Botez Sisters: Chess, Streaming, and Fame | Lex Fridman Podcast #319

i mean i've definitely experienced moments where i didn't want to do anything but chess i

also say that's pretty universal i think if you want to be that the best at anything you do or any sport you have to be that level of obsessed

the following is a conversation with alexander and andrea botez they're sisters professional chess players

commentators educators entertainers and streamers their channel is called botezlive on

twitch and youtube i highly recommend you check it out a small side note about the currently

ongoing controversy in the chess world where the 19 year old grandmaster hans niemann beat magnus carlson at the

sinkfield cup after this magnus for the first time ever withdrew from the tournament

implying with a tweet that there may have been cheating or at least something shady going on

folks like the grandmaster hikaru nakamura fanned the flames of cheating accusations and the internet

made a bunch of proposals on how the cheating could have been done and it ranged from the ridiculous to the

hilarious often both hans himself came out and said that he

has cheated before when he was 12 and 16 on random online games to jack up his

rating but he said that he has never cheated in person over the board

danny wrench from chess.com who i've spoken with may make a statement in response to hanza's claims soon

folks like grandmaster yakabuga spoke to his experience training hans neiman and has said that his memory and intuition

were quite brilliant so as you see there's a lot of perspectives on this chess base has a

good summary of the saga that i'll link in the description also note that this is so quickly moving

that new stuff might come out between me recording this and publishing the episode but i thought i'd mention this

anyway since the episode with the beautiful sisters is a conversation about chess and was recorded shortly

before the controversy so we didn't talk about it i'm considering having hans on this

podcast and also magnus back on the podcast and maybe others like hikaru or

folks from chess.com's anti-cheat staff to discuss their really interesting cheating

detection algorithms but i may also just stay out of it i find just to be a beautiful game

and the chess community full of fascinating brilliant people and so i'll keep having conversations like these

about chess it's fun my goal with this podcast and in general

as a human being is to increase the amount of love in the world sometimes that involves celebrating

brilliance and beauty in science in art in chess sometimes it involves empathetic

conversations with controversial figures that seek to understand not deride

sometimes it involves standing against the internet lynch mob as the chess-based article calls it to hear the

story of a human being who is under attack even if it means i get attacked in the

process as well this is the lex friedman podcast to support it please check out our sponsors

in the description and now dear friends here's alexandra and andrea botez

you just got back from italy what's the most memorable thing i was just there recently as well it was very

chaotic because we went out on a whim and we only had our first hotel book and

then we rented a car and drove around all of the cities and went to like five different cities in about a week and a

bit um so i think it was just the variety of seeing so many different places when we're used to being at home

all the time and andrea is yours your luggage yeah i would say it was the most stressful vacation we've

been in in our life and it was a valuable learning lesson because now i know how to be prepared for trips um but

we lost our bags and i never got him back and like alex said we didn't know where we'd be sleeping every night and

we're just driving through a new city um with a giant van in the most narrowest streets with and getting in many many

fights with italian men um so it wasn't really a vacation i saw this motion so

many times wasn't it liberating to lose your baggage is it like a silver lining it

was liberating my entire life i've always had the issue of over packing and i told her for the trip andrea you're

gonna pack light right yeah alex yeah and then i see her stuffing her over you did the same we both had giant big extra

baggage that we didn't need and i'm actually very glad we lost it because for venice hauling that around on all

the boats and through the tiny streets and there's no ubers and now it's the first time where i can

travel without checking in a bag which i've never done before so now i've learned what it means to pack light because i saw that i could survive off

of just my this sounds very dramatic but it was really a big learning lesson for me the driving must have been crazy

because driving in italy is rough the driving was crazy i did most of it and

it would be really interesting driving through places like florence or even

through uh the beach areas that were super windy because they're two-way streets that should really only be one

way so you'd be driving this huge van and then another car comes on a cliff and you're just waiting for it to slowly

pass so it took all of my focus and concentration to drive well in italy but

it was actually really relaxing because the hardest thing about uh making a lot of videos online is you're

always thinking about it what's coming next and when we were in italy it was so chaotic that i did not think about work

for a good week and a bit oh cause you're just we were stressed i was just trying to keep us alive

higher priority and that was kind of fun it was kind of fun no planning nothing i

wouldn't recommend it or ever do that again but it sounds sounds pretty awesome and we

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

of the trip yeah so you just took on the chaos exactly it was an adventure okay and i see like because you were using

your hands a lot you gotten you you picked up some of the the italian hand gestures i did we did

get yelled at by a lot of italians the old italian grandmas would come to us after breakfast because we'd leave

something on the plate and she'd be like you could feed an entire village with that tell your friends and we'd be we'd

feel so ash yeah we got cursed out a lot but it really reminded me of where we grew up and how true yeah bring back

those where'd you grow up oh we were romanian but it was like an immigrant neighborhood

um so you know same if you don't finish your plate that's disrespectful to the people who made the food how's the food

in italy i feel like uh the carbs thing is too much very yeah i think very overrated in my opinion so i'm actually

not supposed to eat gluten because i have an allergy yeah but i was in italy and it's you know gluten galore so i was

actually eating a lot of it and it was very interesting because i didn't get sick while i was in italy but i do while i'm in the u.s

so somehow the food was actually maybe more okay for me to digest which i appreciated but

i didn't like it as much as i thought did you like the food there yeah no

it's uh i did i did i love cars but it's um it's it feels like vegas when when i go

there for the food it's like if i stay here too long i'm gonna do things i regret

that's what it feels like with the food right i don't know how to moderate and everybody is pushing very large portions

and wild kind of eating things on you uh pasta pizza and it's so good and bread

so delicious so yeah i i love it but i regret everything so it's like i don't want to i don't

want to go to a place where um i'm going to regret everything i do

for too long of a time yeah surprisingly the people there though are still very fit and everyone

stays in good shape but that's probably because you're walking around all day and you're much more active than anything and they also just know how to

moderate food i think i got used to the u.s way of eating the u.s porsche what is that

just a lot never always a lot yeah and more and i

feel in the u.s food advertisements are also much more in your face and you're more often reminded of junk food than we

were in italy so even though you're eating less healthy things i think we're getting cravings and being pushed

towards junk food less often all right i got to ask you a hard question uh so the romance languages so i think

french is up there as like number one number one in terms of i don't know this was ranking them

oh you guys speak italian or no not italian but we studied french and spanish in school

and romanian i feel like every country calls their language a romance like no but it's romanian french spanish

portuguese um and i think there was one more that was like this dialect but those are

considered the romance languages okay so where would you put italian i think we got yelled at i'm so

it's on the bottom of the list because people did not use it nicely but i always really liked how french sounds

um i i think something about it where maybe spanish actually sounds nicer to the

ears but french has more character and it feels more sultry so i like french that was my answer too oh sultry okay

yeah i feel like uh french well in france i feel like i'm always being judged

like they're better than me that's what friends they are better yeah this is so true

uh which is why you know yeah i long to belong to that i like the british accent

the british really yeah actually one thing we did on our italian trip is we just picked up british accents for the

entire trip for fun and we forgot we were doing them to the point where we talked to british people

and they just ask us why are you talking like that i just couldn't stop i i did feel much more elegant and mature true

people like you know i don't know if they felt the same way about us but it was more of you know the confidence

you do feel like you're more poised for sure yeah so how'd you guys get into chess

when when did you first let's say when did you first fall in love with chess

so we both started playing when we were pretty young around six years old that's when our dad taught us and

i enjoyed playing chess because i had good results early on but a lot of it was being pushed from my dad to play

chess and i only really started loving it when we moved from canada and we started moving a lot and chess was the

one stable thing that i had and it was also where all my uh friends were so it was kind of that

foundational thing for me and that's when i started studying chess very intensely and when i started putting in the hours out of my own will

not because i was being pushed by my dad that's when i started really loving it and i even wanted to take time off college to just focus on chess

so training and competing training and competing yeah it was when i was doing

it for myself that i started getting my best results and actually enjoying the thing and

really enjoying it yeah i would spend summer vacation studying for tournaments and my mom would come and say you need

to make friends go leave the house and i'd be like no i need to play chess and i i remember those moments that you

rebelled by playing chess yeah exactly how did you get into it yeah my my

experience with loving in high school is very opposite from alex's but right my sister was

playing and my dad taught me when i was andrea was cool in high school unlike me you are uh i i wouldn't say cool i'd

save more balance and i was interested in other hobbies in my childhood if i ever really did love chess there's

certainly moments about like traveling and being together with my family and spending those moments together but those are more the social and the

experiences but funny enough like i think my happiest moment where i really played the game for my own enjoyment was

probably my most recent tournament because this was after obviously we've

been streaming and i'm no longer in high school but when i was in school i was always playing for college and for the

results trying to build a resume so i was too stressed out about the pressure to really enjoy the game whereas when i

just played my first tournament so it was like after like a two-year break because of the pandemic um and it was also all live

on twitch so there was some pressure but it was the first time that like i was

really eager to study for the game sitting and focusing since we've been streaming and not getting distracted by

something else in years like i said and the tournament experience i hit my highest rating and it was my best

tournament ever and i think most of that is because it came from my own enjoyment so

you didn't enjoy the domination because i think you like did really well right this is like a couple months ago uh oh

yeah yeah the tournament well of course i think the results came from enjoying the tournament because i would be in

high school like studying double triple the amount of time like six hours every day compared to this tournament i didn't

even prepare for it and for three years i wouldn't be able to pass one rating whereas in this one term and i passed it

by like 70 points without even any preparation so it was i think as soon as you stop worrying about the competitions

when the games get much better what does it mean to pass a rating so i was stuck at 1900. 1900 is 100 points off of

expert yeah usually when you reach 2000 you're considered an expert which is the rating

andre i was going for okay expert that's the technical term or this like

it's more of a colloquial term where if somebody's around a 2000 you're playing them in a tournament they won't have the

actual title next to their name but you say i'm playing an expert what about like the the more official things like

master that have to do with the ratings yeah so national master in the us is when you're 2200.

okay and what's international master international master is based off of a different system the fide system which

is international to be an international master it's 2400 and you have to have three

international master norms yeah i think magnus said he's uh 28 6

something that was yeah and then he said uh that's pretty decent no well he always uh but the thing is i

think what he meant is that's a decent rating because it accurately captures his actual level

so it's uh it's not over inflated or underinflated and so on and so the discussion there was how do

you get can a human being get to 2900 and then he says because my current

rating is pretty decent representing my skill level it's gonna be a long road to actually get there

right because it's like so you have to beat people your same level that's how the number increases exactly

yeah and you beat a bunch of people in the tournament right that are higher than that very lucky oh i was playing i

was really nervous because my category was like 200 points above my rating and of course

i was very rusty and i hadn't played a tournament in a while but it went pretty well do you feel the pressure when you're

actually recording it like the streaming it was definitely so before every round i was

vlogging and i was doing meet and greets and doing other things for them that's how you do a meet and greet you didn't

know what the hell you're doing is great yeah like where am i how do i do this yeah i see

what do i do it was actually really wholesome the beginning was um very silly because i was just not expecting

that it was going to be more of a seminar i thought it was like oh you pose and take pictures but they actually asked really nice meaningful questions

but unfortunately it's bad for youtube retention and we cut them all out so bad for you

the good long-form conversation so it was like questions q a type of thing exactly you have to have very fast pace

for youtube and um that seminar was not fast-paced okay well not everything in life needs to be on youtube right

there's like two parallel things stuff that's fun for youtube yes and one day we'll post that q a one yeah when you

guys like when you become like ultra famous you're currently just regular famous

q and a slow content yes and that the youtube aspect the creation

aspect does that add to the fun ultimately how's the chess of like your love of chess oh for the love of chess

in general or just for competing in that one tournament no love with just in general i i think you said that for

competing for that tournament was adding pressure yeah but actually i would say like a good pressure but yeah this is

where i differed to alex because um when i was just competitive and i was younger

i don't think i loved chess as much as when i started doing it for content because unlike her a lot of her friends

and social circle other chess players i never really traveled and built really solid friendships through chess until i

started streaming and meeting other chess streamers and actually playing and talking to people for fun rather than just always being

alone in the game and never really meeting other people my age or people with similar interests so i would say

twitch was the thing that really changed how i approached the game i think with uh with some youtubers

there's a pressure to be almost somebody else you create a persona and you're stuck in that persona i think

um i'm too i'm too much of a boomer to know what the hell twitch is anyway but the

it feels like when you're actually live streaming you can't help but be who you really are

i think it's oh well i think when you're live streaming and i've talked to a lot of other streamers about this

you kind of just over exaggerate one side of your personality and of course it's kind of like being like on all the

time like you're trying to be more entertaining and sometimes you're being sillier at moments or

more you take what character traits like people know you for and for me one is being like adhd and the younger sibling

who's very energetic and causes trouble even though yeah i'm sure you caused trouble just for the camera yeah right

i think yeah i think and of course once you're live streaming for like four or five hours there's gonna be moments in the stream where

it's more chill but especially when you're like editing that content or you're doing bigger streams that are

shorter you are kind of playing up a side of yourself because of course there's a lot of parts of me that i don't show to the

camera because they're not as entertaining to watch like the more serious part and also there's things

that you are really interested in about what you do like i love competitive chess where i could sit and really think

about it but i know that that is not going to be as entertaining for stream i know that's not going to be as entertaining for youtube so you kind of

have to take what you like but then really adapt it for whatever the format is and sometimes that feels inauthentic

uh but other times it just feels like repackaging what you love for people

in a more general audience to enjoy do you feel like it's a trap a little bit as you evolve like uh

oh i think social media oh sorry go ahead social media in general is a trap of that of that kind

well so we've been trying to switch to learn how to make youtube videos recently and so much of learning youtube

school is kind of the beastification of content where you try to get to the point of the video within like the first

10 seconds to not lose people you try to take it you mean like mr beast yeah okay yeah where it's so fast-paced there's a

reason to wait there's high stakes and everything is created to keep people watching the video and keep people on

the platform and in some ways it is a trap because it's harder to do

the kind of content you like because you really have to squeeze it to be like okay well do we have a good thumbnail for this do

we have a good title for this um and that's something that we're trying to figure out how

to keep true to what we want to do yeah see the way i think about it is yeah there's

a lot of stuff you can create and yeah the mr bestification process

but also i think about what are the videos conversations or things i will create in

this life that will be the best thing i do

and um i try not to do things in my life that will prevent me from getting there i feel like if you're

always focusing on um doing kind of the optimizing the thumbnail in the 10 seconds and so on

you'll never do the thing that's truly you're known for and remembered for so

finding that balance is tricky i get that but at the same time this might be my own copium which i know is a word you

know now yeah i'm slowly learning the complexity of the term yes um but

the other way i think about it is it is the skill to learn how to

communicate with large audiences and first i started streaming chess which is

something i just did and really loved but now i have to learn how to translate that format and if that's a skill set we

could build then we could use it to do really important things and i've seen a lot of youtubers who

have done interviews about how you know they didn't love the kind of content they did at at first but what they're

doing right now is really meaningful so i like to think of it maybe like skill development because not everybody hits

off podcasts where they can talk to super interesting people right off the bat yeah you can be slow and boring in a

podcast you don't have to worry about the first 10 seconds i mean people like keep pushing me for because but the

first 10 seconds of the videos i do is well i know it's most important for youtube but i don't give a damn i

wrote a chrome extension that hides all the views and likes i don't look at the the the click i don't look at twitch

views andrea does so we also can relate i love numbers too but that's why i don't look at it because you become like

oh i you'll start to think that a conversation or a thing you did sucks because it doesn't get views yeah but

that's just not the case the youtube algorithm is this monster that figures stuff out and if you let it

control your mind i feel like it's going to destroy you creatively so you have to find a nice balance i have to say i was

laughing a little bit when i was listening to the magnus episode and the first 10 minutes you guys are talking about soccer football two robots seem

like humans yeah i was like let's have some fun a

conversation about non-chess related topics yeah talk about sports yeah it was kind of hilarious i was surprised

that uh even at his level i wasn't sure but i was surprised how

much he loves chess it sounds cliche to say but like the way he looked at a chess board you know those memes like i

wish somebody looked at me in the way he's still like the way he glanced down

and he reached for the pieces with excitement to show me something there was there wasn't like uh okay i'll show you it was like

like there was still that fire that's something that always shocks me about some of like super grand masters

like one of my coaches was a person who also his name's jim hammer of norway he

also coached magnus he was his second and he was helping me train for my tournament and i

was kind of putting off doing the homework he's like if you're putting it off that means you're studying the wrong thing like you should be enjoying even

when you're practicing which when i grew up i thought to get to the top level like practicing has to be hard and

unpleasant and when i was listening to magnus episode he was like i didn't read books very much or it there's one thing

that you said that's like very normal for studying classical chess that he didn't do just because it didn't

interest him he says i suck at puzzles i don't like puzzles yeah and he doesn't do what he doesn't enjoy and that's

because it's like purely driven out of passion i think the internet was like i suck at puzzles too yeah they like that

i don't have to study at all it's just it's fun and uh but i think the lesson

there that's really powerful is he spends most of the day thinking about chess because he wants to yeah so do

whatever if you're into getting better chess to whatever it takes to actually just the number of hours you

spend a day thinking about chess maximize that if you're like super serious about it i actually get very

addicted whenever i start studying chess which is why i don't do it as seriously when i'm focused on content uh because i

go through these rabbit holes where if i'm focusing on chess i want to be as good as i possibly can at the game

otherwise it's hard for me to enjoy it because it's such a competitive thing and i remember training for tournaments

and when you're training for tournaments you even start dreaming about chess and you can't stop thinking about it and

it's as if you're flipped into this completely different world which is also what i like best about the game that

it's a completely different living experience and then you take some drugs and now you start to see things on the ceiling is there some factual um

hallucination like uh to the uh queen's gambit like those scenes uh i think it's is that based on

your life story from well i can't say that on camera no just kidding um actually chess players are very careful

to not take drugs they drink a lot yeah they drink so much it's actually crazy

for how good they're able to play chess when they do but when it comes to things like psychedelics or other things they

usually stay away from those because they don't want to mess anything up in their brain so this is actually an intervention i've i saw that you

mentioned somewhere i think was the lie detector test where you have a drinking problem

is that actual i think i think that's actually um a meme that we like to joke

about on stream because occasionally we'd have like a white claw on stream or something like that and then people meme

about it it goes back to andrea's point of amplifying a part of your personality to make yourself a little bit right more

entertaining you could use that as an excuse from now on i'm just this podcast is just amplifying a part of that person

now i'm not really like this uh but have you played drunk like magnus has played drunk he says it helps him

with the creativity is there any truth to that well andrea is under 21 so she's obviously would never do it never do

that um but i have played while drinking actually i enjoy playing jess chess and drinking

more than pre-gaming or going out to a club and drinking which sounds really silly and i'll usually play against

opponents who are also you know having some beer and it does make you feel like you're seeing

the game from a fresher perspective where it can sometimes make you feel more confident liquid confidence and it does

help with creativity you just feel like you could pull things off um but there's also a limit it's more like you've had

one drink or two drink but then it goes beyond that and then you just start missing tactics and it's not worth it

yeah i think it only helps players in very short time controls one time i was challenging this grandmaster on stream

and we were playing bullet chess which is one minute chess and i was giving him handicaps and i said okay you have to

take four shots before the next game and he just got like 10 times stronger and transformed into like the hulk and

destroyed me more than the last game so but of course if you're playing like a three-hour game it's gonna get old but i

think in short time controls it's amazing yeah it does definitely has to be blitz it has to be where it's more intuition rather than sitting in

calculus this is probably like negatively affecting your ability to calculate absolutely how much when you guys play when you

look at the chess board how much of it is calculation how much of it is intuition how much of it is memorized

openings um it really depends between short form

chess so five minutes three minutes one minute and classical chess what's your favorite to play i love playing blitz

now because that's most of what i do and that's actually how i got into chess streaming because i couldn't spend

entire weekends or weeks playing tournaments i would just while i was in college log on and play these long blitz

or bullet sessions and it's very fast so you don't have time to go calculate as deeply you basically have

to calculate short lines pretty quickly and a lot of it is pattern recognition and intuition um that's three minutes

you said three minutes yeah okay cool and so for that it's just it's basically intuition a lot of it is intuition yeah

see i saw on the streams you actually keep talking while playing chess it seems like yeah that's my result that doesn't help my results it doesn't help

the content not the game yeah exactly but you can still do it because i i it feels like how can you possibly

concentrate while talking it's because so much of it is intuition you're not

while you're talking you're thinking about that topic but then you just come to the board and you just understand what you should be doing here and then

sometimes you get in trouble because you're talking and you have now lost half of your time you have a minute and a half your opponent has three and

you're kind of at a disadvantage um but that kind of goes to show that that's how blitz chess usually works

whereas classical is very different which of you is better at chess i mean let's do it this way can you

um andrea can you say what is in which way is alex stronger than you

which way is she weaker than you not physically in in terms of the ch in terms of chess

um well yes of course she is higher rated but when we do play um i think her strengths against me

where she really gets me is the end game she has stronger end games so she can and i actually have a stronger opening

um but as soon as she's i'm supposed to say what is good about you not you yeah i'm getting there well see this is

the same because don't worry it's related okay because if i can i can get an advantage in the beginning of the

game but as soon as she starts trading pieces down like my confidence drops because i know that the end game is the

hardest part of the game and the longest and that's where she ends up beating me so her end game is her

i think really what makes a difference and she sounds like her psychological warfare is better too

because if you're getting nervous that is that but it's harder to play against higher rated players same how you know

magnus and former world championship champions have that psychological edge so i think it's always going to be

different for andrea because she knows statistically she should be winning something like one in four games but she

usually does better than that because she's very distracting and talks a lot that does help what does it feel like to

play a higher rated player what's the experience of that

in like uh playing somebody like magnus so it depends on how much higher rated

than you they are if it's someone who's like between me and andrea let's say it's a 200 point difference

you know they should win but at least you still feel like you have a chance i was playing in uh title tuesday which is

this tournament chess.com has every tuesday and i got really lucky beat a gm drew an international master and then i

got paired against hikaru nakamura and my brain just went blank because the i just know that i'm so unlikely to win

that i couldn't even play the game properly when it's that much of a difference where they should be winning like 99 of the time

but that's like psychological so you're saying that's the biggest experience it's like actually knowing the numbers and

statistically thinking there's no way i can win but i meant like is there a suffocating feeling like positionally

you feel like you're constantly under attack you just feel like you're slowly getting

outsmarted and the worst is when you don't even know what you're doing wrong you come out of that you're like

i thought i was doing great and i got slowly squeezed i didn't understand what was going on and you're just kind of

baffled it's kind of like watching alpha zero beat up stock fish and you don't really understand why it's making

certain moves or how it thought of the plan you just see it slowly getting the position better and that's what it feels

like i i would add it's kind of different for me if they're someone who's significantly higher rated

so let's say more than like 300 points or you're playing magnus what i notice is i just feel lost

straight as soon as i don't know my preparation because they know so many opening lines that they're going to know

the best line to beat you that you haven't studied so then on move 10 you're like he already has a maybe plus

.5 advantage which is really small but for someone with such a significant skill level you know you already lost at

that point and it's like a third of the game what are the strengths and weaknesses of

andrea andrea is very good at opening preparations as she said as she said she

likes bringing that up i mean she's very meticulous about it where she'll really go in and learn her lines

and having that initial starting confidence isn't just helpful for the opening but it helps develop your plans

for the middle game so i think she's very good at that um i think she's actually pretty good at

tactical combinations um what is tactics tactics is like solving puzzles

um or basically finding lines that are forced where if you find them you're going to win

so that's like puzzles within a with yeah exactly whereas strategic chess is

making slow moves and over the process of like 20 moves you get a slightly better position based on

an understanding of the overall strategy so in my extensive research review on

wikipedia it says your most played opening is the king's indian defense

in which quote black allows white to advance their pawns to the center of the board in the first two moves i is there any

truth to this so the kings and what is it probably is my most played opening um

and it's one where even when my coach who was a grandmaster taught me he's like so you know i've been playing the

king's indian for 10 years and i still don't understand it and it's one of those openings that computers really

don't like because you do or at least stockfish doesn't like it maybe alpha zero would change their mind i forgot to

look at what can you show me by the way what it is yeah is it uh is it white's opening or black something

black responds to uh the d4 queen's pawn push and you take your knight out to f6

i'll just put in the you know stereotypical classical king's indian more so to say

um so we actually have a very famous king's indian game in the notes that we prepared okay

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

something yeah um so this is the king's indian as you can see white has much more control over the

center white has three pawns in the center while black has none past the fifth rank and you just have this pawn

on d6 and one of the ideas in chess is if you're not taking the center then your plan revolves around trying to

continually challenge it but what is really fun about the king's indian is that black sometimes gets

these crazy king side attacks while white gets queen side attacks and even

though it's a little bit suspicious for black and the computer could usually break it

it's hard to defend as a human when you're being attacked but if you don't pull off the attack as black then you're

just gonna end up being lost in the end game so it's like a very asymmetrical position it's very asymmetrical although

a lot of people now stop playing into the classical kings indian even though computers give it a big advantage and

they play these slower lines in the king's indian which are less fun to play what's slower mean it takes a longer

time to like do something interesting with um they basically don't let you get as much

of a kingside attack because they try opening up the center and then you have no weaknesses but you're just slowly

improving the position of your pieces instead of being able to go for that king side attack so for people just

listening there is a the white pawns are all on the fourth row in a row together that feels like a bad

position for black for white oh you don't like taking the center no i like taking the center so this is now

you're talking trash around oh sorry but like they're just like they're like feel

vulnerable they're in a row together like it's like uh like a you know because they're like who's gonna defend

them i guess the nice defender when the queen defends it that you're actually talking about a theme that you do see

sometimes which is called hanging pawns when you have two pawns right next to each other with no other pawns to defend

them yeah um so it it is a value valid point and actually as black you're trying to break apart these pawns or get

them to push and create some holes into the position but it's a trade-off and that's a lot of what

chess openings are about you get more space but you'll also end up having to protect your pawns

potentially or move them forward to the point where they're overextended and plus pawns being vulnerable it's kind of

fun this it's like there's more stuff in danger they're not because if it's if it's like this everything's like trapped

like you can't do anything everything's blocked yeah blocked off yeah because you can't have fun yeah

the the one of the most one of the opening principles for white is get your pawns in the center so i'd say

like this is actually preferable for white go let's go over some opening principles there we go because this is a

very good learning okay in the audience

okay so first thing you want to do is control the center there you go e4 the more aggressive one

isn't that like the the basic vanilla move i didn't uh somebody told me that's the most popular

opening move in chess it is why is that considered aggressive so the two it's e4

and d4 and the king's pawn is known as being for more tactical players whereas d4 is known for more positional players

so that's why it's considered more aggressive gambits with e4 i think so tactical

means i'm i'm gonna try to attack you you're gonna try to go for puzzles and

rely more on your um combination abilities uh whereas if it's something positional

you usually have like three to four moves that are all good in the position whereas tactics you need to see this one

line so it's more precise so this this one's cool because he can like you know the

queen can come out the bishop can come out yeah and that's uh one of the most popular checkmates and

usually what you teach new students to try to cheese their friends because then they feel really excited that they know this new trap where you bring the bishop

and the queen out and you try to check mate on f7 yeah it's the trap that uh queen's gambit beth harmon falls for

nerf like first game versus the janitor she gets all mad because she gets checkmated very early that's the one she

gets checkmated with yeah okay i love how you guys were actually paying attention to the games carefully

uh which is pretty cool that they did a good job of improving evolving her game throughout the show to actually

represent an actual growth of a chess player yeah they they really took every detail into consideration

which was cool okay so what what else that's that's i brought stuff okay

so then you want to develop your pieces so in the beginning of the game you want to take out the bishops and knights

first because you don't want to start with the most valuable piece like the queen because then it'll become a

vulnerability and it'll get attacked very early on and the reason you're taking up these

two pieces first is because you want to castle your king so you can move a night move or a bishop move and that's

considered developing yeah so if at this stage not like even before getting a few pawns out

you usually want to start with getting a pawn because you want to get space in the center but also when you push pawns it

helps free up some of your pieces um so usually start with one pawn first and

then you can start taking out your minor pieces which is the bishop in the night i have anxiety about a pawn just floating out there

defenseless but i'm not attacked yet it's a see those are what you call ghost threats so you're scared of something

that hasn't happened yet so if i were to attack it i feel like there's a deeper thing going on here

actually let's say yes so you're attacking the pawn in the center here and it is vulnerable but as

soon as you do that i can develop my own knight and defend it as well okay and now for people just listening

there's two pawns that just came out to meet each other and a couple of nights we love the chess card

the pawns met after midnight yeah yeah i'm gonna romanticize the game a bit

exactly uh okay cool so so like there's uh if you bring out the bishops with the

knights you're matching that with the other uh the black is going to match it whatever you're attacking with yeah

can't defend it i could develop your bishop or your knight whatever you'd like

oh no now you gave him options oh right yeah there you go now i am attacking the pawn in the

center which is what you were afraid about before but let's see how you defend it here

by doing this symmetrical thing bringing out the knight on the other side and actually your other move was good as

well defending with the pawn because then you're freeing up space for your bishop so you're basically trying to

develop your pieces as quickly as possible put your pawns in the center and then get your king to safety and

that's usually the basic opening tips that you get it is kind of counterintuitive that safety is in the

corner of the board for kings that was always confusing to me but you know three pawns in front though you

typically don't push those maybe like one maybe i'll go one square but

these are will be like the wall of defense that keep them safe but another way to also think about it is um your

pieces usually want to point towards the center if you have a knight closer to the center then closer to the side it

actually has more squares it can go to so a huge part of it is just wanting to have flexibility for where your pieces

go so more pieces are going to be able to make threats in the center or even

open up the position so since that's where it's most likely to open you want your king somewhere

where the position will stay closed so that you have the pawns to defend you know there is like rules like this but i

always wonder because i build chess engines but then you start to wonder like why is it that

positionally these things are good like you've built up an intuition about it but i wish and that's the thing that

would be amazing if engines could explain why is this kind of thing better than this kind of thing you start to build up

an intuition but if i'm just like know nothing about chess it feels confusing that cornering your king

like getting them uh like trapped here like it feels like you could get check made it easier there if

i was just using like dumb intuition but it seems like that's not the case

i imagine maybe because alpha zero learned by playing games against itself right yeah and i imagine if you have a

lot of games then you do build intuition because if you were to keep your king in the center you just see that in those

games you're dealing with threats a lot more often um but yeah they're shortcut rules and

this doesn't even mean it's the best way to play chess as we've seen with alpha zero kind of changing the rules of

the game a little bit but as a human to learn it from scratch is a lot more difficult than to start with principles

so that's why beginners usually learn chess this way yeah but because you're playing other

humans and the other humans have also operated under different principles and that's why people that come up now that are

training with engines are just going to be much better at than the people of the past because they're

going to have they're going to try out weirder ideas that go against the principles of old right and they're gonna do like weird stuff including

sacrifices and stuff like that yeah and i also think that's why alpha zero was so shocking because stockfish was using

an opening database so it was already based off of knowledge that humans have from playing chess for years that we

just thought is how you're supposed to play whereas alpha zero just learned from playing the game so many times and

came up with very novel opening ideas were you impressed by alpha have you have you seen some of the games i have

seen some of the games i think impressed bewildered and uh motivated were the three things i

experienced i think magnus said uh he was also impressed that

it could easily be mistaken for creativity that's this trash talk towards the ai that was a beautiful

sentence i i was listening to the podcast i mean as a human i agree with him because you

don't want to give the machine the the power of creativity but if it looks creative

get give it give it a compliment that's that's fair i know that you're being nice to the

machines in case they are ever looking back through this what else is there what other principles

are there for the um the opening you can go a little bit more forward let's say and yeah we can

finish full of development positions like this let's just say you developed all of your pieces

um so that's like a really nice like nobody nobody took any pieces and

we're just in a nice positional thing yeah so it's not actually a very accurate yes

i could put a different one on the board but usually after you've developed all of your pieces um you want to get your queen out a

little bit to connect your rooks and you also start thinking about certain pawn pushes and getting more space

but another good tip is just can you improve the position of your pieces think about timing so if you've already

moved a piece once and there's a piece that hasn't moved at all then you want to focus on the piece that hasn't moved at all

to be able to have it more likely to jump into the game right so don't move pieces multiple times exactly like try

to move it to the most optimal position yeah yeah that makes sense what uh

so what's the indian so i think we kind of went over it but why did you ever say

why you like it so much because that's weird because it's king-sized i liked it because it's a very fun aggressive

defense where you're just throwing your pieces towards white and there's so many

sacrificing opportunities and for some reason tactical games always feel like the most beautiful the

most satisfying and that's what i liked about the king's indian but i also suffered a lot from this this love

because i would play things that are not necessarily correct then my attack wouldn't pan out and i would just

struggle the rest of the game having no play and just trying to defend so if you're always a wikipedia also says that

that you're known for your attacking play it's also known for losses according to

stanford okay let's not bring see wikipedia doesn't talk trash

a lot nicer um i actually played a lot of positional chess in classic because i really like the slow

squeeze but when i transition to playing a lot of online chess it's

almost as if i was looking for more instant gratification because it feels so much better to beat someone with an

attack and even if sometimes it doesn't pan out i was okay with it because you get so many games in

so i think my style in online chess really changed for my classical chess

what about you andrea do you have a style are you attacking are you uh more like conservative defensive player

are you chaotic opening wise i like to play more positionally like i like to push d4 and just slowly improve my

pieces and slowly get an attack but like alex said if you're playing bullet chess or blitz against viewers you often like

wanna play riskier moves that may not be as good and then that's kind of when i

would play more aggressive but i do enjoy tournaments for that reason because then like once her 15 moves in which as soon

as you're out of your prep i like sitting and thinking in more positional um yeah positional middle games one of the

games you found to be pretty cool is the uh hakara nakamura versus golf on in

2009. and that one i think includes the king's indian defense yes um what's

what's why is that an interesting one to you i also played the king's indian as black and i loved this model game but

and as alex was saying like all these advantages for the king's indian but now there's this one line

that like every higher rated player just destroys my king's indian and you see these beautiful games they're like oh

yes i want to play for these ideas but now no one plays into it anymore and you just get demolished so this is why i

don't play the kings indeed anymore but not to ruin the fun right the love hate relationship truly the reality but

that's like the higher level players do or does everybody yeah if you're studying openings and you know this line

as white you just you automatically get the upper edge and that's kind of how openings develop you start having

players trying new lines and then you see ones and then everybody adopts it if they think it's the best one but yeah so

hikaru is really known for his aggressive style of play black hero yeah hikaru is black here so

he's playing the king's indian and as you can see in this position white already has a lot a huge center

advantage but what hikaru is going to start doing even with the next move is bringing all of his pieces towards the

white king side because his plan is to start pushing his pawns towards the white king and this ignore the attacks

that's a great example of a dream attack with the king's indian so there's a complete asymmetry towards the king side

on the left side of the board is a ton of pieces yeah exactly um wow he moved the night like three times

in a row and that's what you need to do because you have to move the knight in order to make space for your pawn so again this

is why it's so counter-intuitive and stockfish doesn't like it you're putting almost most of your pieces on the back

rank and you're pushing your king side pawns and you're blocking your own dark squared bishop so none of it makes sense

you're mimicking it that's awesome um okay so yeah here you see white going for queen side attack black going for

the king side attack and you can keep going a little bit and i'll wait to where he starts with the pretty sacrifices

it's more fun to analyze games in person than on the computer i think yeah okay

okay so here hikaru is preparing the attack and what i really like about this

game is that he finds these tactics that are not necessarily what a computer

would go for but it's very hard to face as a human and that's why a lot of people play the king's indian because in

in practice it's hard to defend against so we can keep moving a little bit forward

okay yep so white is just continuing the king side plan now it's the first is that

like the first piece i think that's taken in the game yep that's the first trade so it begins exactly hikaru had to

pause his attack for a little bit to just make sure that white didn't have two dire threats on the queen side so

cool to see the asymmetry of this thing exactly that's what's beautiful about this and just one thing to highlight

because his his rook move here is very bizarre and typically like a computer probably didn't like this but the ideas

are very interesting because this is a major weakness for black that they're coming to attack and he's also making

room for his bishop to come backwards and challenge so this is like a human-like maneuver that computer i

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

attack yeah well have you looked at it when i actually studied this as a line and this right away isn't the best move

current computer so actually that's a good question did you guys when you study games use your own mind but do you also use computers to

build up your intuition of like looking at a position like this and what would a computer do and then try to understand

why it wants to do that when i was studying seriously i would try to use my own mind because you're never going to

get the exact same position so you really need to notice trends and often computers will give you moves that are

only specific to that position because of a certain tactic um but i do use computers to check what

i did and make sure i didn't make any obvious blunder that i might have missed what does a computer tell you just like what what is the best move or does it

give you any kind of explanation of why it doesn't tell you why but it gives you

the different valuations of the position like black is down a half pawn here or something like

that um but it hints you towards what the right move is and then it's on you to figure out why and you could usually

figure out why if not right away than just by going through a few moves and being like oh okay that makes sense i

feel like a computer will take you down with some weird lines potentially like sacrifice like why the hell am i

sacrificing this well we'll get to the pretty sacrifice soon um

so we could just keep playing bonds are being pushed forward yeah and hikaru is kind of ignoring the queen

side attack here um they basically both only reply to each other's plan when

they have to this is where you convert all the podcast viewers to youtube yeah they

have no idea what we're talking about right now there is a zen like experience of just like listening and imagining the

board just imagine the pieces on the ceiling yeah you should we should be calling them out and then people will be

freaking out even more am i supposed to keep track of what the position is

how hard is blindfold just have you tried like are you able to keep them i've played blindfold chest before um

for me it's pretty hard it's not a muscle that i've trained as much and i'm very visual when it comes to chess um

but it is one as a top player that starts becoming very second nature for

you actually this is what i talked to magnus about this um maybe i was again influenced by

queen's gambit what do you actually visualize when it's in your head so for magnus it was a boring 2d board

right are you do you have some kind of that's every chess player no you don't have like because you know some chess

like uh computer games you can do all kinds of skins and like yeah like fancy stuff you don't have anything sadly i

don't have like a cool 3d warrior mode on it's just a chess baseboard in my

head because you don't yeah you can't use your brain power for adding colors to it

because you already have to keep track of the pieces it's one board at a time yes okay the current position yeah i bet

every chest i wonder if there's any who there's certain players who are really good and they can even play blindfold

chess and play multiple games at the same time um so i would be curious how they do it but

usually when you're thinking of one game that's the only one in your mind yeah but you have to do this operation where you move one piece

you're doing like the branch analysis like yeah and so uh you still have to somehow visualize

the the branching process um and not forget stuff maybe that's like constant memory recall or something

you're always looking one board at a time but and you're also oh because you're also looking in the future yeah yeah and then you have to backtrack

you're keeping the position in your memory so you're remembering where all the pieces are and then you're playing it out on one board and then you can

come back to the initial one that you started with that you kind of just keep in your brain and it's also easier to

come back to it once you've played a position from it i feel like it's that

memory recall that gets you to blunder so i'll like see that i'm being attacked by certain

things but then because i get so exhausted thinking about a different thing i

forget i actually forget about an entire branch of things that i was supposed to be worried about it happens very often

yeah if you spend a bunch of time calculating in a position let's say like when you're really in trouble and you're

spending 15 20 minutes calculating you'll forget about something that you spotted like oh if i do these two three

moves i'll walk into a trap because you've looked at so many lines and then you play it and then you see it and you're like oh i i looked at it and i

saw it but i forgot about it yeah it's often called tunneling where you're just looking so deeply on one thing you

forget about the rest of the board and it's the worst when at least in a beginner level there's like a

i don't know a bishop just sitting there obviously attacking your like queen or something and then you just forget that

bishop exists because if they just sit there for a few moves and don't move you just forget their existence and then

it's just yeah that's that's definitely very embarrassing well it happens to everyone so

yes um okay cool okay so

we see a few trades happening on the queen side where he had to go for those otherwise he's in trouble um and this is

where the game oh sorry this is where he gets excited yeah so so knight h4 is really when the sacrifice

starts and here the two important pawns are the ones in

front of the king because they're helping with the entire defense and ikaro is actually preparing to sacrifice

his knight for a pawn just so that he can continue his attack and open up the position because if you

don't do that here as black and don't get some kind of attack you are completely lost on the queen side and

also you've pushed all of your own king side pawns so you're going to be in danger so it's one of those do or die

moments oh okay so that that's what makes it all in because the king is wide open yeah yeah the king is wide open and

you all of white's pieces are pointed towards the queen side too where you're also cramped so it's the attack primarily by black done by the two pawns

and then and the knight and the light squared bishop is always extremely important so you don't want to trade

this in the king's indian because it's very helpful for a lot of attacks even though it's on the other side of

the board i guess it can go all the way across in in like i i'm not sure what it's doing here

but probably threatening like for example if if it was another move black could have played would be something

like bishop h3 where if you take the bishop you actually get mated on g2

with what so let's say you take here and then you could push the pawn and then it would be checkmate

so you're kind of using your bishop to sacrifice against whites king side pawns

yeah i'll be freaking out if the bishop did that exactly what are they up to right and that's the thing this position

looks very scary as white because all of black's pawns are starting to come towards you and it's one of those things

where humans do start to worry in these positions whereas computers obviously can just calculate the best line and

maybe the attack doesn't go through so you're saying the computer might say that the white is actually a slight

favorite here yeah especially exactly okay so then uh white makes a little bit of room by

moving the rook right and the attack begins i like the commentary here

then the knight um the knight is hugging the king and actually white can't even

take the king here because then h4 and h3 is coming in i can't take the knight yeah did i say king yes thank you the

knight well why can't take the knight because why um so if white takes the knight here then black starts pushing

his pawn to h4 with h3 incoming and the idea of trying to defend against this

is it looks very difficult so why just choose it it'd be cool to watch a chess

game to experience watching it without understanding it just for a day i feel like i could use that to make better

content true um okay i mean that's what getting drunk does it start unfortunately for chess players it

never leaves you doesn't matter how but this is actually a very cute move because black's queen

is under attack but the king is so cramped that he can't actually take it or he's going to get

checkmated by a pawn which is a sad way to go truly yeah those pawns are doing a lot of work here that is the king's

indian this is the king's indian player attack of the king side pawns yeah these pawns are like uh right so

they're the ones that are doing a lot of the threatening right and they're also opening up the position to bring more of

the pieces in but that the pawns kind of help break open the king side but they can't checkmate by

themselves so after the pawns come in that's when you need to start bringing in pieces as well which you will see uh

hikaru do here okay there you go he puts more sacrifices so this was actually another beautiful sacrifice in the game

um but then puts the king in check with the pawn right that and the pawn is going to

be given here for free but the idea is you're giving your own peace because you want to have more space and open up the

king which is what you're always trying to do when you have a king side you're trying to remove as many of the king's defenders as you can without giving up

too much and then you have a ton of pieces on the king's side for black

just waiting to exactly to do harm and then uh and notice how every single move white is

getting attacked like they're just never getting a break black just keeps throwing all their so it's funny that

black's queen has been hanging for like three moves now and white still can't do anything about it yeah so rock puts the

king in check yep the king runs and then again we leave the queen

hanging and you develop a piece the slight squared bishop that's so important and you're once again

threatening checkmate on g2 and then bishop's coming to yeah again

the queen hanging i think and i mean the game is just so beautiful the amount of

calculation hikaru put into this position it feels like so much is in danger right it's so interesting

and uh knight takes what upons so now his queen is attacked twice

and he doesn't care he takes the bishop and he's still threatening the checkmate on g2

and then the queen takes the bishop yep so now he's defending against g2

and black just goes and grabs some material back here so here black is

already is winning well he ends up winning a night here because black had to be so much on the

defensive he's just taking pieces yeah i mean at this point you're up two whole pieces so

you would yeah exactly but and queen

queen and then you take and then the rook takes

and there's not as much of an attack on the king anymore but hikaru is up a knight

here which is gg yeah what's the correct way of of of saying that because i was i played uh

albus i played him in chess and then i quickly realized

like from his facial expressions that i should have like stopped playing oh it was like it's

already set yeah and then he's like like this is the good time to like give

up right you're not going to get to checkmate where like this you know he could see like the checkmate is like

five or seven moves away or something this and uh what's the play usually you have to resign if you're in

a position or you should through chess etiquette resign when you're in a position where

your opponent is definitely going to win out of respect like if you're a piece down um and obviously all top grand masters

do that the only people who don't do that is kids because their coaches play until they get their coaches always tell

them never resign and they'll be in hopelessly lost positions playing against like two rooks a king and they

only have their soul king but they're still playing on so that's a position where it's obvious they can't win

because the kids might make errors yeah and so might as well that was the interesting thing about i

think game six of the previous world championship with magnus was it the one where he beat nap yeah the first time he

beat him where was like he said that i don't know how often you come across

this kind of situation he said the engines predict the draw yeah but

that doesn't mean that it's going to be a draw so you play on hoping that you take a person into i

mean this is i guess an endgame thing you take them to deep water and they make a positional mistake or something i

don't i don't know when like he from his gut knows that this is supposed to be a draw but he still plays

on yeah i mean that is one where it could theoretically be a draw but it could be very hard to

defend because it's a hard technique to know as a human and especially in that game i know that uh nepo was also in

time pressure which makes it even harder so in situations like that you should always continue it's more where an

engine would give you something like plus 10 or something where it's not just clearly a win but anybody would know how

to win and that's where you're usually supposed to resign so what do you find beautiful about this game is it the uh

the the attacking chess and just the the asymmetry of it it's the asymmetry

and it's the fact that this is the dream for the king's indian uh where you're

able to get a beautiful attack and there's also those two really nice sacrifices where

black just continuously kept putting pressure on white's king to the point where he was able to win material

and the best part of it is that if the attack didn't work out black would have been completely lost

how often does that happen by the way like as an attacking player you like how often do you put yourself in the position of like

i'm screwed unless this works out on an online chest more than i should and it's usually when i sacrifice i know it's

either gonna work or i'm lost and those are the most fun

positions to play usually but in tournaments if you're doing a sacrifice you're playing it with 100 confidence

because you're taking the time to calculate it but yeah when you have three minutes you don't have time so you take a whim and you follow your

intuition or you find out later or you're very confident it'll work and you

haven't calculated all the way until the end but you've calculated to the point where you have enough in exchange for

the sack and you think you could play that position uh how do you train chess these days

what's um do you practice do you do deliberate practice i mean you're in this tough

position because you're also a creator and educator and entertainer so do you try to put in time of like daily

practice i don't train chess anymore when i'm focusing on creating i do if i'm

preparing for a tournament but back in the day i would train very tournament very seriously for tournaments and

the way it would work is i do opening preparation for a specific tournament because that's when you really need to

have those lines memorized and you could also prepare for specific opponents and i would do tactics to make sure i stay

sharp so those are the two things i would do every single day for a tournament and then mix up the rest with

like maybe some end games maybe some positional chess so what does tactics uh preparation looks like do you do like a

puzzle like uh like a random puzzle thing yeah i would just train puzzles for at

least like 30 to 60 minutes or books and sometimes you were and there's different kinds of puzzles

one you could train for pattern recognition where you're supposed to go through them very quickly and that's just so that when you're playing the

game if your mind is tired it's still keeping track of things a little bit more easily and then there's where you're practicing

your combination and those sometimes take like 20 minutes to find because you have to just calculate a lot and it's

more like making sure that you've trained with that muscle but andrea is actually very good at finding ways to balance and still study

while also doing content yeah so what you're able to do both that's the hard thing i was getting very

irritated with content because i'm very competitive i don't like playing chess if i'm losing and if you're talking and

entertaining you're going to be losing more games than winning so then i started doing more training streams

where i'd bring on my coach and one of the things that i wanted to add to alex is training repertoire so i

do i would do daily puzzles every time i'm streaming which helped me a lot even

if it's like there's this thing on chess.com called puzzle rush where you have three minutes and you just do

puzzle after puzzle where they get incrementally harder um and it's just a really good way to build your pattern recognition

especially when you're rusty so i would do that until i hit a high score and i wouldn't play any blitz until i hit the

score that i want um but that's kind of more like the fun part of chess studying

the very important one is actually analyzing your losses and your tournament games

and first you sit and you look through your mistake yourself and try to see if you can find the better moves and then

that's why you would check over with a computer to see if you're right so game analysis is also very important

which i try to do remember to give a shout out i listened to a couple of episodes of the perpetual chess podcast

which is pretty pretty good but what with the whatever i listen to i remember the per it's um

i think they really focus on like teaching people

how to train yeah how to play how to train all that kind of stuff uh they do like uh

yeah i'm looking now adult improver so basically like how do regular noobs get better at

chess yeah uh one of the things they one of the person that said i think he's the grandmaster but he said uh

to maximize the amount of time you spend every day of like basically as you were saying like suffering so like

you it's not about the like you should be thinking you should be doing calculating so it's the opposite of what

magnus said like you should be doing a lot of time it doesn't matter what the puzzle is or whatever the hell you're doing but you

should be like doing that difficult calculation that's how you get better yeah it really depends what you're

training because i used to think the same but it depends what you're weak you're at because if you're doing the really difficult puzzles you're training

for like visualization and calculating more moves ahead than you typically would which maybe you wouldn't get into

that as often in a regular game because typically you run into like three to four tactics which are actually the

easier and more fun ones to solve so it really depends and on top of that as a

hobbyist your motivation is very different than when you're playing from a young age and have pretty high

competitive ambition and a lot of people who are new to chess

you could basically work on anything and still improve so if you're focusing on something you

like you're probably going to stick to it more and be more consistent which i think is more helpful long term what was

the most embarrassing loss of your career i had so many flashbacks but i'm so glad

it's a question for andrea i like that you specified you know it's funny because

i mean because you said you're so competitive and like yeah no i could tell just even from the way you said it

that like you hate losing yeah i mean that was the reason i hated chess in high

school because it'd always be like but okay there's many traumatizing losses whereas you're like you're top three

you're running for first and then you throw a game you shouldn't but and this shouldn't hurt my ego as much as it does

um but it's always kids or when i was a high school girl it's the younger boys who are really cocky

and when they win they start rubbing it in your face and they're yawning and looking around when like

90 of the game you were destroying them and you had this one tiny mistake and now their ego is huge um but i'll never

forget i was playing like for a chess scholarship um and i was it was

tiebreaker for first and i think i lost to a 12 year old girl who couldn't even use the scholarship but she beat me in

one first place and she got some other prize um so yeah i was losing to that little girl who's literally like 2 300

now so makes sense all right you keep telling yourself that what do you think because

do you think caspar was feeling that when he was playing 13 year old magnus like yeah why as much as it's a beauty

of the sport that any age can be brilliant any demographic anything

um i feel like when you're adults and you're paired against the kid it's just hard not to let it get to key and it

depends maybe if they're a really sweet kid but most times i play kids they're just really arrogant and but i don't

think they do it intentionally because they're kids i mean there is a certain etiquette thing where like like you said yawning and in general like it's not

kids there's no etiquette yeah yeah yeah the kids traumatized me too i was

playing in vegas and it was not even my opponent it was the board next to me and the kid was at

least 10 years old made 12 max and he was playing against an adult and he takes out his hand and he starts doing a

fake phone to which the kid studying sitting across diagonally picks up their banana and starts talking like it's a

phone and they're just mouthing words why their two adult opponents are thinking intensely at the game and then

i see the adult look up look at the kid just making banana phones and then destroying his eyes as he sighs

yeah and they're not even doing for trash talking no no they're just bored kids yes exactly what was the

because you you played a bunch of uh people for for your channel uh what was the most like memorable what's the most

fun most intense there's a bunch of fun ones you've played kids before some trash talking

kids that sounds great they trash talk kids yeah nothing like a

loser 12 year old who then starts doing a fortnight dance yeah so that that actually happened that did

happen he he is uh you know a very young master i think he became master when he was like nine years old or something and

he's very good at chess and doing a lot of training but he's also incredibly good at trash talking and he beat me one

game and he stood up and he started doing the fortnite dance so you know you gotta just swallow your

pride in those moments what is that culture of like street chess players it seems it seems pretty interesting like

um i don't know that seems to be celebrating the beauty of the game it's the trash talking but also having fun

with it but also taking it seriously and you've done a few of those did you go to new york yeah in union square park

washington square what was that like it's such a unique place i haven't seen

it anywhere else in the us where people are just professional chess hustlers even if

they're not necessarily you know a top player but they play chess every single day and so many of them learned chess by

themselves and never had a professional coach so they are quite good at it they're also very tight-knit they all

know each other and it's a very social thing where you're not just playing chess it's the experience of getting to

know this person who's a very much a personality and they talk to you they could either give you tips or

they can be really chatty and talk to you during so it's a chess experience rather than just playing a game do you

tell them like what your rating is or do you just let people just like both ways do you discover how good the

actual the person actually initially i loved going and not telling people my rating and just surprising them and and

winning games but now we've gone so many times that they just know us so we can't get away with it anymore one time

actually i don't know if i should share this but one time we dressed up as grandmothers and we had

prosthetics on our face yeah and i think they still recognized us yeah it's probably the

there's other components like probably the trash talk and all that it was actually no it was funny we were talking

like grandmothers but it was the way i held it was the way grandmother didn't talk like you don't want it

oh okay what were your names what were the

code names oh my god i think it was edna edna and i had a really uh i can't

remember the other one but it was embarrassing because we were walking so slowly and andrea dropped her

cane or something at one point then people in the park they were able to help her we felt so happy

but but yeah it was funny because they didn't know it was us until he saw the way i reached for my pond and he said

the way you held your pawn i knew it was you it was like such a sneesh thing that was what blew the grandma cover

uh yeah do you have a style of how you play physically is that i didn't think we did until

grandma went to play chess but yeah i've never thought about that yeah i think our style is just trash talking now

it's style is very if you're talking about style on and youtube and twitch we

definitely have a distinctive style what's that what's your distinction i'm just talking shit

but not going too far no no definitely that's that's definitely going to if it's us two against each other oh we we

trash talk each other so hard so and i love looking at andrea

as she's annoyed and the satisfaction i get when that happens how many times do you play against each other on online publicly i think i've

seen a couple of games played a lot of times we try not to do it too often because it's repetitive but every now

and then when we haven't done it for a while we'll go at it again what do you mean repetitive is like is that implied trash talk right there no it just we we

place similar openings so you just start seeing the same position you offer each other every time

andrea is really good at opening so i just start playing bad openings to get her out of her preparation because i

don't like opening theory very much i just like playing the game and getting into middle games and end games but yeah typically

the only time we're playing each other is when we're setting up in the park and we don't have opponents yet and we need

content so we just play each other until people show up but we always put stakes on the line which makes it more very

interesting because otherwise it wouldn't be fun to play each other if there's no stakes where's where is the most fun place you've you've played is

in new york i think so and it was actually when we set up in times square one night we just brought a table with

us and chess and it's not even where people usually play chess but it was

so lively there were all of the lights out and so many people just kept stopping by to play chess and it was

really one of my favorite streams just the opposite of like the classical chess world it's super loud there's music

there's cars there's street dancers even some naked people walking around who we had to be careful not to get banned yeah

but i honestly really like the chaotic environments for chess games because i think it's a good way to break more into

the mainstream culture and make it entertaining and appealing to anyone who doesn't know anything about chess

and also in an authentic way because it's what we really like about chess when you're just enjoying the game but

also the atmosphere and the people who you're playing with and that's one of the things that i think you see less

when you're just thinking of chess as a competitive thing you've uh you mentioned a few other

games like the bobby fischer games the candidates match the game of the century

which i feel like is a is a weird game to call the game of the century when there's still like a few decades left in

the century but yeah i mean it wasn't an official thing it was just the chess journalist on a chess article but it

stuck if you look yeah no it didn't wikipedia this is all i do research-wise

because there's so that particular one was a 13 year old fisher

and he did a queen sacrifice i wonder is it there's that movie searching for bobby fisher was that

related because didn't have a young somebody who's supposed to be kind of like bobby fischer played by josh

wadeskin yeah i think he ended up being an international master it wasn't based on bobby fischer was based on another

player but i liked how they told it through the lens of being inspired by bobby fischer do you remember that game

of like why do you think it was dubbed the game of the century it was just journalists being like i i think part of

it was the atmosphere where you have the us junior champion who's this 13 year old nobody and it's the first time he's

playing in a very competitive landscape against some of the top american players

and he goes up against an international master so somebody who's a lot stronger than he is who's played in you know

olympiads for the american team he's having a bad tournament but then he has this one game where he just shows off

his uh tactical prowess and plays incredibly well and i don't know if this

is true but in the paper clippings of it they'd say things like grandmasters were by the board and they would say things

like oh bobby is lost in this position what is he doing but there's this 13 year old kid who's just playing

incredibly well and then that also happened before bobby's started really rapidly improving

at chess not that people knew that but he kind of seemed like a rising star so i think the game was beautiful but i

also think the idea of a 13 year old kid coming out from nowhere and beating a top american player was very fascinating

and there was aggressive chess and it was in the interesting ideas um yeah taking big risks it's cool to

see a 13 year old do that yeah uh what about the you you mentioned that his match against uh

mark taimana from their 71 candidates match was interesting in some way why is it

interesting to you i'm move 45 i'm looking at some notes

this is with the bishop e3 i think i know which one you're talking about um it's

i wouldn't say a lot of these games on these lists i think are really great combinations that

that when tactics come into play which is what we're talking about but they're very good at exemplifying lessons

this is why you study famous games so you can apply these lessons to your own games and i think the main takeaway for

this one was they were punishing their opponent from steering away from opening principles which is something that we

learned a little earlier where he delayed the development of his king and put his queen out a little bit

too exposed so bobby fischer immediately punished that and then there was just

like a beautiful combination where it was like a 12 in a row perfect moves which was a

tactic just winning the game but it only came from punishing those mistakes the mistake being bringing the queen out

bringing the queen out and yeah not castling your king right away and these were just like opening principles that now they're written in

books but but for books you would study these principles by studying games

and also i'm looking at some notes his dominance during the candidates tournament was unprecedented

he swept two top grand masters i mean that guy's meteor cries is incredible

sad that i think at whatever in his 20s he then quit chess

one has to wonder what where he could have gone yeah it is sad that

we lost such a brilliant mind so early on and it's also sad i think kind of what ended up happening in his life and

the slowly going crazier is there some aspect of chess that

opens the door to crazy like like how challenging it is on you

the stress the anxiety of it the isolation and being isolation yeah

this is a very lonely sport it is even to you guys since you both play it it's still lonely the experience of it it was

when i was competing a lot i think the crazy part of it for me was how obsessed

you can get about a board game where you're optimizing your entire life to

beat another person at you know pushing wooden pieces across the board and it doesn't necessarily translate to other

things and the fact that so many people spend so much of their life on it but you can also spend so much of your life

because it's so deep and so interesting and i mean i've definitely experienced

moments where i didn't want to do anything but chess and i had that before

i went to college where i just wanted to take a gap year and focus on chess because i still i went to high school we moved a

lot there was always other things going on so i felt like i could never really focus on chess

and the one time i could by taking a gap year i ended up not doing because my parents really wanted me to go to

university right away but i think maybe if i had taken that gap year i don't know if i would have gone back to school

so maybe it wasn't a bad thing i also say that's pretty universal i think if you want to be that the best at anything

you do or any sport you have to be that level of obsessed so i don't know if that's only chess well some things some obsessions are

more transferable to a balanced social life that is like healthy development yeah

chess is a lot less social than most other sports yeah there's something deeply isolating about this game i mean

the the great chess players i've met i mean they it's like it's really competitive too

and there's something that you're almost non-stop

paranoid about blundering at every level and that develops a person who's really anxious about losing

versus someone who like deeply enjoys perfection or winning and so on it's just this constant paranoia about losing

maybe i'm like misinterpreting it but um that gets that that creates a huge

amount of stress over like thousands of games especially in a young person

and that blundering is such a painful experience because you could be playing a game that you've

played for five six hours and you have one lapse in focus and you blunder and

you throw the entire game away and sometimes not just the entire game but the entire tournament now you can't place or do anything anymore so you just

feel those mistakes so strongly yeah there's no one to blame but yourself

are you as hard on yourself have you have you been about losing like before you became

super famous for streaming where you could be like well fuck this at least i can i can so i was really hard on myself and

i went to play a tournament in canada to try to qualify for the olympiad team

and i was like well i'm an adult now i'm not gonna feel emotional if i lose and then

i got there on the first day i think i was ranked like fourth in canada for for

females um and how long ago was this this was like uh earlier in the year actually

and i go and i lose to somebody lower rated on the first day and i think it was because i had blundered and i went

back to my room and i was like i am not an adult i'm not eating i'm not leaving this room i feel terrible and i know i

shouldn't but it just cuts so deep um and then i actually ended up qualifying

for the olympiad team but i didn't want to play because i didn't have enough time to train and the losses are so

painful that i was like it's not worth it yeah it's in high school and growing up i was i just remember weekends and i i

think being competitive in any sport again probably people relate to this versus like spending weekends crying and

even like alex said like punishing yourself because you're disappointed in yourself because you fight so hard and you prepare and you study and you're

like oh i yeah but that's once again on the right

side though when you're studying so hard and after like a four hour game and you actually are on

the opposite end and you win you feel like such a huge rush of dopamine and serotonin and you're like on a high from

the wind so there's also plus sides or you can turn this around but yeah like alex said like losing after preparing

for something and fighting on hours and hours is the worst feeling in the world did you ever get anything like that with

martial arts yeah so you know wrestling i wrestled all through high school in middle school

definitely so it's an individual sport i did a lot of individual sport tennis those kinds of things but i think even with wrestling and

tennis you're still on a team right you can still like there's still a camaraderie there i feel

like with chess especially go on your own with the tournaments like it you really are alone but i i mean i always

personally just had us like a very self-critical mind in general i would not that's one of the reasons i decided

not to play chess because uh i think when i was really young i met

somebody uh who was able to play blindfold chess yeah they were teaching me they were

laying in there on the couch trash drinking and smoking and they were sounds like a russian yeah

exactly um there are now a faculty somewhere in the united states i forget

where but he um making jokes talking to others and he would move the pieces

like he would yell across the room and i remember thinking that

if a person is able to do that then that kind of world you can live in

inside your mind that becomes the chess board to me that meant like the chess board is not just out here it could be

in here and you could do these beauty you can create these beautiful patterns in your mind i thought like

i had such a strong pull towards that or where i had to decide either i'm

gonna dedicate everything to this or not uh you can't do half-assed and then i

that's when i decided um to walk away from it because i had so much other beautiful things in my life i

loved mathematics i loved just everything was beautiful to me i thought chess

would pull me all in and there was nothing like it i think in my

whole life since then i think it's such a dangerous addiction it's such a beautiful addiction but it's

a dangerous one depending on what your mind is like it reminds me of something i thought of before i stopped competing as much and

i'd look at people and think imagine being so intelligent that you could become a

grand master and yet only spending the rest of your life being a grandmaster because it's one of those things where

it does require a lot of mental power but by doing chess you're not going to be able to explore other subjects deeply

yeah and not in a way that is is bad necessarily more in admiration and

wondering what else could have been because i've just seen people get to these levels of obsession where it's all

they want to do and they're grandmasters but they're not even top players so they're never going to make a living out of it they'll make like maybe 30 40k

your max they can't even focus on their competitive chess because they have to supplement it by you know teaching and

doing things they don't like and it's just because of how strong of an obsession it can be because it truly is

very intellectually rewarding and i think that's what people are addicted to and the self-improvement but

you can get that from a lot of other things as well well i think for me what i was inspired by that stuck with me is that

a human being could be so good at

one thing right to me that person on the college drinking so on i i assumed he was the best chess player

in the world like that to be able to play inside your head right uh

it just felt like a feat that's incredible and so i fell in love with the idea that i hope

to be something like that in my life at something it's it would be pretty cool to be really good at one thing and like

life in some sense is a search for the things that you could be that good at i didn't

even think about like how much money does it make or any of that is can i fall in love with something

and make it a life pursuit where i can be damn good at it and the being damn good at it

is the source of enjoyment not not like um not to win because you want to win a

tournament or win because uh like you just want to be better somebody else no it's for the beauty of the game

itself or the beauty of the activity itself and then you realize that that's one of the compelling things about chess

it is a game with rules and you can win if you want to be really damn good in

some aspect of life like that it's it's harder it's a harder and weirder pursuit don't

you feel like you kind of did that with computer science or ai related things like getting that level of

damn good that's one of the cool things about ai and

robotics or intellectual pursuits or scientific pursuits is you can spend until you're 80 doing it so i'm in the

early days of that one of the thing reasons i came to texas one of the reasons

i didn't want to pursue an academic career at mit is i want to build a company

and so that i'm in the early days of that ai company and so it's an open

world to see if i'm actually going to be good at it but the thing that's there

that i've been cognizant of my whole life is that i have a passion for it something within me

draws me to that thing and you have to listen to that to that voice so with chess

you're fucked unless you like early on are really training really hard

i think life is more forgiving you can be you can be world-class at a

thing after after making a lot of mistakes and after spending the first

few decades of your life doing something completely different in chess it's like um it's like an olympic sport like

there's no perfection is a requirement as a necessity

what do you think is that pursuit for you like why did you decide to stream

what what drew you i like these questions that were really getting deep yeah this is like a therapy session i

mean what um isn't it terrifying to be in front of a camera well it's terrifying to be in front of

five cameras instead of corrections six six okay more terrifying for me oh yeah

try to remember if i actually turn them all i'm like i mentioned to you off mike i'm still

suffering from a bit of ptsd after uh screwing up a recording of magnus i i

uh he had to console me because that was the thing is i

felt okay you want to you want to build robots if you can't get a camera to even run

correctly how are you going to do anything else in life oh no don't let it spiral like that

it was it was spiraling hard yeah and i was just laying there and just just feeling sorry for myself but i think

that feeling by the way and a small tangent is really useful like yeah i feel like a lot of growing

happens when you feel shitty as long as long as you can get out of it like don't let it spiral like indefinitely

but just feeling really really shitty about everything in my life like i was having an existential crisis like how i

how will i be able to do anything at all like this you're a giant failure all those kinds of negative voices

um but i think i made some good decisions in the in the week after that

do you think you couldn't have made those decisions if you were less hard on yourself me personally

no i'm too lazy okay so you really need to be angry at yourself enough to go and do whatever

yeah it's not even angry it's just upset of being self-critical like also for me personally because i don't

have proclivities for depression i

have a lot more uh room to feel extremely shitty about myself

uh so if you if you're somebody that can get stuck in that place like clinically

depressed you have to be really really careful you have to notice the triggers you don't want to get into that place but for me

just looking empirically feeling shitty has always been productive

like it makes me long-term happier ultimately it makes me more grateful to

be alive it helps me grow all those kinds of things so i kind of uh

embrace it otherwise i feel like i will never do anything i have to feel shitty but that's not a thing

i prescribed to others there's a there's a famous professor at mit his name is marvin minsky

and uh when he was giving advice about like to the students he said the secret to my success was

that i always hated everything uh i did in in the past

so always sort of being self-critical about everything you've accomplished never really take a moment of gratitude

and i think for a lot of people that hear that that's not good you should be you should like take a pause and be

grateful but it really worked for him so you know it's a choice you have to make

it reminds me of the quote be happy but never satisfied where you can have a positive spin and still

want to improve yourself but yeah um

like uh when did you decide to take a step in the spotlight that terrifying

spotlight of the internet it was actually my senior year of college and i was really busy with work

and school and chess was kind of like this lost love and the interesting thing is that

the longer i don't play chess the more i kind of miss playing it casually and enjoy it more because then i start

looking at it with fresh eyes but i didn't have time to play tournaments so i started streaming online because it

was more social than just playing strangers on the internet without knowing anything about who they are

and i started slowly growing a community and got in touch with chess.com pretty

quickly too so then it was this hobby that i would do once a week every thursday at 8pm and it was one of the

things that brought me a lot of joy and actually i speaking of depression did struggle for

with you know at least 10 years of my life and it was one of those things where chess and streaming was such a

distraction and it brought me such great joy that i just kept doing it because i really really liked it um and then

i was working on something that didn't pan out and decided to go and take a

risk and just stream full-time which you know seemed a little bit weird at

the moment but was that terrifying that leap it was terrifying but i had taken so

many terrifying leaps in the past and they didn't and you know the last two hadn't worked out but i was like well

i'll get it eventually so somehow having failed before and going through failure and knowing that

it'll be okay made me more likely to just try something that was a very very weird job

goodbye camera i thought it died yeah the the camera that we don't need it oh but one of the things luckily we have

another five yeah i know like this is where this triggers the spiral alexis

it's still it's still somehow awake um

is there advice you can give about the dark places you've gone in your mind the depression you suffered from how to

get out from your own from your own story whenever i go to those really dark

places the scariest thing is that it feels like i will never get rid of this

feeling and it is very overwhelming

and i just have to kind of look back over time spans and remember that every

single time i have got through it and remind myself that it is just temporary and that has been the most helpful thing

for me because i just try to combat the scariest thing about it

and then believe have faith that it's gonna like this will go away and take action obviously to make sure it goes away and

i've also tried to spin it as depression is one of the hardest things i've had to deal with but also one of the biggest

motivators because if i just am left with my own brain i get very depressed then i really like

working or focusing on things so it actually pushed me to you know try to focus on school try to focus on chess

focus on whatever i'm doing and also if i'm feeling really bad then there's probably something a little bit off and

i use it as a signal and try to think of it as okay this is just a sign that there's things that could be improved

for long term what about you andrea have you gone to dark places in your mind

i'd say i my family like like i see alex going through this my mom also has very

serious depression luckily i got the genes where i don't go through that serious

level of depression that they do i say mine is much more temporarily so it's more similar to what what i was feeling

when i was exactly feeling shitty here he is yes exactly where like but i know that it's not something that's clinical

and that's just a genetic thing or a mental thing where as i know it's more serious for like my

family members um and i did relate a lot with you where you're saying where that really pushes you and i felt that a lot

through content where you just kind of feel hopeless and kind of like an existential crisis

where i don't like the content i'm doing and that's what pushes me to like okay you have no choice but to try something

that now you're going to be passionate about because otherwise you're going to be stuck in this never-ending cycle um so it does it's short-term and then um

it helps me come up with the things that i enjoy the most content-wise and it also long-term taught me just how to

have a more balanced life like doing small things that make me happier on a daily basis to like working out to

eating healthier which i notice when i don't do for weeks i just get a lot more depressed

what has playing chess taught you about life has

hasn't made you better at life in any kind of way or has it made you worse you know a lot of people kind of romanticize

the idea that chess is kind of like life or life is kind of like chess and becoming better at making decisions

on the chess board is going to make you better at making decisions in life is there some truth to that

i always shy away from these comparisons with chess and life

um because yeah it has both positives and negatives so one thing it really helps

develop from an early age is having an analytical mind but then you could also get like paralysis of analysis where

you've just thought of everything to death and you're moving too slowly when you just have to keep going forward

because there's not a great path ahead so it's more like exercising your brain

and staying sharp and then also applying that to other things whereas if instead of playing chess or watching tv or

something like that you'd probably end up being less sharp yeah i used to

in high school i'd always preach like ah chess transfers for life skills at college i would teach

i taught chess for juvenile department for special education school i had site studies in prisons where like oh playing

chess helped them with x and for your kids it helps with teamwork and thinking over life choices and now that i'm older

i don't believe in any of that bs but um i do think that the process of

working really hard at something which takes really long to see results and you have to be really dedicated and like i

remember in high school and in middle school well all my friends they were having fun on the weekends and i'd have

to be there studying towers of chess a day and knowing one day will pay off but for like two three years nothing paid

off kind of learning that type of patience with anything it's like you know like getting a real job i can't say

i ever really worked a real job in my life since i went straight into streaming and i got to work for myself

but i'd say it's what people go to college for like they learn how to live in the real world and i'd say that that's what chess taught me

as a kid when you're streaming when you're when you're doing the the creative work do

you feel lonely so a bunch of creators talk about sort of the it's it's counterintuitive because

you're famous now but it's you know sort of not quite but

we're very lucky to have each other so is that the source of the the comfort and the

like is there some sense where it's isolating to have these personalities they have to do to always be having fun being wild

and so on or is it actually the opposite like is it a source of comfort to know that there's so many cool people out there

that are giving you their love and it started as a source of comfort

because it started with a very small community who would be something it would be around 200 to 300 viewers and

you know only like 30 to 40 of them would actually chat actively so you felt like it was a community not an audience

so you like knew them personally almost yeah exactly and it was people who were interested in chess um and i would

really enjoy that and then as you know we started growing bigger the audience kind of changed where

they're not there for you personally they're there while you're entertaining um and it

changed for me and i ended up being a lot more self-conscious of things online and started even thinking of myself more

like a product than a human being when i'm online because i had to brand yes exactly otherwise you just start taking

everything personally that people comment about you and it's based off of very small

i see so it was almost a kind of a defense mechanism exactly and it took time to get enough

because even if you have tough skin eventually it gets to you when you're online every single day listening to you

know thousands of people's feedback on you i think the loneliest part of being

creator is going through burnout which everyone is just it's bound to happen um

which is why i think we're very lucky that we have each other because right it's a numbers game and you're viral and

trendy at one point and then you have to fall and then there's months where you're just grinding and i just every

day i'm like andrea we're relevant that's that's really like the worst part

of being creative and figuring out how to get over that hump but makes me very grateful that i have my sister because i know that i'm not the only person going

through it um and yeah i know that most of my creator friends feel very lonely in that process

because they don't have someone who's their family and their business partner and they're working by each other side by side you kind of tie in your

self-worth to your job and your content and maybe even more extremely than other jobs because you also are

the entire company in the entire product so when things are going well or when things are not you just need to be

careful to not reflect like oh i am doing bad i am better other than the trends have now changed there's outside

things we're going to keep going and this is just the normal waves which is how we think about it now and also just

about are we enjoying it this is this what we want to make but we were stuck in the the camp for a

while when we 10xed our viewership um after the pandemic because people were home and

playing chess and then of course that dropped by like 70 and then you see that and you're trying your best um and you

just kind of have to deal with it and be like okay i'm just gonna keep persevering and maybe it'll get better

that's so fascinating i mean this is a struggle of sorts in the 21st century

of like how to be an artist how to be a creator how to be an interesting mind

in response to this algorithm i'm telling you turning off views and likes is really good i don't look at twitch

views for that reason and i get obsessed with the numbers too and i know andrea does but for me

what i try now is to be more focused in the moment but andreas somehow can do it even with the views

so you just you get you have fun with it it's like ooh number one i'm too much of like a given to the temporary

satisfaction like i like seeing i'd like knowing that if something happens right now viewership's going to boost by a

couple hundred and seeing that i'm right of course but what about when the viewers started exactly well and i

always like you just have this intuition now and but i think also the reason that it doesn't affect me so much is when we

first started our content journey we were only twitch streamers and we our livelihood were based on twitch viewers

but now like i've learned how to recycle that content into like youtube and shorts and other things where i know

like okay if this stream does badly there's so many more things you can do that also just have a much larger output

so it doesn't get to me as much as it did do you ever feel that with your podcast or do you feel like it's been authentic

since the start no so there's there's a million things to say there so one

is there's a reason i stopped taking a salary at mit

and moved to texas is i wanted my bank account to go to zero because i do my best with my back against the wall so

one of the comforts i have is i don't care if this podcast is popular or not i wanted to not be popular so i don't

want it to make money failing lex yeah i want i want to i mean i just do best when i'm um

more desperate that's like one thing to say seems like a reoccurring theme with how you build up your greatest work

which is honestly very respectable yeah so uh

i thank you that's just like uh i would recommend it right thank you for finding it don't try

it the silver lining for an unhealthy um mental state um

but the other thing is i was very conscious just like with chess and those kinds of things

that i love numbers and i i would be if i paid attention

if i tried to be somebody at their best like a mr beast who

uh really pays attention to numbers i would just not i'd be become destroyed by it

the highs and lows of it and i just don't think i'll be creating the best work

uh possible uh but one of the i mean they're one of the big benefits of a podcast

it's listeners and there's an intimacy with the voice and i think

that is much more stable and a deeper and more meaningful connection than youtube youtube is a

fickle mistress it's like it's a weird drug that like

uh it really wants you very addicting feedback loops when you have a video that's number one out of ten yeah oh my

god the the adrenaline you get and then the the thing i really don't like also is the world

uh like will introduce you as a person that has a video on youtube

with some x number of views like the world wants you to be addicted to these numbers

because they associate it with having done a good job yeah because that's what people think views are even if it's not

right and because and primarily because they don't have any other signal of what's a good job i think the much

better signal is people that are close to you your family your colleagues that say wow that was cool i listened to that

that was really i didn't know this this was really powerful this is really moving and so on

but definitely i'm not terrified of numbers because i i feel like just like i said i'd rather be um

i would rather be a stanley kubrick right you you'd rather create great

art like um not to be pretentious but the best possible thing you can create whatever

the beauty that's the capacity for creating beauty that's in you i would like to maximize that and i feel like

for some people like mr beast i think those are perfectly aligned because he just loves the most epic

thing possible but not for everybody i think there's a lot of people for whom that's not perfectly aligned

and so i'm definitely one of those and i'm still really confused why anybody listens to this anyway

um but that's also something i guess you're trying to find trying to figure out i i get very afraid

of ever becoming someone who just makes junk food content where you can't stop

while you're in the moment and it has all of your attention but when you're done it didn't really bring any value to

your life which is something that i think the algorithm still does really reward

and making sure that as we are learning how to create better content it's still something that is going to be meaningful

long term well ultimately you know you inspire a lot of young people

uh this yeah those are the best when i get messages from people who are like i played you a year ago and my rating was

1400 and now i'm 1900 i'd like to challenge you again it's a 14 year old writing a former email those things are

always very very fun to get and even just outside of chess it's just empowering to see and like for young

women too to see that kind of thing and you guys are um being yourself

and making money from being yourself and having fun and like growing as human beings which i think is really inspiring for

people to see um so in that sense it's really rewarding and then like the way i think about it is um

there is some benefit of doing entertaining type of stuff so that you get the

um kind of like mr beast does with philanthropy right the bigger mr beast

becomes the more effective he is at actually doing positive impact on the world so right those things are tied uh

tied together but of course with with podcasts you guys well maybe you have these kinds

of tense things but what kind of ideas what kind of people do platform

what kind of person um what kind of human being do you want to

be because you're actually becoming a person and um

a set of ideas in front of the public eye and you have to ask yourself that question really hard like really

seriously because uh if you're doing stuff in private you have the complete luxuries to try

shit out right i think you have less of a luxury to try shit out because the

internet can be vicious and punishing you for trying shit out and do you think that's sometimes a bad thing where you

have less freedom to make mistakes yeah you have two choices so one you put

up a wall and say i don't give a shit what people think i don't like doing that because i like

being fragile to the world keeping my sort of wearing my heart on my sleeve uh or the other one yeah you have to be

you have to you have to actually think through what you're gonna say you have to think of like

what do i believe you have to be more serious about um what you put out there

it's annoying but it's also actually you should have always been doing that you should be deliberate with your

actions and your words um but i don't know it's uh

but some of it it's such a balance because some of my favorite people are brilliant

people that allow themselves to act ridiculous and be silly elon musk who's

become a good friend is the silliest human of all i mean he's incredibly

uh brilliant and productive and so on but allows themselves to be silly and that that's also inspiring to people

like you don't have to be perfect you don't have to you can be a weird a giant weird mess

and it's okay it's a it's a balance i think when you start to delve into political topics into topics that

really get tense for people then you have to be a little bit more careful and deliberate um but it's also wise to stay stay the

hell away from those topics in general uh like i mentioned to you offline somebody i have been debating whether i want to

talk to nas kuryakin on the chessboard because you know chess is just a game but

throughout the history of the 20th century it was played between the russians and the

americans and so on where they were at war cold or hot war

and those are interesting those those are interesting um conversations to be had at the olympics

and so on it's not just a game it's some sense it's like a mini war

and so i have to decide whether i want to talk to to him or not and those kinds of things you have to make those kinds

of decisions for now you guys are not playing chess with donald trump or obama or so on

we are not right now no how long is a stream like a few hours right now they're two to three hours

when i was first streaming i'd stream for like six hours a day a day at least usually yeah for like seven six to seven

days just like a talking one no i would be playing chess the entire time while talking and

when i started streaming uh that's kind of how everybody blows up on twitch you're just putting in crazy

hours and you're always there it's not about making the best content it's about letting people feel like they're hanging

out with you and just being on as much as you can but i ended up feeling very burnt out

because it's hard to be your best self when you're in front of a camera for that long because you

do get scared of going into places where you want to learn but you might not be the best in because it's harder to learn

in public than do something that like yeah we're better than 99 of our viewers at chess so that's a lot less scary than

trying to play a game that you're bad at or discuss topics that you're interested in

yeah be have the beginner's mind and be dumb at something right yeah which is where the

fun is and you get to learn together but people punish you for it on the internet um what about you

andrea yeah i think like alex said at the beginning when we were grinding a lot you don't really even have time for

much of a private life because you're streaming every hour of your life and people want it like

the appeal of streamers it's called like being parasocial where you feel like they're your friend and they like it

because they want you to share everything about your life um really the main challenge for me

at first when trying to prioritize uh quantity over quality which we're not

doing anymore was realizing that i can't turn everything i'm interested in and every passion into content

before i'm like well i must stream more but i like music and i like playing piano and i like reading into these

topics and i like fitness and then i try to live stream all of it and that's just

at some point it's like just enjoy your time off for those hobbies and prioritize what you're good at because

that's just going to be better for the channel overall so that was a learning lesson for sure it's nice because there

are some intersections when i have tried new things that i really enjoy and it pays off but that's more uh less often

so it's more like you can be yourself but only specific parts of yourself online and

the rest sometimes it's nice to just keep private and feel that you could just

give it your 100 freedom see i i i feel like um

i try to be the exact same person on podcasts as in private life i really don't like

hiding anything but you're also a generalist right where you have people with all topics for us we built our

audience off of very specific things so people sometimes feel like even at the start when we started playing less chess

they're like i subbed for chess why are you not playing chess exactly people are tuning in for an

interesting conversation on a bunch of topics so like the more you are yourself the better it is but it is very hard

when you build your brand on like one type of gaming content build your brand

but yeah the way you become a journalist is you slowly expand it's like uh like uh

expanded checkers i guess that's that's a downward uh

maybe poker poker yeah exactly poker but also just the ideas the space of ideas

and one of the cool things about chess is when you're talking over the chessboard you're it's a kind of podcast you know

that is actually an idea we've had with playing chess while also doing a podcast and talking with people it's kind of

like an ice breaker where you're also focusing on the game at the same time but you know we are slowly evolving and

we're doing more things like one thing we wanted to do is spend less time in front of the computer so now we're doing

a chess travel show where we go to different countries and look at the chess culture so it actually feels like we're doing things that we would want to

do and explore anyway and maybe it's not as much in the idea space which we both

enjoy and do a lot in our own free time but in the sharing and cool experiences with our audience that we actually want to do

what do you look forward to going we're going to romania um on september 9th and i think this is the

most exciting for me because we're going back to you know the country where our entire family is from

where our grandmother taught our dad who taught us how to play chess it has a very strong chess culture so it'll be

very unique to go back and see um how everything is when we haven't been back for a very long time and for

romanians like it's very rare when there's like a famous romanian who accomplishes something which is why like

right now andrew tate's the most famous romanian but he's banned for a bad reason exactly and there's like

something very special about romanian pride and when we meet fellow romanians in the us like it's just an amazing

connection and like i hear the way my dad talk about like for example nadia who was a famous romanian gymnast

and he's like yeah like romania we sucked at everything but when she won the olympics for gymnasts every kid on

the street was doing gymnastics because it's very rare that they make it to that level of success i'm not saying that we're super successful super famous but

it is really cool to meet other romanians through chess because it's a very special bond you you you feel

like it's a community and like you belong yeah you can't get that anywhere else

let me ask your opinion since you mentioned him andrew tate you're both women successful women you're both

creators so andrew t is an example of somebody that has become exceptionally successful

at galvanizing public attention but he's also

from any perspective of misogynist so let me ask a personal question do you think i should talk to him on

this podcast how would you feel as a fan

as somebody i'm talking to the great alex and andrea bortes and the next

episode is with andrew tay i think it's a double-edged sword and most of these things are not as black

and white as they seem you know because on one hand i don't agree with his beliefs and i think he

said a lot of things that are very hurtful and that influence people's opinions um

at the same time talking to someone through that and trying to get to the

root of it and how much of it he used just as a social media tactic to maybe

change the opinion of people who have been so influenced by him towards something that is maybe more

understanding towards women or things like that could do some good but at the same time

platforming someone like that and giving them more attention also signals to other people who have a platform that

it's okay so it's kind of weighing the pluses and the minuses and it's a very tough decision because it's not clear

and uh the thing about the internet when you make the wrong decision you're gonna pay for it right

that's the thing like personally and it is it is funny like i think the whole way rose to fame is just the

growth hack and i've seen other people do it where like you just say kind of i don't

honestly i don't really listen to his content because i just find it so dumb but i think he knows that by saying the

dumbest most controversial things that's like a quick rise to fame and i think surface

level like he can really hold it up but that's why i would honestly enjoy tuning into a conversation where you're really

breaking down to the core of those beliefs and i think like the young kids who look up to him and when you actually

hear someone challenging it could actually be helpful for people but at the same time

it's a lot of bad publicity people see your podcast they say wow like they don't if they don't know you and they

don't know why you're interviewing him and they don't listen they'll see that and that 100 think it's for the other reason

but i'm also afraid of a society where you can't have discourse with people you don't dis with people you disagree with

and even though i don't like andrew tate i think the fact that he got banned from all the platforms is kind of scary

because it sets a precedent and you always have to ask yourself would this be ethical if i was on the other side

and even things with a president like trump even if let's say you're somebody who was on the left if that would have

happened to a leftist president how would you feel would you think that's morally ethical so

that is something that i think is important we try to find ways to have conversations and

reach some mutual understanding and try instead of just amplifying the worst about every human being

well so one of the major reasons i'm struggling with is because i really

talking to brilliant women i think it's also a lot of women reached out to me saying like

it is what it is but they're inspired when the female guest is on yeah and to me if i talk to somebody like andrew day

even if i have a really hard hitting i think it could be a very good conversation

that lessens the likelihood that a brilliant powerful female will go on

the show they'll never they'll never watch it but the thing we're doing the society is we

put labels on each other well lex is the person that platforms misogynist

i did a thing where um joe rogan got in in trouble over an

n-word uh controversy earlier in the year and joe's a good friend of mine and i

said that i stand with joe that he's not a racist or something like that and

within certain communities i'm now somebody who's an apologist for racists

right or a racist myself uh that kind of thing and we put labels without ever listening to the content without ever

uh sort of actually just even the very simple step or seems to be difficult of like

taking on the best possible interpretation of what a person said and giving him the benefit of the doubt

and having empathy for another person so you have to play in this field where people assign labels to each other

and uh it's difficult but ultimately i believe i hope that good conversations

is a way to like a greater understanding for people to um grow together as a society and improve

and learn the lessons the mistakes of the past but you also have to play this game where people just like putting

labels on each other and canceling each other over those or that guy said one thing nice about donald trump

he must be a far-right nazi or or the opposite that this person

um says something nice about the vaccine he must be a far left um whatever because

apologist for whatever for fauci um or most of us i think are ultimately in

the middle it's a weird it's a weird thing but i think uh and it's also painful on a personal level like

people people have written to me about things like single words

half sentences that i've said about either putin or zelensky where they have hate towards me because

of what i said either both directions i have now accumulated very passionate people

that some call me a putin apologist some call me as a landscape apologist and it hurts

to given how much i have family there how much i've seen of suffering there and to

carry that burden over time and not let it destroy you is tough so like do you want to take on another thing like that

when you have conversations right or can i just talk to awesome people like you too

where it's not we're not controversial it's or you're interesting you're fascinating you're inspiring you're like

fun you know not all those difficult things that come with more difficult conversations right

but somebody has to be making those difficult decisions and

challenging the notions that we should cancel someone just for slightly disagreeing with us and it's

very hard to take that on personally and i think that's a huge part of it when you know it's something you're doing for

the right reasons and you're getting a lot of people coming and misinterpreting it it's very painful

but i think you have to ask yourself long term if when you made that decision you

ultimately thought it would be better or worse for your listeners to know that conversation and then if you can sleep

with it at night take the risk yeah when actually when i talk to people that uh especially like astrophysicists and you

realize how tiny we are right how incredible like how huge the universe is like you don't it doesn't matter you can

do anything you could like um you can walk around naked talk shit to people do whatever the hell

and uh actually modern social media people will just like forget it's like it's ultimately liberating just try to

do at least from my perspective the best possible thing for the world you can take big risks it doesn't matter and

that's the other thing with being canceled nowadays because everyone's attention is much more short-sighted you

can get cancelled and then it'll blow over in three days and you actually see things like this on twitch very often where people just have

outbursts of outrage and they come into your chat and they're all spamming and saying mean things and then three days

after and of course they're not actually ever serious things they're usually like things clipped of any streamers and like

their worst moments but then people forget about it pretty soon after so you're able to accept that

like when somebody's being shitty to you for a day uh yeah i mean i still get sometimes emotional about it especially

when i'm like oh wow like these things are being said are not true or like this is clearly taken out of context but i've

just accepted that it's part of the job and if i am trying my best and i am

trying things with as good intentions as possible then i just try to learn every time that happens and be like okay what

could i do better and what is just part of the job well let's start some controversy who's

the greatest chess player of all time uh is it magnus carlsen is the guerrilla

caspar visit somebody else bobby fischer do you have a favorite alex

so whenever i hear this question i interpret it in a very specific way

where it's not who was the most talented chess player or who had the most impact on the chess world but who is the

greatest at playing chess where if you were putting all of these players at

their peak who would be the best and you know we're kind of living in a world where obviously humans are

becoming more like cyborgs and their tools make them a lot more powerful yes

um and the computer is the most powerful tool for chess that we've ever witnessed and

the top players now someone like magnus carlsen or gary kasparov if they were going to go towards people like you know

even lasker or bobby fischer back in the day lasker he was world champion for 27

years he was the best in his field by far but would he be able to stand up to someone like magnus carlson who has had

these tools i don't think so so most chess players have said gary

kasparov um and i think even magnus has said that in the past but i like to

think of it as magnus in his peak and gary at his peak and because magnus was able to live more in a computer era i

feel like so far he's the greatest of all time and some studies say things like how there's raiding inflation but i

looked into some of them and they basically calculated people's um play in

over the years and it seems that there hasn't been inflation people are just getting better and i think it's because you have better tools at chess

and also the one one of the cases what's your i was gonna say i actually i disagree

with that good make it interesting i think i would judge the greatest like greatest player

of all time in relative to the time that they lived in and magnus although

he is technically the strongest chess player in history that is because he had computers to study chess with and of

course if you compare him to like gary kasparov he plays most like stockfish but gary

kasparov at his time he beat more players of his skill level than magnus

did magnus loses more often he also of course held the belt for 20 years more so i'd say actually because gary lacked

the help of computers to study chess and overall performed better against players

of his skill level i think he would be number one nice yeah but i mean the case that people

make for magnus on many i mean what alex said but but also

magnus plays a lot and he doesn't he plays a lot blitz bullet and

like he puts he gets drunk and like he's really putting himself out there

and in all kinds of conditions and he's able to dominate in a lot of them we get to see many of the like losses of

blunders and all that kind of stuff because he just puts himself out there and i think uh caspar was much more like

i never saw him play drunk right and it's very focused on the world championship is very like

um very limited number of games and very focused on winning and so there's some aspect to the versatility

the aggressive play the fun the all of that that i think you have to give credit to

100 in terms of just the the the scope the scale of the variety of genius

exhibited by magnus and he might not even be done yet i don't know if you'll ever hit 2 900 but we can't judge yet

because he's not at the peak of his career potentially what do you think about him not playing world championship isn't that like isn't that wild the

entirety of the history of chess in the 20th century going like meh

let's walking away from this one tournament that seems to be at the center of chess

um what do you think about that decision i mean you can't help but be disappointed as a chess fan who wants to

see the best player in the world defend his title but i also understand it on a personal

level and not feeling as satisfied when you're going to the world championship and have

to having to defend against people who are less strong than you and also imagine winning world championships and not

feeling a joy out of that yeah so maybe by not doing that and focusing instead on a goal like 2 900

he'll be more likely to accomplish it because he's focusing on what actually motivates him to play

chess but i do think that it will hurt how we judge

the next world champion i think it won't change him being the best player in the world

and for someone to replace him even let's say like nepo versus sting even if

one of them win and right on some stance it does lower the merit because now who

has the world chess championship title isn't actually the best player in the world and that has happened before in

the past but still going to take him the same effort to prove when they would

pass him like 10 20 years to become stronger than magnus so i don't think it changes the skill level that it takes to

become the best chess player in the world i think for chess fans it's very disappointing but i think in the overall

like grand scheme of like the public view to people who don't really so like you know what breaks the popular

culture and you think of what names people know who don't play chess like bobby fischer

did it most people know casper over magnus it takes the same ability and talent and that doesn't change i think

it does change though if you're playing a player who's not as strong but i i see your point as well and i

know we differ on this like i heard you asked magnus but what is your take on it

well listen his answer is kind of brilliant which he's not saying he's he's bored of the

world championship he's bored of a process that doesn't determine the best player

like and it's too anxiety-inducing to him to have a small number of games he's

he's he doesn't mind losing which is really fascinating to a better player right

or somebody who's his level he's more anxious about losing to um

a weaker player the weaker player because of the small sample size now if like poker players had that anxiety they

would never play at all right that's the world series of poker you you get to lose against weaker players

all the time that's the throw of the dice but um that's an interesting perspective that he would love to play 20 30 40

games in the world championship but then he would enjoy it much more and also play shorter games because they

emphasize the um like pure chess actually being able to

like like much more variety in the middle game just to see a bunch of chaos and

see how you're able to compute calculate and intuition all that kind of stuff and yeah that's beautiful

i wish the chess world would step up and meet him in a place that makes sense

you know change the world championship so feed it changing it somehow that a loss for that or having

other really respected tournaments that become like an annual thing that step up to that

or more kind of online youtube type of competitions which i think they're trying to do more

and more like the crypto cup and all those kinds of things yeah and the grand tour the graduate does play in which takes a lot

of the top players and they do it online in shorter formats but there's you know and so that's his

perspective my perhaps narrow perspective as i

romanticize the olympic games and those are every four years and the and the world championships

because they're rare because the sample size is so small that's where the magic happens everything's on the line for

you know for people that spend their whole life 20 years of dedication

everything you have every minute of the day is spent for that moment you think about like gymnastics at the olympic

games there's certain sports where a single mistake and you're fucked and that stress that pressure

it can it can um it can break people or it can create

magic like a person that's the underdog has the best night of their life or the

person that's been dominating for years all of a sudden slips up that drama from a human perspective is beautiful so i

still like the world championships but then again looking at all the draws

looking at like well the magic isn't quite there

so to me when i see faster games of chess that's much more that's much more beautiful so but that i

don't understand the game of chess deeply enough to know like does it have to be so um

so many draws like is there a way to create a more dynamic chess and he talked about random

chess like with a random starting position that's really interesting but then of course that that's like then you do have to play

hundreds of games and that kind of stuff right uh so i but i think

it's great that the world number one is um

struggling with these questions because he's in the position he has the leverage to actually change the game of

chess as it's publicly seen as publicly played so it's um it's interesting he's still

young enough to to dominate for quite a long time if he wants so i don't know i you know i do with

kasparov the the the fight between nations i i hope these have the world championship

and i hope there's a i hope he's still part of it somehow i hope he changes his mind

and comes back comes back some kind of dramatic thing i don't know but it is it is his heart is not in it

and then um and then that's not beautiful to see

right uh yeah it is beautiful

that the thing he wants is a great game of chess against an opponent that's his

level or better and that's that's great that he's coming from that place but i hope he comes back

tomorrow because the the world championship is uh is a special thing in any sport

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

no i hope that the best people in the world the two best people in the world are the

ones that sit down but the person that wins is the person that that's the magic of it nobody knows

who's going to win i think magnus is so he he really wants the best person to

win like the the that's why he wants the large sample size but to me there's some magic to it

the the stress of it the the drama of it that's all part of the game like it's

not just about the purity of the game like the the calculation

the pure chess of it it's also like the drama like the yeah the the pressure the drama all

of it the shit talking if it gets to you the mind games yeah this is the part that's fun to watch but less fun to be playing

to be but that's why it's great who can melt who can rise under that pressure and who melts under that pressure

uh what there's a lot of people to look up to you like they're inspired by you because you've taken a kind of

non-linear path through life is there any advice you have for people like in high school today

that are trying to figure out what they want to do do they want to go to stanford do they want to pursue a career

um in i don't know uh in industry or or go kind of the path you guys have

taken which is have the ability to do all of that and still choose to make the thing that you're passionate

about your your life i always like the calculated risks approach where

when you're younger it's okay to take more risks because you have a lot more time but there has to be a reason why you're

doing that particular risk is it something that you've spent a lot of time already really passionate and working on or is it just something

that's trendy and you want to do it because you don't have a better option and that's actually similar to what andrea did when she decided to go into

streaming instead of school yeah it was the reason i got into streaming because i was initially going

to go to college but the pandemics it was right the beginning of the pandemic and all my classes were online and i

never thought ever since i was 12 like my dream was school and i saw myself

nowhere else than going to university um and i just i thought of it and kind of weighed out the wrist i'm like well

if i take a gap year and i try streaming with my sister what do i have to lose i gain some experience working with someone who has

a lot more experience than i do um and then i can go back to school after and if i go to school right now i do

online classes for a year and that's something that i could do at any time so that's why it made a lot of sense for me to go into this

but of course this is also a very unique opportunity so i don't know how applicable but i do think overall the

calculated risk is a really good it's a life is like chess exactly maybe sometime exactly uh you're

also have you considered a career in professional fighting i saw you did a self-defense class these little jiu

jitsu did you see the 10 year old kid who throwing her through her yes and

apparently i could have broken a leg but it's actually funny like chest boxing is a thing and i have been doing a lot of

boxing like i physical activity is like honestly one of my favorite things to do and i have

been testing it out on content and we have a creative friend who's hosting a chess boxing tournament but there's no

woman who's could match me unfortunately because all the opponents are male yeah and i can't fight a guy um how does

chess boxing work so you do a round of chess and round of boxing and we actually did a training camp for it

before and of course like after you go into the ring is this real this seriously actually yeah we went to the

london chess boxing club and like after you've seen like videos i thought it was something you did in russia or something

no it's a real sport yeah real sport yeah no it's very cool but after you get really tired you're more likely to make

a mistake or something yeah there's probably good strategies like what do you want to

because some of it is a cardio thing do you want to work on your chest they do both it's very fun

but yeah from a content perspective i'm sure there's a lot of people that like and would love very entertaining we'd love to see

i don't want to see andrea getting hit that would be i would love to oh she doesn't get hit but i wouldn't get it

our roommate fought in a fight and she did end up winning but seeing her get hit i thought i was going to throw i

just think it was so cool she had no experience in boxing whatsoever and then coming from someone in the content world

where you start like waking up six days a week at six a.m and he's training every day like you know like a real

professional athlete i think like it's such a unique experience and also like a really test of how much you can really

commit to this and progress and i think that's really rewarding and did you ever end up doing the marathon with david

goggins that you were training i know i got injured but we're gonna do it soon that's on my uh uh bucket list just to

see what your limits are you're ready what did you do leading up to this

it's meant it's mental anyway oh yeah but i do run a lot to make sure like there's no um

like you know you have to be have a base level of fitness to make sure your body doesn't completely freak out but other

than that you know 50 plus miles is just about like uh taking it one step at a time and just

being able to deal with the suffering and all the voices the little voices that tell you all the excuses like

why are you doing this this blisters bleeding uh whatever whatever the

the thing that makes you want to stop just just shuts off sometimes it feels like you like pain

no well no no but the pain does seem to show the way to

progress so what you're talking about am i in my world something that's really hard and i

don't want to do that's usually the right thing to do and i i'm not saying that's a

that's like a universal truth it's just uh you know if there's a few doors to go into the one that i'd want to go into

least that's the one that usually is the right one afterwards i will learn something from

it uh the david gaga's thing i don't know that's listen i uh we're talking offline the different the conversation

with liv she's a very numerous calculated risk everything is planned i i go with the

heart i just i just go whatever the hell i think two years ago i woke up

it was summer i i decided to tweet i will do as many push-ups

i don't know why i did this but i i'll do as many push-ups and pull-ups as the sweet guest likes

something like that okay right and then uh that you got like

30 000. once you put it out on the internet you're held accountable for myself i

mean in some sense and then that's when i already was connected to david at that point but that's when he called

me and then they have to do it and then i did it was one of the hardest things

i've ever done i got it i i did it for seven days and i got injured so i did about a few

thousand so this is what got you to be injured this challenge no it's different i keep getting

keep getting injured doing some stuff but this particular thing i started doing the you don't realize that you have to really ramp up

so i got uh like overuse injury tendonitis on on the shoulder all the way down to the elbow

so i took like eight or nine days off and then started again and then it took about

31 days to do [Music] i the number was like

26 27 000. yeah because and i remember it took like

three four hours a day oh god yeah sounds like torture and not you know in

the constantly asking myself what am i doing in my life this is why you're single what's the

voice of my head this is what are you doing it's like face down on the carpet

like exhausted like what what because of a tweet what is this

did you record it or you just i did i did record it for myself okay now imagine doing this every day and that's

what it's like to be a twitch streamer just kidding right doing stupid things that was really important to me actually

to not make it into content um you know i recorded everything so maybe one day i could publish it i recorded it

mostly because it's really hard to count yeah when you get exhausted yeah like i

just so um you actually enter the zen place where uh with push-ups

where it's just like it's almost like like breathing you get into a rhythm and you could do quite a lot

but i wanted to make sure like if i actually get this done i want there to be evidence that i got

it done for myself so i can count it i had this idea that i would use machine learning to like automatically process

the video to count it but then like after like 10 days i didn't even give a shit what anyone thought it was

about me versus me i didn't even care lex versus lex yeah and then uh

yeah and dave was extremely supportive but that's when i realized like i really want to go head to head with him

um yeah this those kinds of people are beautiful they really challenge you to your limits whatever that is it's like

the thing is physical exercise is such an easy way to push yourself to your limit there's in all other walks of life

it's it's trickier to configure like how do you push yourself to your limits in chess it's hard to figure out but like

do you think it's ever dangerous yeah and that's what that's why it's beautiful

the danger you like the pain i don't like that your eyes lit up as i said yeah

like if you don't know how you're gonna get out of it you're gonna have to figure out something profound

about yourself and i mean one of the reasons i went to ukraine is i really wanted to

uh experience the hardship and

the intensity of war that people are experiencing so i can understand myself better i can understand them better so

the words that are leaving my mouth are grounded in a better understanding of who they are and i mean the the the

running a lot with david gong is is a much simpler thing to do um simpler way to understand something

about yourself about like the limits of human nature i think most growth happens with voluntary suffering or struggle

involuntary stuff that's that's where the dark trauma is created but i don't know well maybe maybe it is

maybe i'm just attracted to and what is that your mind does when you're going through this involuntary suffering

i think

it there's like stages first all the

excuses start coming like why are you doing this and then

you start to wonder like what what kind of person do you want to be so all the dreams you had all the

promise you made to yourself and to others all the ambitions you had that are haven't come yet realized somehow

that all becomes really intensely like visceral as as this struggle is happening and then

when all of that is allowed to pass from your mind you

have this clear appreciation of what you really love in life which is just like just living

just the moment the like the step at a time like it's i think what meditation does and it's most effective

it's just that pain is a as a catalyst for the meditative process i think for

me for me i don't know um magnus said there's no meaning to

life do you guys agree or no why are we here

i do not know why we're here but i do know that

having some kind of meaning that i give my own life makes it

a lot more motivating every day so i just try to focus on finding meaning within my own life even if i know it's

just self-imposed and then chess is a part of that

chess is a part of it maybe it was more so when i was younger because it was easier

to just feel like i want to improve as a person and to use chess to kind of measure some

kind of self-improvement and now it's more different than that and i think i

need to once again find what that you know northern star is basically i need to

have a why for why i'm doing things and then you i feel like i could do very hard things

what uh role does love play in the human condition

alex and andrea i'll let andrea start this one since i took the last sure

and yeah just to add my answer for the last one i i also kind of think well life is meaningless

but i like the stoic idea where that's something that you live to revolt against but for the second question

i have the revolt against the fundamental meaninglessness of life exactly

yeah it was what does love play what role does love play yeah in the human condition

the way i see it i love is a reason you want to share

experiences with other people that's how i see it like the people you really love you want to share the things

you're going through with them um the good and the bad yeah exactly

that's my simple take on love my take on it is that

part of what it is to be human is to be somebody who feels things emotionally and love

is one of the most intense feelings you can have um obviously there's the opposite of

that and there's things like hate but i think the love you feel for people like your parents and your friends and

romantic love in that moment is much more intense than in other situations

um and i think it's also just very unique to humans and that's

what i appreciate about it maybe that's the meaning of life maybe that's what the stoix is searching

for andrea alex thank you so much for this and thank you for an amazing conversation thank you for creating keep

creating and thank you for putting knowledge and love out there in the world thank you for having us

it was a pleasure and uh we're both big fans of your podcast so this was really exciting for us

thanks for listening to this conversation with alexandra and andrea botez to support this podcast please

check out our sponsors in the description and now let me leave you with some words from bobby fisher

chess is life thank you for listening and hope to see you next time