Behind the Bastards - Part One: Bobby Fischer: Chess Nazi
Aired: 2023-02-14
Duration: 01:22:56


=== Ladylike Trash Talk (01:50) ===

[00:00:00]  This is an iHeart podcast.
[00:00:02]  Guaranteed human.
[00:00:04]  On a recent episode of the podcast Money and Wealth with John O'Brien, I sit down with Tiffany the Budginista Alicia to talk about what it really takes to take control of your money.
[00:00:15]  What would that look like in our families if everyone was able to pass on wealth to the people when they're no longer here?
[00:00:21]  We break down budgeting, financial discipline, and how to build real wealth, starting with the mindset shifts too many of us were never ever taught.
[00:00:30]  If you've ever felt you didn't get the memo on money, this conversation is for you to hear more.
[00:00:36]  Listen to Money and Wealth with John O'Brien from the Black Effect Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
[00:00:46]  Will Farrell's Big Money Players and iHeart Podcast presents soccer moms.
[00:00:51]  So I'm Leanne.
[00:00:51]  Yeah.
[00:00:52]  This is my best friend Janet.
[00:00:53]  Hey.
[00:00:53]  And we have been joined at the hip since high school.
[00:00:55]  Absolutely.
[00:00:56]  A redacted amount of years later.
[00:00:58]  We're still joined at the hip.
[00:01:00]  Just a little bit bigger hips.
[00:01:01]  This is a podcast.
[00:01:02]  We're recording it as we tailgate our youth soccer games in the back of my Honda Odyssey with all the snacks and drinks.
[00:01:09]  Why did you get hard seltzer instead of beer?
[00:01:11]  Oh, they hit a BOGO.
[00:01:12]  Well, then you done.
[00:01:13]  Listen to soccer moms on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:01:18]  How much you wait, Wanda?
[00:01:19]  Right now?
[00:01:20]  I'm about 130.
[00:01:21]  I'm at 183.
[00:01:22]  We should race.
[00:01:22]  No, I want to leave here with my original hips.
[00:01:25]  On the podcast, The Match Up with Aaliyah, I pair prominent female athletes with unexpected guests.
[00:01:30]  On a recent episode, I sat down with undisputed boxing champ Clarissa Shields and comedian Wanda Sykes to talk about Wanda's new movie, Undercard, The Art of Trash Talk, and What It Really Means to Be Ladylike.
[00:01:40]  Open your free iHeartRadio app, search the matchup with Aaliyah, and listen now.
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=== Chess and Genocide (15:30) ===

[00:01:50]  Well, it's behind the bastards.
[00:01:54]  That's right.
[00:01:54]  It certainly is.
[00:01:56]  It certainly is.
[00:01:57]  You can't argue about that.
[00:01:58]  That is a fact that is as undeniable as it is undeniable that someone in the subreddit will decide to argue with us about that point because that is what they like to do.
[00:02:09]  I'm Robert Evans, host of Behind the Bastards, where just a couple of weeks ago, I made a comment that I will not be calling mummies mummified persons because I like mummies.
[00:02:18]  And somebody took offense at that on behalf of the mummies.
[00:02:22]  And I'm just going to tell you right now, Abbott and Costello versus the mummified person, terrible, terrible name for a movie.
[00:02:28]  So we're not going back.
[00:02:30]  Never.
[00:02:31]  Anyway, Mia, welcome to the program.
[00:02:33]  Thanks.
[00:02:34]  I'm here.
[00:02:35]  I'm going to make a non-legally actionable statement, which is that if I remember correctly, the Oriental Institute stole their entire, everything that's there was stolen.
[00:02:42]  So non-legally actionable.
[00:02:44]  This is just what I remember off the top of my head.
[00:02:46]  Yeah, it's one of those things.
[00:02:49]  People were like, well, you know, it's important to acknowledge the humanity of these mummies because a lot of them were stolen.
[00:02:56]  And I was like, no, no, no.
[00:02:57]  It's important to give them back because a lot of them were stolen.
[00:02:59]  We can still call them mummies.
[00:03:01]  The problem is not that people were calling them mummies.
[00:03:04]  It's that they stole dead people.
[00:03:06]  And then ate them.
[00:03:07]  Yeah.
[00:03:08]  Which is good.
[00:03:09]  The issue is not that we used the term mummy.
[00:03:12]  Just let it be, everybody.
[00:03:13]  Anyway, I'm very mummy-pilled.
[00:03:16]  I'm very glad you're mummy-pilled, but I'm going to introduce our guest, Mia Wong.
[00:03:21]  Mia.
[00:03:21]  Mia Wong, how are you doing today on the podcast that it is right now?
[00:03:26]  Normally you're on another podcast, but today you're on this one.
[00:03:30]  Yeah, I've hijacked this podcast in order to chess.
[00:03:35]  Oh, God.
[00:03:35]  Oh, God.
[00:03:36]  We're talking about chess again.
[00:03:38]  Yes, which I'm realizing because if it wasn't a hack and a fraud, I would have actually asked you before we did this, if you actually play chess at all.
[00:03:45]  Well, again, there's no works in chess.
[00:03:47]  So no, of course not.
[00:03:49]  No, when I was a child, I played a few games of chess, and then I was introduced to the true game of skill, Warhammer 40,000 3rd edition.
[00:03:59]  And so that's the only strategy game I ever needed.
[00:04:03]  You know, considering the minds of every single person in this story who plays chess, I think this is actually a wise decision.
[00:04:12]  It does something to your brain.
[00:04:13]  That's what I've learned after many, many hours of reading about chess players is something fundamentally breaks in your brain when you play chess for this long.
[00:04:22]  That does not surprise me.
[00:04:24]  It seems like the kind of thing that people get extremely into and then make it the entire core of their identity.
[00:04:34]  Much like Warhammer 40,000, but again, without orcs.
[00:04:37]  Yes, but similar numbers of fascists as we're going to find.
[00:04:40]  Yes, yes.
[00:04:42]  That also does not surprise me to hear.
[00:04:45]  Oh, God.
[00:04:46]  Okay.
[00:04:46]  So speaking of Nazis and fascists, one of the sort of elements of this story that is kind of important is getting some kind of understanding of how good these people are at chess.
[00:04:58]  Because none of the story makes any sense unless, you know, the people doing this are genuinely previously good.
[00:05:04]  So I'm going to start this with a brief tangent about a man named Miguel Nazdorf.
[00:05:10]  So Miguel Nasdorf is not a bastard.
[00:05:13]  He is very cool and his life story is very sad.
[00:05:17]  He was born to a Jewish family in Poland in 1910, which is...
[00:05:20]  Oh, that's not going to go well.
[00:05:22]  So yeah, you tell us how this is going to go.
[00:05:24]  Oh, boy.
[00:05:27]  One of the bottom times to be born to a Jewish family in Poland, 1910.
[00:05:32]  That's right, because you're going to be old enough to be fully aware of how bad things are going.
[00:05:37]  Yep.
[00:05:38]  So no magical realism for you.
[00:05:41]  Oh, God.
[00:05:42]  Yeah.
[00:05:42]  No, this story is going to get very bleak very quickly.
[00:05:46]  So Nasdorf, as a kid, it's very clear that he's very, very good at chess.
[00:05:51]  He very rapidly becomes a grandmaster, which is the highest official rating in chess.
[00:05:56]  So there's this organization called FIDA or the International Chess Federation.
[00:06:00]  And they basically run chess after a certain period of time.
[00:06:06]  Okay, you could do like 17 episodes just about Fide politics.
[00:06:09]  It's nonsense.
[00:06:10]  I don't understand how this chess organization has so much political drama, but it does.
[00:06:16]  So in 1950, Fide creates the rank of international grandmaster, and they choose 27 people to be the first grandmasters.
[00:06:22]  Nasdorf is one of them.
[00:06:24]  These days he's famous.
[00:06:25]  Yeah, he's a mighty player.
[00:06:30]  You would have to have a pretty good strategic mind to make it out of Poland.
[00:06:35]  Yeah, you got to be a thinker.
[00:06:39]  So he gets out of Poland, but he's out of Poland when everything goes to shit because he's playing a tournament in Argentina.
[00:06:46]  Oh, oh, boy.
[00:06:47]  Wow.
[00:06:47]  That's...
[00:06:48]  I don't...
[00:06:49]  There's like, there's a comment to make there, given the history of Argentina and the people who let Poland be a problem, but I don't know what it is right now.
[00:06:56]  So we should probably just move on.
[00:06:57]  Yeah, I mean, the other thing I will say about it is that there are a lot of Jews who fled to Argentina before this was happening.
[00:07:02]  So do not automatically assume that someone with the European last name in Argentina is a Nazi because there's actually a good chance that they're like someone who is fleeing the Nazis.
[00:07:10]  Well, that's awkward, but it makes sense.
[00:07:12]  Yeah.
[00:07:13]  Yeah.
[00:07:13]  So Nasdorf today, I think, is probably most famous.
[00:07:17]  There's an opening in chess called the Nasdorf, or technically speaking, its full name is the Sicilian defense, the Nasdorf variation.
[00:07:24]  So, okay, we're going to do a little bit of, we're going to do like one thing of chess terminology, which is that chess is this thing called openings.
[00:07:30]  Okay.
[00:07:30]  And they're like standard sets of moves that people play at the beginning of the game.
[00:07:35]  Yeah.
[00:07:35]  And, you know, if you have a, if you have an opening named after you, it is because you're an important player in the history of chess.
[00:07:43]  Okay.
[00:07:43]  And Nazdorf.
[00:07:44]  I mean, that openings.
[00:07:45]  Yeah.
[00:07:46]  Yeah.
[00:07:46]  And Nasdorf's opening, like, I, I, I, this might not be true, but I'm pretty sure it's like the most, it's like the most studied opening in the history of chess.
[00:07:56]  Yeah, I mean, at my game store back when I played Warhammer 40,000, there was a move that everybody called a Robert, and it was when somebody did something so stupid with their army that it led to a victory because the other person simply didn't conceive of somebody doing something that dumb.
[00:08:12]  Look, I once beat an 1800 in tournament.
[00:08:15]  Like, an 1800 is like a pretty seriously good chess player.
[00:08:18]  I was like a not very good chess player, but I once beat him because I did that.
[00:08:21]  I played so badly that he stopped paying attention.
[00:08:24]  He put his queen down, and then I took it.
[00:08:26]  There's nothing more dangerous than an idiot with a trick up his sleeve.
[00:08:29]  Yep.
[00:08:30]  It's the most dangerous thing in the world.
[00:08:33]  Or at least in wargaming.
[00:08:36]  Anyway.
[00:08:37]  Yeah.
[00:08:37]  So, okay.
[00:08:37]  So I'm going to talk about Warhammer a lot during this, Mia.
[00:08:40]  Yes.
[00:08:41]  Well, okay.
[00:08:42]  The conclusion that I had about Bobby Fisher is there's two ways to write about Bobby Fisher, right?
[00:08:46]  Bobby Fisher is the eventual going to be the subject of this show.
[00:08:50]  There's one way where you talk about chess a lot, and then there's another way where you talk about genocide a lot.
[00:08:55]  And everyone has already done the one where you talk about chess a lot.
[00:08:58]  So I'm going to do the one where you talk about genocide a lot instead of that.
[00:09:00]  Sure.
[00:09:01]  So speaking of genocide, okay, so how good is Nasdorf at the game of chess?
[00:09:07]  Here's the Guardian talking about how many games Nasdorf could play at one time while blindfolded for decades.
[00:09:14]  Miguel Nasdorf's 45 games at Sao Paulo in 1947 stood as the record.
[00:09:19]  Nasdorf stayed.
[00:09:21]  Yeah, 45.
[00:09:23]  Nasdorf had stayed in Buenos Aires when the war broke out during the 1939 Olympiad and took up blindfold displays in the hopes that the news of his achievements would reach his relatives in Poland who would actually perish in concentration camps.
[00:09:36]  Yeah.
[00:09:37]  Oh boy.
[00:09:38]  Yeah.
[00:09:39]  That's that's a lot.
[00:09:40]  There's a lot there.
[00:09:41]  Yeah.
[00:09:43]  Yeah.
[00:09:43]  Playing 45, the desperation that is behind playing 45 games of chess at once so your relatives will know that you achieved something is it's both deeply impressive and like heartbreaking in a really specific way that I don't think I've encountered before.
[00:10:04]  But I get it.
[00:10:07]  It's, I don't know.
[00:10:08]  This is one of the things.
[00:10:09]  The political backdrop of chess is just really bleak.
[00:10:11]  Like one of the things that's going on this period is Nasdorf keeps trying to play this guy named Alaken, who's a world champion.
[00:10:17]  And Alakin is a Nazi.
[00:10:20]  And he like just is not able to play Alaken because bullshit just keeps happening.
[00:10:26]  But yeah, chess is a game that very, very quickly gets enfolded in this kind of stuff.
[00:10:32]  Yeah.
[00:10:34]  That said, we can, we can, you know, we can look back at what sort of Nasdorf like did here in order to like have a chance to see his family again.
[00:10:42]  And, you know, okay, so what was he actually doing?
[00:10:44]  The answer is he is playing 45 people at the same time in his mind.
[00:10:51]  Yeah.
[00:10:51]  Yeah.
[00:10:52]  Purely just kind of keeping track of the movements in his head.
[00:10:56]  Like, yeah.
[00:10:57]  Yeah.
[00:10:59]  And, you know, I can't find his actual win rate like for these, but you know, most of the times when people do time like this, they win almost all of these games.
[00:11:08]  And, you know, yeah.
[00:11:11]  And like this is the kind of person that is like at like Bobby Fisher is better than Nasdorf.
[00:11:17]  And this is the kind of thing Nasdorf can do.
[00:11:18]  So this is the level of chess that everyone in this story can do, right?
[00:11:22]  Is they can do things like playing 45 games of chess in their mind at the same time.
[00:11:28]  Yep.
[00:11:28]  I mean, yep, okay.
[00:11:31]  Yeah.
[00:11:32]  And this is this is sort of the justification for everything that we're going to see in this story, right?
[00:11:36]  Like chess is really good at chess.
[00:11:38]  Yeah, this is this is a justification for like literally people, people like like physically turning their backs on like actual genocides going on is I mean, people don't need chess as an excuse to do that.
[00:11:53]  Oh, yeah, no, but there's a lot of people.
[00:11:54]  I would go so far as to say the normal reaction to a genocide is to turn your back on it.
[00:12:00]  Yeah.
[00:12:00]  But, you know, okay, they're going to excuse a just incredible amyloid, specifically because one man was really, really good at chess and he was also from the United States.
[00:12:11]  And that man is Bobby Fisher.
[00:12:13]  Oh, boy.
[00:12:14]  Now, most of my knowledge of Bobby Fisher comes from a Hilltop Hoods song called Cosby Sweater.
[00:12:21]  So I know very little about him other than that he was good at chess.
[00:12:25]  Yeah, that's okay.
[00:12:26]  So there are two important things about Bobby Fisher.
[00:12:29]  One is that he's very good at chess.
[00:12:31]  The second one is that he's a Nazi.
[00:12:33]  Okay.
[00:12:33]  We will be establishing both of these over the course of this episode.
[00:12:37]  Okay.
[00:12:39]  Chess Nazi.
[00:12:40]  All right.
[00:12:41]  Well, there's our title.
[00:12:42]  So that's good.
[00:12:43]  Sovi, mark that off the to-do list.
[00:12:45]  Chess Nazi Bobby Fisher.
[00:12:46]  Solid title.
[00:12:47]  That'll keep everybody happy.
[00:12:51]  Yeah, the words Bobby Fisher, chess Nazi, this is the closest I've ever come to divine inspiration.
[00:12:56]  They just appeared in my head one day, and I was like, I need to do this episode now.
[00:12:59]  That's good.
[00:13:00]  So, I mean, why do we...
[00:13:03]  I feel like if a Nazi is good at chess, that's an easy case for just push that fellow in a river.
[00:13:10]  Put some heavy rocks in their pockets right in a river.
[00:13:14]  We don't need a Nazi to be good at strategy and just kind of hanging around society.
[00:13:18]  That's not going to help anybody.
[00:13:20]  You would think, but it's chess.
[00:13:22]  And the thing that happens when a Nazi is good at chess is everyone gives them a bunch of money.
[00:13:28]  Well, I don't like that either.
[00:13:29]  Although, yep, okay.
[00:13:31]  I don't like that either.
[00:13:32]  But I guess it does show that chess isn't really good for anything.
[00:13:35]  Not really.
[00:13:36]  No.
[00:13:37]  So, okay, Bobby Fisher was not born rich.
[00:13:40]  He's born on March 9th, 1943 at the Michael Reese Hospital in Chicago.
[00:13:44]  And I need to put in and make an important note at the beginning here.
[00:13:47]  We do not claim this man.
[00:13:49]  Fuck this guy.
[00:13:50]  This guy's not a Chicago and he leaves very quickly.
[00:13:54]  I mean, you can tell it's bad because his hospital was named after the current sheriff of Multnomah County in Portland, Mike Reese.
[00:14:03]  Who sucks.
[00:14:04]  Anyway.
[00:14:06]  Amazingly, that is not the only person in this story who is going to have the same name as a guy from Portland who sucks.
[00:14:12]  Oh, wow.
[00:14:13]  That's okay.
[00:14:13]  I'm excited for this.
[00:14:15]  Yeah.
[00:14:16]  We have a lot of guys who suck, though, so the odds are always pretty good.
[00:14:20]  Yep.
[00:14:21]  So, all right, Regina Fisher is, who's Bobby Fisher's mother, is she is a wild character.
[00:14:28]  She is a longtime, very committed communist.
[00:14:32]  She does, I mean, she's doing activism for so long.
[00:14:35]  Nazis start as communists.
[00:14:37]  That's, that's, yeah, okay.
[00:14:38]  Yeah.
[00:14:39]  Well, I mean, Fisher, Fisher's never really a communist, but like his mom is like, like, she, she's so dedicated to, like, this.
[00:14:44]  She's a mommy, yeah.
[00:14:46]  The other complicated part about the story is at least his mom, and there's questions over who Bobby Fisher's dad is.
[00:14:51]  I don't think are that interesting.
[00:14:52]  But at least half of his family is Jewish, and Bobby Fisher still turns out like this.
[00:14:58]  His mom, like, so the reason she's in the U.S. is that she, she had been, like, making a living, like, in the Soviet Union, and then anti-Semitism got so bad at her Stalin that she had to flee.
[00:15:10]  And so, you know, she's, she, she's not, she's now in the U.S.
[00:15:13]  And when she gives birth to Bobby, she is like completely broke.
[00:15:18]  She is a homeless single mother.
[00:15:19]  And so after about a week, they kick her out of the hospital.
[00:15:22]  And they're like, okay, well, where do we send this person?
[00:15:24]  And she gets sent to this hospice for single mothers.
[00:15:27]  Great country.
[00:15:28]  I bet this was a nice place, well-funded, had a lot of respect for single mothers.
[00:15:33]  Okay, here's the thing.
[00:15:34]  Here's the thing.
[00:15:35]  If she had been allowed to stay there, it probably would have been kind of okay.
[00:15:40]  The problem is that the way the hospice worked was that it's only supposed to take care of parents and newborns.
[00:15:49]  So Regina has another daughter or has a daughter who's like very young.
[00:15:54]  Okay.
[00:15:55]  And she tries to bring the daughter to this hospice thing.
[00:15:58]  And they, they are immediately like, you need to leave.
[00:16:00]  And she's like, no, I have literally a week old baby and another child and I have no home.
[00:16:06]  So she tries to stay there and they call the cops.
[00:16:10]  Cool.
[00:16:11]  And not only, and this isn't just like a, like, they, you know, the CPD arrests her.
[00:16:14]  And this isn't even just like an arrest.
[00:16:18]  It's not even just like they take her in or like whatever.
[00:16:20]  They, they prosecute her for this.
[00:16:23]  Jesus Christ.
[00:16:24]  Yeah.
[00:16:25]  And I love it.
[00:16:26]  I love the idea of like the, I got a job working at a hospice for single mothers because I want to take care of the next generation.
[00:16:34]  What?
[00:16:34]  She has a child that's slightly too old?
[00:16:36]  Send her to prison.
[00:16:38]  Like, geez, my God.
[00:16:40]  It's so bad.
[00:16:41]  Like the judge looks at this and is like, what are you guys doing here?
[00:16:45]  He's like, okay, give her a psyche vow and let her go.
[00:16:48]  Which like, this is a Chicago judge in 1943.
[00:16:52]  That is a terrifying individual.
[00:16:54]  That guy probably sentenced eight guys to death like that morning for being slightly too queer.
[00:16:59]  And even he's like, what, you're trying to put a single mother in prison for trying to stay in a hospice for single mothers.
[00:17:10]  I mean, this is classic CPD shit.
[00:17:13]  This is definitely like, the two parts of me are warring here because on one hand, this is an almost unthinkable nightmare.

=== Bobby's Strange Games (04:49) ===

[00:17:20]  But on the other hand, I'm very pro-child prison.
[00:17:23]  So this is really tough for me, you know?
[00:17:26]  Well, here's the thing.
[00:17:26]  The children are too young to do labor.
[00:17:28]  So what's the point of child prison?
[00:17:30]  Like, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't put a one-hour child.
[00:17:32]  Children are never too young to do labor.
[00:17:35]  They can, I've seen one-week olds.
[00:17:37]  They can pick up blocks.
[00:17:38]  We have a lot of blocks in this country that need to be picked up.
[00:17:41]  Look, in aggregate, they can do a lot of work.
[00:17:44]  That's all I'm saying.
[00:17:45]  You've watched too many Andrew Tate Hustler University videos.
[00:17:49]  You got to get those kids working.
[00:17:51]  Look, if they're not paying rent, they're just, you know, I don't suck it up.
[00:17:57]  Really?
[00:17:57]  I'm trying to find a way to children.
[00:17:59]  I'm trying to continue this job.
[00:18:02]  But all of the different lines that come to me are literal pieces of Nazi propaganda.
[00:18:06]  So it's probably best just to move off.
[00:18:08]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:18:08]  Okay.
[00:18:11]  So, all right, the first few years of Bobby's life, they are moving constantly.
[00:18:16]  Regina holds like half a dozen jobs in like nine states.
[00:18:20]  And she's, you know, she's like, this is the middle of World War II.
[00:18:23]  So it's slightly easier to find a job than it would be in like, say, 1938 or something.
[00:18:31]  Sure.
[00:18:31]  But, you know, she's trying to like work enough to keep her family together and keep her kids fed.
[00:18:38]  And, you know, this means that Bobby's childhood is kind of a mess.
[00:18:42]  It doesn't sound good, no.
[00:18:44]  Yeah.
[00:18:44]  But one thing that emerges very early is that Bobby loves games.
[00:18:49]  His biographer, Frank Brady, who writes a really good book about probably the best biography of Bobby Fisher called Endgame Bobby Fisher's Remarkable Rise and Fall that I'm going to be using for a long time.
[00:19:01]  So there is a fall.
[00:19:02]  That's good.
[00:19:03]  Oh, there's definitely a fall.
[00:19:05]  Okay.
[00:19:05]  I'll give a minor spoiler here is Bobby Fisher is the first person to be canceled for making fun of 9-11 and maybe the only person who deserves to be canceled for it.
[00:19:15]  So he does, it does eventually go badly for him.
[00:19:18]  Okay, that's good.
[00:19:19]  That is, it is currently 1940, like, what, 1949?
[00:19:23]  So that's going to take a while.
[00:19:27]  Yeah, but Frank Brady tells this story about how Bobby, like, he starts playing Porcheesi.
[00:19:33]  And he really likes the strategy of Porcheesi, but every time a random thing happens, he just loses his mind.
[00:19:40]  And so, okay, so he seems to have, he has a brain that's very good at solving puzzles.
[00:19:44]  And at age six, he buys a chest setup.
[00:19:46]  So he doesn't, he doesn't, what you mean is he doesn't like the fact that like Parcheesi is based in part on like rolling of dice.
[00:19:52]  Like he can't say that there's an element of chance.
[00:19:55]  Yeah.
[00:19:55]  Again, he doesn't have the raw human courage necessary to play Warhammer.
[00:20:00]  No, and that's like he, he, he could never have cut it as a Hearthstone player.
[00:20:03]  No.
[00:20:03]  Which is why I maintain I'm better at that game than he ever would have been.
[00:20:07]  Yeah.
[00:20:09]  But okay, so unfortunately he discovers chess and he okay.
[00:20:14]  He yeah, at like six years old, he buys a chess set for one dollar and he starts playing it with his family.
[00:20:18]  And his family is like I don't want to play chess with you, but Bobby just like wants to play chess constantly.
[00:20:24]  So he starts doing something very strange, which is he just starts playing games against himself.
[00:20:32]  I mean which okay, that makes sense.
[00:20:35]  Yeah, like I have done this before when I was really really bored, back like before smartphones existed and yeah, when the Louis Body dementia was taking my grandmother, she would just play solitaire over and yeah, so that seems that makes sense to me.
[00:20:52]  But the but the thing, the thing with playing chess against yourself, is that you know what the other person is doing because you're both people, and so it's kind of exciting.
[00:21:02]  I mean, I play a lot of like I, so you can play Heroes Of Might and Magic 3 on your phone and you can.
[00:21:08]  You can do a hot seed mode.
[00:21:10]  I've played both sides of that.
[00:21:11]  That can be fun sometimes.
[00:21:12]  I've left him on this is what I'm saying like I kind of get it, but like he, he does this like literally all the time, like this is like what he spends his days doing.
[00:21:20]  Yeah, it's more of a way to pass time on a flight, but yeah, well.
[00:21:25]  So Bobby likes this a lot and you know this, this does not make him a normal kid.
[00:21:33]  I, he's really bad at making friends and also, you know, the other part, the part of his life is sort of genuinely sad, is that he's alone, like after school ends.
[00:21:41]  He's alone basically constantly because his school gets out before his sisters does and then his mom is almost never home because she has to work like night shifts and day shifts to sort of like keep the whole family there, so she doesn't get home until super late and okay.
[00:21:55]  So Bobby has to find something to do and the thing that he does and he's doing this as like a, like a pretty small child, like he's like seven or eight when he starts doing this is he starts just reading chess books and like playing through the games on his board.

=== Financial Education (04:18) ===

[00:22:10]  Oh boy okay, you know, okay.
[00:22:12]  So on the one hand, he doesn't Bobby officials, he like he doesn't really have anyone to play against.
[00:22:16]  But on the other hand, if you want to train, like you know, if you want to train like a six-year-old to be really good at chess, like eventually this is what you do right, if you want to get good at chess, you sit down with a bunch of books and you study them, and he's going to keep doing this literally his entire life.
[00:22:30]  It gets to a point where, like he, he just this is the only thing he does with his time is just sit there and read chess books and articles again.
[00:22:38]  I have i've i've made similar choices with Warhammer 40 000 in my past.
[00:22:42]  Yeah also, I mean I, I the extent that Bobby's doing this.
[00:22:46]  He, he is reading so many chess books that even like the Soviet chess grandmasters, who are literally paid by the state specifically to study chess, are like, how are you reading this much stuff?
[00:22:57]  And he's just like I, I just, it's the only thing in my life.
[00:23:01]  My entire world is empty of anything but chess.
[00:23:05]  And our entire world, Mia and mine, our entire world is empty of everything except for the products and services that support this podcast.
[00:23:12]  We live in a dank void surrounded by the results of unchecked capital exploitation.
[00:23:22]  So lots and lots of gold.
[00:23:24]  Yeah, buy some gold.
[00:23:29]  On a recent episode of the podcast, Money and Wealth with John O'Brien, I sit down with Tiffany the Budgeta Alicia to talk about what it really takes to take control of your money.
[00:23:39]  What would that look like in our families if everyone was able to pass on wealth to the people when they're no longer here?
[00:23:46]  We break down budgeting, financial discipline, and how to build real wealth, starting with the mindset shifts too many of us were never ever taught.
[00:23:55]  Financial education is not always about like, I'm going to get rich.
[00:23:59]  That's great.
[00:24:01]  It's about creating an atmosphere for you to be able to take care of yourself and leave a strong financial legacy for your family.
[00:24:10]  If you've ever felt you didn't get the memo on money, this conversation is for you to hear more.
[00:24:16]  Listen to Money and Wealth with John O'Brien from the Black Effect Network on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
[00:24:27]  I'm Iris Palmer, and my new podcast is called Against All Odds.
[00:24:30]  And that's exactly what the show is about.
[00:24:32]  Doing whatever it takes to beat the odds.
[00:24:34]  Get ready to hear from some of your favorite entrepreneurs and entertainers as they share stories about defying expectations, overcoming barriers, and breaking generational patterns.
[00:24:43]  I'm talking to people like award-winning actress, producer, and director, Fiva Longoria.
[00:24:49]  I think I had like $200 in my savings account, and my mom goes, what are you going to do?
[00:24:54]  And I was like, I'll figure it out.
[00:24:56]  We had a one-bedroom apartment for like $400 a month, and we all could not afford.
[00:24:59]  Like, I was like, how am I going to make $100 a month?
[00:25:02]  I'm opening up like I've never before.
[00:25:05]  For those of you who think you know me from what you've seen on social media, get ready to see a whole new side of me.
[00:25:10]  Listen to Against All Odds with Iris Palmer as part of the Michael Tura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
[00:25:22]  I went and sat on the little ottoman in front of him.
[00:25:25]  I was, hi, dad.
[00:25:27]  And just when I said that, my mom comes out of the kitchen and she says, I have some cookies and milk.
[00:25:34]  This is badass convict.
[00:25:36]  Right.
[00:25:37]  Just finished five years.
[00:25:39]  I'm going to have cookies and milk come on.
[00:25:43]  On the Ceno Show podcast, each episode invites you into a raw, unfiltered conversations about recovery, resilience, and redemption.
[00:25:51]  On a recent episode, I sit down with actor, cultural icon Danny Trail to talk about addiction, transformation, and the power of second chances.
[00:25:59]  The entire season two is now available to binge, featuring powerful conversations with guests like Tiffany Addish, Johnny Knoxville, and more.
[00:26:08]  I'm an alcoholic.
[00:26:10]  And without this program, I'm going to die.
[00:26:14]  Open your free iHeartRadio app.
[00:26:16]  Search the Ceno Show.
[00:26:17]  And listen now.
[00:26:24]  Ah.

=== Nazi Childhood Secrets (15:08) ===

[00:26:28]  I do get like 10 to 15 messages a day about the gold ads.
[00:26:35]  Yeah, well, and you love that, Sophie.
[00:26:37]  That lets you feel like you're not alone.
[00:26:40]  I know, guys.
[00:26:41]  I see you.
[00:26:44]  Look, I am a big fan of people reaching out to us and letting us know that there are random ads from a shady gold company going into our thing.
[00:26:55]  Please continue to do that.
[00:26:57]  Every day, Sophie messages me and says, my life has been improved by the fact that people are complaining about these random gold ads.
[00:27:04]  Don't just skip ahead by like 30 seconds or a minute using the button on your phone.
[00:27:09]  Message Sophie.
[00:27:11]  She loves it and it makes her feel wanted and like she has a wide and broad base of friends out on the internet just checking out to her, letting her know there's gold ads on the show.
[00:27:23]  So please keep doing it, everybody.
[00:27:25]  One of the upsides of podcasts is that none of you ever, well, I say upsides.
[00:27:28]  None of you ever get to see the face of Sophie Bakstreen this, which makes my life better and makes your life worse.
[00:27:34]  And this makes me happy.
[00:27:37]  Just know that my face said, I hate you, Robert Evans.
[00:27:40]  I know, I know.
[00:27:41]  I hate you.
[00:27:42]  I know, I know, I know.
[00:27:43]  But you know who I don't hate?
[00:27:45]  Mia Wong.
[00:27:46]  Oh.
[00:27:48]  All right, then.
[00:27:51]  Let's rock on.
[00:27:52]  Yes, let us return to the world of Bobby Fisher as a very small child.
[00:27:56]  So, all right, Bobby Fisher's mom is very concerned about the fact that he's just sitting around playing chess all the time, but doesn't have anyone to play chess with.
[00:28:04]  So she emails a chess guy at like the local newspaper and is like, hey, can you find someone for my like seven-year-old child to play with?
[00:28:13]  And for reasons I do not understand, this guy is like, yeah, here, go, go play at this simultaneous exhibition that this like chess master is going to be holding.
[00:28:27]  So, yeah, chess masters do these things where they're called simuls, where, you know, like we talked about Nazruff doing one of these, right?
[00:28:33]  Normally they're not blindfolded, but it's a guy shows up and like you show up and like 30 of you just get destroyed by this guy.
[00:28:40]  So this new super editor is like, okay, okay, send Bobby Fisher to play against like this incredibly strong American player.
[00:28:49]  And the result of this is that seven-year-old Bobby Fisher just gets absolutely annihilated and then starts crying because he's a seven-year-old and he's just like gotten destroyed in public.
[00:28:58]  And this is an interesting sort of event in Bobby's life because people make a lot out of this.
[00:29:04]  Like when you read by everybody, like, this is a critical moment.
[00:29:07]  And like, it probably kind of is, but also, like, I don't know, he's a seven-year-old.
[00:29:12]  It turns out when this happens to a seven-year-old, they cry because they're seven.
[00:29:18]  I mean, it's still toughen up a little bit.
[00:29:20]  Come on, kid.
[00:29:22]  He's, I don't know, people expect really weird, like, people keep asking, like, people, like, throughout his entire life, people would ask Bobby Fisher about the games that he played when he was seven.
[00:29:30]  And they were like, do you remember these games?
[00:29:32]  And it's like, this man is seven.
[00:29:34]  Like, come on.
[00:29:38]  Why do you, the chess writer, expect this guy to remember a game that he played at age seven?
[00:29:43]  I don't know.
[00:29:45]  I've just been sort of continuously baffled by chess writers.
[00:29:48]  I've been.
[00:29:49]  I mean, a chess writer does kind of presuppose a few things about a person.
[00:29:54]  I guess I'm not surprised that someone who would pick that as a living would want, like, question somebody in depth about a series of games they played when they were too young to be fully conscious of the world.
[00:30:05]  That makes sense to me.
[00:30:07]  If someone were to interview me about being seven, I would, I could probably, I have moderately strong memories of herding a bunch of cows with a broomstick in my fucking back 40, but that's about it.
[00:30:23]  I remember the time my dog got skunked and then ran into the house and skunked the entire house.
[00:30:29]  And I remember getting not the big Lego pirate ship, but I had a good report card and my mom got me the small Lego pirate ship.
[00:30:35]  And that was the best day of my childhood.
[00:30:38]  You know?
[00:30:39]  It was fucking dope ass pirate ship, everybody.
[00:30:42]  Look, so someone should have got Bobby Fisher this thing so he didn't turn into Bobby Fisher and instead had a cool pirate ship.
[00:30:48]  One Lego pirate ship could have solved a lot of problems.
[00:30:50]  Yep.
[00:30:52]  Instead, unfortunately, what happens is that, okay, so there's a guy who is the president of the Brooklyn Chess Club who like sees this seven-year-old playing this game.
[00:31:00]  And he's like, wow, the seven-year-old is actually pretty good.
[00:31:03]  And he invites him to join the Brooklyn Chess Club, which is very weird because the Brooklyn Chess Club is like, it's a very prestigious organization.
[00:31:11]  It's like where doctors and lawyers and stuff go to play chess, and they don't allow children in.
[00:31:16]  But the president's like, nah, I'm making an exception for this like seven-year-old.
[00:31:20]  And so Bobby shows up and nobody wants to play him because, and this is sort of a thing that's, I think, kind of special about over-the-board chess that you don't get with very many other things, which is that over-the-board chess is one of the few games you can play where you sit down and there's a seven-year-old across of you and the seven-year-old just destroys you.
[00:31:40]  Yeah, I mean, Warhammer actually would be one of the others, but yeah.
[00:31:44]  But they're kind of rare now.
[00:31:46]  But the problem is, okay, so Bobby Fisher shows up.
[00:31:48]  Nobody wants to play with it.
[00:31:49]  It would be cool if football worked that way.
[00:31:51]  Oh my god.
[00:31:52]  Like full contact football, throw some seven-year-olds on the field.
[00:31:56]  Now let's see if they're prodigies.
[00:31:57]  Put them up against these 350-pound steroid monsters.
[00:32:01]  See how it goes.
[00:32:03]  All right, kid.
[00:32:05]  After the snap, there's no more rules.
[00:32:09]  I mean, you know, I always say, so they throw Bobby Fisher into this pool, and it goes about as well as you would expect a baby fighting like a guy in full football shit, which is he gets run over and destroyed like continuously.
[00:32:21]  Awesome.
[00:32:22]  That's good.
[00:32:22]  That's good for kids.
[00:32:23]  Yeah.
[00:32:24]  But unfortunately, he like just keeps doing this.
[00:32:26]  And so he, like, even though progressively more and more of his time is consumed by chess.
[00:32:31]  It gets to the point where like he has this like little chest set and his chest set is just like covered in crumbs and like stains of all the food that he's eating while he's playing chess.
[00:32:40]  And this gets to a point that's like, I'm going to read this thing from Endgame, which is that Fisher biography.
[00:32:46]  He even maintained his involvement with the game while bathing.
[00:32:49]  The Fishers didn't have a working shower, just a bathtub.
[00:32:52]  And Bobby, like many young children, needed to be urged to take at least a weekly bath.
[00:32:57]  Regina established a Sunday night ritual of running a bath for him, practically carrying him up to the tub.
[00:33:03]  And once he was settled in the water, she'd lay a door from a discarded cabinet across the tub as a sort of tray and then bring in Bobby's chess set, a container of milk, and whatever book he was studying at the time, help him get into position, position him on the board.
[00:33:16]  Bobby soaked sometimes for hours as he became engrossed in the games of the greats, only emerging from the water prune-like when Regina insisted.
[00:33:26]  Ew, the milk of it all really just added to the visitors.
[00:33:30]  It's not right.
[00:33:32]  I don't like that.
[00:33:33]  Yeah, that's not my favorite thing that I've heard.
[00:33:37]  Yeah, I, to the, to Regina's credit, she actually likes.
[00:33:42]  This is why we, okay, I don't know.
[00:33:44]  I, I'm, I'm, I'm on, I'm on shower gang now.
[00:33:47]  I'm, I'm fully shower pilled.
[00:33:48]  I'm a shower cell.
[00:33:50]  I couldn't agree more.
[00:33:53]  I used to think a bath was a lovely thing, and now it's been milk-ified and dormant.
[00:34:00]  That sounds horrifying.
[00:34:01]  Yeah.
[00:34:02]  It sounds like, it sounds like a scene from one of the later alien movies where one of those androids has been wounded and they've got that like white, milky blood gooping out everywhere.
[00:34:15]  Gross.
[00:34:16]  Thanks for that, Mia.
[00:34:18]  Yep.
[00:34:20]  So, oh, yeah, as you can see, this is a very normal child.
[00:34:23]  Yeah.
[00:34:24]  Sounds like a great childhood.
[00:34:25]  Yeah, unfortunately, he's just a- He's taking his milk baths.
[00:34:28]  He's getting his ass beaten by adults, reading lots of weird chess books.
[00:34:33]  Sounds healthy.
[00:34:34]  Yeah, so I can't see how this guy turns out to be fashion.
[00:34:37]  Oh, oh, oh, don't worry.
[00:34:39]  We are literally right about to get to that.
[00:34:42]  So, okay, the problem is that he just keeps getting better at chess.
[00:34:45]  And by the time he's 12, he's like actually really good at the game.
[00:34:48]  Like, he's playing real tournaments.
[00:34:49]  He's beating people who are actually good at chess.
[00:34:52]  And at this point, Bobby becomes involved with the extremely wealthy chess patron, E. Florey Locks, who arranges for him to go on this chess trip around the U.S. and then go to Cuba to play chess against Cuban chess players.
[00:35:04]  Okay, what do we know about this guy?
[00:35:06]  Because that's oh boy.
[00:35:09]  Okay.
[00:35:11]  That does sound a little bit, that does sound a little bit sketchy.
[00:35:14]  Oh, yeah.
[00:35:15]  Locke frequently wore a small black enameled lapel pin bearing a gold Nazi swastika.
[00:35:20]  Oh boy.
[00:35:21]  Amazingly, it never seemed to attract much attention.
[00:35:24]  He didn't wear it all the time often enough.
[00:35:27]  Did he wear that once?
[00:35:28]  And people should be like, fuck, man.
[00:35:32]  It's wild.
[00:35:34]  And it didn't seem to inhibit him when he was in a Jewish delicatesser and to get his favorite sandwich of pastrami on Rai or when he was talking to Jewish chess players.
[00:35:42]  One player will be.
[00:35:43]  Why didn't it affect him?
[00:35:46]  I don't know.
[00:35:47]  This is like right after the Holocaust.
[00:35:52]  Honestly, it shouldn't have mattered if it was before the Holocaust.
[00:35:55]  Like, you shouldn't be able to.
[00:35:56]  You shouldn't be able to go.
[00:35:57]  Anyway, I think.
[00:35:59]  Cool.
[00:36:00]  This is getting worse.
[00:36:01]  So at one point, there was a player who gets embarrassed when he walks it and you know, no, he walks into this restaurant and nobody says anything about it.
[00:36:08]  Okay, here's some worse off just about who this guy is.
[00:36:11]  In addition to the pin, Locke's often wore, weather permitting, a small-brimmed alpine fedora with a feather in the band, adorned with emblems from countries he traveled to.
[00:36:21]  Absolutely not.
[00:36:23]  Okay.
[00:36:25]  He'd ostentatiously dressed in later hosenette times and for a few years even sported a Hitlerian mustache.
[00:36:34]  When he entered tournaments dressed in cocky shirt and pants and dirt tie and displaying that mustache, it was as if the Dopper game here of Dare Fury had been reincarnated.
[00:36:42]  In his home hung Nazi flags in prominent locations and displays of airplanes, models of meschmitz and junkers, as well as semi-pies and young people.
[00:36:52]  Yeah, sorry.
[00:36:53]  I'm not a world person.
[00:36:57]  Look.
[00:36:59]  The German language is accursed.
[00:37:01]  That's true.
[00:37:02]  Yeah, he also has just like a bunch of, he has like a giant oil painting of Adolf Hitler in his house and like a bunch of Third Reich member billions.
[00:37:08]  So this guy's great.
[00:37:09]  Yeah, no, he sounds dope.
[00:37:12]  Yeah, the next line from this book was, Lax was inarguably one of the most eccentric people in the New York chess community, which like I guess eccentric is a way that you could describe this guy walking around in a Nazi pin with the Hitler mustache and later hosen.
[00:37:27]  That is, that is certainly eccentric.
[00:37:30]  You know, you know, so later on in his life, right?
[00:37:32]  By the time he's about 60, he's on this tour when he's like, I think like 13.
[00:37:37]  When he's like 16 or 17, Bobby's going to be like a very serious anti-Semite.
[00:37:41]  And, you know, people are always like, well, how did this happen?
[00:37:44]  And it's like, well, it might have been the fact that he was hanging out with this Nazi guy as like a 12-year-old.
[00:37:51]  And also on the trip to Cuba is this guy named Norman T. Whitaker, who, quote, had also been in prison for car theft and for raping a 12-year-old.
[00:38:00]  When he was in his 60s, he proposed marriage to a 14-year-old.
[00:38:04]  So this is a great crowd of chess players that we've assembled here.
[00:38:09]  Real luminaries in the field.
[00:38:11]  Best of the best.
[00:38:12]  Yeah.
[00:38:13]  Frank Prady also notes, quote, Bobby sat up in front between the fascists and the con man, which is this is this is called foreshadowing.
[00:38:21]  Sounds like dad's doing a great job, by the way.
[00:38:24]  Yeah, well, this is where.
[00:38:25]  No, no, this is where your kid's got to be.
[00:38:27]  Yeah, keep him there.
[00:38:28]  Well, his dad is like fucked off somewhere.
[00:38:31]  Yeah.
[00:38:34]  I don't know.
[00:38:36]  It's good.
[00:38:36]  No, this sounds fine.
[00:38:38]  I can't wait to hear how well the rest of the story goes.
[00:38:42]  Well, the problem is he just keeps winning that chess.
[00:38:44]  At age 13, he wins the U.S. Junior Chess Championship, which is like nuts.
[00:38:49]  And okay, unfortunately, I do have to talk about one game of chess because Bobby Fisher plays, I mean, he plays a lot of famous games of chess.
[00:38:57]  He plays one very famous one at age 13 where, okay, so this game gets dubbed the game of the century.
[00:39:04]  People talk about it literally all the fucking time.
[00:39:07]  I'm sick of it.
[00:39:07]  I'm very angry.
[00:39:08]  This game's fine.
[00:39:11]  He's playing like a very strong international master.
[00:39:14]  And, you know, he does, he plays a pretty cool game where like he like sacrifices, he famously like sacrifices his queen and then uses his queen sacrifice to like get this attack and does all this stuff with his knights and his rooks and everyone is like loses their minds.
[00:39:28]  Exactly.
[00:39:29]  Unbelievable.
[00:39:30]  Yeah.
[00:39:31]  And, you know, okay, on the one hand, like, this is a pretty good game of chess.
[00:39:35]  On the other hand, I can open YouTube right now and find like a thousand games of chess that are way cooler than this that aren't the product of like domestic operation paperclip.
[00:39:44]  So this is this is this is this is okay.
[00:39:47]  This is the extent to which I'm going to talk about the game of the century because I'm sick of people talking about it.
[00:39:51]  Okay.
[00:39:53]  Yeah, but unfortunately, I do have to mention order to chess people will like attempt to murder me in my sleep.
[00:39:57]  So yeah, chess people, I hope you're now satisfied.
[00:40:00]  I have briefly covered this one game.
[00:40:02]  See, I'm not worried about that at all.
[00:40:04]  I feel like I could beat the shit out of chess people in a fight.
[00:40:07]  Maybe.
[00:40:08]  But no, they're time reading chess books.
[00:40:10]  They have, I don't know.
[00:40:12]  They have suspiciously high-level state contacts, which is not a...
[00:40:18]  I don't know.
[00:40:19]  You wouldn't think that was true, but these guys know a lot of intelligence agencies.
[00:40:24]  Yeah, well, that's fair.
[00:40:27]  So at age 14, Bobby Fisher becomes the American chess champion.
[00:40:34]  And Robert, you might be asking, how did a 14-year-old win the U.S. Open and become the American chess champion?
[00:40:40]  And part of it is just that the Americans suck at chess.
[00:40:42]  Yeah, that sounds right.
[00:40:44]  And the other thing that's going on here is that Bobby Fisher, you know, okay, so like he realizes that Americans aren't very good at chess.
[00:40:51]  And so he learns Russian in order to read Russian chess books.
[00:40:56]  And he just keeps doing this his entire life.
[00:40:57]  He just keeps learning languages like specifically to read chess books that are in other languages.
[00:41:03]  And so, you know, he starts reading, like, he starts like reading these things.
[00:41:07]  And, you know, while all of this is happening, Bobby Fisher starts getting investigated by the FBI.
[00:41:14]  Okay.
[00:41:15]  Which okay, so he's.
[00:41:18]  That's bad, right?
[00:41:19]  You don't want to get investigated by the FBI.
[00:41:21]  Yeah, I mean, he is being investigated by the FBI for like a third of his life, but somehow it's the third of his life where he doesn't think that he's being investigated by the FBI.
[00:41:31]  Oh.
[00:41:32]  Which is a very, very serious.
[00:41:33]  So the reason this is happening is that the FBI thinks that his mom is working for the Soviets.

=== FBI Investigation Begins (04:58) ===

[00:41:37]  Okay.
[00:41:38]  And okay, it turns out that not only was she not working for the Soviets, she'd actually gotten kicked out of the Communist Party, but, you know, it's the FBI.
[00:41:44]  They're not going to let something as petty as, you know, reality get in the way of their sort of domestic, like, espionage operations.
[00:41:50]  And this gets like so serious that like they are, the FBI is infiltrating TV shows, like the crews of TV shows that Bobby is going on to like see if he's a Soviet spy.
[00:42:04]  His mom starts drilling him about what to say if the FBI shows up at your door, which is apparently, quote, I have nothing to say to you.
[00:42:11]  Yep, that is, no, I mean, that is the thing that you say if the FBI shows up at your door.
[00:42:15]  Come back with a warrant.
[00:42:16]  I'm not speaking to you without a lawyer.
[00:42:19]  Nothing the fuck else.
[00:42:22]  No, I mean, actually, honestly, this is the first time mom has given him good advice.
[00:42:26]  Yeah, well, like, you know, I feel really bad for her because it's like, she, she, well, she, she also, she's also the only person in Bobby Fisher's life who ever attempts to stop him from playing chess.
[00:42:35]  But she does this by going to like chess psychiatrists and being like, is he addicted to chess?
[00:42:39]  But they're all chess psychiatrists.
[00:42:40]  Are they like, no.
[00:42:41]  I don't think you're going to get good information from a chess psychiatrist.
[00:42:44]  So, okay.
[00:42:47]  Later on in life, Bobby Fisher is going to get absolutely obsessed with the idea that he's being spied on and people like coming to kill him.
[00:42:54]  And on the one hand, this is just like his own sort of like dissenting conspiracy, conspiracy theories.
[00:42:58]  But on the other hand, it's hard to argue about the fact that the U.S. government was in fact spying on him for a bunch of his life, like did not play a role in this.
[00:43:06]  I mean, given the period of time that this is, if you are someone who is even moderately prominent in a thing that might put you in contact with people outside of the United States, you're being spied on by the U.S. government.
[00:43:17]  Okay, so one of the big things happens is Bobby Fisher is trying to go to the USSR to play against the Russian chess players.
[00:43:25]  And, you know, so the Americans hate this.
[00:43:28]  But, okay, so the larger backstory here is because Bobby Fisher is now the U.S. chess champion, he gets invited to this tournament in Yugoslavia.
[00:43:37]  And if you place high enough in this tournament, you get a chance to be in another tournament.
[00:43:41]  And that, and if you, and if you win that tournament, you can become the world, you can play the guy, you can play the world champion and become the world champion.
[00:43:47]  So he goes to this thing, right?
[00:43:48]  And while he's in Yugoslav, well, he has to go to Yugoslavia, but he's like, okay, I'm going to go to the Soviet Union because it's like close.
[00:43:54]  And the Soviets are like, sure, 15-year-old Bobby Fisher.
[00:43:57]  Like, you can come be a guest in our country because you're good at chess.
[00:44:02]  So Fisher shows up to the USSR and like he like steps off the plane and just immediately starts demanding that the Soviets like bring out their best chess players to play him.
[00:44:12]  The Soviets are like, really, dude, like we brought you here as a guest and you are yelling at us to bring out your best chess players.
[00:44:19]  So eventually they bring out a guy named Petrosian, who is like, this guy is four years out from becoming the world champion.
[00:44:26]  Like he is a good, he's like good at chess.
[00:44:28]  Pretty good at chess.
[00:44:29]  Yeah.
[00:44:29]  But Fisher's pissed off because he's not the current world champion.
[00:44:32]  And then immediately Fisher starts asking how much he's going to get paid for playing Petrosian.
[00:44:38]  And Petrosian's like, what the fuck are you talking?
[00:44:41]  What do you mean?
[00:44:42]  You came like Soviet Union.
[00:44:44]  They have no money.
[00:44:45]  Oh, they have money.
[00:44:47]  It becomes clear very quickly in this story.
[00:44:49]  They do in fact have money.
[00:44:50]  But he's like, he's like, what do you mean?
[00:44:53]  Like, you came to stay as a guest here and now you are demanding to get paid money for playing us.
[00:44:58]  Like, what is happening here?
[00:45:00]  And, you know, and Fisher just gets progressively more and more mad as this goes on because he wants to play like actual like tournament games and they're just playing like speed chess.
[00:45:10]  And he just gets like progressively angrier.
[00:45:14]  And okay, so there is a very important event in the life of Bobby Fisher that happens next.
[00:45:19]  And there's a lot of disputes over what exactly happens.
[00:45:23]  The claim at the time was that Fisher, like standing right next to his like English, like his English translator, starts yelling about like, quote, these Russian pigs.
[00:45:34]  This is the way that I've seen it reported in a lot of the sort of books and articles about him.
[00:45:39]  And this is what gets reported to the Russian press.
[00:45:42]  Frank Brady, who's Fisher's biographer, claims that Fisher actually said pork and was complaining about his food, but the translator got the confused word for pork and pig.
[00:45:51]  Okay.
[00:45:52]  But whatever happens, like this turns into sort of like a firestorm, right?
[00:45:56]  Because, you know, this American kid came here and then starts screaming about Russian pigs.
[00:46:00]  And the Soviets are like, okay, you like can't stay here now.
[00:46:05]  And okay, so this means that Bobby, Bobby still has time before this tournament.
[00:46:09]  He's like, okay, where am I going to go?
[00:46:10]  And then from left field, by God, is that Tito's music?
[00:46:15]  Oh, shit.
[00:46:16]  Oh, shit.
[00:46:17]  Is he coming in with a steel chair?
[00:46:19]  Yep.
[00:46:19]  He is.
[00:46:20]  He is about to beat the shit out of who is in power in the Soviet Union at this point.
[00:46:25]  Probably Khrushchev.
[00:46:26]  He's about to hit Trush from the high wire with a stale chair.
[00:46:30]  God, man, I just, every time Tito comes into a story, you know, things are about to get fun.

=== Russian Pig Firestorm (02:28) ===

[00:46:35]  But you know what else makes things fun?
[00:46:40]  Is it the products and services that support this podcast?
[00:46:43]  Is it not?
[00:46:44]  You're goddamn right.
[00:46:46]  There's nothing besides buying products and services that makes anyone happy.
[00:46:50]  And that's the truth.
[00:46:52]  That's science.
[00:46:53]  That's mathematics.
[00:46:58]  On a recent episode of the podcast, Money and Wealth with John O'Brien, I sit down with Tiffany the Budgeta Alicia to talk about what it really takes to take control of your money.
[00:47:09]  What would that look like in our families if everyone was able to pass on wealth to the people when they're no longer here?
[00:47:15]  We break down budgeting, financial discipline, and how to build real wealth, starting with the mindset shifts too many of us were never ever taught.
[00:47:25]  Financial education is not always about like, I'm going to get rich.
[00:47:29]  That's great.
[00:47:30]  It's about creating an atmosphere for you to be able to take care of yourself and leave a strong financial legacy for your family.
[00:47:39]  If you've ever felt you didn't get the memo on money, this conversation is for you to hear more.
[00:47:45]  Listen to Money and Wealth with John O'Brien from the Black Effect Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
[00:47:56]  I'm Iris Palmer, and my new podcast is called Against All Odds.
[00:47:59]  And that's exactly what the show is about.
[00:48:01]  Doing whatever it takes to beat the odds.
[00:48:03]  Get ready to hear from some of your favorite entrepreneurs and entertainers as they share stories about defying expectations, overcoming barriers, and breaking generational patterns.
[00:48:13]  I'm talking to people like award-winning actress, producer, and director, Fiva Longoria.
[00:48:18]  I think I had like $200 in my savings account, and my mom goes, What are you going to do?
[00:48:23]  And I was like, I'll figure it out.
[00:48:25]  We had a one-bedroom apartment for like $400 a month, and we all could not afford.
[00:48:28]  Like, I was like, how am I going to make $100 a month?
[00:48:32]  I'm opening up like I've never before.
[00:48:34]  For those of you who think you know me from what you've seen on social media, get ready to see a whole new side of me.
[00:48:39]  Listen to Against All Odds with Iris Palmer as part of the Michael Tura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
[00:48:51]  I went and sat on the little ottoman in front of him.
[00:48:54]  I was, hi, dad.
[00:48:56]  And just when I said that, my mom comes out of the kitchen and she says, I have some cookies and milk.

=== Religious Conspiracy Theories (11:43) ===

[00:49:03]  This is badass convict.
[00:49:06]  Right.
[00:49:06]  Just finished five years.
[00:49:08]  I'm going to have cookies and milk come on.
[00:49:12]  On the Ceno Show podcast, each episode invites you into a raw, unfiltered conversations about recovery, resilience, and redemption.
[00:49:20]  On a recent episode, I sit down with actor, cultural icon Danny Trail to talk about addiction, transformation, and the power of second chances.
[00:49:29]  The entire season two is now available to binge, featuring powerful conversations with guests like Tiffany Addish, Johnny Knoxville, and more.
[00:49:37]  I'm an alcoholic.
[00:49:39]  And without this program, I'm going to die.
[00:49:43]  Open your free iHeartRadio app, search the Ceno Show, and listen now.
[00:49:53]  And we're back.
[00:49:56]  All right.
[00:49:56]  Please continue, Mia.
[00:49:57]  So, Bobby is about, is getting kicked out of Soviet Union.
[00:50:00]  Yugoslavia, who is like the great socialist enemy of the USSR, swoops in and is like, hey, Bobby Fisher, yeah, come here, play our grandmasters.
[00:50:07]  It'll be great.
[00:50:09]  And, you know, Fisher is like incredibly happy about this.
[00:50:12]  And I just got to say this, man.
[00:50:14]  Tito, old buddy, this man is going to do things to your country that if you found them out would cause all of your organs to explode simultaneously.
[00:50:21]  Like you should have left him to the Soviets.
[00:50:23]  But unfortunately, Tito offers hospitality to this terrifying American man.
[00:50:29]  And, you know, the product of this is that Fisher like goes to Yugoslavia and loves it there.
[00:50:35]  And for like the rest of his life, he's going to, well, okay.
[00:50:38]  And this is where we need to be sort of careful.
[00:50:40]  He's going to, like, he's going to like Belgrade a lot, specifically.
[00:50:46]  Hell yeah.
[00:50:47]  This is going to become important later.
[00:50:50]  Hey, Belgrade's dope city.
[00:50:52]  Love it.
[00:50:52]  Yeah.
[00:50:54]  If you want to get a pile of perfectly cooked processed meat walked to you by a waiter who is actively smoking a cigarette over the plate and enjoy the entire experience, Belgrade is the city for you.
[00:51:09]  I mean that unironically.
[00:51:11]  Great town.
[00:51:12]  Love it.
[00:51:13]  Yeah, Fisher, I don't know.
[00:51:16]  He indeed just enjoys that a lot and other stuff that he's doing there.
[00:51:20]  Question mark.
[00:51:21]  We'll get into that a little bit.
[00:51:24]  Okay, so he's playing this tournament, right?
[00:51:26]  And everyone expects him to just sort of bomb out because he's like 15.
[00:51:29]  But instead, what he does is he draws like a bunch of the best players in the world.
[00:51:33]  And, you know, he beats some people.
[00:51:35]  He draws like three of the best Soviet players.
[00:51:39]  And somehow, you know, this like 15-year-old kid from the, from like the, just, just the absolute provincial backwater United States qualifies for the champions tournament and simultaneously becomes the youngest grandmaster in history.
[00:51:53]  And it's at this point that everyone starts to lose their minds for Bobby Fisher.
[00:51:57]  Okay.
[00:51:57]  Like all over the American chess scene, everyone's suddenly talking about like, oh my God, there's this kid who could beat the Soviets at chess.
[00:52:05]  Like he gets a full editorial in the New York Times.
[00:52:09]  Suddenly there's this like, there's like the great white hope against the Soviet chess machine.
[00:52:13]  And, you know, every like from this point on, like everything that he does just becomes like in layered in like levels and layers and layers and layers and layers of propaganda because the U.S. had finally done the thing that it always does when it used to fight communism.
[00:52:25]  They had found their own Nazi.
[00:52:28]  So, okay, even at like this age, Bobby is very, very anti-Semitic.
[00:52:34]  He's better at hiding it than he's going to be later on.
[00:52:38]  But he is doing stuff like, for example, the Encyclopedia Judica, I like put him on their list of like famous Jewish people because his parents are Jewish.
[00:52:48]  And he writes them a letter saying he is not Jewish and they need to take him off his list.
[00:52:53]  And then he starts doing something he's going to do for the entire rest of his life, which is threaten to whip out his dick to show that he's not circumcised and thus not Jewish.
[00:53:01]  Wow.
[00:53:02]  Can't argue with that.
[00:53:03]  Perfect evidence there.
[00:53:06]  I don't know.
[00:53:07]  I have nothing on this.
[00:53:08]  It is a very, very weird kind of anti-Semitism.
[00:53:11]  And I need everyone to like, okay, whenever you think of Bobby Fisher, you need to understand that he is at all times two steps away from just whipping out of his dick to prove how not Jewish he is.
[00:53:21]  Like he, he's going to like, there's going to be another time he does.
[00:53:25]  He's going to bring racism into the proud tradition of whipping out your dick at a chess tournament.
[00:53:30]  That's, that's heartbreaking.
[00:53:32]  Yeah, it's he's, I don't know.
[00:53:35]  It's, it's, it's, he is, he is a wildly weird anti-Semitic person.
[00:53:41]  There's, there's another story of his sort of early anti-early anti-Semitism.
[00:53:45]  So in 1962, he's doing this interview.
[00:53:48]  He's, I think, how old is he?
[00:53:50]  Like 18 or 19 at this point.
[00:53:56]  There's this Harper's Magazine interview where I he says, quote, yeah, there are too many Jews in chess.
[00:54:04]  They have taken away the class of the game.
[00:54:06]  They don't dress too nicely.
[00:54:08]  That's what I don't like.
[00:54:10]  And I want to remind everyone here that, like, okay, Bobby Fisher is about to become like the, like, literally the symbol of American chess, right?
[00:54:18]  And, you know, a genuine sort of geopolitical and moral hero of the U.S.
[00:54:23]  And this was just in Harper's magazine.
[00:54:26]  Like, he just said that.
[00:54:28]  Wow.
[00:54:29]  And that, and that's, and this isn't like, it's not like he's saying this to like, I don't know, like a tiny village paper in like rural Idaho or something.
[00:54:37]  Like, like, the journalists actually read this, right?
[00:54:41]  But, you know, this is something that's going to happen time and time again in the story.
[00:54:44]  Is it like the press is just like, they'll see him say something like this.
[00:54:50]  And then they're going to see some pretty good chess and they're just instantly going to forget about it.
[00:54:54]  And everyone's going to go back to comparing him to like Mozart and like Picasso and immediately forget what he thinks about the Holocaust.
[00:55:01]  Yeah, he's a literal Nazi, but he's good at chess.
[00:55:05]  So who can say if it's bad?
[00:55:07]  Yeah.
[00:55:08]  Yeah.
[00:55:08]  So, okay, but back to him being good at chess for a little bit.
[00:55:11]  Fisher qualifies for the candidates tournament, which is a tournament where like if you win it, you get the red challenger world championship.
[00:55:16]  And like almost immediately after he gets there, he makes history about becoming the first grandmaster ever to get into a fist fight with another grandmaster at a chess tournament.
[00:55:24]  Okay, now that's dope.
[00:55:25]  That's that's good.
[00:55:26]  That's like Adam Sandler and fucking happy Gilmore.
[00:55:30]  Yeah.
[00:55:31]  Yeah.
[00:55:31]  So, all right.
[00:55:33]  So I respect that.
[00:55:36]  Look, he's a Nazi, but that's pretty funny.
[00:55:39]  Yeah.
[00:55:40]  And then he has, he does another very, there's another very famous Bobby Fisher thing that happens here.
[00:55:44]  And I'm just going to read this in Endgame.
[00:55:46]  Henry Stockhold, a chess player who was covering the match for the Associated Press, brought Bobby to a broth of one night and waited for him.
[00:55:54]  When Bobby exited an hour later, Stockholm asks him how he enjoyed it.
[00:55:58]  And Bobby's comment, which he repeated other times, has been quoted, chess is better.
[00:56:03]  Huh.
[00:56:05]  So this is a, this is a, a, a, a incredibly weird, weird dude.
[00:56:12]  Yeah.
[00:56:13]  Um, unfortunately for Bobby, he just gets like destroyed in this tournament.
[00:56:18]  And this leads to basically what becomes the Bobby Fisher chess special.
[00:56:23]  Uh, he immediately starts screaming about how the entire tournament was rigged.
[00:56:27]  And this is like enough that he gets an entire like giant, I think it was like a front cover piece in Sports Illustrated called The Russians Have Fixed World Chess.
[00:56:37]  And, okay, so this is kind of true.
[00:56:41]  What was happening at these tournaments that the Soviets would play these like fast draws against each other so that they could like preserve their energy when they had to play non-Soviet players.
[00:56:50]  But also, there was a bunch of, there's like, there was endless analysis of this that's done by like people then and people now.
[00:56:55]  And basically what they concluded was like, okay, so the Soviets win every tournament, but the Soviets win every tournament because they have more good chess players than anyone else does.
[00:57:04]  I mean, yeah, that makes sense.
[00:57:06]  Yeah, but Bobby, Bobby is convinced it's because they're just like cheaters.
[00:57:10]  And he, this, he, this just like, he gets really, really angry at this.
[00:57:15]  And, you know, he's already emerging this grudge from the Soviets that kicked him out.
[00:57:18]  And so at this point, he basically just like swears eternal revenge on the Soviet Union to the point where he refuses to play any tournaments that the International Chess Federation puts on because he's like, the International Chess Federation is like a tool of the Soviets.
[00:57:31]  And from here.
[00:57:33]  Okay, man.
[00:57:33]  Yeah, okay.
[00:57:34]  So this, this is, you know, as much as I've been saying he's reported, this is where he starts to get really weird.
[00:57:40]  So there's this like, you know, I guess it's like, that's like a little fucky what they were doing, but that's not really.
[00:57:47]  Yeah, it's not really right.
[00:57:48]  Like, if you're playing them, you're still just playing a game of chess.
[00:57:51]  Like, they haven't taken chess steroids.
[00:57:54]  They're not hiding an extra queen up their sleeves.
[00:57:57]  No.
[00:57:57]  They're just like kind of coming in a little fresher than you because they fucked around slightly.
[00:58:02]  But I don't know.
[00:58:03]  Cheating seems like a weird way to phrase that.
[00:58:05]  Yeah.
[00:58:06]  And he just gets, he gets just utterly like he, like, on his like deathbed, he is going to be yelling about how the Soviets cheated him and like stuff like that.
[00:58:16]  All right, man.
[00:58:17]  And, you know, okay, and partially, he just gets like, like, yeah, he turns into a kind of guy that is partly very recognizable and partly not.
[00:58:25]  So his two favorite books in this period are 1984 and Animal Farm.
[00:58:30]  Okay.
[00:58:31]  So this is a, you know, things are going great.
[00:58:33]  I'm going to guess he didn't read a lot of other Orwell.
[00:58:36]  No, it's you know, he'll and amazingly, those are like the two most normal things he's going to read from here now.
[00:58:44]  He also like he starts listening to my ancient enemy, the evangelical preacher Billy Graham.
[00:58:52]  Oh, no, no.
[00:58:53]  And then he discovers a man named Herbert W. Armstrong's Radio Church of God.
[00:59:01]  Oh, no, no, not Armstrong.
[00:59:03]  Oh, boy.
[00:59:04]  We should talk about Armstrong a little bit.
[00:59:06]  So Armstrong is, he's cut from the same cloth.
[00:59:10]  I'm fairly certain we've mentioned him once or twice on the show.
[00:59:13]  Yeah.
[00:59:14]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:59:14]  He's like, he's like, I mean, he's technically, he's like, okay, I think he's technically Christian, but he's.
[00:59:19]  He's definitely technically Christian.
[00:59:21]  Here's the thing.
[00:59:22]  Here's the thing.
[00:59:22]  He's not a Trinitarian.
[00:59:24]  And at that point, I start looking at you real closely when you deny the Trinity as to whether or not you are actually a Christian.
[00:59:31]  This is the line that I, someone who is not Christian, has imposed on Christianity.
[00:59:35]  See, see, see how they like imperialism this month.
[00:59:40]  I have no opinion on that, but Armstrong is like a real weirdo.
[00:59:45]  He's like a, he's a British Israelite, which is just like...
[00:59:47]  Yeah, I mean, he's, yeah, he's, he's, these are the folks who believe that like British people are the real Jews and Jews aren't real.
[00:59:56]  Like the actual Jewish people are not actual Jewish people.
[01:00:01]  Which, which, you know, there's a bunch of weird, like it, this kind of feeds into the creativity movement.
[01:00:07]  Oh, yeah, we're going to get to that a little bit, too.
[01:00:09]  Oh, good.
[01:00:10]  Yeah.
[01:00:10]  Huzzah.
[01:00:12]  Yeah.
[01:00:13]  So there's a lot of things that he like gets involved with.
[01:00:18]  Fisher like, well, he hasn't quite joined the church because there are some like prescriptions on stuff.
[01:00:24]  The church has rules about like, you're not supposed to date anyone outside the church.
[01:00:26]  And Fisher's like, this is stupid.
[01:00:28]  So he hasn't technically joined the church, but he's like Bible classes.
[01:00:31]  He's fighting the power.
[01:00:33]  Yeah, but he also picks up something that like he picks up basically these guys are also sort of like I don't know if proto is right, but they're basically like like Christian science people.
[01:00:43]  So they like don't believe in doctors and they don't believe in vaccinations.

=== Cold War Propaganda (15:37) ===

[01:00:47]  And Fisher like picks this up.
[01:00:48]  He like is really hardcore on this don't go to doctors thing.
[01:00:52]  And he also starts tithing the church 10% of his income.
[01:00:56]  Dope.
[01:00:58]  And the other thing he starts doing around this period is he starts carrying around this blue cardboard box everywhere that he goes.
[01:01:06]  And he would just refuse to open it.
[01:01:08]  Everyone would like, he's walking around carrying this blue cardboard box.
[01:01:10]  And everyone's like, okay, Fisher, like, what, what is this blue cardboard box?
[01:01:13]  And he'd just get really mad when anyone asked him.
[01:01:16]  And one time he finally like relented to the pressure and opened it.
[01:01:20]  And inside of the box was the Bible, which like this is something that like a youth pastor would, a story like a youth pastor would tell.
[01:01:28]  That's like one of those like this child's baby.
[01:01:31]  Something for Jesus there, buddy.
[01:01:33]  Yeah.
[01:01:34]  So he gets very weird.
[01:01:38]  So, okay, so this goes on for like a couple.
[01:01:40]  He has a couple of years of being wrapped in his like, I'm not going to play for Fide.
[01:01:44]  I'm not going to, he plays like very little chess.
[01:01:47]  But eventually Fide is able to sort of like, entice him back to like play chess again by like changing the format of the world's tournament.
[01:01:56]  So, like, people couldn't, the candidates' tournaments, people can't collude.
[01:02:00]  And so Bobby Fischer, like, goes into this tournament.
[01:02:04]  And he just trivially easily destroys, like, three Soviet Grandmasters.
[01:02:11]  And he, you know, he very, very quickly and incredibly decisively, I mean, he just annihilates them.
[01:02:17]  And this means that he has the right to challenge the world champion, Boris Spassky, who, at this point, Spassky's, like, one of the few people on Earth that Fischer has never beaten.
[01:02:27]  But you know, this is a sensation in the U.s.
[01:02:29]  Suddenly, like you know, back back, back back when he like qualified for the candidates tournament, like chess, like there was some coverage of it and like chess, people are talking now, like everyone knows who Bobby Fisher is like in the entire country, that this is, this is like everyone.
[01:02:42]  And suddenly everyone's into chess too.
[01:02:44]  Like it's on the front page in NEW YORK Times, every tv station is covering it.
[01:02:48]  Like when people briefly cared about uh, hockey because uh, because of that team fought the Soviets yeah yeah, and like this is, this is, this is basically the 1970s version of like the han the the, the Magnus Carls And Hans Nielman like cheating butt plug thing, and it sparks like until basically literally this month, probably like the greatest chess boom America has ever seen.
[01:03:10]  And you know okay, so this, this is a like nobody really cares about chess.
[01:03:15]  What's actually happening here is this is, you know, this is like this is basically American nationalism and sort of anti-communism, and Fisher is seen by everyone like, including himself, as as a cold warrior, a term that people took like incredibly seriously at this time and now sounds like the tag off for like a ripoff Mortal Kombat character.
[01:03:35]  Yep, and you know okay, like the stated reason for this is that, like chess is like a big deal to the Soviets, it's ideologically important.
[01:03:42]  Like Lenin like played chess and wanted everyone to play chess.
[01:03:46]  Yeah, we got a.
[01:03:48]  Yeah yeah, it's quite a time.
[01:03:52]  Yeah like yeah, this is the thing you have to understand about the Cold War is every single person on the face of the earth is completely insane during this entire period.
[01:04:01]  Right, this match has literally no effect on the Cold War.
[01:04:05]  Nothing, it does nothing.
[01:04:07]  It there was never a chance it could even conceivably have done anything, and I I want everyone to keep this in mind as we tell, as I tell the story of this world championship because, by the end of the story, the president of the United States is going to be personally involved in getting Bobby Fisher to play this game.
[01:04:23]  Like this is, this is a game of chess, they're just playing chess.
[01:04:27]  This is complete.
[01:04:27]  Everyone is completely deranged.
[01:04:30]  So okay, now that we've prefaced this with the fact that, like nobody nobody involved with this is even remotely sane um, Bobby Fisher is like, okay, he's headed into his like world championship match with Borispassky.
[01:04:46]  They're gonna play a bunch of games, one of them is gonna win.
[01:04:49]  Um, there's a huge fight about the location.
[01:04:51]  That frankly, doesn't matter.
[01:04:52]  That they settle on Iceland and this tournament, you know it it's, it's gonna be a huge deal.
[01:04:58]  It has the largest prize pool of All time for a chess match.
[01:05:02]  And Bobby Fisher takes a look at the most money a chess player has ever received for playing chess and is like, no, I want a bigger cut of the ticket sales.
[01:05:12]  And they're like, Bobby, like, if you, if you take money from the ticket sales, like, we're going to lose money on this.
[01:05:17]  And he's like, I don't care.
[01:05:18]  I literally will not play unless you give me money from the ticket sales.
[01:05:22]  And they think he's bluffing, but he's not bluffing.
[01:05:24]  He cancels his flight from New York to Iceland because they won't like pay him more.
[01:05:31]  And this is also very funny because the head of the Atlantic Chess Federation, who's like the guy who's been organizing this whole thing, is a very hardcore anti-communist, right?
[01:05:39]  And he's trying to use this whole match as anti-communist propaganda.
[01:05:42]  But, you know, you get what you pay for, buddy.
[01:05:44]  Like, yeah, you want to do anti-communist propaganda?
[01:05:48]  Have fun dealing with like this absolute capitalist asshole who just keeps extorting you literally every five seconds.
[01:05:55]  And okay, so this sort of saga of Fisher like refusing to show up to Iceland continues until a chess journalist calls this British investment banker named Derek Slater who puts like $900,000 in today's money into the price pool in order to get Fisher to play.
[01:06:14]  Huh.
[01:06:15]  And Fisher's still like, yeah.
[01:06:17]  And at this point, Henry fucking Kissinger makes a personal call to Bobby Fisher and says, you have to play this game for America.
[01:06:25]  The United States of America requires you that you play this chess game.
[01:06:32]  And this finally convinces Bobby to play.
[01:06:35]  Now, the other thing that's very weird about this is, okay, so this is like, this is like, you know, high Cold War drama, right?
[01:06:43]  So you would expect that Fisher's opponent, who is Boris Spassky, like the darling of the Soviet chess machine, you would expect him to be a communist.
[01:06:51]  But no, he's a czarist.
[01:06:54]  Oh, no.
[01:06:57]  Here is a quote from Spassky.
[01:06:59]  As for my views, I'm a Russian nationalist, and there's nothing scary about that.
[01:07:02]  Don't be afraid.
[01:07:03]  Some say that Russian nationalist is a nasty thing, most definitely an anti-Semite, a racist, a national Bolshevik.
[01:07:09]  No, for a nationalist, God exists and nations that respect each other.
[01:07:14]  I'm a convinced monarchist.
[01:07:16]  I remained a monarchist during the Soviet years and never tried to hide that.
[01:07:19]  I believe the greatness of Russia is connected to the activity of the national leaders represented by our czars.
[01:07:26]  Wow.
[01:07:28]  Strong take.
[01:07:30]  Okay.
[01:07:32]  I talked about this a bit earlier, but like this was the moment where I finally just became convinced that I spent like a bunch of time trying to find like a super grandmaster who has like normal-ish politics.
[01:07:45]  And the thing that I realized, yeah, there's something about just spending all your time playing chess that drives you completely mad.
[01:07:50]  Like all of these people have the most nonsense politics I've ever seen.
[01:07:54]  Like it's like looking through a poll board and you just find you find ideologies.
[01:07:59]  They're like, how are you a czarist in like 2003?
[01:08:04]  What is happening here?
[01:08:05]  I mean, there are still czarists today.
[01:08:08]  Like, there's many, many monarchists on Twitter, at least, that you can find.
[01:08:13]  And if you go to YouTube and you look up like Russian imperial anthems and stuff from the czarist era, you will find people being like, ah, for the days of Nikolai II.
[01:08:24]  So I'm also not surprised that a chess guy in specific would be a monarchist.
[01:08:30]  It is low-key, a monarchist.
[01:08:31]  It is true.
[01:08:32]  But the thing that's weird about this, right, is like all of the sort of like all of the like every single like major communist, I don't know if actually Stalin did, but like every major communist person, like Cheeto plays chess, Lenin plays chess, Che Guevara at one point, like helps Fisher play a tournament in Cuba.
[01:08:47]  Like everyone plays chess.
[01:08:49]  And then all of their chess players are like weird fascists and none of them are communists.
[01:08:53]  It's it's oh God.
[01:08:56]  I don't know.
[01:08:57]  I'll never understand chess.
[01:08:59]  So I but clearly, if you like chess a lot, you're problematic.
[01:09:06]  So I think we can say that for certain.
[01:09:08]  It's true.
[01:09:09]  This is how I get canceled.
[01:09:12]  So, all right.
[01:09:13]  This I'm just going to read a quote about EndNotes from Endgame about what Bobby Fisher does when he finally shows up in Iceland after getting personally called by Henry Kissinger.
[01:09:24]  Several hours later, coming home from bowling in the early hours of the morning, before returning to the hotel, Bobby sneaked into the playing hall to check out the conditions.
[01:09:32]  After an 80-minute inspection, he had a number of complaints.
[01:09:36]  He thought the lighting should be brighter.
[01:09:39]  The pieces of the chess set were too small for the squares of the custom-built boards.
[01:09:44]  The board itself was not quite right.
[01:09:45]  It was made of stone, and he thought wood would be preferable.
[01:09:48]  Finally, he thought that the two cameras hidden inside burlap covered towers might be distracting when he began to play.
[01:09:54]  And the towers themselves looming over the stage like medieval battering rams were disconcerting.
[01:10:00]  So he is showing up at like four in the morning and he walks into the hall and he just starts bitching about all like the chess pieces are the wrong size.
[01:10:10]  And so, okay, the tournament organizers are like, whatever.
[01:10:14]  We need this game to happen.
[01:10:16]  And they're just desperate for this match to happen.
[01:10:18]  And, you know, okay, so chess starts to be played.
[01:10:21]  But in the words of John Boyce, who cares about that?
[01:10:24]  Midway through game one, Bobby Fisher starts complaining that one of the cameras in the back is distracting.
[01:10:29]  So the game like adjourns for the day.
[01:10:32]  There's a thing in this period where like you play 40 moves and then everyone leaves and goes home and you come back and finish the game the next day.
[01:10:37]  So Fisher comes in, he plays one move and then he stands up on live TV, walks to the backstage and spends 35 minutes of his own game time with his clock ticking down, screaming at the organizers to take down the camera.
[01:10:52]  And okay, they eventually give in.
[01:10:55]  But the next day, the game is supposed to start and Fisher is nowhere to be seen.
[01:11:00]  Fisher's team shows up.
[01:11:02]  His team is sort of like lawyers and like advice.
[01:11:04]  They show up and they tell them that Bobby Fisher will not play unless all cameras are removed from the venues.
[01:11:10]  Oh my God, Bobby.
[01:11:12]  Jesus, what a fucking primadonna.
[01:11:18]  We are like maybe in the early mid-game of Bobby doing this shit in this tournament.
[01:11:23]  Okay, so he then refuses to even show up to the hall to see if the accommodations the organizers were like, okay, well, we'll remove cameras.
[01:11:30]  And he like, he won't even show up to like check if they're fine.
[01:11:35]  So, you know, he just is not there.
[01:11:37]  So the game starts, right?
[01:11:39]  And Spassy's like, okay, I'm going to start the game clock.
[01:11:42]  And Fisher is just still in his bed, like in his underwear in his hotel.
[01:11:47]  And eventually the organizers are like, okay, fine.
[01:11:50]  For one game, we will remove all the cameras.
[01:11:53]  And Fisher goes, I'm not going to show up unless you give me back all of the time on my chess clock that I spent yelling, like arguing with you about removing these cameras.
[01:12:04]  And the organizers finally are like, come on, man.
[01:12:06]  Like, there has to be a line.
[01:12:07]  Like, you can't just not show up to your match and then demand we give you all of your time back because you were arguing with us.
[01:12:15]  So, and they, they, everyone at every point in the story, like, expects Fisher is going to compromise.
[01:12:20]  He just doesn't.
[01:12:20]  He just does not show up for this game.
[01:12:24]  Okay.
[01:12:26]  Yeah.
[01:12:26]  So, so we're now on day four, right?
[01:12:30]  And the organizers are like, Fisher is like, okay, we need to wipe this game from the record.
[01:12:36]  I didn't lose this game.
[01:12:37]  You have to, like, forget that I didn't show up.
[01:12:40]  And they're like, come on, like, you didn't show up to this game.
[01:12:42]  And so Fisher books a flight home to the US.
[01:12:46]  So it is now day four of the World Chess Championship.
[01:12:49]  Fisher is still refusing to play.
[01:12:51]  The New York Times on its front page publishes an article begging him to play.
[01:12:56]  Like, That's sad.
[01:12:59]  Yeah, he gets a second call.
[01:13:02]  New York Times don't fucking simp for a fascist impossible challenge.
[01:13:07]  Henry Kissinger calls him again.
[01:13:08]  Richard Nixon, Richard Nixon personally invites him to the White House in order to try to back it up.
[01:13:14]  That is the least surprising part of this story.
[01:13:18]  Also, the fact that Henry Kissinger would negotiate back.
[01:13:21]  Oh, yeah.
[01:13:22]  It's...
[01:13:23]  And, you know, okay, we could reasonably ask ourselves at this point, why is the Secretary of State and the President of the United States getting involved to make sure some like random assholes anti-Semite plays a chess game?
[01:13:35]  And the answer is that, like, insofar as this game is important anyway, it's because, you know, it's about like symbols and sort of myths.
[01:13:42]  And Spatsky is like the representative of like the bureaucratic terror apparatus of the Soviet Union who's being challenged by like this like lone individual manic genius of the free world.
[01:13:53]  But like, okay, if you think if you take about two seconds to think about what the U.S. is doing while this is going on, right?
[01:14:00]  Okay, like what is Kissinger doing?
[01:14:02]  And the answer is using one of the, like literally one of history's largest, most, most like bureaucratic organizations to deliver munitions from Tennessee to Tokyo in order to burn children alive in Vietnam and Cambodia to, you know, prop up an incredibly corrupt and tyrannical narco-dictatorship.
[01:14:19]  So, you know, in some sense, right, Fisher is like, he's someone, he is kind of someone the Americans need, right?
[01:14:28]  He's, he, he's someone that like someone like Kissinger or someone like Nixon needs to be the sort of like individualist hero to match the Soviets collective hero.
[01:14:36]  Because otherwise everyone's going to start questions about, start like asking questions about the fact that like we also have our own terror bureaucracy that is like murdering everyone in the street.
[01:14:45]  But like, no, hey, look, it's Bobby Fisher.
[01:14:46]  We're going to like wave this like shiny trinket in front of you and be like, he is all of us.
[01:14:50]  And then meanwhile, like, okay, like the great American collective hero is sitting in his underwear, refusing to play, like refusing to play chess because there's cameras in the room.
[01:15:01]  And even after all of this, Fisher is still refusing to play.
[01:15:06]  And what eventually convinces him is that Boris Spatsky, who by all rights at this point could simply have gone, I beat him.
[01:15:14]  He refused to play me again.
[01:15:15]  I'm going home.
[01:15:16]  He's like, fine, I will look.
[01:15:18]  Like, I will go talk to him.
[01:15:20]  We'll play a game, be like backstage where there's no cameras.
[01:15:24]  And Fisher, like, finally, having gotten literally everything that he wants out of his temper tantrum, like, waits until 90 minutes before the match is going to start and finally agrees to play.
[01:15:33]  So the match starts again.
[01:15:34]  Fisher makes one move, jumps out of his seat and starts screaming at the organizers that there's a camera again.
[01:15:43]  And at this point, Spassky, who is like, he has been putting up with Fisher's bullshit for like months now, just like, just snaps and just like walks out of the room.
[01:15:53]  And this one referee has to convince both Spassky and Fisher that they should actually play this game.
[01:16:00]  And eventually this guy who like absolutely should have had Kissinger's job because he's apparently just a miracle worker like manages to convince both of them to play the game.
[01:16:10]  And at this point, like the game, after like a litany of bullshit, two calls from the Secretary of State, like cash infusions from British bankers, the thing like finally gets going.

=== Muhammad Ali Matchup (03:49) ===

[01:16:25]  And meanwhile, in the U.S., like this is such a big deal.
[01:16:29]  It's a good thing there's no other problems happening in the world at this point.
[01:16:32]  Oh, God, yeah.
[01:16:32]  That these people could be focusing on.
[01:16:35]  This was the number one thing happening at the time.
[01:16:38]  Yeah.
[01:16:38]  Well, okay, we're going to get something about that.
[01:16:41]  So PBS puts together a special program specifically just to broadcast these games.
[01:16:45]  This is watched by over a million people.
[01:16:48]  Here's from Endgame.
[01:16:49]  So popular was the show that it crowded out the baseball and tennis coverage normally seen in sports bars in New York.
[01:16:55]  And when the channel was covering the Democratic National Convention in Washington, the stations were flooded with thousands of calls to have them put the chess match back on.
[01:17:04]  Station officials gave in to the viewers' demands, dropped the convention, and went back to broadcasting the match.
[01:17:12]  Oh, God.
[01:17:15]  So, okay, people love chess bania, but like back in the match, like nothing interesting happens.
[01:17:20]  It's not a very good match.
[01:17:21]  Both of them are playing kind of badly.
[01:17:22]  Fisher wins.
[01:17:24]  And then he shows up to his medal ceremony.
[01:17:27]  And then in order to complain that there's not his name isn't engraved on the medal.
[01:17:31]  Huh.
[01:17:32]  And that is that is Fisher winning the Chess World Championship.
[01:17:39]  You know, he, at this point, you know, Fisher is an American hero, right?
[01:17:43]  Like, he's done all the stuff.
[01:17:47]  He is a profoundly American figure.
[01:17:48]  And he comes back to the US.
[01:17:50]  That is undeniable.
[01:17:51]  He sounds extremely American.
[01:17:53]  It's amazing.
[01:17:55]  So, okay, so he comes back to the U.S. and he gets like, he has a just infinite number of sponsorship deals and like branding stuff.
[01:18:02]  And everyone wants to talk to him.
[01:18:03]  And he just turns them all down.
[01:18:08]  Here's one last thing from Endgame.
[01:18:10]  The most fabulous offer came to Fisher in 1974, right after the Muhammad Ali George Foreman fight, known as the Rumble in the Jungle in Zaire.
[01:18:18]  The Zaire government offered Fisher $5 million.
[01:18:22]  I think that's like $40 million or something in modern money to play Anatoly Karpov in their country in what would have been a month-long championship chess match.
[01:18:31]  Too short, said Bobby.
[01:18:33]  How dare they offer me $5 million for a month-long match?
[01:18:36]  This is like, yeah, this is $30 million in today's money.
[01:18:39]  Ali received twice that much for one night.
[01:18:42]  He didn't.
[01:18:42]  Muhammad Ali did not get $10 million.
[01:18:45]  No, no, but also Muhammad Ali's, the sport that he played involved him destroying his brain by getting his skull smashed.
[01:18:53]  So yes, I understand why he might get more money.
[01:18:56]  Yeah, okay.
[01:18:58]  Get this fucking next line.
[01:18:59]  It was after that match that Ali began calling himself the greatest.
[01:19:03]  And Bobby took issue with that, too.
[01:19:05]  Ali stole it from me, said Bobby.
[01:19:07]  I used the greatest for myself on television before he ever used it.
[01:19:11]  Okay, okay, Bobby.
[01:19:13]  You don't get to copyright the term the greatest.
[01:19:16]  Yeah, and you don't get a complaint that Muhammad Ali is using.
[01:19:21]  No, no, you know what?
[01:19:22]  I think we should do a hybrid chess boxing match between Ali.
[01:19:27]  No, I would have loved this special murdered him.
[01:19:30]  It would have been a misdied in the ring.
[01:19:33]  It would have been very funny.
[01:19:37]  Unfortunately, chess boxing will not become a popular thing until two months ago.
[01:19:43]  So rest in peace.
[01:19:44]  We do.
[01:19:44]  Yeah.
[01:19:46]  And this is, this is where we're going to leave Fisher here for today at the absolute peak of his fame.
[01:19:52]  Amazing.
[01:19:52]  And yelling at Muhammad Ali for calling himself the greatest because he did it first.
[01:19:58]  I think we can all agree chess was a mistake.
[01:20:02]  Yeah.
[01:20:03]  Yeah.
[01:20:04]  Mia, you want to plug your pluggables before we write out?
[01:20:09]  Yeah.
[01:20:09]  So I do a show called It Could Happen Here that Robert is also on sometimes.

=== After the Revolution (02:41) ===

[01:20:14]  I am.
[01:20:14]  And other people are also on.
[01:20:15]  And it's good and you should listen to it.
[01:20:17]  And I'm also at it me, CHR3 on Twitter if you'd want to be there for some reason.
[01:20:23]  Yeah.
[01:20:24]  Yeah.
[01:20:25]  I have a book called After the Revolution.
[01:20:28]  You can buy it by typing it into any place that sells books, Amazon or bookshop.org or whatever that place is.
[01:20:36]  Or just go to the AK Press website.
[01:20:38]  You can buy After the Revolution everywhere.
[01:20:41]  All right, folks, until next week, go play Warhammer.
[01:20:46]  You know, engage with the true sport of strategic masters, the one that has a lot of chainsaws in it.
[01:20:55]  Behind the Bastards is a production of CoolZone Media.
[01:20:58]  For more from CoolZone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:21:08]  On a recent episode of the podcast, Money and Wealth with John O'Brien, I sit down with Tiffany the Budginista Alicia to talk about what it really takes to take control of your money.
[01:21:18]  What would that look like in our families if everyone was able to pass on wealth to the people when they're no longer here?
[01:21:25]  We break down budgeting, financial discipline, and how to build real wealth, starting with the mindset shifts too many of us were never ever taught.
[01:21:34]  If you've ever felt you didn't get the memo on money, this conversation is for you to hear more.
[01:21:39]  Listen to Money and Wealth with John O'Brien from the Black Effect Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:21:50]  Will Farrell's Big Money Players and iHeart Podcast presents soccer moms.
[01:21:54]  So I'm Leanne.
[01:21:55]  Yeah.
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[01:22:00]  A redacted amount of years later.
[01:22:02]  We're still joined at the hip, just a little bit bigger hips.
[01:22:05]  This is a podcast we're recording it as we tailgate our youth soccer games in the back of my Honda Odyssey with all the snacks and drinks.
[01:22:12]  Why did you get hard seltzer instead of beer?
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[01:22:16]  Well, then you gotta.
[01:22:17]  Listen to soccer moms on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:22:22]  You know the famous author Roald Dahl.
[01:22:24]  He thought up Willy Wonka and the BFG.
[01:22:27]  But did you know he was a spy?
[01:22:29]  Neither did I. You can hear all about his wildlife story in the podcast, The Secret World of Roald Dahl.
[01:22:36]  All episodes are out now.
[01:22:37]  Was this before he wrote his stories?
[01:22:39]  It must have been.
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[01:22:41]  Okay, I don't think that's true.
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