a problem.
1:42:55 Speaker 01 You mean side by side or rivals?
1:42:57 Lex Fridman? Yeah, it would be like, yeah, as rivals, there would definitely be a war.
1:43:01 Speaker 01 It's one of the reasons I would, I would, I would not chess box him.
1:43:05 Lex Fridman? Do you guys, how much do you like each other? I mean, do you admire each other as fellow?
1:43:12 Speaker 01 I can tell you how I feel.
1:43:13 Lex Fridman? So entertaining.
1:43:15 Speaker 01 Well, we should finish Magna Hans.
1:43:17 Lex Fridman? Yes, that's, yes, that's good, yes.
1:43:19 Speaker 01 I know. It's, I feel like just inside, we don't want to talk about it because it feels like it's been talked about so much. I'm gonna, I'm trying to give a very-
1:43:24 Lex Fridman? No, for you, just remember, for me, it's even, it's much less.
1:43:27 Speaker 01 Yeah, and for the listener, maybe zero.
1:43:29 Lex Fridman? The listener, zero, yeah, yeah.
1:43:31 Speaker 01 So-
1:43:31 Lex Fridman? Like, like Rogan asked me, like, so what, what's this?
1:43:34 Speaker 01 I know, I heard him even talking.
1:43:35 Lex Fridman? What's this chess?
1:43:36 Speaker 01 You know, Joe talked about the Indonesia thing.
1:43:39 Lex Fridman? Oh, he did?
1:43:40 Speaker 01 In some super random, small thing, and that was a very funny moment for me.
1:43:44 Lex Fridman? I told him about this drama a few weeks ago, and then he's like, yeah, this is interesting. Is the anal beads, is that possible? Is that good? I was like, yeah, I think it's possible. I don't remember how drunk he was, but so even, you know, he's curious, he doesn't really know. But anyway, cheating when he was 12, when he was 16, as he said, he admitted-
1:44:03 Speaker 01 Yes.
1:44:04 Lex Fridman? -to cheating online when he was 12 and 16.
1:44:07 Speaker 01 Yes, but for timeline's sake, let's just, let's just do it this way. He has a lot of over the board success, but nobody really talks about the online cheating stuff. It's sort of, kind of kept low key, couple hundred people, maybe a couple thousand people, which sounds like a lot, but it's not because there's millions of viewers know about this. It's generally kept kind of low key because historically, if you cheated online as a teenager, you're not cheating over the board. It's not possible, you will get caught, nobody has ever attempted it. We've had over the board cheaters, but not at the ultra elite level.
1:44:41 Speaker 01 And so what happens is they play this tournament in Miami. And the first day Hans loses 3-0. This is important because on the very next day, it's not like Hans was destroying every day. The second day of the tournament, he sits down game one versus Magnus in their best of four and destroys him. Like, he destroyed him. Made it look like I was playing in Magnus' shoes, you know, the level difference. It went even like he wasn't close. Of course, we can argue it might be because of the maybe Magnus knew something ahead of time. There's obviously the psychological element. Not important. Hans leaves.
1:45:23 Speaker 01 They say, interviewer says, Hans, yesterday, by the way, horribly phrased interview question. He goes, he goes, Hans, yesterday was terrible for you. And today you start with a masterpiece. What do you have to say? Chess speaks for itself. Walks away. Argue, you can argue it's cringe, you can argue, I thought it was cool. And then the guy then keeps asking a question with his arm extended because he's so shocked, he doesn't know what to do. Like, he didn't even occur to him how ridiculous it looked to be asking. And then not only does Hans come back and loses the best of four, he loses like two more games or maybe three, I think he loses the next three games. He then proceeds to lose every single best of four match for the rest of the tournament.
1:46:08 Speaker 01 He ends with zero points and a prize money of $0. They put up the graphic. And he put Niemann zero. I think he got some minimum, right? So it's like, wow, this is like insane. This guy comes out with this crazy interview. And in my recap videos, I was like, the next time Hans has success, he has to stay away from the cameras. Don't let him talk. Just don't let him talk. It's gonna be bad luck. You know, I'm joking around, like, next time he plays, it's crazy, he's gonna. So that was their kind of first interaction there. They also. There were some photos. They were having fun playing on the beach. I don't know why they had a chessboard on the beach. Chess players are such.
1:46:41 Lex Fridman? Magnus and Hans?
1:46:42 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:46:43 Lex Fridman? So they were still getting along?
1:46:44 Speaker 01 I guess so, yeah.
1:46:46 Lex Fridman? It's interesting because I talked to him at that time. Would he have mentioned something?
1:46:49 Speaker 01 Right.
1:46:50 Lex Fridman? I wonder what he would have said if I asked him about Hans because I was clueless. Did anyone care?
1:46:55 Speaker 01 No, no, no, no.
1:46:56 Lex Fridman? Hans is not a super known entity, right? He became much more known.
1:47:01 Speaker 01 He became probably a top five all time popular chess player in the last three weeks.
1:47:06 Lex Fridman? Yeah, so it's not, it wasn't, it wouldn't even be a worthy question.
1:47:10 Speaker 01 No, you don't know. Maybe Magnus already kind of knew. A lot of the top players, it seems, are coming out now and saying, we already were suspicious.
1:47:19 Lex Fridman? It seems like Magnus might have known, but maybe not enough to address it. He still might not be willing to address it.
1:47:25 Speaker 01 Yes.
1:47:26 Lex Fridman? But anyway, so like, so yeah, so totally horrible tournament performance after.
1:47:31 Speaker 01 Correct.
1:47:32 Lex Fridman? After Hans.
1:47:33 Speaker 01 Yes. Then the annual tradition of the St. Louis tournament happens, which is a strong field of players first for a fast tournament, rapid and blitz, and a classical tournament. And the classical tournament is the Singfield Cup. It's the, it's named after Rex Singfield, billionaire chess philanthropist.
1:47:53 Lex Fridman? And it's like St. Louis Chess Club is like a prestigious place.
1:47:57 Speaker 01 It's this whole.
1:47:58 Lex Fridman? And a host of a prestigious tournament.
1:47:59 Speaker 01 Hall of Fame is there for chess. I don't know if it's US Hall of Fame or Worldwide Hall of Fame, but yeah, it's.
1:48:06 Lex Fridman? Other countries play chess, I didn't.
1:48:08 Speaker 01 They do, but you know, we, I don't know who determines where the Hall of Fame gets to be. If we say it's the Hall of Fame, okay. One day, some other part of the world is going to be like, actually, it's over here. So basically what happens is we have a field set for the Singfield Cup.
1:48:25 Speaker 01 Set, it's the top 10 players in the world. Some can't make it. So, okay, you get number 11 in there or something. One of them can't come because of something related to coronavirus. It's not, it's not. Now we're going to get a little asterisk on Spotify because it was mentioned.
1:48:42 Speaker 01 Get more info about COVID-19.
1:48:46 Speaker 01 So I don't know why he couldn't come, but he couldn't come. Okay, something happens. He can't make it. Hans Niemann is the replacement.
1:48:51 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
1:48:53 Speaker 01 At the time, we didn't know this, but now weeks later, we knew Magnus wanted to not play. This is very important. Back then, we didn't know. Apparently, some other top players also didn't want to play. They also were suspicious. They also wanted increased anti-cheating measures, which by the way in chess are dogshit. Like you give this little metal wand and you put it on the little ears, body, and there's apparently an argument a micro earpiece would not be caught, something in the armpit vibrating would not be caught, something in the shoe, they don't make the players take their shoes off because it's too elitist. How are you going to make players take their shoes off? That's, oh my god. But if these things are out there.
1:49:34 Lex Fridman? Or if anything was inside any other orifice.
1:49:37 Speaker 01 Correct. Yes.
1:49:38 Lex Fridman? I have to bring that up.
1:49:39 Speaker 01 I mean, to be honest, yes, that is very truthful. So.
1:49:43 Lex Fridman? If nothing else, this podcast is about honesty and truth. So I have to be completely.
1:49:47 Speaker 01 Correct. And transparency. So what ends up happening in this Singfield Cup is Magnus ends up still playing, but the anti-cheat measures are not introduced. So the first few games, Hans has a very, very impressive first round game against Levon Aronian, one of the best players in the world. Okay, draw. He was pushing, draw. Second game demolishes like a top player. Mamedyarov crushes him. Dominant opening, but not like a perfect game. You understand? Like it was, he made some inaccuracies here and there and he ended up winning in a complex game. As game three happens versus Magnus. And not only does he
1:50:32 Speaker 01 beat Magnus with the black pieces, he dominates him from start to finish. So in the opening, Magnus played something with white that he had maybe played once or twice before. There was some big debate about it. I'm not going to get into it. Basically, a very niche, small thing that just, he had never played in maybe a long game before with some sprinkled in venom that might get Hans off guard. Hans proceeds to play like the first 15, 20 moves absolutely perfectly and then converts the game into a slightly better endgame and squeezes Magnus to death. Basically beats Magnus with black, which nobody had done in years, the
1:51:16 Speaker 01 same way Magnus would have beaten other players. Then he goes and gives this interview, which where he claims that he had looked at those first fifteen, twenty moves right before the game, basically. He got lucky.
1:51:28 Lex Fridman? Didn't he say he looked at something very similar?
1:51:31 Speaker 01 No, no, it was either similar or literally that exact variation, which is possible. I've done that before. One of my best wins of my life. That morning I went, you know, I'm not prepared. What if my opponent plays this Queen's Gambit accepted variation? And I literally learned the first twelve moves. He didn't know move twelve. I killed him. Okay, like it just happens.
1:51:49 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
1:51:51 Speaker 01 Unfortunately, when you combine that with other small elements of the interview, and now there's body language experts going all on this, it was odd.
1:51:59 Lex Fridman? He gave an interview afterwards explaining his, explaining various details of the game.
1:52:05 Speaker 01 But not really explaining them. That's the thing. The standard chess player interview is you sit down, you go, something about the opening, something about not, oh yeah, I looked at this right before the game. And then you explain various symphonies and compositions of variations, things that went through your head, things you were evaluating. But Hans's interviews are different. So everything about him as a chess player already is different, and his interviews are extremely strange and also different.
1:52:30 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
1:52:31 Speaker 01 That's fine. But not when you combine it then with the world champion withdrawing right after you beat him and ghosting the entire chess world.
1:52:41 Lex Fridman? Yeah, so there's a, for people who haven't listened to it, there's a kind of sloppiness to the way he analyzes the game. Like, he's like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, like, it's very.
1:52:56 Speaker 01 Because it's very obvious. Like, what do you mean? Just completely winning here.
1:52:58 Lex Fridman? Yeah, I'm completely winning here. And it's like, I, yeah, I just played perfect. I played perfect. Like, there's a sense of like, but it also doesn't, for me, again, a very outside spectator, it doesn't raise any red flags. That's just his personality. He seems to really like to talk this way. And plus, this could be crazy, but do you have a sense that he's more of an intuitive player versus like, he's just not the kind of person that analyzes really well? Or is that a ridiculous notion?
1:53:30 Speaker 01 Well, let's put it this way.
1:53:33 Speaker 01 To succeed legitimately, because obviously this is a cheating scandal at the end of the day, at the 2750, 82800 level, the upper echelon of chess, you cannot be an intuitive player. You can be a little bit more intuitive than a calculator and a concrete evaluator of positions, meaning if I give you five seconds to play a move, you're going to choose the best move quickly. Those people are generally better at fast time controls, but you have to be good at everything. And what raised red flags in this interview was the fact that it was different than every other interview any human being ever gave at that level of
1:54:15 Speaker 01 chess, particularly after beating Magnus for the first time as a teenager, which is a very small group of people. So that's where it got weird. And the very next day, Magnus withdraws from the event. Chess World lights completely on fire for multiple weeks.
1:54:31 Lex Fridman? He also tweets.
1:54:33 Speaker 01 Right.
1:54:34 Lex Fridman? That's the resignation. No resignation.
1:54:38 Speaker 01 The tweet was, "I'm withdrawing from this tournament in St. Louis. I've always enjoyed playing here and I will in the future." And then it's a clip of Jose Mourinho, "I cannot speak. I choose not to speak. If I speak, I'm in big trouble. I don't want to be in big trouble."
1:54:49 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
1:54:50 Speaker 01 And that's when people nuts, that people said it's not even a cheating insinuation, which was one of the theories. Another theory was someone in Team Magnus told Hans what Magnus was looking at, and that's why Hans learned those first 15 moves, which is so fucking stupid, because Magnus knows like five people, not in his life, but his team is five.
1:55:14 Lex Fridman? Yeah, it's very close in that group.
1:55:15 Speaker 01 Right. But to the outsider, that sounds like a very legitimate theory. How else can you explain? Hans said he knew before the game what was going to happen. Magnus senses a mole. He's not, no.
1:55:26 Lex Fridman? By the way, just so I know, like if that was, forget the cheating aside, if you knew, doesn't matter how, the opening your opponent is going to do, they prepared, is that a significant help to you?
1:55:43 Speaker 01 If that opening is ultra-sharp and requires basically the game to be on a knife's edge?
1:55:50 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
1:55:51 Speaker 01 Yes, meaning one mistake can be fatal.
1:55:54 Lex Fridman? Because then you can look up what the engine says.
1:55:56 Speaker 01 Yeah, you can know everything. You can know all the possibilities. So even if your opponent goes off that engine path, you will know how to punish it. In this case,
1:56:06 Speaker 01 what happened basically was Magnus played a line that if completely optimally punished, would have given Hans a slightly better position. And that's what happened, but then he also demolished him in that later phase of the game.
1:56:22 Lex Fridman? Yes, and then, okay, so Magnus designs, goes silent, the chess world goes crazy. What else is interesting in that period of time?
1:56:35 Speaker 01 Hans's fourth round game of that tournament, right after beating Magnus, was also just absolutely genius. Just an absolutely brilliant game, which he failed to win. But then after that game, he also gives once again another interview, where he's like, "This game was absolutely genius. I was just killing him from start to finish." And there was a moment, he literally says, "Oh yeah, I just gave him a piece, like a full piece, which is a substantial advantage to the other side." And he starts explaining why
1:57:08 Speaker 01 the position is winning, but in words, not in chess moves, not in specific, concrete chess moves, which is the way you're supposed to if you understand the position, right? So now there's this new theory that's being cultivated. The interviews are going to be used as the evidence. And beyond round four, he just played like a good grandmaster. And he lost two or three games, maybe two games, and he drew the rest. So he didn't win again. He beat the first two out of his first three games. He beat Mamedyarov, he beat Carlsen. And he also went on the attack himself. That was when he publicly admitted to cheating in an interview
1:57:50 Speaker 01 that he gave to the St. Louis Chess Club. That's when he said he has never cheated over the board. Then he said, "Chess.com has banned me from the Global Championship, which is what I was invited to to play privately. They banned me. They didn't even ban me publicly." And then he said, "And Hikaru is on Twitch every day, you know, saying things about me, this and that." And since then, nothing. Tournament finishes somehow. I don't know how we got to the end of the tournament. I really thought that it was gonna get called off. But tournament ends. Hans hasn't said anything since then. So.
1:58:24 Lex Fridman? Has he still said? When was the last time?
1:58:27 Speaker 01 That was the last tweet that he sent, September 7th. Said Hikaru wants to play the victim, something like this.
1:58:34 Lex Fridman? They face each other again recently. When was that?
1:58:38 Speaker 01 They played in the online event of this Meltwater Champions Chess Tour, which is a 16-player tournament where everybody plays everybody first. And after 15 games, the top eight make a knockout bracket.
1:58:57 Speaker 01 And Magnus played the game. There was obviously a lot of hype prior for what was gonna happen in this game. Magnus plays one move and resigns.
1:59:09 Speaker 01 Actually, I imagine he didn't wanna play one move. I imagine he would have resigned the game as it was starting, but I think some websites don't let you resign before you make one move, because then the game isn't counted. So I think he didn't wanna play at all, but he played one move, and that made it even more epic, I suppose. And he resigned. And that was that.
1:59:28 Lex Fridman? So you lose, that game counts, right?
1:59:30 Speaker 01 Oh, game counts.
1:59:31 Lex Fridman? You lose the rating.
1:59:33 Speaker 01 These online events unfortunately don't count for any sort of rating. But on the tournament, yeah, you play one move. Yeah.
1:59:41 Lex Fridman? So he resigns. And then how does the tournament still work out? Is the tournament already over? So he made the eight, as Magnus still made the top eight?
1:59:50 Speaker 01 It was round five, or like round six or something. So it was halfway through the preliminary stage. It affected his standings. But then, after resigning that game, Magnus finished first in the bracket, in the preliminaries, and then he won the entire event. There was a chance that they were gonna meet in the final, but Hans lost in the first round against the Vietnamese, strong player, Le Quang Liem. And then Magnus gave a short interview to the live broadcast, where he said he would give a statement at the end of the tournament. And then he did. He gave a statement at the end of the tournament. And now here we are. The only other thing missing from this is the very intense scrutinization
2:00:34 Speaker 01 of all those over-the-board games that I mentioned earlier.
2:00:39 Speaker 01 That Hans dominated in. So people are now going through all of his games that he played in tournaments. And they're analyzing them with engines and they're saying he played exceptionally well. And the debate is, was he cheating? Or was he way too good already, but underrated?
2:00:58 Speaker 01 Because he could have had incubated knowledge. So he could have not played for a couple of years, was 2700 level, but was playing people who were 24, 2500.
2:01:07 Lex Fridman? Well, well, over the, I see. So not just over the board with the top level people like Magnus, but over the board in general.
2:01:15 Speaker 01 Yes, before he got a chance to play in these super tournaments against the best players in the world, he had to go to Europe. He was the most active chess player in 2021.
2:01:23 Lex Fridman? And he was quite dominant.
2:01:26 Speaker 01 Yes, I think he played more over the board games than any player in 2021 or 2022. I think it's 2021. And yes, I think his rise was steeper than everybody. Maybe with the exception of Alderweireld Farouzja, who got to 2800.
2:01:42 Lex Fridman? See, I'd like to believe, because he, he talks about being very, he just became obsessed with chess.
2:01:50 Lex Fridman? I like stories like that. I like stories of the underdog, especially with the scarlet letter of having been a cheater in the past. I like the idea of somebody who is flawed psychologically and ethically and just, just a full fascinating personality. And this somehow just becomes obsessed. I mean, similar to Bobby Fischer is also a tortured soul, also flawed, also just chaotic all over the place. You could see Bobby Fischer being somebody that might cheat when he was 12 on online chess, right?
2:02:27 Speaker 01 If, if it existed, yeah, actually, I think in some podcasts, like small chess podcasts, I don't want to.
2:02:34 Speaker 01 I like Ben Johnson, so I'm apologizing for calling it small, but compared to like, let's say Lex Fridman podcast, it's a
2:02:42 Lex Fridman? What's, what's, what's his podcast?
2:02:44 Speaker 01 It's perpetual chess. It's kind of like
2:02:46 Lex Fridman? Oh, I love perpetual chess. You joke.
2:02:49 Speaker 01 Really?
2:02:49 Lex Fridman? Dare you cop. Yeah. The way, all right. I'll show you. Cause it does a lot of, it talks. It makes me feel special. Let me see, where is it? Perpetual chess. He does like improver series.
2:03:03 Speaker 01 Yes.
2:03:04 Lex Fridman? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
2:03:05 Speaker 01 Yes, yes.
2:03:05 Lex Fridman? Yeah, he's great. Ben, I forgot, I'm so horrible with names. His name is Ben, Ben Johnson? Yeah, it is Ben Johnson. That's right. Yeah. The perpetual chess podcast.
2:03:13 Speaker 01 That's amazing. See, Lex, when even individuals like myself who might have a large audience, when I look at you, you're at a, you're just at a different level. I don't expect you to be listening to chess podcasts during the day. Just imagine you're generally doing something to change the world or talking to some visionary people.
2:03:31 Lex Fridman? Well, I should say, you know, I've been running a lot and I listen to podcasts a lot because they're such, I love human beings excited about stuff that really energize me. And I've listened to a bunch of chess podcasts. I'm really energized by your love of chess. I really like, yeah, sorry, I forgot his name, but Ben Johnson. I love it when he talks to grandmasters. I love it when he talks to the, the, the, the regular folks for the improvers, like to see how they balance life and chess and all that kind of stuff. He's just pretty good at it. He's like super excited. And they talk about books.
2:04:10 Speaker 01 Yeah.
2:04:11 Lex Fridman? And they get excited about different books.
2:04:12 Speaker 01 Yes.
2:04:13 Lex Fridman? I mean, it, it also gives me a sense of where the chess world is from a different perspective. It's like people studying chess, like what they get excited about, how difficult it is. Yeah, it's, it's nice to get a sense of the community, the language that's used, because I did want to have a bunch of conversations.
2:04:37 Lex Fridman? With folks about chess, because I think it's a beautiful game and I think it's a beautiful community. So that's, that's one of the podcasts I listen to. So yeah, anyway, it's great. Anyway, you were saying, why, why did you bring him up?
2:04:47 Speaker 01 Yes.
2:04:48 Lex Fridman? Great podcast.
2:04:49 Speaker 01 Great podcast. I, only reason I thought of it, and I use the word small, no disrespect, Ben, is because even that episode, which he did with Hans, like it was a small episode. It wasn't seen by mass audience of chess.
2:05:04 Lex Fridman? He did an episode with Hans recently, or no?
2:05:06 Speaker 01 Some time ago, yeah. And in that episode, Hans very openly is like Bobby Fischer was misunderstood and he was my idol.
2:05:12 Lex Fridman? Oh, wow.
2:05:13 Speaker 01 Said a couple of things like that. And Hans is an intense guy. Like I, when I listen to Hans, I get a little anxious. It's just, he brings out some sort of disturbance in my ecosystem.
2:05:23 Lex Fridman? Yeah. Yeah, I can't really pin him down to like what, what's going on there.
2:05:28 Speaker 01 Yeah.
2:05:29 Lex Fridman? As a person who's trying to read people.
2:05:30 Speaker 01 Yeah.
2:05:32 Lex Fridman? It's difficult. Like I can, I can, this is the dark aspect. He could be both the genius of Bobby Fischer and a genius cheater. And you could see, like, there's something chaotic about him, which makes him very appealing in that way.
2:05:46 Speaker 01 Yes. So, right now, late September 2022, the current environment is such that Hans hasn't said anything in weeks. And people are sort of dissecting every bit of circumstantial evidence that they can, and they're trying to present the case, I don't even know to who, ultimately. I guess it would be the FIDE Cheating, Anti-cheating Commission, or whatever.
2:06:17 Lex Fridman? It might be to you, essentially.
2:06:19 Speaker 01 I mean.
2:06:19 Lex Fridman? To people with the platform.
2:06:20 Speaker 01 It could be.
2:06:21 Lex Fridman? To, to present convincing evidence to where the, the people, the people are convinced that we're the other. Because you're, for people who don't know, and they should definitely follow Gotham Chess, you've been on this, you've covered it a lot, and I'm sure if anything comes out, you'll cover it more. But you've been quite balanced and thoughtful and kind of objective about the whole thing.
2:06:41 Speaker 01 Yeah. So the reason for that is, I understand the power that I wield with.
2:06:50 Speaker 01 Anything and if I say one sentence the wrong way, I might be sending 10,000 people or more to go do something.
2:06:59 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
2:07:01 Speaker 01 And I hate that. I want to present the evidence and I want the video to end and people go, "Okay, I understand." Not, "I'mma go fuck someone up." You know what I mean? Like, because that's, and I also believe that even if Hans, even if Hans is guilty,
2:07:20 Speaker 01 this goes all the way back. He's a human being.
2:07:23 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
2:07:24 Speaker 01 And you can argue that cheaters gotta be punished and you can argue that people who do things wrong, you shouldn't feel any sort of compassion. But I would hate to have the whole world pointing their fingers at me, the entire world that I've known my entire life. And even if I messed up, there's still a world after chess. There might still even be a world in chess. I don't know, but that stuff, it doesn't make me, it doesn't make me feel good to present all of the circumstantial evidence in my videos and start being like, "Yeah, it looks, you know, so..."
2:08:00 Lex Fridman? But at the same time, you deeply care about chess and the chess community and there's some sense where, was it you or was it Magnus that said that cheating poses an existential threat?
2:08:11 Speaker 01 Magnus said that.
2:08:13 Lex Fridman? I mean, there is some aspect of truth to that, which is like, you know, we, the chess is in a state where bots, chess engines are much better than humans.
2:08:23 Speaker 01 Yeah.
2:08:23 Lex Fridman? And we're living in a world where technology becomes easier and easier to integrate with human beings, whether you put it in some orifice or elsewhere. And that, that does pose a threat to, um, to our ability to trust that a world champion is indeed a world champion, that somebody we think is good is indeed good. And so there is some aspect to the ecosystem that should punish cheating and perhaps over punish cheating.
2:08:51 Speaker 01 And the other thing is, in sport, you can take PEDs and have bigger muscles, bigger, better reaction time, but you still have to perform the action in a successful way. There is still a chance you can lose if you take PEDs. Maybe in some sports, the gap between non PED and PED user is significantly more noticeable. But in chess...
2:09:19 Speaker 01 If you cheat, you play god.
2:09:23 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
2:09:24 Speaker 01 You decide when the game is over. You can fake bad moves. You can fake everything. You can even, if you're cheating, quote unquote, the right way, you're gonna lose plenty of games. To avoid getting detected.
2:09:37 Lex Fridman? So you can create bots that are 2800, like.
2:09:41 Speaker 01 You can also just not listen. If you know all the best moves, but choose to play on your own, oh, I made a mistake, not a big deal. You could, yes, bots are all at a different level. But if you were to cheat, that you you play god. You can decide when you make your move and when the engine makes its move. And if you know the top four lines of the engine, you choose the fourth one. So in hindsight, people will analyze your game and they will go, oh, it wasn't perfect. Well, no shit. Only the stupid cheaters play the top engine line the whole game.
2:10:12 Lex Fridman? By the way, I'm not saying that this is what's happening here, but, but there's a, there's probably an excitement to playing god. To to and get in the way with it. Like.
2:10:26 Speaker 01 I know people, I know adults, grown adults who are successful in their fields. And they they cheat. They cheat in lessons, they cheat in like I've, I don't want to say I've taught any. May I may or may not have. For some reason, one of them watches this and they know they're guilty. And it happens, it happens. Not just teenagers, not just young adults, but full grown adults will cheat when they play because it, they think it helps them learn.
2:10:54 Lex Fridman? Oh, well, that's exactly just that justification. But I just meant like I'm, it might not be just about winning. It might also just feel good to have that power.
2:11:04 Speaker 01 Power.
2:11:06 Lex Fridman? Like, I bet you it's a drug.
2:11:08 Speaker 01 Oh, yeah.
2:11:09 Lex Fridman? I mean, like with a lot of criminals. With a lot of criminals, I feel like part of like the mass murderers and serial killers, I feel like a lot of it is they can get away with it, the fact that they like they like everyone else is a sucker and they figured out how to do this evil thing. And obviously cheating is nowhere close to that, but there's still a feeling of getting away with it. Yeah, I wonder. I mean, you're pretty objective on the whole thing. Where if you were a betting man, what would you say is the probability? Are you changing day by day in your head? What's the probability that Hans cheated? Over the board against Magnus in the in St.
2:11:54 Lex Fridman? Louis?
2:11:55 Speaker 01 That's a tough one, man.
2:11:56 Lex Fridman? Have you even allowed yourself to to put a probability on it?
2:12:01 Speaker 01 No, not on that specific game because I think a lot of that game was affected by Magnus' own psyche. That was one of his worst games ever.
2:12:12 Lex Fridman? So he played poorly too, Magnus played.
2:12:14 Speaker 01 Which doesn't help his case.
2:12:15 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
2:12:16 Speaker 01 Hans might have cheated in that game, but we'll never know. I I think day by day, the evidence is slowly starting to show more and more that he's cheated in like, like how Magnus said, more than he said and more recently. It's undeniable, like, right? A lot of the statistics are there. The problem is, you can't prove you're not cheating.
2:12:45 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
2:12:48 Speaker 01 Unless you strip naked, like that site offered him a million bucks to like, everything about.
2:12:56 Lex Fridman? Which site?
2:12:56 Speaker 01 I saw some headline that said Hans Niemann was offered a million bucks.
2:13:00 Lex Fridman? Can't be real.
2:13:01 Speaker 01 And where I struggle to comprehend is how on earth he could pull it off. And like, I'm a guilty that my brain goes to guilt first and resentment, remorse, guilt, that kind of that trio.
2:13:16 Lex Fridman? Magnus put out a statement as we speak yesterday, saying, Dear Chess World, at the 2022 Sinfield Cup, I made the unprecedented professional decision to withdraw from the tournament after my round three game against Hans Niemann.
2:13:31 Lex Fridman? A week later, during the Champions Chess Tour, I resigned against Hans Niemann after playing only one move. I know that my actions have frustrated many in the chess community. I'm frustrated. I want to play chess. I want to continue to play chess at the highest level in the best events. I believe that cheating in chess is a big deal and an existential threat to the game. I also believe that chess organizers and all those who care about the sanctity of the game we love should seriously consider increasing security measures and methods of cheat detection for over the board chess. When Niemann was invited last minute to the 2022 Singfield Cup, I strongly considered withdrawing prior to the event I ultimately chose to play.
2:14:14 Lex Fridman? That's the thing you're referring to is that he can, like now we know he was torn about the whole thing. I believe that Niemann has cheated more and more recently than he has publicly admitted. His over the board progress has been unusual and throughout our game in Singfield Cup, I had the impression that he wasn't tense or even fully concentrating on the game in critical positions while outplaying me as black in a way I think only a handful of players can do. This game contributed to changing my perspective. He must do, we must do something about cheating. And for my part, going forward, I don't want to play against people that have cheated
2:14:55 Lex Fridman? repeatedly in the past because I don't know what they're capable of doing in the future. There's more than I would like to say, unfortunately. At this time, I'm limited in what I can say without explicit permission from Niemann to speak openly. So far, I have only been able to speak with my actions and those actions have stated clearly that I am not willing to play chess with Niemann. I hope that the truth in this matter comes out, whatever it may be. Sincerely, Magnus Carlsen, World Chess Champion.
2:15:26 Speaker 01 How would you sign off your statements?
2:15:30 Lex Fridman? If I was a world, no, just say whatever.
2:15:32 Speaker 01 Lex Fridman, what would be the title?
2:15:34 Lex Fridman? Yeah, I don't know. I think I would not, even if I was a world champion, I would just say Lex.
2:15:42 Lex Fridman? Or make up a title.
2:15:45 Lex Fridman? And I feel like I really fucked up in life if I have to tweet a statement as an image. That's like when you get, you're a politician and you got caught cheating on your wife. Like for many years in a row.
2:15:59 Speaker 01 Yes.
2:15:59 Lex Fridman? Then I tweet an image, I'm sorry for all the people I have hurt. And the people that believed in me. And whatever else, and then I would sign world chess champion.
2:16:10 Speaker 01 You know, the most like the, the modern way to give a statement, what I thought Magnus was gonna do.
2:16:14 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
2:16:15 Speaker 01 Thought he was gonna write. On the recent.
2:16:21 Speaker 01 Scandal or my statement on the past few weeks, twit longer.
2:16:27 Lex Fridman? What do you mean?
2:16:27 Speaker 01 So you put a URL.
2:16:29 Lex Fridman? Oh, yeah.
2:16:30 Speaker 01 So that's for tweets, but it's unlimited characters. It's not a hundred and forty.
2:16:33 Lex Fridman? I didn't know what that is. Can you explain that to me?
2:16:35 Speaker 01 Yeah. So generally when a celebrity has a giant audience on Twitter, they will make their statement on social media and say what it is in a sentence.
2:16:45 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
2:16:45 Speaker 01 One line, and then there's a link.
2:16:47 Lex Fridman? Where's the link take you?
2:16:48 Speaker 01 To a website called twit longer.
2:16:50 Lex Fridman? Oh, that's a natural website.
2:16:51 Speaker 01 Twit longer. Yeah. And that is where they write their statements. That is what I was expecting.
2:16:55 Lex Fridman? Who did this? I haven't seen this before.
2:16:57 Speaker 01 Oh, this, this is, I don't have one off the top of my head, but it's.
2:17:00 Lex Fridman? Is that Kanye, Kim Kardashian breaking up that would use that?
2:17:02 Speaker 01 Streamers, musicians. Yeah. I don't think politicians use it because it's just feeling.
2:17:08 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
2:17:08 Speaker 01 They use the image.
2:17:09 Lex Fridman? Use my, yeah, MySpace and Facebook, right? Yeah. I would probably go, see, I, I like, um. I mean, I'm not just being biased here just because I have a podcast. I'm a huge fan of podcasts. I feel like I would go on a podcast to talk about it. With somebody I trust. So like long form and discuss it.
2:17:30 Speaker 01 Thought I was gonna do that too. In fact, I wanted to write him a message and be like, I can be that, that guy for you. I have a very strange relationship with Magnus because.
2:17:42 Lex Fridman? Good, bad?
2:17:43 Speaker 01 I, I don't, I, we've never interacted. I very openly.
2:17:51 Speaker 01 I don't want to say use him for views because that is a very crude way of saying it.
2:17:55 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
2:17:56 Speaker 01 But if you wanted to insult my YouTube channel, that is what you would say.
2:18:00 Lex Fridman? So Magnus is in a lot of videos.
2:18:02 Speaker 01 Thumbnails or videos, not clickbaity, but if he's playing in a tournament and he plays a great game, he's going on that fucking thumbnail.
2:18:11 Lex Fridman? Oh, because, uh, let's see, he's the number one chess player, very likely the greatest chess player of all time.
2:18:17 Speaker 01 Right.
2:18:17 Lex Fridman? Plus he's exciting.
2:18:20 Speaker 01 And YouTube algorithm loves his name and people click on it.
2:18:23 Lex Fridman? Oh, do they?
2:18:24 Speaker 01 Do the best.
2:18:25 Lex Fridman? Yeah, but I don't know what the chicken or the egg is, but the reason it loves it, the reason people click on it is because he is an exciting personality. He's an exciting chess player. Is there's something compelling about him?
2:18:39 Speaker 01 Yeah.
2:18:39 Lex Fridman? He's also, he can, he knows how to, in a subtle, dry, wit, humor way, talk shit. With the silences and all of that.
2:18:48 Speaker 01 Yes.
2:18:49 Lex Fridman? He knows, he knows it, he knows it, he knows the whole game of it.
2:18:52 Speaker 01 Specifically to Magnus, my relationship with him, we've never interacted and throughout the last couple of years, he generally has interacted with Hikaru as a competitor. He has done some collabs with the Botezas. He obviously has talked to Ludwig, who's a very, very big streamer. And part of me regrets the fact that
2:19:16 Speaker 01 when I was smaller as a YouTuber and a Twitch streamer, I'm sure I used to make jokes or some tweets at Magnus. Like when Magnus would tweet something, I would try to respond so I could be the top reply because that was my social media. I literally think, I once responded to a Magnus tweet and saying responding for engagement. Because it was some like, it wasn't some controversial tweet.
2:19:35 Lex Fridman? Yes.
2:19:36 Speaker 01 It was just something funny. And I went, haha, responding for engagement because I was just being a little bit of an idiot and I knew that if it got enough likes, it would be at the top and people would see me, my brand and just get to know me. This is the type of-
2:19:50 Lex Fridman? Please don't use the word brand, but yes.
2:19:51 Speaker 01 Yes.
2:19:54 Lex Fridman? But yeah, no, and your worry is that he wouldn't take you seriously.
2:19:57 Speaker 01 He wouldn't take me seriously. And if I was one of the best of all time and I saw some dude on YouTube just kind of being a moron and I'm all over his thumbnails, I can imagine he has a very legitimate case.
2:20:09 Lex Fridman? I appreciate your humility and self-critical nature, but one of the realities with people like him is he wouldn't hold a grudge or not treat you seriously. I'm pretty sure he's a fan. He's a big supporter. He doesn't watch YouTube videos of that kind.
2:20:31 Speaker 01 I barely watch YouTube videos.
2:20:32 Lex Fridman? I think of chess. He might watch like more fun chess adjacent stuff, but he just doesn't. It's not for him. So I'm pretty sure he knows of you and likes you and your commenting on stuff has zero effect on his belief, which is funny. That's something you think about. Yeah, you're a perfect, but you're well-respected. Like, you're, a lot of people mention you as a person who was like, okay, this person's legit, which is an important thing. It's not just an entertainer. It's not just a shit talker and so on. This person is a great educator, a great fan and student of chess, a great player himself, so all of those components. And so, yeah, you're definitely a good person.
2:21:15 Lex Fridman? And on this particular aspect, have been very objective.
2:21:18 Speaker 01 I understand that I'm nowhere near perfect. I'm not a different person on camera or off camera. I will say it like it is, maybe on Twitch. You gotta dig in the mud there a little bit more, a lot more sarcastic, a lot more brash and whatnot, but you meet me in a taco place and I'll talk with you the same way I might if it was a video, just that you may not, you may not consider me just a random guy at a taco place. And that's why I think about this stuff with, specific to Magnus. And it's one of the reasons I don't reach out to him directly ever. I've never have, never DM'd him on Instagram, hoping for a response, never. I've never even reached out to anyone on his team, trying to get a conversation very candid with him,
2:22:02 Speaker 01 which I think it would be. I even barely reached out to guys in the top 10, like top 15. Only recently started pushing myself more to do that. And I even in my intro messages to them preemptively say something like, you might think I'm some idiot, you might not be totally wrong.
2:22:21 Lex Fridman? Yes.
2:22:21 Speaker 01 But like, I think this would be a good conversation and give it a shot. And I've been surprised, I've been ignored by a few, but some said, oh yeah, I've seen your stuff. I'm generally a fan, like no problem. I was actually really blown away. This YouTube channel, Levitov Chess, it's a Russian chess channel. And I think the last name of the guy is, the name of the channel is named after Ilya Levitov, who has some sort of managerial role in the Russian Chess Federation.
2:22:48 Speaker 01 And this channel has interviewed some of the greatest players of all time. They have interviews with the modern best Russian players and Kasparov, Karpov, Kramnik, you name these guys from Russian chess history, it's unbelievable. I just thought this was a channel of just unbelievably well-respected chess players and legion of fans that were longtime chess fans. And I mentioned them very briefly in a YouTube video. And that little clip went into their next community event. And the founder of the channel went on this two-minute, beautiful description of why he liked me and how he only watched my channel as a beginner and how I have a natural voice
2:23:31 Speaker 01 and how if I talked about cards, I would have a million, 100 million subscribers. Just all this really kind stuff that in my mind, I thought was either undeserved or I just never fathomed that.
2:23:43 Lex Fridman? Yeah, I mean, you certainly should not feel as deserved. You should have humility about that kind of stuff. But I think that is the thing that works over time. It's like reputation spreads, which is like, if, if one person likes you and they tell you to other people and it kind of spreads and over time, you have one conversation with a top 10, like a, like a super grandmaster and they, they say nice things about you and it just kind of spreads. Because I've been very surprised in all walks of life. Like, um, you know, this, this really gets me, this makes me happy, honestly. Cause like people ask me like how I get guests and so on. And it just seems honestly just be a good person and.
2:24:30 Lex Fridman? Like a real person and honest and just kind of spreads the word, word of mouth.
2:24:36 Speaker 01 You know, even coming here, I almost didn't reach out.
2:24:40 Lex Fridman? What do you mean?
2:24:40 Speaker 01 I had seen you, I'd never talked to a chess person and I've watched a lot of, I've watched some of the things start to finish, especially if the guest I'm really interested in, like George St Pierre, I'll watch that guy do whatever.
2:24:51 Lex Fridman? Yeah, exactly. I'll watch him do basically anything, make an omelet or something.
2:24:54 Speaker 01 Yeah, I love listening to him. Some of the other things I've listened to as well. And I noticed that neither, well, to me, you, you obviously and Joe are the two biggest podcasters. I don't know if that's like factual. I don't know if some influencer has some podcasts, but you guys interview folks that I listen to more, more often than anybody else. And when Magnus came on, I was like, oh, this is, that's amazing, you know? I, I don't even know how I would reach out to someone like you. It just seems like a limb, like climbing a mountain. And then a couple of days later, and I even in that episode wanted to write, but I didn't know how. Like, do I make a YouTube comment? I don't want that. I'm looking like I'm clout chasing on the Magnus episode.
2:25:35 Speaker 01 Then you talked about Tezis and I said, oh, I shouldn't overthink it. Like, you know, I, so I just said, all right, fuck it. I'll, I'll just write a comment and you're like, yeah, I'd love to have you on. I was shocked. I didn't even, you responded just within a couple of hours or something.
2:25:51 Lex Fridman? Yeah. Yeah, I loved it, man. I mean, it was an honor. It's a good way to connect. I also like on live streams, I'll watch, I try to resist commenting, but, um, you know, I'll watch some, some even smaller channels. Like I'll get super excited by them and connect in that way. There's an intimacy to that. Man, YouTube is beautiful. I don't know anything about Twitch. Maybe it's similar. But YouTube has.
2:26:16 Speaker 01 Ruin you.
2:26:18 Lex Fridman? There is an intimacy, like especially if it's live. I don't know what that is, but if it's live, they're like right there. You can just like reach out and say hello.
2:26:29 Speaker 01 Yep.
2:26:29 Lex Fridman? It's cool. It's like really, uh, I don't know. I'm just happy to live in this time where you could connect with people in that way. There is an intimacy. That's why I love podcasts too. I I listen to people and I feel like they're my friend. It's cool. It's a cool. It's a cool feeling. It makes you feel less lonely in this world. Like you have a lifelong companion, especially like people that do a podcast for many, many years. I'm like, we've been, you've gone through all the ups and downs of life together with a creator, with a with a podcaster, with anything. It's cool. I don't know. It's a it makes it surprisingly intimate, a one-way friendships. Maybe for intro, I don't know.
2:27:10 Speaker 01 There's, there's, there's some negatives that people definitely describe. The word that gets used a lot is parasocial. You think you you like, the viewer will think that the the streamer or the YouTuber knows them or owes them something or has some, they have a bigger connection than they do.
2:27:30 Lex Fridman? Yeah, you know what? Actually, sorry to interrupt. I have to look. Maybe you can explain to me. I've heard this term parasocial a lot. I'm meaning to look it up. Might as well look it up while in live.
2:27:40 Speaker 01 Yeah, sure, sure, sure.
2:27:41 Lex Fridman? Parasocial interaction, PSI, refers, is this a new term? Because I have just started listening, hearing it like the last
2:27:48 Speaker 01 Yeah, I think it's
2:27:48 Lex Fridman? year or so.
2:27:49 Speaker 01 Yeah.
2:27:50 Lex Fridman? Parasocial interaction, PSI, refers to a kind of psychological relationship experienced by an audience in their mediated encounters with performance in the mass media, particularly on television and on online platforms. Viewers or listeners come to consider media personalities as friends despite having no or limited interaction with, oh shit, that's a term for a thing I've been referring to. Interesting. The term was coined by Donald Horton and Richard Wall in 1956.
2:28:20 Speaker 01 Wow. When there was like very limited media, huh? Wow.
2:28:25 Lex Fridman? I guess TV and radio and stuff. Yeah, yeah. Parasocial interaction and exposure that gave us interest in a persona become a parasocial relationship after repeated exposure to the media. Yeah, okay, what's the downside, bro? What's, what's, okay?
2:28:38 Speaker 01 Oh, well, I can tell you the downside. The downside is is people thinking they're in relationships with streamers and stalking them. That's
2:28:46 Lex Fridman? Oh, the stalking part, but the relationship is like, I mean, okay, you mean like actual relationship, like?
2:28:55 Speaker 01 Like waking up and saying, how are you doing? Like in your head to them. Yeah, no, but that might be an extension. More like, yeah, getting mad. They don't respond to you in, anytime you're in the stream or that convincing yourself the other person wants you and you need to go to them. So you need to find where they are. Like this has happened. Some of the biggest female streamers have reported that they get stalked and harassed for months. And that's born out of this. This on a very small scale is you come into a stream every so often and give an update about your academic career. That's not so bad.
2:29:38 Speaker 01 I was gonna mention, I've streamed on Twitch for years and I watched people have kids. Like people will come in over the course of months and say, hey, man, you know, I just finished, I just took the bar exam. Yo, man, like I'm having my first kid. And that's crazy. That's amazing.
2:29:53 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
2:29:54 Speaker 01 But if they do it in a healthy way, that's one thing.
2:29:58 Lex Fridman? But I There's always gonna be downsides, but most of it is beautiful, man.
2:30:03 Speaker 01 Yes.
2:30:03 Lex Fridman? I have very, I have, I guess, parasocial relationships of people that take it a little too far. But it's all love.
2:30:15 Speaker 01 You also have a fundamental belief and hope in people to be good.
2:30:19 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
2:30:20 Speaker 01 Yeah.
2:30:20 Lex Fridman? Yeah. And I've been, you know, I haven't gotten in trouble with it yet.
2:30:25 Speaker 01 That's, that's a good thing. Me too. I've interacted with plenty of people in person and no one's been negative. So
2:30:30 Lex Fridman? Yes. And I've even gone to a war zone. There
2:30:34 Speaker 01 I can't.
2:30:34 Lex Fridman? There's no, there hasn't been, people have been very, I don't know. People have only surprised me in the positive direction and the depth of the capacity they have for compassion. Do we, okay, so now we're in this weird place with the cheating. Can I ask you a question about how it's possible to cheat? Like if you and I You know, the conversation you're gonna have with Mag, so we're gonna have, we're gonna play chess. If we're, we're trying to figure out, how can you beat him? What are the different ways, do you think? Over the board chess, what are the ways to cheat?
2:31:12 Speaker 01 Cheating? That's where I lose the thread because I don't know.
2:31:18 Lex Fridman? See, that's what I immediately went to is like the engineering challenge of cheating.
2:31:23 Speaker 01 Right, well, that's because that's like how you're good at that, I mean, you're not good at creating cheating in over the board situations. I'm just saying you, your brain works differently. I just choose to not even, like, I can't entertain that. I, I can come up with some bullshit, but i- it's not gonna be anywhere.
2:31:38 Lex Fridman? Oh, your mind is not like immediately attracted to pulling at that thread of like, how would you fuck with the system?
2:31:44 Speaker 01 Yeah, my mind stops at, huh, that would have to be a really sophisticated thing and that's it. It doesn't go any further. My brain every day thinks about the best way to compartmentalize chess into a digestible format and put it out into content.
2:31:58 Lex Fridman? Chess on the board chess, not cheating.
2:32:03 Speaker 01 Yeah, I just think about YouTube, I just think about that. That's currently where my mind is fully focused. I'm also working on like a, a book, so.
2:32:10 Lex Fridman? So that's what you think?
2:32:11 Speaker 01 Yes.
2:32:12 Lex Fridman? For me, because I've built chess engines that, without understanding chess much. As like, you know, as anyone does who's interested in AI, you build all kinds of systems that do all kinds of stuff. And chess is just an easy game. Like, it starts with Othello, goes up the chess and go, there's, it's just a great benchmark, a great place to explore different AI algorithms. From search to machine learning and so on. But to me, cheating is like, it's, it's a similar kind of ideas. Well, if I make it a board instead of eight by eight to 10 by 10, like, how does it change things? And with cheating, it's almost like expanding the engineering challenge of chess out into the, the real world.
2:32:55 Lex Fridman? To me, okay, so just allow me, I know cheating is horrible and everything.
2:33:01 Lex Fridman? But stockfish, AI engine and human working together in interesting ways. It forget chess, just machine and human working together to expand the capability of the human is really fascinating. And that's like a beautiful thing to me. Of course, purely for the chess game, it ruins the game.
2:33:22 Speaker 01 Yeah.
2:33:23 Lex Fridman? But.
2:33:25 Lex Fridman? I just like thinking of how AI can interact with the human
2:33:31 Lex Fridman? in ways that doesn't, that is frictionless, like, you know, like neural link, brain-computer interfaces dream of directly connecting the human brain to AI system.
2:33:43 Speaker 01 The problem in this case is I don't think the human and the AI are interacting together. The AI dominates. The human is just the mechanism that makes the moves.
2:33:52 Lex Fridman? I actually played, if I may, I don't, maybe I need your advice on this. I thought, and I told myself, I won't do it. And then a friend of mine said, and a couple of friends, and
2:34:06 Lex Fridman? both of them are previous guests in this podcast, told me I definitely need to do it, which is, you know, connect. So I already have, for the chess arm that I built,
2:34:19 Lex Fridman? this computer vision on the chessboard is able to extract from vision
2:34:26 Lex Fridman? the way you do optical character recognition, extract the board. So I was gonna just build that cheating system to demonstrate it with, the reason I thought it was interesting, so, something we didn't mention is, I don't know who started this rumor, but the rumor started that it might have been like Analbeads, that, I don't know who started this, but I do know that Elon magnified it.
2:34:49 Speaker 01 My username was dead center in that thing that he retweeted, which was hilarious to me.
2:34:54 Lex Fridman? You're using, what do you mean?
2:34:57 Speaker 01 He retweeted the clip, but also the copy pasta, like the paragraph that was like describing the whole Analbeads theory, and dead center in the middle of that paragraph is, as Gotham Chess says, and the worst part about it was, I was literally tagged. So it was as user slash Gotham Chess says. So every time that paragraph gets posted on Reddit, I get tagged. Getting posted a lot. So, yes, but yes, he tweeted.
2:35:29 Lex Fridman? And then there's also the funny thing, which I really love, the weirdest, most entertaining thing. Was that part of the same thing where, like, plot twist, Magnus has been using Analbeads this whole time, that's how he got?
2:35:45 Speaker 01 Yes, yes.
2:35:47 Lex Fridman? I love that so much. Okay. But anyway, there's a
2:35:53 Lex Fridman? I quickly realized that there is, I have to admit that I know not much about sex toys. And then I quickly realized that there's a lot of sex toys that have Bluetooth capability that you can interact with. It's very easy to connect stockfish to a sex toys. Actually. Actually, yeah. So apparently that's a popular thing, like a lot of sex toys are Bluetooth enabled. So you can communicate with them. So this is actually pretty trivial to do, not trivial, but then, and then in fact, there is a, there's several libraries. One of them is really active called, now this is on GitHub, friends.
2:36:38 Lex Fridman? It's in Rust, but I think there's Python wrappers. It's called butt plug. It's the name of the library.
2:36:45 Lex Fridman? That communicates with, it supports a bunch of different devices, a bunch of different like vibrators and all that kind of stuff. But then I looked at the kind of vibrators it supports and they're all like creepy looking. I mean, like it doesn't, it doesn't have, I don't know, it felt too dirty, you know? Like there's a line, I was like, ah, is this not gonna, because the reason I like that kind of stuff is I like the joke of it. That ultimately is somehow educational. Because to me, I really care about AI and this is a cool little project to do. It's pretty easy to share.
2:37:20 Lex Fridman? Yeah, but I was thinking about doing it. I was thinking about doing it. At first I said, no, it's just kind of feels dirty. But then the aforementioned friend said, no, you should definitely do it.
2:37:32 Lex Fridman? I like the. Who's your test subject? No, we wouldn't test.
2:37:38 Lex Fridman? I'm sure that people would sign up, right? I just went on the table, like show the vibration, like, like you're basically converting. Now, it's not, I'm not obviously a grandmaster, so you have to say everything. I feel like, no, you don't.
2:37:55 Speaker 01 You could say the square. You don't have to say the piece. The human will fill in the gap.
2:37:59 Lex Fridman? No, a good human chess player. I can't.
2:38:02 Speaker 01 Oh.
2:38:02 Lex Fridman? That's the point I wanted to make is like, for me, I would like to know the actual move I need to make.
2:38:09 Speaker 01 Yeah.
2:38:10 Lex Fridman? So I need the full information.
2:38:12 Speaker 01 Right.
2:38:12 Lex Fridman? So I have to convert the bishop, c5, whatever, to Morse code, which is a lot of my patience.
2:38:20 Speaker 01 Yes, exactly.
2:38:23 Lex Fridman? But it still works. It's hilarious and fun. So I was thinking about doing it, but
2:38:28 Lex Fridman? because it's pretty easy to do. It would be just like a fun exercise. I love a mix of technical rigor and humor.
2:38:38 Speaker 01 Well, this is the perfect project for that.
2:38:40 Lex Fridman? Right, exactly.
2:38:40 Speaker 01 This was born, I think, out of a user comment in a Twitch stream. So I thought it was born on Reddit, this theory, but I think Eric Hanson was streaming ChessBra, and someone in his chat made that joke, and he read it out loud. That was the first time it was read out loud. And then somebody clipped it, and it became international news. Like, I don't, have you followed how big the traction got on this anal beads thing?
2:39:10 Lex Fridman? No.
2:39:10 Speaker 01 It was covered by every major news network, late night talk show, Trevor Noah, Stephen Colbert.
2:39:16 Lex Fridman? No.
2:39:16 Speaker 01 International news, international news in countries like China where I would have never thought that they would report about anal beads. Yeah.
2:39:24 Lex Fridman? Did they, what was the tonality of it? Was it seen as a joke? Or did they say, there's a cheating scandal?
2:39:31 Speaker 01 I think to us-
2:39:32 Lex Fridman? How do you even mention anal beads?
2:39:33 Speaker 01 I think, literally, anal beads. Like, just-
2:39:36 Lex Fridman? Anal beads.
2:39:37 Speaker 01 Just-
2:39:37 Lex Fridman? Accused?
2:39:39 Speaker 01 Accused, denies, denies cheating with anal beads, which he never did. He never denied cheating with anal beads. It was a joke internet theory.
2:39:48 Lex Fridman? If I was him, I would lean into it.
2:39:51 Speaker 01 Yeah, I can't imagine, man. Like, that's I I don't I don't know what the right thing for him to do is, but it's.
2:39:56 Lex Fridman? You're not touching this one?
2:39:58 Speaker 01 I I I've talked about it. I don't say the words anal beads in my YouTube videos, but I'll say beads. Yeah, I'll. The thing is.
2:40:05 Lex Fridman? You think I should do the the code thing? It's like a tutorial.
2:40:09 Speaker 01 Sure, yeah, I think it would be hilarious. If you find a way to do it. Yeah, you can show that it is possible to theoretically vibrate via Bluetooth. Chess moves. And if someone shoves it up their ass, what? That was another joke. Okay, they offered you to play naked. They're gonna make you spread your cheeks?
2:40:30 Lex Fridman? Yeah, I I didn't understand why naked solved the problem. I think there's so it doesn't have to be naked. I don't think naked is enough.
2:40:37 Speaker 01 Yeah.
2:40:40 Lex Fridman? Okay, some questions from Reddit.
2:40:43 Lex Fridman? Ask him, ask Levy if he deep down hates his audience.
2:40:47 Speaker 01 I saw that. Yeah, I saw I saw that was the one. I have a I have a love hate relationship with the chess subreddit.
2:40:52 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
2:40:53 Speaker 01 So that's why some of those questions were gonna be tough. I have a love hate relationship.
2:40:57 Lex Fridman? You think that's a tough question, or does that come from a place of love?
2:41:00 Speaker 01 Ah, very, very tough to say, very tough to say.
2:41:03 Lex Fridman? Love and hate, like, they're basically next door neighbors on Reddit, I feel like.
2:41:07 Speaker 01 Correct.
2:41:07 Lex Fridman? They oscillate very quickly between each other.
2:41:10 Speaker 01 Yes, so Reddit chess specifically, I think, is mostly folks who are around before the chess boom. So the chess.
2:41:18 Lex Fridman? This is the chess subreddit, sorry.
2:41:19 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah. So a lot of them have been around for five years, seven years, 10 years, even more. And I think the average age on Reddit is lower than the average age on the chess subreddit. I think that the chess subreddit is beyond the age of 20, maybe even 25. Like, a lot of folks there are.
2:41:36 Lex Fridman? Ancient, ancient people in their mid twenties.
2:41:38 Speaker 01 Yeah, I mean, not 15 or 16. Anarchy chess is younger, so Anarchy chess is basically chess memes.
2:41:45 Lex Fridman? That's a subreddit name?
2:41:46 Speaker 01 Yes, you got it. Yeah, Anarchy chess. This is great. A lot of stupid memes on there.
2:41:49 Lex Fridman? Do they like you or or no, or is it love?
2:41:51 Speaker 01 They did until my crypto sponsorship.
2:41:55 Speaker 01 Which is a separate convo that I'm more than happy to have. But yeah, so my relationship with the Reddit chess subreddit is tough because my content on YouTube stops at a certain point with them. They can't learn from me because I'm tailoring to 95% of my audience, which is about 16, 1700 and below. And I have a lot of content where I jokingly make fun of low rated players. And everyone's in on it and we all have fun and I laugh at myself a ton. Laugh at, as you can even see in this conversation. But just like you mentioned in with with clips and out of context things.
2:42:38 Speaker 01 Folks have already formed the perception of my personality. There's nothing I can do to win them back. And I think the dominant percentage of the loudest group of folks on the chess subreddit, they just, they have a certain perception of me. It's not going to change. And you add something like cryptocurrency sponsorship, which people on Reddit, just in general, are relatively negative on the subject. It's going to start, you know, snowballing more and more. So if you ever look up a thread of should I buy a Gotham course? And it's on Reddit chess, I was gonna say no. Everyone's calling it a scam, overpriced.
2:43:12 Lex Fridman? Interesting. I got, I, I heard a lot of really positive stuff. I don't know where, on Reddit in general.
2:43:18 Speaker 01 You mean?
2:43:18 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
2:43:19 Speaker 01 You might have, you might have been looking for it. You might have not been looking for, for negative things and I do.
2:43:24 Lex Fridman? So I was looking for like best educators online, like that kind of stuff.
2:43:28 Speaker 01 I don't, I'll, it might have not been Reddit chess. I'll be totally honest with you. If, if you ever go there and look for something like best recaps or best educational content for intermediates, I'm not mentioned. I might not be mentioned because I'm already expected to be on the list. So they just kind of want to generally shout out smaller creators. Totally fine with that. And I'm not even going on this whole explanation because I want to win folks back. It's just sort of the reality of the situation. A lot of my stuff is really clickbaity and I'm playing the YouTube game. They don't want that.
2:43:59 Lex Fridman? Do you ever feel like a limit? Or tension between your creativity and the YouTube algorithm? Like, do you feel like it has negative effects on it?
2:44:09 Speaker 01 Oh, yeah, yeah. I want to cover more in-depth stuff in a 30-minute video that I think is super useful to people. It's only going to get 60,000 views.
2:44:18 Lex Fridman? And you feel, why is that a bad thing? Is it good to mix it up?
2:44:23 Speaker 01 Yes, it's good to mix it up, but I make a video a day. I make one bad video, the other videos suffer. And then if I make two videos that underperform, the rest of the videos don't get pushed out as much. Your earnings can go down 40% day to day, which doesn't happen in other careers. And if I ever want to supplement, if I ever want to make a very instructional video, I try to do it in a very fun way. So something like eight of Magnus Carlsen's best endgames. You can still learn a ton, but the concept of the video is going to be different. Like, I try to still teach things, but in more interesting and exciting ways. Like, the guy who was scammed for a million dollars,
2:45:07 Speaker 01 Alexey Shirov, who was basically promised the world championship. If he won his match, he won his match. He didn't get a world championship. So there's still stuff in there you can learn. And you can, my goal is just you click on the video, you learn something, and you enjoy yourself. That's it.
2:45:21 Lex Fridman? Get people to click on it by any means necessary. But once they're there, have quality stuff they can learn.
2:45:28 Speaker 01 Yeah.
2:45:30 Lex Fridman? Yeah, man, I wish, so I have zero of those pressures. But I also really, really, like, I turn off views and all that kind of stuff. I don't pay attention to any of that. But I wish YouTube would like, the algorithm would include how good the video is, like beneficial for people's long-term well-being in the calculation.
2:45:56 Speaker 01 Yeah.
2:45:56 Lex Fridman? I actually really hate the fact that they turned off dislikes.
2:46:01 Speaker 01 Yeah, I didn't get that at all.
2:46:02 Lex Fridman? Because like, now I don't know the difference between like, for tutorials specifically. Like, I don't know what's a good chess video or not. Or what's a good review or not.
2:46:12 Speaker 01 Yeah.
2:46:12 Lex Fridman? I mean, it emphasizes following certain people more than like if you trust the creator. But like, man, I really don't know what's a good video or not, essentially. And then you have to trust more the title and then the clickbaity-ness comes in and it's it's no good. You have to use your own gut instinct as opposed to data. It sucks.
2:46:31 Speaker 01 Yeah, there's videos that have almost no views that are still great.
2:46:34 Lex Fridman? Incredible.
2:46:35 Speaker 01 Yeah.
2:46:35 Lex Fridman? And some of some of the best ones, some people who are just focused on like the the quality.
2:46:41 Speaker 01 Yeah.
2:46:41 Lex Fridman? And don't want to play the game or don't even know how to play and they don't really want to play the game of the YouTube algorithm. Yeah, it sucks. It sucks, especially given how dominant YouTube is in the in defining the sort of the creative energy of our whole freaking civilization of the youth.
2:47:00 Speaker 01 Not just chess.
2:47:01 Lex Fridman? Not just chess. When you're going to Chessbox against Eric Rosen, this is a question from Reddit. Chessbox, you uh you said your your hands are all messed up.
2:47:13 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah.
2:47:13 Lex Fridman? Are you training for something or regular like?
2:47:17 Speaker 01 So I also just remembered we never talked about Hikaru, so I can talk about Rosen and Hikaru in the same chessboxing.
2:47:23 Lex Fridman? Oh shit, alright. Is this your McGregor like shit talk segment?
2:47:29 Speaker 01 No, no, no, no. Eric Rosen is actually a close friend of mine. I probably have five of those. And he just so happens to be not just the chess streamer, but we we've we talked about buying homes. We've talked about, he's stayed at my place. He took my wedding photos. I flew him to New York and paid for all his stuff just so he could hang out with my wife and I and, you know, take some 6 a.m. photos in the sun in in the park, so.
2:47:54 Lex Fridman? Oh, he looks familiar.
2:47:55 Speaker 01 Yeah. So he's a, yeah, he's a good friend of mine. Now, in terms of chessboxing. Chess boxing is this really fascinating sport where you have boxing, but you also have chess and you have rounds. So you start a chess game with a clock. That segment itself lasts for a couple of minutes. They put the board away and pause the clock, whatever the time situation is, then you box for a minute. And that keeps going on. I don't know how it works in terms of the time expiring, meaning in fighting, there's judges that just tell you how the fight was going, right? Here, I don't know who wins and how. Like, do you win by, you can win by knockout, you can win by checkmate, or their clock can run out on the chessboard, but is there- Who judges? Who, who, is there a round limit? Does this just go on and on and on and on?
2:48:40 Speaker 01 You know what I mean? Yeah, I thought it's like 12 rounds, right? Isn't this a thing in, in, in Russia? It's a big thing in the UK. UK? Yeah, UK. I don't, I don't know why. And there's a lot of YouTuber events just for boxing. So YouTubers just learn to box and then they just box. No chess. They just straight up box each other. Like Jake Paul, for example. You ever gonna get Jake Paul in here? Yeah, yeah, I'm sure. Okay. I'm sure. I feel like we've, so many different guests have been mentioned. Uh, yeah, Jake, Jake Paul would be, would be a fun guest, but he's obviously the biggest scorer. He's legitimately boxing people. He's not, uh, but chess players is never gonna learn to box to that level and all of us are starting basically from zero.
2:49:21 Speaker 01 And Ludwig talked to me behind the scenes, say, hey, how would you feel about being in a chess boxing match?
2:49:28 Speaker 01 I said, okay, yeah, maybe. When is it gonna be? He said, five months from now. I've always wanted to train combat. I've weight lifted, I've done cardio, I've played basketball. And you're a UFC fan too? Yeah. So you admire fighting? Yeah, I would enjoy it. I just have a really bad lower back and that makes a lot of different combat difficult. But I said, you know what? Screw this. I'm going to contact a few local gyms. Yeah. And one of them, the guy emailing me back and forth, had actually watched my YouTube videos. So he was the first to respond. And he said, yeah, like, come in, do a couple of classes, like, see how you feel. So first I did conditioning, which killed me because fighting conditioning, as you know, it kills you. It's, it's a completely different type of conditioning.
2:50:09 Speaker 01 But I felt good and I really wanted to come back. And since July, I've been training three, four days a week. Nice. You feel pretty good? I love it. Lower back feels good? Lower, everything, the whole body got stronger. So you, what you're saying is you're gonna fuck up in Karo?
2:50:23 Lex Fridman? Is he training?
2:50:24 Speaker 01 I'm not fighting. So I talked to Eric about it and the truth is, we're both concerned about head trauma. I haven't actually sparred. I like sparring, shadow boxing, but I go there, I do personal training. I don't do a group class. I'm not fighting. I'm fighting the bag. I'm doing shadow boxing. My form is improving, but I haven't been punched. I get hit in the stomach, you know, I get hit in the side with kicks. Nobody's punched me in the face yet. So I think we both were adequately concerned about that. And there was not some ridiculous amount of money on the table. So we decided it's just not worth pursuing.
2:50:57 Lex Fridman? How does Hikaru come into the picture?
2:51:00 Speaker 01 Well, he
2:51:01 Lex Fridman? He's a possible competitor?
2:51:03 Speaker 01 People ask me all the time, would you, who would you fight? Would you, people are like, Andrea Bots would kick your ass. That's a tough one because I can't, what am I going to say? I'm going to fight a woman who I'm larger than, and you know, so I just have to take the elegance anytime a woman is mentioned. That's fine. I'm like 0 and 6.
2:51:18 Lex Fridman? There's no winning that one.
2:51:19 Speaker 01 Right, exactly. So I'm, I've lost to both Bots's, Anna Rudolph, Anna Kremling. They're all chess creators.
2:51:25 Lex Fridman? Like hypothetically?
2:51:26 Speaker 01 Yeah, I get asked.
2:51:27 Lex Fridman? Hypothetical fight?
2:51:28 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah.
2:51:30 Lex Fridman? He's been training. I think Andrea's been training.
2:51:33 Speaker 01 That's because an event got announced. This, this event that I was hypothetically going to be the main event against Eric Rosen.
2:51:39 Lex Fridman? Yeah. It was announced. Yeah. And then you kind of like thought, like, maybe let's not do this.
2:51:45 Speaker 01 No, I knew once I declined to fight Eric that I would not be participating. And I even knew, you know, I knew who was going to be the main event. Because I was kind of offered both of those guys. So Amon Hamilton.
2:51:58 Lex Fridman? Is this still going on?
2:51:59 Speaker 01 The chess boxing event will happen in December in Los Angeles. Yeah.
2:52:03 Lex Fridman? Nice. So who is the main event?
2:52:04 Speaker 01 It's Amon Hamilton, who's also chess bra. So they have a couple of guys as part of the chess bra channel and Lawrence Trent. Lawrence Trent is a international master from England. He's a
2:52:16 Speaker 01 I think he's done some boxing a little bit. He's a commentator, brash guy.
2:52:21 Lex Fridman? Nice.
2:52:22 Speaker 01 Controversial guy, yeah. It's funny because they started, Lawrence put out some videos and I went, damn, I should have done this.
2:52:28 Lex Fridman? Yeah, I think.
2:52:31 Speaker 01 But.
2:52:32 Lex Fridman? I mean, you're right. First of all, there's so many things to say, one of which is if you're, if you want to take it seriously, you know, it does pull you in like, you know, if you train a lot, it's gonna affect the rest of your life and then, and then there's, it changes you. I think taking combat sports seriously changes you in good. And there's negative costs to it, I think, because it's a whole nother thing, man. It's like, it's like doing marathon running or something. It really pulls you in. And the other thing is the, is the head trauma. Like, you have to take that kind of stuff seriously, especially if you're doing sparring and all that kind of stuff.
2:53:07 Speaker 01 Yeah.
2:53:09 Lex Fridman? Still, some of the celebrities, I don't know why, but it's pretty exciting, right? I don't know why it'd be fun to watch Hikaru. Like, there's something.
2:53:17 Speaker 01 Well, I always said if Hikaru and Magnus did a boxing event and I was the co-main event against, I don't know who, that would, that'd be, that'd be.
2:53:25 Lex Fridman? Has Magnus said anything about it? Like about doing chess boxing?
2:53:28 Speaker 01 Uh, well, first of all, he's gonna commentate the Ludwig event.
2:53:32 Lex Fridman? Nice.
2:53:32 Speaker 01 Which he, which he said, he, he kind of said, oh, there's been people in the past that are my level in chess, not mine, his level in chess, and have wanted to get physical with him. I think he's talking about Hikaru. It's, I don't think anybody else is. That'd be, that'd be a good one, man. That'd be a good one. I think Magnus.
2:53:49 Lex Fridman? What do you think? Who is that one?
2:53:50 Speaker 01 I think Magnus is in better physical shape. He's also a little bit bigger, I think, than Hikaru.
2:53:57 Lex Fridman? Longer reach?
2:53:57 Speaker 01 I think Hikaru's a dog, though. I think, I think he'll, I don't think he's gonna, he's gonna get out of there. Like, I, I don't think he's gonna quit in, in the ring.
2:54:05 Lex Fridman? I, I would think Hikaru just goes nuts in the beginning and burns himself out. So if Magnus can survive that. I feel like a car would just go crazy and then just get exhausted, would not be able to pace themselves correctly.
2:54:16 Speaker 01 Maybe, chasing that first round knockout.
2:54:19 Lex Fridman? Yeah, you just swing like crazy. Honestly, I'd just love to see that. Which is like the effect of physical exertion on the, on the game.
2:54:28 Speaker 01 I think it's.
2:54:28 Lex Fridman? I'm sure they're strong enough to.
2:54:31 Speaker 01 Yes, but I think we definitely underestimate the effect of being punched, maybe bleeding out of your nose or something like that. It's, it's, it's no joke. I can't, I can't say I'm anticipating the first day I actually do some sparring and get seriously hit. Cause I know it's not gonna feel good. Even now, I take a hard jab to the, to the stomach or the ribs and I'm just like, man, this is, this is rough. I mean, I, I had to do three minutes on heavy bag and when I finished, my, I had, I had been like slacking on my form because my arms were tired and I hit with my fingers instead of my knuckles and my hands are like, you can see the, the red skin, like completely pink, meaty skin under.
2:55:13 Speaker 01 I didn't realize when I was hitting and only today it's, the pain is unbearable. So I can't imagine head, this must be.
2:55:20 Lex Fridman? No, I mean, it gets, it's a different thing. I mean, of course your skin gets tougher, everything gets tougher. So you get used to it. The head, the head is a weird one because it's not going to send you those kinds of signals. You're not going to get the, the skin type of signals. The brain is a weird thing because it doesn't hurt.
2:55:37 Speaker 01 Yeah.
2:55:38 Lex Fridman? It just does the damage and the damage can materialize itself, manifest itself only years later.
2:55:44 Speaker 01 Yeah.
2:55:44 Lex Fridman? It's a weird one, but then we all die. There's, there's that Braveheart speech. I gotta ask you about bots because to me it's like super interesting and you've played a lot of bots at different levels.
2:55:58 Lex Fridman? You have a video called the advanced chess bots are terrifying. So what's the difference between playing humans and bots? Like you mentioned this Nelson bot.
2:56:08 Speaker 01 Yeah.
2:56:08 Lex Fridman? Brings his queen out, I think rated 1600.
2:56:11 Speaker 01 12 or 1400.
2:56:12 Lex Fridman? Okay, 12, 14. So like there's a style to those. What, uh, what's the difference between the way bots play and the way humans play?
2:56:20 Speaker 01 A lot of people prefer playing bots because they have anxiety playing other humans. It's a very legitimate thing.
2:56:26 Lex Fridman? Interesting.
2:56:26 Speaker 01 A lot of beginners, they, they don't like live chess. They get nervous, ELO anxiety, you get close to your highest ever rating, you panic. Happens to me too.
2:56:35 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
2:56:35 Speaker 01 Happens to me even now. So they play bots.
2:56:39 Lex Fridman? They're somehow more reliable or something.
2:56:41 Speaker 01 Yeah, they're, I don't know, but that's, it's a big thing. It's a big thing and the popularity of that video shows that people enjoy watching you play chess bots. So I'm gonna demystify this. This might be shocking. Those bots are all the same bot for the most part. You could just program a bot to make mistakes at a certain moment. You could program a bot to spend less time on certain moves. And it's gotten sophisticated enough that you can basically program it to play at whatever more or less level that a human plays at. You say, I'll play it at 1800 level. So it's programmed to throw in mistakes. The problem is, and this is why it's all beginners to not play bots.
2:57:27 Speaker 01 Because bots are programmed in the following way. Beginner bots are like literal toddlers. They have no understanding whatsoever. They will literally lose all their pieces, but they won't lose all their pieces and make mistakes the way beginners do. Beginners actually know how to start a game. They just struggle the first eight moves, nine moves. Their mistakes are very different than bot. Bot plays completely outlandish types of mistakes that you cannot pick up in terms of a pattern standpoint because no actual humans play like that. They just move their queen to the opposite side of the board for no reason and you can take it.
2:57:59 Lex Fridman? Yeah, it's not even a blunder. It's almost like randomness.
2:58:02 Speaker 01 Yeah, it's completely random. And this problem extends further because advanced bots will play an opening completely reasonably. And they just hang a rook.
2:58:13 Speaker 01 Which, okay, maybe happens, but that's not exactly how you get to 1800. At 1800, that's a very strong level of the game. You know your openings very well. You start navigating the middle game based on already things that you remember. And then basically one side chooses a bad plan and the other side chooses a better plan. And one thing leads to another. Nobody just recreationally hangs all their pieces, which is the way bots are kind of programmed to play. But some of those bots in that video were, I remember playing them. And they were, yeah, they were nuts. They were out calculating me every time I thought I had a trick and two, three second moment of thought, it would just play the best move. And sometimes that also happens. It gets into a dead loop where it just starts bulldozing you and it can't stop. So it made its mistakes already.
2:58:58 Speaker 01 It's programmed to make only a few. And then it just bulldozes you the rest of the way.
2:59:02 Lex Fridman? Interesting. I mean, that's, that's why I, I played with Stockfish a bunch.
2:59:08 Lex Fridman? So I, I got, um,
2:59:12 Lex Fridman? I built for myself a bunch of different chess experiments recently. It had to do with the chess playing bot. But I also built the infinite chessboard where it was Stockfish was playing like an infinite number of chess games. And one of the parameters that was interesting to play with is how long it gets to think about a move and how that affects the rating of the thing.
2:59:34 Speaker 01 Oh, I, I did that a little bit.
2:59:36 Lex Fridman? So that's a tricky one. I'm sure people know how to do that well, but it's true. It's not trivial to, to understand like what, there must be a good formula for it. But it's also interesting to think about like a controlled number of blunders. But it's probably better, the controlled number of blunders is not a good way to build a bot.
2:59:58 Speaker 01 Yeah, it's, yeah.
2:59:59 Lex Fridman? For training purposes, at least.
3:00:01 Speaker 01 The time, the time per move is probably better. But the craziest thing is I did that. A couple of my, of my devs were helping me with the build, like, uh, I'm, I'm scaling my courses into a better chess learning platform, essentially. We've done a lot of different experiments with Stockfish, which I'm even happy to get into here.
3:00:21 Speaker 01 And Stockfish making moves in 0.1 millisecond plays better than a human, which is disgusting and disturbing, frankly, because that's crazy. Like you can't react to a, a car stopping in front of you anywhere near that fast. And.
3:00:34 Lex Fridman? Yeah. So the reason I was interested in that is because when you have a very large chessboard, you have tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of game going on at the same time. You have to, the, like, think of the minimum amount of thinking per move that you can allow for. And it does, it does, it's damn good. At least to my eye, basically at the lowest possible setting you can give it. So, yeah, it's incredible. It's incredible what bots are able to do. Now it's. As far as I know, it was primarily machine learning based, Stockfish. So Stockfish moved to machine learning completely. It's not doing search, as far as I know.
3:01:15 Speaker 01 Yeah, this is where you lose me a bit, but the move discovery and evaluation is what's been changing in the way Stockfish works. So it's discovering of moves and then the way it looks forward and then evaluates positions. That has changed. But Matthew Sadler, who wrote the book Game Changer about AlphaZero.
3:01:35 Lex Fridman? AlphaZero, yeah.
3:01:36 Speaker 01 Yeah, that he explains it significantly better, but that's the way I think it works.
3:01:42 Lex Fridman? What did that make you feel when you first saw AlphaZero play?
3:01:45 Speaker 01 I was excited. I didn't have any, any sort of existential thoughts. I enjoyed watching it completely destroy openings that people thought were good.
3:01:57 Speaker 01 And it, that experiment though, has, does have some caveat in the sense that I think AlphaZero was playing with a full tank of servers. And I think Stockfish wasn't, which I think is what, one of the things people point out. They weren't playing.
3:02:10 Lex Fridman? Since then, they were able to demonstrate much less.
3:02:13 Speaker 01 Yeah.
3:02:16 Lex Fridman? But also AlphaZero stopped developing. They stopped developing it.
3:02:21 Speaker 01 Yes.
3:02:22 Lex Fridman? Which sucks, but again, from their perspective, from DeepMind's perspective, it's like, all right, well, we took on this really tricky game. Did something honestly incredible.
3:02:32 Speaker 01 They won. They won. I mean.
3:02:35 Lex Fridman? Well, not just won. I mean, they did it without any human supervision. So like, without any training on human expert games. So only through self-play, which, I mean, that's what learning is about. It's like, it's what you think of as a child, a human child, a toddler. Learning from, you know, somewhat nothing and becoming a capable human. That's, that's what we think of when we think about intelligence. So the fact it's able to play itself and become the best player in the world at, at the game of Go and all kinds of games is just incredible. And obviously that inspired the modern Stockfish.
3:03:13 Speaker 01 Yeah.
3:03:14 Lex Fridman? Now to do the same, all the same kind of self-play methods. Somebody on Reddit asked a pretty interesting question. I don't know if you have an interesting answer to it. What makes a chess move, quote unquote, "human"?
3:03:28 Lex Fridman? As you are someone, oh, this is to me, but it's mentioning you in third person. As you are someone working in AI, this idea of humanness would seem incredibly interesting. Yes, sir, it is, especially since most cheat detection relies on humanness as a way to detect cheaters. I think since children being born right now will have the advantage of engine training their whole life. They will start to see the game the way an engine does. Will a person be considered a cheater if they play like an engine? There also seem to be a discrepancy, especially with Levy, about who can play what appears to be a non-human move. He often says things like, quote, "If you were a normal player,"
3:04:10 Lex Fridman? "normal" in quotes, "if you were a normal player, I would think you were cheating." But since it's Magnus, I don't doubt Magnus is great, but if humanness is our benchmark, what is the Elo rating where your moves can start to look like an engine without critique? There's a bunch of questions in there.
3:04:26 Speaker 01 They combined two of my quotes.
3:04:28 Lex Fridman? Yes.
3:04:28 Speaker 01 Into one. So one thing that I like to say is sometimes in a chess game, moves look or an opening look so ridiculous that if a viewer played it, I would make fun of them or slap them. That's always the joke. If I was your chess coach, I'd smack you. But when Magnus plays it, it was, oh, wow, you know, it's very different. So they mixed up this quote with another quote, which is,
3:04:53 Speaker 01 you know, if I, if I'll be explaining something and I'll say, oh, and here the engine says you should play like this.
3:04:59 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
3:04:59 Speaker 01 If one of your opponents plays like this, report them for cheating. They fused two quotes. They said, oh, human can't play like that, but because it's an engine move, but because Magnus is playing. So they mixed kind of two things.
3:05:12 Lex Fridman? But there's interesting levels of humor and insight there on both of those.
3:05:19 Speaker 01 Yeah, the difference between human move and engine and like what an engine move is, is I think two things. Number one, a computer move.
3:05:29 Speaker 01 Is outlandish in its in its concept and its and its idea. So the best example that I can give of that is if you gave 100 grandmasters a position and told them, you know, what do you think the best move here is for black? Not in this position, right here, we have nothing. But an overwhelming amount of them would look at the position, evaluate everything they know about the game of chess, which is relatively similar, but obviously slightly imbalanced based on their skill level. And they would come up with a sample size of two or three moves. And in comes the computer with a fucking haymaker. And suddenly, everybody goes, oh, everything we know about chess has gone out the window. So they all start looking at that move and they know it's the best move.
3:06:12 Speaker 01 So now they start adding the evidence behind the verdict, as opposed to getting to the verdict while first looking at the evidence. So the concept of it and the idea of it is so outlandish, based on a certain type of position, that you can't fully grasp it. You have to continue to beg the engine to tell you what the variation is. A move is only good if its extension is good. That's the way chess works. So it's like a move is good is because the computer has seen that the various branches of things going forward are also good. So you bring all that back. And no human could have even conceptualized that initial thing. But the second thing about computer moves is they they look counterintuitive.
3:06:55 Speaker 01 So that's a if you might be in a position where it it looks like the demands of the position are A, B, C. And then the computer is like, nope, it's not. Because I've seen the future way more than you possibly could have, and I don't have emotions.
3:07:11 Lex Fridman? So like dumb moves and brilliant moves can look similar.
3:07:15 Speaker 01 Yes, and oftentimes do. And this is actually back to the Hans thing. A lot of people now dissecting these games they're playing. And they're they're basically saying, like even Fabiano Caruana, one of the best players in the world, was on some on his podcast yesterday, basically saying, OK, this is beyond my level, saying, out of my league. What's that? What's out of your league? You played for the world championship. Can we get what we can read between the lines, right?
3:07:38 Lex Fridman? Is it possible that Hans is that level of genius? Is there like different?
3:07:45 Lex Fridman? Different kinds of genius, like where one, you could be out of each other's league kind of thing?
3:07:53 Speaker 01 Maybe. In the case of Magnus, it's understanding of endgames. It's just somehow he understands the, that last phase of the game and the complexities and the problems he can pose better than anybody else.
3:08:04 Lex Fridman? So you can see Magnus do, uh, poor looking moves in the endgame.
3:08:11 Speaker 01 Or?
3:08:11 Lex Fridman? Like moves that don't fit what your gut says is, would be the optimal.
3:08:18 Speaker 01 Yes, but also, so it's not that you even think they're right. You, you just might not even consider them.
3:08:25 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
3:08:26 Speaker 01 Because of overreliance on your own information or even the computer. That was what was going on in game six. Just kept doing things and kept playing and kept finding play and posing those questions that humans and computers could not understand. So he beat the engine, basically. He could, he wouldn't have beaten the engine because they would have defended. Jan lost that game in the nineties move psychologically. He thought the game was over, so that contributed. Computer would have defended.
3:08:50 Lex Fridman? So by the, by the time this podcast comes out, which I don't know, it would be in a week or something like that. I feel like more will happen. Let's see, you're predicting, how, how does this Hans drama end saga? Like, let's look in, um, in three months. By the time we get to the next world championship, let's say. What, what, uh, this, what are the options? What are the possible, let's imagine, let's not say like what the probabilities are. What are the options? Chess.com is forced to or agrees to or whatever to come up with a huge amount of evidence of cheating in the past. Or Hans comes out. What are the, what can Hans do with this?
3:09:34 Lex Fridman? So I'm uncomfortable with the general, next year you could maybe update me on this. But there was a little bit of an attack on him, a lot of an attack, that he's a cheater, right? Without evidence, without clear conclusive evidence.
3:09:50 Speaker 01 Physical evidence.
3:09:51 Lex Fridman? Physical evidence. So all of those.
3:09:54 Speaker 01 Right. That's the tricky thing.
3:09:56 Lex Fridman? Yeah. So like that stuff we're talking about is beyond my level. That starts being, um, kind of intuitive circumstantial evidence.
3:10:06 Speaker 01 There's.
3:10:08 Speaker 01 The statistical evidence behind the over the board games that he's played in 2020, 2021, where the games match what's called engine correlation more than Magnus and many other top grandmasters combined. But that can be argued is because he was very strong in playing weaker opposition. So there's always kind of this argument against statistics, right? There's the fact that the guy who Magnus name dropped, Maxime Blugi, Blugi is a chess grandmaster and he's even been, I think, president of the US Chess Federation. I've played him in some blitz games. It turns out, I wasn't even fully aware of the extent of this, he has been banned from chess.com.
3:10:49 Lex Fridman? For cheating?
3:10:50 Speaker 01 For cheating.
3:10:51 Lex Fridman? Have they actually, has him and Hans actually worked?
3:10:54 Speaker 01 Yes. So that was why he name dropped that, right? That's also not good. You see where this is getting, you still don't have the physical proof, but you have smoke. So I don't know how this ends. I don't know if this, if, if he denies it to the death and he ends up filing some sort of legal action, some sort of ethics complaint, or he admits everything. I don't know.
3:11:20 Lex Fridman? Boy, well, no matter what, I hope despite chess or not, that he's mentally strong enough for whatever is to come.
3:11:26 Speaker 01 That's what I keep saying.
3:11:27 Lex Fridman? He's been under fire, right?
3:11:29 Speaker 01 Yeah, I can't, I can't imagine, right? Like, I just, I really can't imagine. And maybe we just have too much compassion, but I don't think so. I really just feel like...
3:11:36 Lex Fridman? At the end of the day, chess is just a game, but it is a game played by millions of people throughout history and nations have basically fought wars over the chessboard. So like, there's, there's a lot. It's like Olympics. Olympics is just a little, this dude running and so on. The hockey is just the thing with, with a puck and, but you know.
3:12:01 Lex Fridman? It's it's also much more than that. It's also it's also nations.
3:12:08 Lex Fridman? Sort of figuring out their conflict in a way that doesn't involve violence. Yeah, it's a serious thing, and it's a thing that inspires. Millions of people and it's a testing ground for intelligent systems that eventually.
3:12:27 Lex Fridman? Take over human civilization.
3:12:28 Speaker 01 I know.
3:12:29 Lex Fridman? Yeah, I mean, the bots are really interesting. I don't know if there's other lessons like you. You played a clone of yourself.
3:12:36 Speaker 01 That was.
3:12:37 Lex Fridman? You watched Stockfish versus Stockfish. You have video. People should check out your channel. You have a lot of awesome videos. You have video titles, Stockfish versus Stockfish.
3:12:46 Speaker 01 That was the experiment. I made them play each other. So I made them.
3:12:51 Lex Fridman? What did you learn from that experiment?
3:12:54 Speaker 01 Uh, I enjoyed. First of all, they will always make a draw. So engines don't get to play each other from a beginning position because they will always draw. Especially if they're the same engine. So Stackfish 15, Stackfish 15, I don't think one side will ever beat the other, basically. But if you program them to play a certain opening position, according to chess theory, you get to see interesting ways into how they evaluate. One of the things, one of the ways that it played against the London opening was absurd. Like it just, it was completely ridiculous. Black sacrificed two pawns as early as move six, which is a borderline completely lost position. And then both sides foresaw that the only way white was going to be able to use that material advantage was to give it back.
3:13:38 Speaker 01 And stabilize their own position. Like black just got a crazy attack. Jesus Christ, this is crazy.
3:13:44 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
3:13:45 Speaker 01 But they drew. I mean, they ended up drawing. So I'm also gonna make them play against each other in. Either bad openings or like some of the most popular gambits. Looking, looking at something like that. And the way I'm gonna do this is basically say. Which chess gambits are the best? And the way I'm gonna do that is theoretically, the engine should be able to beat a gambit. Because a gambit is very rarely blessed by the computer. So if the computer cannot beat that gambit, that means it's good. That means it's not losing. If it's a completely lost gambit, it will beat it. But if it draws despite getting that early disadvantage, then that means the gambit is very reliable and you can play it.
3:14:29 Lex Fridman? So that's a good way to evaluate opening games.
3:14:32 Speaker 01 Yeah.
3:14:33 Lex Fridman? What's the best, what's your favorite opening?
3:14:38 Lex Fridman? Or what openings do you like?
3:14:40 Speaker 01 There was an opening that got me back into chess when I was 15. I had quit for like three years and I went to my friend's house and he had a book by Lars Skandorf, a Danish grandmaster called the Karo-Kan Defense, which is c6.
3:14:56 Lex Fridman? Do you want white or do you want black? Do you want to show me the opening?
3:14:59 Speaker 01 This is the opening. The Karo-Kan Defense. So you play e4, I play c6. I have to play black.
3:15:05 Lex Fridman? That's it.
3:15:05 Speaker 01 Yeah, and we develop from here. I put my
3:15:10 Lex Fridman? What counts as an opening? Okay, but the development, does the development matter?
3:15:15 Speaker 01 Yeah, so from here, the development goes into the variations of the Karo-Kan. So this is the Karo-Kan. Like you can be in a city, but then you can be in neighborhoods.
3:15:24 Lex Fridman? That's a very non-dramatic, okay.
3:15:26 Speaker 01 Yeah. Two pawns in the center. So that's called the Briar Variation.
3:15:30 Lex Fridman? So which, what's a good thing for me?
3:15:33 Speaker 01 Two squares. Yeah, if you can put two pawns in the center, yeah, you should. And then
3:15:37 Lex Fridman? That's a good thing.
3:15:37 Speaker 01 Yes, and then I will go here and now you have to decide what you're gonna do with your center pawn. You can push, take, or defend it.
3:15:45 Lex Fridman? And push, take, or defend, right?
3:15:48 Speaker 01 Yeah.
3:15:49 Lex Fridman? What would you suggest? Take is the worst?
3:15:52 Speaker 01 Take is just stable, so we just trade. But pushing is considered the best. Advancing and taking my space away from me. So I think AlphaZero or Stockfish would probably always push.
3:16:04 Lex Fridman? Push.
3:16:04 Speaker 01 And now there's something called like the main line or the sideline. Main line is what's the most popular, played at all levels, which is moving the bishop here. I've played this a lot, but for beginners, this is, and intermediate players, this is why I love this opening so much. On move 3, black already has a plus score. Which is crazy. It's not supposed to happen. And there's this very tricky second most popular move, which is undermining your center, trying to get you to take my free pawn, but destabilize and leave both of them kind of hanging.
3:16:36 Lex Fridman? Is that why the the plus score? Is because you're susceptible to the destabilization?
3:16:42 Speaker 01 Yes, because people at 99% of the rating ladder do not understand how to deal with what's coming, basically. They don't know how to deal with a structural attack.
3:16:53 Lex Fridman? So would would Stockfish try to defend the pawn here?
3:16:56 Speaker 01 No, it would take the pawn and tell you to go fuck yourself.
3:16:59 Lex Fridman? Oh, I knew that because I am 3400.
3:17:03 Speaker 01 Right. It would take the pawn and be like, all right, win it back. And even if you did, you would suffer. It would make you win it back in the most annoying way. It would make you tie your shoes together and block.
3:17:13 Lex Fridman? So I like as Stockfish, I would take.
3:17:15 Speaker 01 Yes, that's the best move.
3:17:17 Lex Fridman? That's the best move.
3:17:18 Speaker 01 But not at 99% of the rating ladder, which is funny.
3:17:22 Lex Fridman? Interesting. But you like to play this.
3:17:28 Speaker 01 I play this against GMs. I play both. I move my bishop. I push.
3:17:31 Lex Fridman? And what are the different ways it evolves? Like then the rest doesn't matter. So this is just like a pawn structure thing.
3:17:38 Speaker 01 Yeah, and I mean, it.
3:17:39 Lex Fridman? How deep are most openings? So it's anywhere from like two moves to like 10 moves kind of thing?
3:17:45 Speaker 01 Yeah, you can be out of theory very, very quickly to move two, move three. Like basically on your own, you have a general idea, but you don't remember games. I mean, I know Carocon games from start to finish because I've played it since 2011.
3:17:58 Lex Fridman? So you know all the different branches it goes down down?
3:18:00 Speaker 01 Yeah, I think I know every opening in chess, basically. I think most most titled players know every opening, but we don't know, we can't play it competitively because we'd be but.
3:18:11 Lex Fridman? What are some of the weirder openings that?
3:18:17 Lex Fridman? Like slightly suboptimal, but might be explored. Like Magnus might play them just to fuck with the opponent.
3:18:25 Speaker 01 He played something recently, actually, against this German prodigy, Vincent Keimer, which was a specific move order in a very popular opening. So it was basically a position that had been reached thousands of times. But the move order Magnus chose with white was played maybe 0.05% of the time, which is crazy, thousands of games. And it's supposed to be not good, meaning it allows black to equalize, because that's what black is going for, not winning the game, but equalizing, because you go second. Magnus says, I don't care about equalizing. I just want a position. I don't want my opponent to know the answers to the test.
3:19:06 Lex Fridman? That's so interesting. Because also fucks you psychologically, it throws you off and just always keeps you on your toes. He's in a weird position, but he also has the advantage of being able to intimidate. I wonder how many people, how much is that a role of it, like being scared of the other person?
3:19:26 Speaker 01 It's a huge role, I think. I think some of the top guys would deny it, but you know when you're in the seventh hour and you're playing Magnus. It's a very different feeling than some of the other. When Magnus is messing around in the opening, it's very different than another person messing around in the opening. You just kind of like expect to, for something to be there. We'll see if it translates to poker for him, but I think he gets a little bit, maybe, less respect in the poker world. In the chess world, he's sort of alpha.
3:19:54 Lex Fridman? He gets a lot of respect. I just talked to Daniel Nogroda, he gets, the only person that doesn't respect Magnus Carlsen, honestly, either in chess or poker, is Magnus Carlsen.
3:20:05 Speaker 01 I was gonna say Hans Niemann. That's true.
3:20:08 Lex Fridman? But like Magnus is hilarious. I mean, when he talks about his ratings, he's like, it's pretty good. When he talks about how good he's this poker, I suck. But you know, I think that self critical view that he, I think he honestly believes to a degree is probably part of the the engine that fuels him to get better and better and better and better.
3:20:28 Speaker 01 Yeah, but what I'm saying is if you if you're face to face with Magnus at a chessboard, it's not the same as being in a nine handed poker table with him. You kind of keep an eye on him, maybe in a, he's a mysterious guy, but chess is different because you're like, this is the man.
3:20:41 Lex Fridman? Yeah, there's very few people. Yeah. So in in poker, they talk about Phil Ivey that way.
3:20:46 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
3:20:46 Lex Fridman? As like this super intimidating. I think that's, that's, it's probably harder to intimidate in poker. Actually, I don't know. I don't know. There's something intimidating about like excellence in a deterministic game. That's just terrifying. Like you're, I mean, it's like playing stockfish. Like you're fucked. This thing will suffocate you. And especially when you do makes moves that you don't understand. This, I, to me, the most beautiful thing, honestly, is the sacrifices that the the engines do. Just the, it's such a fuck you.
3:21:28 Speaker 01 Yep.
3:21:28 Lex Fridman? Like I could sacrifice pieces and I'll get them back and I'll get them back more. And I could look.
3:21:33 Speaker 01 Doesn't even, I don't even have to get them back. Your position is so bad. I gave you full material and there's nothing you can do about it. Yeah.
3:21:39 Lex Fridman? That's terrifying.
3:21:40 Speaker 01 Yeah.
3:21:41 Lex Fridman? That's terrifying. That's like, and that transfers to AI systems in general, like, like a system that plays weak, just to to fool you.
3:21:56 Lex Fridman? For people who are trying to get better at chess, beginners or at any stage of their development, what advice would you give about getting better?
3:22:08 Lex Fridman? Except watch your channel.
3:22:10 Speaker 01 Yeah, of course, watch my videos. Check out chess.com. That's where we're gonna scale the courses to. Uh, but no, on a serious note, you have to be prepared to lose way more than win. My mom gave me advice when I was maybe 13 or 14, and I just discovered that I liked girls. She said, "You're gonna get a lot more no's in life than yeses." Uh, that even happened with my wife, actually. Our whole journey is quite fascinating.
3:22:40 Lex Fridman? It's paved with rejection?
3:22:42 Speaker 01 Paved with, yes, various ghostings over the course of years. But we got married and we love each other very much, so. Um, it's a wonderful tale, but it's the same in chess. You're gonna lose a lot and you have to be, for adults, I noticed, kids and adults learn chess very differently. Kids yell out in class and they're very excited and they don't realize how many times they get something wrong. Adults never wanna talk during lessons because they're afraid of being wrong. Adults will preface correct answers with, "This is probably wrong, but like, shut up. You're paying for a private lesson. This is the place to be wrong." You know, so adults especially think that being dominant in a career where they've dedicated a lot of their brain power,
3:23:27 Speaker 01 a lot of their work ethic and a lot of their study time, it's gonna translate to chess. They do it to their own kids. They helicopter their own kids because they try to apply a lot of the same stuff. Chess, studying chess is different than studying anything else. Anything else. Same could be argued for martial arts, I guess, but.
3:23:44 Lex Fridman? Yeah, 100%. You have to have a beginner's mind and what that actually means is sucking in every aspect of the game and studying all the interesting ways in which you suck.
3:23:54 Speaker 01 And you will realize you get better without actually trying to get better. I show up to the boxing gym one day, I move my hips better.
3:24:00 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
3:24:01 Speaker 01 And I would do shadow boxing. Sensei goes, "You're moving your feet better today. You got better." I'm like, "I didn't practice footwork." It's just, your brain just starts putting it all together randomly. You might study a shitload and still lose 100 points. If you're gonna study chess, oh, and for fuck's sake, this is the only activity where people go in going, "How much do I have to work to be a grandmaster? Nowhere else in my life have I ever seen someone try to pick up a hobby and wanna be the top ranking level. Only in chess.
3:24:28 Lex Fridman? You're right, but like, for example, when I like grappling sports, I'll see people come to a gym and basically ask like, how long before I can get into the UFC? Right? But UFC champion is different. I mean, no, grand master is equivalent to getting into the UFC.
3:24:47 Speaker 01 I guess, yeah.
3:24:49 Lex Fridman? So, but people quickly realize when like, the 110 pound girl taps them out over and over and they're a 230 pound like,
3:24:58 Lex Fridman? ripped dude, they realize like, okay, this is an art, this is a journey.
3:25:02 Speaker 01 Yeah.
3:25:03 Lex Fridman? And I think if you resist the lessons that failure teaches you, that's when you don't grow. So like, just relax. And one of the things you have to learn, probably applies to chess too, is to know how to relax your body, your mind. And just like, there's something about, just like you said, like, if you don't resist, if you relax, then your body, your mind will learn the way of this game. And probably add to that is just put a lot of hours in of having fun. But then, then I, on that perpetual chess podcast, I listened to somebody that say like,
3:25:43 Lex Fridman? it doesn't like puzzles, none of that. What matters is the number of hours you spend kind of suffering. Meaning like thinking deeply, like count like, like straining, like thinking with your mind, like really working hard. So, and then, you know, you have the Magnus who says, no, what matters is the number of hours you spend having fun.
3:26:05 Speaker 01 Yeah, it's a mix. It's a mix. He's right. I don't quite agree with suffering, but I think people do a lot of fake learning. They play speed games, they just go through tactics. So, okay, I have to do 20 tactics. Okay, boop, wrong, next one. I used to tell my students, you need to do 10 puzzles and you need to get 100% correct. I don't care how long it takes. So I suppose that kind of is like the suffering theory. But if you do 30 puzzles and you get eight correct,
3:26:39 Speaker 01 what even is that? That's.
3:26:42 Speaker 01 It's a laughable and the correct amount of, you know, it was 29%, I don't know, but 26%. It's, you can't do that. You have to get things right and that's the only way you're actually.
3:26:52 Lex Fridman? And that requires like thinking deeply and like really struggling, especially if you're doing the puzzles at the level that that's your level.
3:26:59 Speaker 01 I've done a puzzle for an hour before because I was so stubborn.
3:27:03 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
3:27:03 Speaker 01 I didn't want to just put in a wrong answer.
3:27:05 Lex Fridman? Yeah, the, the, the guy I was listening to said like, that's good. You should, you should do.
3:27:09 Speaker 01 Maybe for me and the same with blindfold chess, I have to say like my, my blindfold skills, I never practiced. I just, I can visualize the board quite well. I've played. At most I've played four games blindfolded at the same time. That sucks. That just feels horrible in the brain afterward, but like I can play four simultaneous games.
3:27:28 Lex Fridman? Blindfolded?
3:27:28 Speaker 01 Yeah.
3:27:29 Lex Fridman? Yeah. What's that take to do that?
3:27:30 Speaker 01 I don't know. And I get asked that all the time. How do I practice? Why the fuck? Why would you do that? There's no need.
3:27:36 Lex Fridman? It's a good party trick.
3:27:37 Speaker 01 It is. Yes, I, it is. The video of Magnus doing it in Columbus Circle on YouTube has like, I don't know how many views. I did it live with an announcer. I can't imagine how chaotic that was, but he, yeah, it's a great party trick.
3:27:51 Lex Fridman? Yeah. Oh, there is a Reddit thing. I, I forgot to ask Magnus that they asked me to ask him because they moved the wrong piece.
3:28:00 Speaker 01 Yes. And then somehow he remembered. I don't know how that happened. I have to tell you, I.
3:28:05 Lex Fridman? I was, I kind of presumed that he figured out from the way the other person was moving that they moved the wrong piece.
3:28:11 Speaker 01 Yeah.
3:28:12 Lex Fridman? Yeah, I forgot to ask him that.
3:28:14 Speaker 01 Yeah.
3:28:15 Lex Fridman? I mean, my memory sucks. Uh, you said, you know, ups and downs in your childhood, a little rough sometimes. Um, also you get attacked by the beautiful, wonderful people on the internet.
3:28:29 Speaker 01 Sure.
3:28:29 Lex Fridman? So sometimes it's difficult. What's, uh, what's been the lowest point that you've ever gone to in your mind?
3:28:37 Speaker 01 In my career, in my life.
3:28:39 Lex Fridman? In your life, in your career and everything, your mind. So have you ever been depressed?
3:28:46 Speaker 01 For sure, yes.
3:28:48 Lex Fridman? How, how did you, like, if you can remember moments, how did you overcome that?
3:28:53 Speaker 01 Well, I, I will share two anecdotes. Uh, one, when I was, uh, May 2012, so I was sixteen and a half.
3:29:07 Speaker 01 And I was living in a household situation where
3:29:17 Speaker 01 I thought nobody knew what was going on, basically, without sharing, obviously, extremely personal details, like, what was going on except me.
3:29:26 Speaker 01 And I confided in my grandmother. I was, imagine living in a house where you basically feel like a prisoner. You don't want to interact with anybody in the house. You don't know how you're supposed to bring these things up. Of course, this sounds extremely vague and I just don't, I don't feel like exposing all of my entire family drama to the audience. But I lived this way for probably something like
3:29:55 Speaker 01 eight months, I don't, I don't, something ridiculous. It was the junior year of high school. So I was supposed to take my SATs. That was the year I was supposed to finish up my portfolio for college because you only get really a few months of senior year to start applying. It was a fuck, it was a nightmare, a complete nightmare. And I, I don't know how I got through it. Time went by. I listened to sad music and tried to spend as little time at home as possible. I would pretend to fall asleep at my friends' houses so that my mom was like, you coming for dinner? And I would just pretend to be asleep.
3:30:26 Lex Fridman? It was just a grind.
3:30:27 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah, it was, it was a grind. I, I don't remember a whole lot from, from that period, just sort of finding what made me happy and trying to focus on it. And I was a teenager in the house. I wasn't going to run away. I still had a roof over my head. So I'm not, not saying I had it better or worse than others. I just had it different. Uh, and actually recently, this, this is much more wrong in my memory. Uh, I.
3:30:53 Speaker 01 More or less tore up a very happy life my wife and I had. And I've talked about this in bursts on stream. But essentially what happened was we we had just been living in. It's actually funny that the way we got into this apartment was was also very bad. But we were living in just a very like nice little apartment, like high rise apartment, safe. And the reason we moved into a high rise was because we had lived in a house for two weeks that got broken into. Not because of who I am, but because we suspect we had people moving in mattresses. And they went, oh shit, these two people live here? That's it? And basically there was three apartments.
3:31:36 Speaker 01 My upstairs neighbor let in somebody that they didn't expect. And the guy cracked our door open with a crowbar. Thank God that was the first day in two years my wife went to work. Did they know? Did they not know? I don't know. Everything happens for a reason. So nobody got hurt? Hmm? Nobody got hurt? Nobody got hurt, yeah, they stole. They stole some couple of important things, but nobody was hurt. And the Cubs did nothing. So you moved into a high rise? Moved into a high rise in New York? Yeah, in New York for for safety and we're away from things and we have our own nice little nook. And somewhere some months into it, I started hearing noises from above our neighbors.
3:32:19 Speaker 01 And it started in the morning, 7:00 AM. It started in the afternoon. And I picked up on it and I expected it every day for weeks. And then it was driving me crazy. And I was like, OK, we're gonna go have a civil conversation with whoever up there. Sounds like kids. So we go knock. Lady gaslit the shit out of us. I've never been gaslit that hard in my life. She went, noise, what noise? It's probably our other neighbor who's a boxer. Lady, you have kids. We can hear you through the vents. You're talking to your kids. Went to the front desk of the building. They did nothing. Went to the leasing office. They did nothing. And basically, over time, I just let this drive me nuts. It was in back to the stubbornness thing. I I decided we were leaving.
3:33:04 Speaker 01 We were going to live somewhere. There was no noise. Because we can't beat these people. There's there's nothing we can do. Right? And my wife, I dragged her around to a bunch of different viewings. Because I was dead sad. I was I was decided I was completely miserable. And we found a house to rent, like a nice house. Family had just moved away. House, standalone house, not gonna have neighbors. But wife decided that, not wife decided, we decided that the it's too big. It's too big for for us. So we're gonna get a dog. We always wanted an animal. So we're gonna get a dog. So we get an absolute lunatic puppy who just doesn't let us sleep at all. This is on top of everything else, the mental health crisis that's going on. And the day we are moving to this house, I realize I fuck up.
3:33:49 Speaker 01 Like, I realized that this whole thing was in my head, and I don't want to leave. I don't want to leave. This could have all been avoided. And the guilt and I didn't want to exist. Like, it's not that I it wasn't suicide, but you know, the feeling of just you want to just observe yourself from a distance.
3:34:06 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
3:34:07 Speaker 01 And I couldn't sleep. I thought my wife was gonna leave me like this. And that's what anxiety does. It also takes everything you feel to an absolute dread. And that I experienced for a good chunk of two weeks. And then we kind of settled down and decided like, we're gonna live.
3:34:24 Lex Fridman? Did you tell her about it? Like, were you able to talk through it?
3:34:26 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah, I, yeah.
3:34:29 Lex Fridman? Does she know the levels of madness that could be inside your mind?
3:34:33 Speaker 01 I don't know if she'll ever know, but I tried to tell her that and.
3:34:36 Lex Fridman? Give glimpses.
3:34:37 Speaker 01 Yes.
3:34:38 Lex Fridman? I'm not sure you'll ever know. I kind of the point.
3:34:41 Speaker 01 Yeah, I tried to. That's why I tried to keep busy. But that was that was the darkest that got. And yet, through all of that, I went on stream every day. I made YouTube videos every day. Like, I understood that I had a job to do. And and I did it. And I talked about it here and there. But that was that was the worst that ever got because.
3:34:59 Speaker 01 I'm learning that the emotions I experience are guilt, remorse, and your brain just goes in circles, basically, about things that you've done or haven't done.
3:35:09 Lex Fridman? It's funny, because noise can do that also. So the noise was real, but it was building in your head.
3:35:15 Speaker 01 Yeah.
3:35:18 Speaker 01 So.
3:35:18 Lex Fridman? I try to, I actually. It's kind of funny, because I like to focus deeply. And I'll have like sources of noise. I've tried to teach myself over time. I'll go to like coffee shops and stuff to like. I like, I almost try to put myself next to annoying situations. So I get like trained.
3:35:36 Speaker 01 Really, maybe I should do that.
3:35:38 Lex Fridman? But it's at a certain point, at the same time, I've gotten to hang out with certain people, especially in L.A. They're like in the middle of nowhere, like a Malibu or something. And it's like that quiet.
3:35:49 Speaker 01 Can you hear your ears ringing, it's so quiet?
3:35:51 Lex Fridman? Basically. And it's like, holy shit, this is a good place. This is a good way, if you want to write something or create something. This is like super quiet.
3:35:59 Speaker 01 So my mom does, my mom's a science journalist, science author. She just published her first, her first book, actually, on poop, of all things. Yeah, fecal, the waste management. It is actually a very fascinating concept and look through history. And she would do that. She goes to complete solitude. And she writes, yeah.
3:36:19 Lex Fridman? It's beautiful. No sirens. I mean, New York is the opposite of that. So, you know, it's you've brought it.
3:36:27 Lex Fridman? You brought it on yourself.
3:36:29 Speaker 01 I've lived there for 20 years.
3:36:31 Lex Fridman? Has it been tough, like going on stream, to put on the face of happiness through that?
3:36:36 Speaker 01 Yeah, yes. But I find my ways to have moments where I can talk about it. If it's on a stream, I don't get 10,000 live viewers. So it's very different. It's if I stream late night, I get 1,500, 2,000 viewers. I used to care a lot more about viewers on stream, but I've basically invested fully in YouTube. So that's kind of the way I.
3:36:59 Lex Fridman? And I think, I don't know, maybe you can correct me. But I think people appreciate. The human being behind the chess streamer.
3:37:08 Speaker 01 I think so. I think so. I think a lot of people, not in the chess world, but just a lot of people, they put on a persona and just in general, social media is the highlights of your life or the lowlights, just as long as they're dramatic. But I've tried, I tried to be very open and honest. When I'm tired, I'm tired. It's what makes my recaps of my tournaments, I think, so real.
3:37:31 Lex Fridman? Yeah, man, you're an incredible person. I've been a fan for a long time. It's kind of funny that we connected and we got in chess to talk. Please, please keep creating, keep teaching people.
3:37:41 Speaker 01 For now, I'm not going anywhere.
3:37:44 Lex Fridman? Well, it could end at any moment, as we talked about. So yeah, thank you so much for talking today, man. Thank you for everything you do. It was an honor.
3:37:54 Speaker 01 It was great. Thanks for having me on.
3:37:56 Lex Fridman? Thanks for listening to this conversation with Lev Yarosman. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Irving Chernov. Every chess master was once a beginner. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.
Previous #326 – Annaka Harris: Free Will, Consciousness, and the Nature of Reality Next #328 – John Danaher: Submission Grappling, ADCC, Animal Combat, and Knives Page updated October 26, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
