Bobby Fischer's 1992 Belgrade match occurred amidst Bosnian genocide, where he ignored U.S. Treasury sanctions threatening $250,000 fines or ten years in prison to play under a regime funding paramilitaries. While the press covered his absurd demands regarding chess piece noses and his anti-Semitic rhetoric equating Bolshevism with Judaism, they overlooked the ongoing slaughter. Fischer later evaded extradition for years, sought asylum in nations like North Korea and Libya, and made calls to execute Jews before dying in Iceland after a legal battle involving genetic testing. Ultimately, this episode exposes how international media prioritized a controversial chess match over human rights atrocities, allowing a notorious Nazi sympathizer to operate with impunity during a genocide. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Money Memo for the Uninformed00:01:50
This is an iHeart podcast.
Guaranteed human.
On a recent episode of the podcast Money and Wealth with John O'Brien, I sit down with Tiffany the Budginista Aliche to talk about what it really takes to take control of your money.
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?
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.
If you've ever felt you didn't get the memo on money, this conversation is for you to hear more.
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.
Will Farrell's Big Money Players and iHeart Podcast presents soccer moms.
So I'm Leanne.
This is my best friend Janet.
Hey.
And we have been joined at the hip since high school.
Absolutely.
A redacted amount of years later.
We're still joined at the hip.
Just a little bit bigger hips.
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.
Why did you get hard seltzer instead of beer?
Oh, they had a BOGO.
Well, then you done.
Listen to soccer moms on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
You know the famous author Roll Dahl.
He thought up Willy Wonka and the BFG.
But did you know he was a spy?
Neither did I. You can hear all about his wildlife story in the podcast, The Secret World of Roald Dahl.
All episodes are out now.
Was this before he wrote his stories?
It must have been.
What?
Okay, I don't think that's true.
I'm telling you, I was a spy.
Binge all 10 episodes of The Secret World of Roald Dahl now on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
The Secret World of Roald Dahl00:15:40
Fuck it.
We'll do it live.
We'll do it live.
I'm Bill O'Reilly, and this is the O'Reilly Factor.
Why is it a podcast?
What, Sophie?
I have a really hot beverage in my hand.
If I spill it during this, I'm going to be really mad at you.
Well, everyone's mad at Bill O'Reilly because he speaks the truth, Sophie.
I'm mad at you.
Well, that's fair.
This is Behind the Bastards, a podcast about the worst people in all of history, one of whom is, in fact, Bill O'Reilly.
But we are not talking about Bill O'Reilly today.
We are instead talking about Bobby Fisher, chess Nazi.
Also featured in the Hilltop Hood song, Cosby Sweater, which is not about Bill Cosby's crimes.
It's actually a reference to Biggie.
So it's okay.
It's fine.
You can enjoy the song.
Mia, how you doing?
Doing okay.
We're heading into the downhill stretch of this Friday afternoon and also the downhill stretch of the life of one Bobby Fisher.
That's good.
That's good.
I am ready for it to be the downhill stretch of Bobby Fisher's life.
Unfortunately, it gets really bad before it gets over.
It hasn't been good yet.
So that's going to.
It's only getting worse.
Okay.
Well, let's ruin my Friday afternoon, please.
So, all right.
When we last left the hero of American chess, Bobby Fisher was the hero of the free world, the chess world champion, and also, like, people are just like, like, just, just dropping piles of money on him, and he refuses to pick any of it up.
He does just no promotions.
Everyone wants to pay him, and he's just like, no.
He does do one thing after this.
And that one, that one offer that he does take is to go play a tournament in the Philippines in 1973.
And this is where Fisher gets into the business he's going to be in for the rest of his life, which is the dictator business.
Now, okay, it's important to note that this is the year 1973, right?
This is the year after future pod subject Ferdinand Marcos staged his military coup and became a dictator of the Philippines.
He is about to torture, well, he has already tortured people.
He's going to torture tens of thousands of people.
He's going to inflict a raid of terror on the beleaguered people of the Philippines.
And Fisher just spends this whole tournament there, like hanging out with Marcos and his wife.
And he's having a dinner.
That sounds like one of the worst dinners imaginable.
He likes it, apparently.
I'm sure he liked it.
I'm saying it sounds like one of the dinner conversation.
Just absolute trash tier.
Oh, God.
Yeah.
No one has ever.
Well, actually, that's not true.
They did actually accuse Bobby Fisher of having good taste before he proved them wrong.
But it's, you know, he like, this is one of the places that like always sort of sticks with Bobby Fisher.
Like, he, he, he likes the Philippines so much that like he's going to move here eventually.
And Fisher's reaction to, you know, the Marcos dictatorship is like, this rules.
I love it.
And eventually, okay, tournament ends.
He is back to the U.S.
And there's good news and bad news.
The good news is that he breaks with the Church of God because their doomsday prophecies keep failing.
He's literally the only guy to ever do that.
He really just was like, okay, World Doomsday Prophecy number four.
Like, none of them are working.
So he gets it.
So that's the good news.
Yay, he's out of the cult.
The bad news is that one of the first things he does when he comes back to California is buy a copy of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
Oh, good.
Yeah, no, that's that.
That's great.
Great move, Bobby.
This is going to send him in some good directions, I think.
Because so far, my main problem with this guy is he's not yet keened enough on esoteric Nazi propaganda.
Okay, so the other book that he gets is called Nature's Eternal Religion by Ben Classen, who is like now that's that's that's actually esoteric.
Very good.
Oh, yeah, nice work.
He's like a weirdo.
He's a really fanatical, like racist and anti-Semitic.
He's one of these guys who is like, like, Christianity is actually Jewish, so it's not like white enough.
So it needs to be like not Christians.
And he's the founder of.
Okay, so the thing that he founds is the World Church of the Creator, which concerns in the creativity movement.
And they're most famous for producing the mass shooter Ben Smith.
And I need to make a note here.
This is not the shooter name, the mass shooter named Ben Smith from Portland from last year.
This is a completely unrelated mass shooter named Ben Smith from 1999.
Look, if you're listening to this podcast and you're also a Ben Smith, your ass is, we got an eye on you, motherfucker.
Be careful.
Don't do any bad things.
Yeah, please, God.
We don't need a third Ben.
It was played out after the first time.
It was played out before the first time.
It's definitely played out.
You don't need a third one.
Third time is not the charm.
Do not.
Enough with the Ben Smith anyway.
Make this just a normal name again.
This Ben Smith goes on just like a murderous rampage shooting black, Jewish, and Asian people before just like going out like a tiny baby in a car chase.
And at this point, but Bobby's getting like real weird with his anti-Semitism.
He sends his two Jewish friends a copy of a book called The Secret World Government by, oh, God.
Actually, okay, I have confidence I can kind of do this name.
Major General Count Chirup Spira Danovich, which, by the way, no, that's not a name.
I'm sorry.
I'm sorry.
You need to walk me through how that fucking thing is spelled because I simply don't believe you.
It's C-H-E-R-E-P-S-P-I-R-I-D-O-V-I-C-H.
What kind of fucking, what, wait, sorry, what kind of place is this motherfucker from?
This guy is a Russian white, Russian white.
Well, he was originally a Russian admiral and then like a Russian white army.
Yeah, he's a, so he's in the fucking pro-Czarist.
See, yeah.
Look, you're not going to hear me stand up for the Bolsheviks all that often, but my God, did those people suck.
Look, anyone, any, any culture that's putting out names like that, you're going to have to line some people up in a basement.
I'm sorry.
It's the only thing to do with names like that.
This is one of those guys who like they absolutely should have shot.
He's like...
Unacceptable name.
Yeah, well, also, he's like a major guy who's like, he's basically like an anti-Semitism organizer.
Yeah, absolutely.
That sounds right for the White Army.
Yeah.
So he writes this book about how a Jewish Mongol cabal is running the world.
Oh, sure.
Yeah.
No, that honestly, I actually, I'm back to having respect for this guy because that is not one.
I have heard of every kind of Jewish cabal except for a Jewish Mongol cabal.
That's very good.
I think I actually, I, okay, my understanding of this is that this is a thing about like there are certain kinds of, yeah, there's like kinds of Russian nationalists who are like insane about the Mongolian, like the invasion.
Well, there's a, I mean, a big, a big part of, especially this era of anti-I mean, it, it bleeds through to today, but one of the big things Hitler would talk about is the idea that like all forms of social justice and tolerance are Jewish plots.
And the Mongols, for all of their flaws, were pretty tolerant of other religions, right?
Like that, that was like a factor in their governance.
Like they didn't really care what you believed.
Yeah.
Okay, like they did lots of genocides, but not because you believed something.
Yes, it's not because of religion.
Their mode of genocide is, are you a pastoralist or not?
Which is a very different thing from stuff.
I can see someone being like, well, the Mongols were tolerant of other religions.
And so that's part of this Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracy to water down Orthodox Christendom.
Except he thinks the Mongols are like still, like, it's a Mongol Jewish.
I don't know.
He's very wicked.
Is it like the Mongol equivalent of the guys who think that the Queen of England still secretly rules the world?
I don't know.
I didn't read this book because I was like, I'm not.
I can't.
I read so much bullshit for this episode.
Like, absolutely not.
Find a Mongol and ask them, are you secretly running the world?
Well, I have family intermongols.
Do your own research, which is not actual Mongolia, but it's pretty close.
I could probably get across the border.
I have always wanted to go.
I want to go specifically for Nadam, which is like this big multi-day.
Everybody goes to the city, Ulaanbaatar, and they wrestle and do horseback archery and drink heavily.
And it sounds like exactly the kind of thing that I want to do.
Yeah, it sounds like it fucking rips.
Unfortunately, back at things that don't rip.
Fisher, like, he's just full-on, like, like, entering his Nazi crank phase.
Like, he, well, okay, so I point out that that book you were talking about, he sends that to, like, a Jewish couple who's been his friends since like childhood.
And they just stop talking to him because they're like, Bobby, what the fuck?
Yeah.
Bobby.
He also, like, people keep trying to write books about him, and he keeps trying to sue them because he's like, no one can write about me unless they're me.
And everyone's like, that's not how the law works.
That's not how writing works, Bobby.
Yeah.
I'm sorry.
Okay.
And, you know, the sort of peak of this is in 1975, he's supposed to defend his world championship, right?
And Manila offers $5 million to host the event as like a PR thing for his old buddy Ferdinand Marcos.
And this is still, this is $27 million in today's money, which is like, and in 1975, that is a truly terrifying amount of money.
Yes.
And Bobby is like, no, I will not play this tournament unless you agree to change the format of the championship to this weird format where like...
Okay, so normally the way scoring works in chess is if you have a draw, both players get half a point.
And if you win, you get one point and you're trying to get to like a certain number of points.
Sure.
Bobby's like, no, no, no.
Draws no longer give you any points.
You play an unlimited number of games, you get to 10 wins.
And if they both are at 9-9, it's like there's a draw and Fisher keeps being the champion.
And Fide is like, okay, like...
Sounds a little stacked in his favor, like he was complaining about the Russians being.
Yeah, and Fide is like, okay, like, whatever, fine.
Like, we'll let you do this.
Like, the 9-9 thing is kind of a normal.
There had been rules previously where if the scorer is a tie, the world champion keeps being the world champion because they haven't been defeated.
Okay.
But, but Fide is like, okay, we cannot let you play an infinite number of games because if, like, you can act, you could actually just get an infinite number of games, right?
Because chess draws a lot.
And Fide is like, come on, man.
Like, we'll cap it at 36 games.
That's enough.
And Fide, and Fisher is like, okay, you do this or I'm out.
And the Chess Federation is like, okay, he's bluffing, right?
He'll come around eventually.
Fisher, instead of doing that, resigns his title because he says Fide won't let me defend it, so I'm resigning.
Which like, that is not what happened.
Like, it's not that Fide didn't let you defend your title.
It's you refused to play unless they stacked the rules the way you wanted them to be, and then you like resigned.
Huh.
It's very weird.
And at this point, so the guy he was supposed to play was Anatoly Karpov, who's like of the famous Kasparov-Karpov rivalry.
And Karpov is really pissed, but there's nothing you can do about it, right?
Like you can't force Bobby Fisher to play chess.
So Karpov just becomes the world champion because Fisher refuses to show up.
Well, okay, Bobby.
Good call.
I don't know.
Seems like you're making the right move for your career.
Yeah.
You know, at this point, Fisher is busy doing other stuff.
And by doing other stuff, I mean he's turning into like a weird fitness bro guy.
Oh, awesome.
Oh, man.
Is he becoming like a fucking like fucking chest influencer?
Like, is he, is he going...
He's doing the reverse Andrew Tate.
No, but okay, here's the thing, though.
Well, actually, he's just doing an Andrew Tate.
No, because he's not actually becoming an influence.
This next phase of his life is he spends 20 years basically in the wilderness and not talking to anyone.
Well, this I support, actually.
Yeah.
Also, Fisher was actually good at chess, unlike Andrew Tate.
That's true.
Right.
Yeah.
Although, one of my theses of this episode is that Fisher's not actually as good as everyone thinks he is.
He's just that nobody had ever seen real chess in like the fucking 1970s.
Like, I will do this rant later.
But, okay, so here is Bobby Fisher, what he's fucking doing while he's not playing the world championship he's supposed to be playing in.
Quote, every day he'd drink one or two pint glasses of carrot juice, one right after another.
Dozens of bottles of vitamin pills, Indian herbal medicines, Mexican rattlesnake pills, lotions, and exotic keys were piled on tables and ledges everywhere, all to keep on what he believed was a strict, healthful diet and to treat some ailments he had from time to time.
So he's taking rattlesnake pills.
He also, this is the other thing.
He like won't go to doctors.
Very, very normal man.
Yeah.
And it's so, you know, He basically like locks himself in his apartment.
And what he spends all of his time doing is like looking over chess games and then yelling about the moves people play so loudly that like people will walk past his apartment and hear someone yelling and be like, what the fuck is going on here?
The second thing that he's doing, and this is another kind of famous Fisher story, is that he's walking around handing out Nazi pamphlets, which.
Oh, okay.
Yeah, but the thing about this is very, and this is okay.
This is like fully his crank phase, right?
Because if he wanted to be like an actual Nazi propagandist, he could have gone to the media and started talking about them.
But instead, what he's doing is he's literally like standing on the street corner with pamphlets and then like putting Nazi pamphlets on like people's windshields.
Well, I mean, I guess I do prefer that to a great version of this.
He's active, not well, okay.
Well, we'll get to what he is good at.
But while this is going on, he refuses to like take work or like make any money from endorsements, which again, everyone is trying to pay him.
He just refuses to sign contracts at this point because he's so paranoid.
And so this means that he has no money, right?
And he blows through all of his original Chess World Championship money.
And in order to like survive, he starts living off his sister's social security checks.
He's actually doing a reverse Hitler here.
Yeah, he has fully turned into a California beach bum.
He's like moving from rented room to rented room.
At one point, he moves in with his sister, but like she kicks him out of his house for his anti-Semitism.
Paranoia and Chess Conspiracy00:06:50
Wait, so she's she's, but wait, is he stealing the money from her?
Or is she giving him a money?
She just doesn't want him in the house.
I guess that makes sense.
Well, because like she, this is like, like, but basically until this incident where he gets, like, even till the end of his life, really, like, his mom still keeps in touch with him.
Like, they're still talking, but they, like, have an agreement never to talk about politics because Fisher will start ranting about anti-Semitic world conspiracies.
Yeah, I mean, that's normally.
Yeah, okay.
Very, very, yeah.
I don't know.
I don't know what you do with Bobby Fisher.
I'm not going to, I'm not going to backseat Bobby Fisher's mom.
Her.
She's, she's made a lot of mistakes, though.
I think we can agree on that.
Yeah.
I mean, I would argue a lot of it isn't her fault.
Like, it was, like, a lot of, a lot of what happens to Bobby Fisher is literally just like, do you know how hard it is to raise two children as a single mom who also has lost who was working class in like 19 like 19 after 45?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Like, yeah, it's like, it's, it's, I don't know.
She, she, she has a hard time, but she is like an impossible task.
And I don't know, maybe, maybe don't let him go to Cuba with the, the, the guy wearing the swastika pin, but I don't know.
The other thing that's going on in this period.
I feel like, wait, this was Castro Cuba, right?
No, that was pre-Castro.
Okay, no, this was, yeah, this is Batista Cuba.
Okay, that makes sense.
I feel like Castro Cuba probably wouldn't let a guy with a swastika pin in, right?
That has to be one thing that'd be good.
To be fair, to be fair, he did really like Franco.
So.
Yeah.
Well, you never know.
You never know.
Okay.
So the other thing about Bobby Fisher, like his, one of his other big movies, he just, like, from the time he wins the world championship, he becomes absolutely convinced that KGB are trying to kill him.
And so he starts walking around with like basically like belts of potions that are supposed to save him if they're trying to poison him.
At one point later, he starts wearing like the modern equivalent of like a 1600s buff coat.
He's wearing this like leather jacket that's like five inches thick because he's like, if they try to stab me, the coat will stop.
He's okay.
You know what?
That's amazing.
I was worried you were going to be like, yeah, he started walking around with a bunch of guns and this was going to go in a dark direction.
But potions and leather armor is pretty cool.
He is kitted out like he's heading to Baldur's Gate.
Yeah, it's you know, like as a result of this, right?
He like it gets to the point where nobody even recognizes him as Bobby Fisher anymore.
Um, there's at one point, there's a very famous story about him where, so, okay, he's in California, he's like wandering around the streets, and there's a robbery nearby, and the cops think that he matches the description of the, of the suspect, and so they arrest him, and then they just keep him there because they think he's sketchy.
After this happens, he writes this pamphlet called I Was Tortured in the Pasadena Jailhouse.
And I'm going to read a little bit of it because I think it gets at what's going on in his mind at this point.
I was immediately handcuffed in a brutal fashion.
The police pushed my hands away way up my back and caused me considerable discomfort and pain.
Later, I saw that the metal had torn into the flesh of both my wrists.
I was put in a police car, but I was unable to move far back enough for them to close the door because there was some kind of hump in the middle of the back seat.
After several attempts to shut the door by brutally pushing my right leg with his left leg, the officer finally succeeded in closing the door by pushing my leg in with the door itself.
That sentence has been going on for like a century.
Yeah.
Later, I saw that my right knee had turned black and blue.
And like, he, you know, like, he, the stuff he's talking about, like, he starts talking, he talks about how he was like stripped naked and like forced to stay in an empty cell with no food or water.
And like, a lot of people kind of make fun of this.
And I think this is absolutely plausible.
Like, this is all stuff that like, you know, people, people who I know have been in jail of like had cops do this to you because cops.
But on the other hand, he's like fully in crank mode now.
And he's fully convinced that like this entire thing is a setup and it's been like orchestrated by like, well, the Jews because he's unbelievably Semitic at this point.
He's convinced that like this whole thing is like a government plot.
And, you know, the thing about this right is if he'd actually gone to like the New York Times and been like, hey, I got tortured by the cops, they would have covered it, right?
Like he, every, everyone still wants to talk to him, but instead he's fully, he's fully a crank now.
And he just like publishes this pamphlet with like a thousand dollars of his own money and like walks around handing out copies like on the street to people.
And meanwhile, like like people are, people are like, just this is like the 1980s.
They're still throwing money at him, right?
Like at one point, so people were willing to take, to spend $10,000 literally to take his picture.
And he's like, no, no, you can't take a picture of me.
No.
And, you know, this is, this is how he spends the 80s.
It's just sort of like another crank like on the street screaming about like Jewish conspiracies.
And I think like, if he was in 2023, right?
I think he actually would have done great.
Like he, you know, he'd have, he'd, he basically would have been, he basically would have been Yi, right?
He'd have a podcast.
He'd have like a giant entourage of like people who kind of have their shit together, but who are also Nazis.
But like, you know, part of part of the thing about this period is, you know, the 1980s have the white power movement, but they don't have the kind of like media infrastructure that like someone like Alex Jones, for example, has.
No, they're just starting to build it.
You've got guys.
What year is this again?
Well, it's like the whole 1980s.
I think it's.
Yeah, yeah.
So you've got guys like Tom Metzger and David Duke and they're building media, but most of it is like what you'd call zines and stuff coming out.
You do have stuff like the Liberty Lobby, Willis Cartoon.
Is out there with a lot more kind of a sophisticated stuff, but it is, it is not, they do not have the kind of media reach that they yeah.
And the other thing about this right, like, so it's not clear to me if any of these guys ever tried to contact Fisher.
It's possible they did, but the problem is his only point of contact was that Jewish family that he sent all his anti-Semitic conspiracies to.
So no one can actually get in contact with him because like his friends just stopped talking to him because they were like, okay, you're too much of an anti-Semite.
Like, I'm Jewish.
Like, okay.
But eventually in 1990, Boris Spassky, like, I don't, I don't remember exactly how he did it.
He finally finds some way to like get in contact with Fisher about doing like a rematch to the world championship with like $2.5 million on the line.
Spassky's original partner like pulls out of this because he realizes that Bobby Fisher is a Nazi and these were the heady days when like people occasionally would see someone who's a Nazi and be like, I'm not going to work with this guy.
ExxonMobil Goes Green00:04:10
But you know who will work?
Wait, shit.
That's, oh boy.
You know who won't work with Nazis.
That's right.
The podcasters who advertise the advertisements who podcast on this shit.
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.
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?
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.
Financial education is not always about like, I'm going to get rich.
That's great.
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.
If you've ever felt you didn't get the memo on money, this conversation is for you to hear more.
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.
Hello, gorgeous.
It's Lala Kent, host of Untraditionally Lala.
My days of filling up cups at sir may be over, but I'm still loving life in the valley.
Life on the other side of the hill is giving grown-up vibes.
But over here on my podcast, Untraditional Le La, I'm still that Lala you either love or love to hate.
I've been full on oversharing with fans, family, and former frenemies like Tom Schwartz.
I had a little bone to pick with Schwartzy when he came on the pod.
You don't feel bad that you told me I was a bootleg housewife?
I almost flipped a pizza in your lap.
Oh, God, I literally forgot about that until just now.
Sorry, I don't want to, I don't want to blame all of that.
I got to blame that one on the alcohol.
This is about laughing and learning when life just keeps on laughing because I make mistakes so that you guys don't have to.
We're growing, we're thriving, and yes, sometimes we're barely surviving, but we do it all with love.
Listen to Untraditionally Lala on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
I'm Iris Palmer, and my new podcast is called Against All Odds.
And that's exactly what the show is about.
Doing whatever it takes to beat the odds.
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.
I'm talking to people like award-winning actress, producer, and director, Fiva Longoria.
I think I had like $200 in my savings account, and my mom goes, what are you going to do?
And I was like, I'll figure it out.
We had a one-bedroom apartment for like $400 a month and we all could not afford.
Like, I was like, how am I going to make $100 a month?
I'm opening up like I've never before.
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.
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.
Ah, we're back.
Wow.
That was easily our best poll to advertising.
Sophie had to drop off because her phone is ringing off the hook from companies that want us to represent them on our show.
Oh, Is ExxonMobil on the phone, Sophie?
Oh, that's a huge get.
I'm very excited.
Mia, we got the Exxon Mobile account.
Um, yay, very excited.
ExxonMobil's going green.
So, by, I don't know, let's say 2070 or so, zero, zero emissions from Exxon.
Everybody, get on the Exxon train.
We have every single oil rig green.
This is Exxon's.
Exxon's goal is no animals harmed by oil spills by 2050, and they're going to make that a reality by nuking the ocean.
Wow, brave, heroic, courageous.
Thank you, Exxon.
Ponzi Scheme in Yugoslavia00:14:30
Anyway, Mia, let's continue.
So, all right, when we last saw Bobby Fisher, right?
He, he, people, people are refusing to work with him because he's a Nazi.
So, okay, what is he saying that people are like, this guy's a Nazi?
Um, eventually, a he has like a kind of relationship.
He, he's like, how old is he in the 90s, like late 40s, has this kind of relationship with like an 18-year-old?
Yep.
And he's going to do this like multiple times over the course of his life.
Um, that's not great.
To be fair, it's not great.
To be fair to Bobby Fisher, I don't, I couldn't find any evidence that he actually did anything with anyone underage, but he he really seems to like like 18 and 19-year-olds.
Um, and at one point, one of like this, this woman named Kita gets a talking to him, and uh, this this is this is a description of what of what he's saying.
This is still in night, this is like in like 1990.
He told her that the reason he wasn't playing like chess was because the Russians cheat.
And over the course of future letters and phone calls, he elaborated on his theory regarding how the games played by Kasparov and Karpov had all been prearranged, and that he believed that Kasparov and Karpov were actually agents of the Russian regime.
He asked if she was Jewish.
Everyone who is Soviet and everyone who is Jewish cannot be trusted, he affirmed.
So, all right, on the one hand, we got some anti-Semitism here.
Um, but I also want to, there's two other things I want to focus on: one is that, okay, A, he's still mad about those people drawing in a tournament in 1970.
It's now 1990, and two, okay, so like there was kind of collusion going on between some of the Soviet grandmasters.
The Kasparov and Karpov games, and I cannot emphasize this enough, are absolutely not being rigged.
This is nonsense.
Kasparov and Karpov, for people who don't know, are like the two best chess players.
Karpov basically from about 1975, and then Kasparov comes in in like the mid-80s.
And these two are the best, indisputably the best players in the world who aren't named Bobby Fisher for like this entire period.
And I actually think Kasparov's better than Fisher was at his height, but Kasrov never gets to play him.
Kasrov and Karpov played like a bunch of world championships against each other, and they fucking hate each other.
It's not clear to me if any other two players in the entire history of competitive chess have ever hated each other as much as Kasparov and Karpov do.
Like Kasparov, like to this day, is a Russian dissident.
Karpov is like the Soviet golden boy.
As best as I could tell, like to this, this rivalry starts in the 80s.
It is now 2023.
They still hate each other.
Karpov's now a Putin loyalist.
Kasparov's still, I guess, a Russian dissident.
Like at one point, it gets to the point where in one of the world championship matches, both sides have like rivaling groups of like hypnotists and mystics in each, like sitting, sitting in the room trying to like hypnotize and counteract the hypnosis.
It's it's wild.
These people just like I cannot emphasize enough how much these people despise each other and how much Bobby Fisher has just like completely gone off the rails arguing that this whole thing is staged.
And Fisher, meanwhile, is like, he's living in his tiny apartment that is just entirely filled with a combination of like books and of cassette tapes that he recorded of his anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.
And I tried to track these down and I couldn't find them.
I don't know.
Maybe they exist somewhere.
But from Endgame, apparently they were materials for, quote, a book that would prove how the Soviets cheated in chess.
And the other thing he's still mad about is Nixon, it turned out, actually lied to him when he said he could come to the White House and never let him go to the White House, which I guess is what you get for trusting Richard Nixon.
Yeah, not ever going to be your best bet.
And he is still mad about this.
Like 20 years later, he is like incensed that he didn't get to go to the White House.
But while all of this is going on, behind the scenes, the cranks are still turning on this sort of like comeback match, like Bobby Fisher, Boris Spassky, like world championship rematch thing.
And eventually they find someone willing to pay $5 million for the match.
That guy's name is, oh boy, Jedizmir Vilesovic, who's often just called Gazda Jezda, which roughly means Jezda the boss, who is the president of the Judoskadnik Bank and what remains of Yugoslavia.
And it is at this point in the career of Bobby Fisher, as he is about to play his first professional match of chess in almost 20 years in the remains of Yugoslavia that we need to talk about the Bosnian genocide.
Oh boy.
So before we go any, yeah, not not.
I'm going to bet he has fun opinions on Bosnians.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
It's, oh boy.
So, all right.
And before we go any further, I need to lay out an accusation here, which is that I think that most of the chess accounts of Bobby Fisher's actions in this period are at the very least lying to their readers by omission.
And I think a lot of them are actively engaging in genocide denial by not telling their readers like what is going on in Yugoslavia in like quote unquote Yugoslavia.
Because it's not really Yugoslavia at this point.
No, no, no.
It's Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, right?
Well, and like, you know, the other thing about this, right, is that like the place that Bobby Fisher comes from, like Srbska and stuff.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, so it's 1992.
And like, technically speaking, there is a country called Yugoslavia.
And when people write about this, they'll be like, oh, you played in Yugoslavia.
But this is not like Yugoslavia in the sense of like the state that had existed up until this point.
This is basically a rump state controlled by genocidal Serbian ethno-nationalists.
And but by the time Bobby Fischer gets there, he gets there in late 1992, right?
The siege of Sarajevo has already begun.
There's a bunch of peace protesters have already been gunned down by Serbian militias.
The Yugoslav people's army, quote unquote, is just fully under control of the sort of Serbian ethno-nationalists, is shelling the city of Sarajevo.
And the other thing that's important to know about, important to understand about when Fischer gets there is that the Bosnian genocide has already started, right?
But Bosnians, Bosnians are already, you know, being, Bosnian Muslims are being routed up and killed by Serbian forces.
Serbian militias have already set up concentration camps.
The sort of like the mass rape of Bosnian women has started.
And, you know, we are like, by the time Fischer is going to this place to do his first public appearance in 20 years, we are like well into one of the worst things that happened in Europe in a century that saw Europe have some of the worst things that's ever happened in 200,000 year history of humanity.
And yeah, it's like by the time the tournament has started, like there were already 50,000 people dead in the series of wars that sort of the Serbian ethno-nationalists have waged against sort of Croatia and Bosnia.
And, you know, okay, like to get a like to get a sort of sense of how bad things are if you're Bosnian, right?
So the Serbian like ethno-nationalists have at this point, they've taken control of like one of the world's best equipped armies, right?
Like Yugoslavia was like a giant army.
I mean, so for an idea of how good, relatively competent the Yugoslavian military was, read Balkan history all the way up to the period where Tito takes over, and then read Balkan history for the period where Tito is in power.
Like, they keep the Balkans for quite a while from going to war, and no one else really does that.
Yeah, and you know, and but the problem is, again, by this point, like, the Serbians have just fully taken over that party.
And when the war against, when the Croatians like try to like, when the Croatians like leave Yugoslavia because their, their alternative is staying in there and being ruled by like Milosevic and these sort of like just absolutely psychological heroes on Milosevic.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Like by the time they start this, like the Croatians are literally, they are like raiding their own museums and like going to film sets trying to find old World War II, World War, sorry, old World War.
God, why can I not say World War II?
I don't know.
Wow, hacking a fraud.
Just call it WW2.
Yeah, yeah.
They're finding all WWE.
That's my favorite way to say it.
Yeah.
Like they are, they are, they are, they are like in film sets recovering weapons that were originally like dropped or like dropped in a Croatia by Tito and the partisans in like 1943.
And, you know, okay, so the create, if you think the Croatians are in bad shape, those are the people the Bosnians are buying weapons from?
Are the guys raiding their own museums for World War II era weapons?
Ah, so that's going to go well.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So Volley Fisher is playing in a chess tournament in a country that has already committed a genocide, right?
They are already doing it.
It has already started.
And this entire tournament is being run as a PR op by Gaza Jezda as this, you know, the sort of like statement against like the US and UN like sanctions against Serbia.
And like, you know, we're going to show the world how ridiculous these like oppressive sanctions are.
And, you know, you can talk about how much good those like sanctions did or didn't do.
I mean, there's one part of it that like doesn't get talked about very much, which is that, so there's a weapons embargo, right?
That's imposed on Yugoslavia, but it's also because Milosevic pushes for it to get imposed on literally everyone, which means that, you know, this weapons embargo is kind of fine for like Serb, the sort of Serbian army, because they already have all these weapons.
But, you know, the Bosnians can't now are under sanctions and can't buy weapons anymore.
And, you know, okay.
So wow.
So in an effort to stop violence, the international community limited the group of people who already didn't have guns from getting more guns and then they were victims of a genocide.
Good thing that's never happened again.
Yep.
Oh, God.
And, you know, like part of the other story about this is like the Serbians really think, and they're right for a lot of the period of time that Shaza has going on.
Like, they think they can get the West on their side because the West will be like, oh, we need them to fight Islamic extremism.
Yep.
And, you know, that famously never led to anything absolutely horrific happening then or later.
But, you know, the reason I'm talking about all of this is, you know, the economic sanctions are still sort of wreaking havoc in Serbia.
And bypassing those sanctions is like one of Gaza Jez's like main jobs.
So this guy, the guy who's like paying for this tournament, right, is running like one of the largest banks that like remains in sort of like this like shattered like Yugoslavia shell.
The problem is it's a Ponzi scheme.
So he's offering 15% returns on deposits.
And everyone's like, well, look at, look at, look at like how connected he is to like the Serbian political class.
Like, would our leaders ever associate with someone crooked?
No, this must be fine.
It must be that he can just get 15% returns because he's not greedy.
And okay, so that's the part that like we can confirm he was doing is that he's running this Ponzi scheme.
Everything I feel like is really murky.
There's these like persistent claims that he was smuggling weapons from Israel to the Serbian army.
Yeah, the source of this is someone who was the former Serbian minister of defense who like testified against Milosevic at the Hague.
I don't know.
I think it's possible.
I'm not going to definitively say it's true because I couldn't confirm it.
But what does seem to have been true is that this bank is part of how the Serbian government is avoiding UN sanctions.
Milosevic very quickly at like the beginning, when he starts all of these wars, right, he very quickly seizes like billions of dollars in foreign deposits in like Serbian banks in order to get a hold of like the value, incredibly valuable US dollars they contain.
Now, okay, so it's a little bit of economicsy stuff.
You need US dollars to buy things.
They simply have to be in the form of US dollars.
One of the most important things you need to buy with that is oil, which can like, it's very difficult to buy oil if it's not in US dollars.
And, you know, by getting people to invest like real American dollars or like German marks in this Ponzi scheme, which you can either buy things from Germany or use to get like dollars, the government's able to bypass the sanctions.
And the bank itself, at very least, once and probably other times, seems to have been like directly running oil through the blockade.
Now, Chesda also claims that Milosevic like forced him to fund a bunch of paramilitary like death squads.
And I don't know, like the guy's a pathological liar.
So who knows if that's true?
On the other hand, there are a bunch of death squads in this period that are getting funded by partially the Serbian government and partially like incredibly sketchy sources.
So who knows?
He might actually be telling the truth here.
It's unclear.
But, you know, of course, he's also just stealing an enormous amount of money because, again, this is all a Ponzi scheme.
And hilariously, this whole like show match that he's funding is actually one of the things that brings down his bank.
Because, so here's from the Washington Post.
The court acted alleging that the bank had failed to make promise payments to private enterprise, which is another bank, including those releasing the Svetli Stefan, the resort where Jalis staged the opening games of the chess match between Bobby Fisher and Boris Spassky last September.
So he like defaults on like his rent payment for this resort.
And the court seizes like a bunch of the sort of oil that he was running through the blockade.
And at this point, everyone begins to sort of realize that, wait, hold on, this is a Ponzi scheme.
And he like flees to, he flees to Israel and then later on is like sentenced to 10 years for like financial crime.
So this is the guy who's running the show match.
And okay, here's from Endgame about sort of what the effect of this show match is.
When the match's venue was moved to Belgrade, Slavodon Milosevic, the president of Serbia, met Bobby and Spassky and asked to be photographed with the two.
He used the occasion to trumpet his propaganda to the international press.
Quote, this match is important because it is played while Yugoslavia is under unjustified blockade.
That, in its best ways, proves that chess and sports cannot be limited by politics.
Milosevic was later charged with crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Tribunal in The Hague and died in prison.
Criminal Dishwasher Cover-Up00:10:06
He sure did.
Yeah, but you know, the really depressing thing about this is like this PR effort worked, right?
There are vast swaths of sort of the international left, including like mainstream progressives who like wouldn't expect to be, you know, backing a genocidal fascist who will to this day hold that like what happened in Yugoslavia was actually like NATO tore it apart from being socialist.
And, you know, like, never mind the fact that Milosevic was a career banker who is like, he is the guy who like does a bunch of the structural adjustments, right?
Like he like he became the butcher of the old socialist economy before he became the butcher of Bosnia.
You know, never mind that, like, his turn to like genocidal ethno-nationalism is like what destroyed Yugoslavia.
Never mind that, like, Serbian fascists carry out a genocide and almost pulled off another one.
Like, there are like enormous numbers of people who today believe that, like, what happened in this war was like Serb resistance to NATO imperialism.
It's like, okay, like, yeah, like, NATO sucks.
Also, these people were trying to kill every Muslim in Bosnia and they almost did it.
And this PR thing, right?
Like...
The other thing about the Fisher tournament is that the kind of PR they get from this, this is also a key part of how the Serbian regime is able to sort of like keep anyone else from getting involved in this by sort of playing different international powers off each other so they could get more time to seize land and do the genocide.
And, you know, okay, so Fisher doesn't care about this shit.
Like, he's like, yeah, fuck it.
Like, I'll do propaganda for Bilosevic.
This is fine.
The U.S. tries to stop Fisher from playing the show match.
So right before he's about to leave for Belgrade, the U.S. Treasury sends him a letter that's like, do not go.
It is a violation of the sanctions that we put out.
I'm going to read from the letter.
Violations of the executive order, which is the sanctions, are punishable by civil penalties not exceeding $10,000 per violation and by criminal penalties not exceeding $250,000 per individual.
10 years in prison or both.
You are hereby directed to refrain from engaging in any of the activities described above.
And Fisher, Fisher's lawyer tells Fisher, like, don't play this.
Like, this is actually going to go really badly for you.
And Bobby Fisher's like, God, fuck you.
Like, I'm going to play this tournament.
The U.S. government can't tell me what to do.
And so, you know, he does.
But, you know, in sort of classic, like, Bobby Fisher fashion, he, he, he throws just another giant chess, like, temper tantrum.
His list of demands continued to grow.
I mean, that's what he does, though.
Yeah, every single time.
Every single time.
He's so consistent.
Yeah.
And every single time someone sets up a chess match, they're like, Bobby Fisher will be reasonable this time.
He's like, no, no, you are not going to be the person that makes Bobby Fisher behave like a noble human being.
He's like physically incapable.
Yeah.
I don't know.
I think this might be the funniest one of these that he does.
His list of demands continued to grow.
Just strategy of appeasement was to give him whatever he wanted, even though the item might not have been mentioned in the contract.
Bobby rejected six tables as inadequate before asking for one from the 1950 Chess Olympics in Dubrovnik.
Even that one had to be slightly altered by a carpenter to satisfy his demands.
The pieces had to have the right heft and color.
He chose the same set that had been played in the Dubrovnik Olympics.
He particularly liked the small color contrast dome on the bishop's head, which prevented their being confused with pawns.
Which, like, you are like one of the best chess players ever.
How are you getting confused between a bishop and a pawn?
Like, what?
Okay, I don't know.
Baffling.
It's difficult to believe, but Bobby rejected one set because the length of the knight's nose was too long.
The anti-Semitic symbolism was hardly lost on those who heard the complaint.
Oh my God.
Oh my God.
Yeah.
Come on.
Come on, man.
Don't.
Yeah.
Are you fucking calling your chest pieces like.
Yeah.
What do you even say to that?
What do you say to a man who's so racist?
He's racist.
He scrutinizes his chest pieces to see if they have Semitic noses.
What is?
Well, apparently you've given $5 million.
I don't know.
This is what keeps happening.
They just keep giving him money.
So, all right.
So he shows up and he plays this match and a shit ton of journalists show up to cover this.
And literally, there are people being herded into concentration camps two and a half hours away from where this match is being played.
Right.
And the journalists are like, fuck that.
Like there's a chess match going on.
And these people, and the other thing about these journalists, right?
You know, okay, it would have cost them like zero total dollars, right?
To go cover the genocide that was happening.
They have to pay $1,000 to cover the event.
And while they're covering the event, they get some classic Bobby Fisher lines.
So there's a things he says to the press, quote, Soviet communism is basically a mask for Bolshevism, which is a mask for Judaism.
Okay, I mean, that's pretty basic stuff.
Yeah, but the thing that strikes me about that, right?
It's like, okay, so there's like modern versions of it, right?
But like normally they have like the Democratic Party as a mask for Bolshevism.
But like, what do you mean Soviet communism is a mask for Bolshevism?
It's the same thing.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It is weird to say that Soviet communism is a mask for Bolshevism.
I don't even think about that.
But yes, that is deeply peculiar.
He has a lot of people.
That's like saying these CEOs are disguising themselves as capitalists.
Yeah.
They're not really.
The other thing that's funny about this is like, when you read some of Bobby Fisher, like you will constantly hear people like screaming about how he has 180 IQ.
And it's like, he's just saying shit like he can't even keep his anti-Semitism into like coherent anti-Semitic steps like a normal Nazi can.
He's just saying this stuff.
He also pulls like another classic of the anti-Semite genre and does the like, I'm not an anti-Semite because Jews are Semites.
I'm sorry, because Arabs are Semites and I'm not anti-Arab, which is like, you know, he's really sort of, he's developing the repertoire of what will become like the modern anti-Semitic stuff.
He has another line where he says, someone asked him how he's doing in chess and he says, I think I'm doing quite well considering I've been blacklisted for the last 20 years by World Jewelry, which is just like, you know, he's just saying this to like a bunch of reporters and then they all immediately forget about this and, you know, the genocide that is going on two hours away.
And, you know, everyone's back to just comparing him to Picasso and Mozart and being like, oh my God, I can't believe I got to witness like Bobby Fisher playing again.
And, you know, okay, so I think there's two things going on here.
One is that like a huge, just like, this is true of the press basically forever, is that a huge portion of the press corps are made up of just like absolute hacks who just don't give a shit.
And in this case, also are just like fervent Islamophobes.
So they just, you know, don't care about the genocide happening outside the window.
And the second part about it is that they're sort of like bewitched by this chess, right?
And I think like we, we have a better perspective on this than they do because, you know, this is the year 2023.
I have seen God play chess.
I have watched AlphaZero, an AI program, like tear a 3,600 rated bot apart like tissue paper in a game that like only bears like a tenuous resemblance to anything you would call chess, right?
Like I can log into YouTube right now and watch like Magnus Carlson or like Ding Lead Rand on Cork, like the sickest shit anyone's ever seen.
And, you know, and like, and part of all these counts is like, people are just better at chess now than they used to be, right?
All these people who are like causing, who are just like calling Bobby Fisher Picasso.
It's like, yeah, okay, like we, we, we have games of chess that you can look at right now that would have made every single one of these people's brains explode.
Like, no, nobody, nobody writes about Magnus Carlson like he's Picasso, even though, again, Carlson is better than Fisher is.
Like, it's basically like indisputably is better than Fisher is.
And nobody calls him this.
Like, we no longer have to respect Bobby Fisher's chess.
It is the year 2023.
My dishwasher can beat him.
Not a joke.
Actually, could.
My dishwasher has enough computing power and it's a piece of shit, but it has enough computing power to run a program powerful enough to beat Bobby Fisher.
And I'm sick and tired of pretending that like that's not true anymore.
You know what your dishwasher couldn't do is fucking take me on at Warhammer 40,000.
That's true.
It actually 2,000 points of orcs versus 2,000 points of whatever you want to pick.
I'll throw your ass down.
Come on, dishwasher.
You can't even paint.
You're not going to be able to get three colors in a base on those models.
So I win by default, dishwasher.
You might be able to make that work.
Yeah, but you know, okay, like, back to what's happening here, right?
Even in the 90s, right?
It's been 20 years since he did this.
The Cold War is basically over, but the sort of mythos of Fisher is like still powerful enough that like all of these people are just sitting there while the genocide's happening fucking two hours away and are being like, oh, hey, look, it's Bobby Fisher.
He's playing all the chess again.
And, you know, this all is an enormous like PR success for Milosevic as an oldest PR success for everyone involved in this sort of genocide.
And Bobby Fisher's like, okay, I can parlay this into getting a chess career back.
The problem is that in December of 1992, he gets an indictment from a grand jury for violating the sanctions in the U.S.
So instead of trying to restart his chess career, he's like desperately scrambling across Europe with like some members of people who I think are like part of like the Hungarian royal family or something trying to like desperately not get like arrested for being a wanted criminal for breaking these sanctions.
But you know who's not a wanted criminal for breaking sanctions.
Forced Roll Indictment00:03:30
I don't know if we can promise that.
It's unclear.
Absolutely.
Roughly 50% of our sponsors, I feel confident that it's somewhere around half of them we can prove have never been forced.
Okay, you know, just roll the ads.
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And wow, I really enjoyed those ads for the Hungarian royal family.
Hey, look, the current president of Hungary, not great.
Why not have a king again?
Canceled Neo-Nazi Interview00:15:19
It went great.
The last time Austria-Hungary had a king, everything went swimmingly.
He made good decisions.
And that's why everyone was, they were so happy with their king that they were like, let's try a completely different series of forms of government.
Yeah, it was great.
Look, look, the First World War, as we all know, started in 1939.
There was no war before that.
Because Austria-Hungary was, it was, it was a king went on vacation.
He just wasn't watching.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So, all right.
One of the things that, so, okay, at this point, like the, the press, the press has finally started to notice that Bobby Fisher is an anti-Semite.
And their immediate thing is like, oh, it's because he's mentally ill.
And this old.
No.
Yeah.
Like, people, like, there are, there were, like, chess psychologists brought in to like diagnose him.
What is a chess psychologist?
How do you are they?
Are they diagnosing him based on how he chesses?
Mia, did you make that up?
Because that seems like a drift.
That seems like a drift.
There are so many chess psychologists in this story.
It is, I didn't, I didn't know this existed until, like, I read a lot of chess books.
Like, I played chess for years.
I didn't know chess psychology existed until I opened these books.
And suddenly there was like 17 chess psychologists trying to figure out if Bobby Fisher's okay.
No, no, no.
I get parts of this because like I think a psychologist could tell a lot of people about how they play Warhammer 40,000.
For example, Dark Eldar player probably shouldn't be allowed to own guns.
Reasonable.
But, you know, okay, like all these people are like making a lot of Warhammer jokes for about 6% of the audience.
You know, it's probably higher than that.
It's probably like 8% at least.
Maybe 9%.
That seems good.
You know, I'm like, I think what's happening with this holstered Bobby Fisher, like, mentally ill thing is just that, like, well, there's two things.
One is that they're treating him in the template of like, oh, there's like the mad genius who's like so smart that he like goes insane in the end.
It's like, no, like, he's not actually that smart, A, and B, like, he's like, it's not that he's mentally ill.
He's just a Nazi.
And people just like cannot get over that.
This person who'd been the like personal hero against the Soviets is like, you know, he could just be like a completely run-of-the-mill Nazi, not even like a particularly good Nazi propagandist, just like a completely run-of-the-mill Nazi yelling about people on the street.
Now, okay.
There are a couple of things that Bobby Fisher does later in life that are like relatively famous.
One of his biggest claims to fame is he invents this game called Fisher Random Chess, which is his chess variant.
We're like, Fisher has this theory that, like, like the reason chess sucks is everyone has to learn openings, which is true.
You have to learn like a million moves of opening, and there's all this theory, and it's very annoying because people, people, someone will just come in like having spent the last like 17 years studying exactly one move order.
And so he's like, okay, well, what if we randomize the pieces on the back of the board's location so that you can't like plan what you're going to do?
And this is supposedly very famously a thing that Volley Fisher invented.
I'm going to read this passage from Endgame.
Eventually, Bobby shifted his monologues from hatred of Jews to chess.
He became angry, however, when Laszlo showed him a book published in 1910 by the Croatian writer Isidor Gross.
This book described a variant of chess that seemed to be the forerunner of Fisher Random with the exact same rules.
Muttering something about Gross being Jewish, Bobby went to change the rules of his variation to make it different from Gross's.
So, yeah, he also, this is also the period where he starts getting obsessed with like preserving his genius by having a child and like preserving his gene pool.
So he starts putting out like ads in the newspaper for like a girlfriend.
He's, the description of his, quote, they must be one, blonde and blue-eyed, two, young, three, beautiful, and four, a serious chess player.
And stunningly, this doesn't work for reasons that are in fact incapable.
We'll never understand why this failed, et cetera, et cetera.
He also starts getting like, he gets progressively more into like he starts reading, what's his name?
David L. Hogan, who's one of like the most world's most like, probably most influential Holocaust deniers.
And, you know, but by the end of the 90s, he started doing radio interviews again.
But the interviews are just like him doing anti-Semitic rants.
Like there's one where he just like he gets on this interview and it starts and then completely out of nowhere, he just like, let me say a few words about the Jews and then just starts ranting about the Holocaust.
And he also does the like, yeah, and the host is like, wait, aren't you Jewish?
And Bobby does, does the thing again where he was like, I will, I will go to the little boy's room and like whip my dick out.
And it was just like, Bobby, man, like, I mean, the title of his episode is.
At least he's consistent.
At least he's consistent.
You know, you gotta respect that.
There he is.
Respect is the wrong word.
Yeah.
And this is not even like the most anti-Semitic thing he says in Radio Inference in this period.
He also is getting like very, very hardcore anti-American, but like from the anti-Semite direction.
And there's a story about, so he's in Japan.
He lives in Japan for a little bit.
And he has a story where he goes to like, he goes to a movie theater to like watch.
I forget what the name of the movie is, but it's some movie about Pearl Harbor.
And when like Pearl Harbor starts, he goes to the...
Maybe I don't remember.
I don't know if it ever said what it was, but he like, so the which is also, by the way, the best Pearl Harbor movie.
No, seriously, it was amazing.
It was made with both like Japanese and American film crews.
It's a fucking incredible movie.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Check it out.
Yeah, it came out in 1970.
So I don't know.
Yeah, so he might have been watching it.
But he's like, so he gets to the part where like they're doing the comic, they're doing like the raids on Battleship Row.
And like he, he like jumps up and starts clapping.
And he's like, everyone else in this theater is like a random Japanese person.
Like, why is this dude clapping at Pearl Harbor?
And he's just like incredibly confused why no one else is like sitting there clapping.
It's the whole thing.
He also, there's another thing.
One of the other things he's obsessed with at the end of his life is, so he has this like storage locker that he put like some of his annotated chess games in, but he doesn't, he never pays the deposits.
And so eventually they like still hold his stuff, even so they change the deposits.
But then the company gets bought by another company and they're like looking through their books and you're like, okay, we have the storage locker full of crap that's not being paid for.
So we're going to auction it off.
And Bobby Fisher, like someone, someone buys all of the stuff in the box and gives it to him.
But for the rest of his life, he has this giant rant he goes on anytime someone interviews him about how he got robbed and how there were billions of dollars in merchandise in it and how there was like a giant Jewish conspiracy and about how like Bill Clinton was secretly Jewish and like was conspiring to take this ship this like like holding container from him.
It's I don't know it it's it's incredibly strange and and all of this culminates in this radio interview that he gives in the Philippines on 9-11 like literally this is like like like several hours after the towers have gone down.
Yeah, so I just want to play a little bit of like so you can get a sense of like what Bobby Fisher sounds like when on this thing that his interview is giving a 9-11 to a Filipino radio station.
This is all wonderful news.
It's time for the f ⁇ ing U.S. to get their heads kicked in.
He was increasingly.
Yeah, that.
Oh, oh boy.
Yeah.
Well, okay, so like Bobby is a trip.
There's like you there's interesting parts of it, which like you can see where sort of like a lot of modern American political culture is going.
Like you will hear a lot of people say shit that sounds like that, right?
Like he's just combining it in a kind of weird way.
There's other, so I played like a shortcoming.
There's like this interview is like pretty long.
He there's like there's some kind of like there's kind of this like Trumpian stuff in it too.
He has this whole rant about how like nobody has single-handedly done more for the U.S. than me.
I really believe this.
I mean, man, you like you played it.
You played a game.
You move plastic pieces around the board.
Like senior, like the, like two of the most powerful American politicians who have ever lived had to like call you in order to get you to play the game.
Yeah.
And, you know, so the most famous part of, and somehow we, like, okay, so as this interview goes on, it gets progressively more anti-Semitic.
And he, he goes on this rant about how he's hoping that like the country will be taken over by the army and they're like, they'll like close all the synagogues down and then like start arresting everyone who's Jewish and like executing them.
Yeah, a little QAnoni, sure.
Yeah.
And, you know, this, this finally does not go well for Bobby Fisher.
And I think like, you know, Fisher's kind of Nazism, I think is it's something that kind of could have worked in the modern U.S., but the problem is like he hasn't, he's gotten to a point where he just has no ability to sort of like quote unquote hide his power level.
Like all of the modern American Nazis like believe this shit.
It's just that like, they're, they're slightly smarter than he is and don't say it out loud.
Yeah.
But, you know, he's he's a couple of moves behind, you might say.
Yeah, yeah.
And like, but like, if, but, you know, he's also, he's also simultaneously like a bunch of moves ahead, right?
Because like the, if you look at the lines that he's taking, right?
It's like pro-Serbia and the Bosnian genocide, like being against the Iraq war, but also being anti-Semitic.
Like these are all coherent political positions in the U.S. after he dies.
It's just that like he even has a rant about how he like appreciates the cultural purity of Islam because they're not like degenerate and shit, which like could have been an anti-tate thing.
Yeah, yet another similarity between him and Andrew Tate.
Yeah, it's just that like he just wasn't like good at doing the press.
And this finally, Bobby Fisher, like finally after literally decades of him saying shit like this, and there's a bunch of other interviews before this that he's given where he says stuff like this, like finally, you know, again, and he said, he's saying shit like this, like in a press conference in Belgrade while the genocide is going on, and nobody cared.
But he made a mistake, which is that he said it on 9-11.
And yeah, that's not going to go well.
He is the first person on earth to learn that the line is 9-11.
Right.
Yeah, right before Gilbert Gottfried.
Yeah.
And he even gave Gilbert to that fucking bunch.
That's one of Robert's favorite things to bring up.
I love Gilbert Gottfried's 9-11 jokes.
Yeah, but like Fisher, like, okay, one of the enduring legacies of this though is when people write about this, right?
Like the part they're the most horrified about tends to be the celebrating 9-11, and they tend to downplay the part where he says he wants every Jew in the U.S. routed up and killed.
Like, you know, because like, again, like, the thing that he violated was like, what's going to become the sort of sacred tableau of like 9-11.
But, you know, and this is, this is finally the moment where like the chess community turns on him.
He gets kicked out of Fide.
So they let him back in later on, which is okay, Fide.
Like, sure.
A choice.
Yeah.
But, like, you know, like, yeah.
This is to one of the things that I'm, I'm optimistic about the Zoomers for, because you really can't exaggerate the degree to which 9-11 was a religion for Americans for a very, like, most of the time that I was like an adolescent to a young adult.
And now Zoomer kids will, like, I don't know, photoshop in fucking Burton Ernie as the Twin Towers and like think nothing of it.
Like there is, it is, it has been desacralized to such an extent because of how fucking far we went in the other direction.
And that's probably necessary.
I will say this.
Like, Fisher, I think, is the, is one of the few people who's ever done a 9-11 thing who genuinely deserves to be canceled for it.
Like, it actually deserved to be canceled a long time before this.
This is one of these people.
He has been saying all of this shit basically for 30 years, right?
I mean, actually, 40 years, because he gave his first interview where he was talking about hating the Jews in like fucking 1966, like 1962.
Well, right.
Look, I think on behalf of CoolZone Media and behalf of the United States, I'd like to say thank you, Osama bin Laden, for canceling getting Bobby Fisher canceled for all of us.
Thank you.
Obliged dub.
What?
What?
I really like coming health insurance, so shut the fuck up.
Mia.
You can't get canceled for that kind of thing anymore, Sophie.
You can't.
Mia.
Okay.
So, you know, okay, like, you know, I think a big part about this also was the fact that everyone put up with this for so long was this was a sign I think incredible amount of times.
Yeah.
Yeah.
People were just fine with it.
Yeah.
And like this is a period where it's like a man from Saudi Arabia stepped up to.
Oh my God.
I wonder who would win in a bin Laden, Bobby Fisher anti-Semitism off.
That would have been a.
I don't know.
Pretty, close to that.
That's an aliens versus predator situation, if I've ever heard one.
But like, you know, okay, like, like, this is the thing.
Although I guess I might say bin Laden did win.
So that's true.
Yeah.
He lived longer than Fisher did.
So yeah, it'd be like, you know, okay, like, like, Bobby Fisher, like, this was the U.S.'s guy in the Cold War, right?
Like, he was America's hero.
And, like, this is this is this is the guy that he is.
But like, it's interesting.
Fisher is smart enough to recognize that he was just like, nobody actually cared about him, right?
He was just a sort of like a tool of like the American Cold War machine, but he's a neo-Nazi.
So the conclusion he draws from this is just like more neo-Nazi neo-Nazism.
But on the other hand, after 9-11, the U.S. actually starts playing to go after him.
Iceland Citizenship Struggle00:06:37
And in 2003, the Justice Department, in a move that is defined by the Bush administration's incredibly questionable grasp on legality, like revokes Fisher's passport without telling him.
Now, they can't actually do this.
It's funny, but not.
Yeah, like you know, the Bush administration versus Bobby Fisher is another one of those sort of alien predator things.
Like, oh, it's not good.
In 2004, Bobby Fisher is in Japan.
He's trying to fly home to the Philippines and he gets arrested.
Now, this is kind of funny in that, like, Bobby Fisher getting arrested in Japan is like, he really went to Japan thinking these guys were like his boys.
And then they hold him in airport jail, which is apparently a thing that exists.
And then move him to a maximum security, like immigrant detention facility because he just keeps on complaining and getting in fights with the guards.
And okay, so like, yeah, like it's, it's like at one point, he starts complaining that his soft-boiled eggs were actually hard-boiled, and this, this, this leads to him getting into a fight with his prison guards.
Um, like, I mean, there is a really big difference there.
It's true.
I'm like, and this is, you know, solidarity on the egg issue.
Yeah, and I mean, and also, like, like, Bobby Fisher is not a good guy, right?
But it's also worth noting that, like, every single Japanese police officer is at all times two bad days away from like hoisting the rising sun flag and hunting down every Korean in a three-mile radius.
So, this is another they both suck situation.
Yeah, it's like you said, alien predator versus predator.
Yeah, and at this point, so Bobby like is really trying to fight getting extradited to the U.S. because if they send him back to the U.S., the Bush administration will just put his ass in prison for like a decade.
Yeah, yep.
And so, he tries to renounce his U.S. citizenship so he get deported somewhere else.
Except the problem is, in order to renounce your citizenship, like formally, someone from the embassy has to show up and see you do it.
And the embassy refuses to send anyone.
So, Fisher just does it on his hand.
You can't even renounce your citizenship, right?
I just read where he tries to get asylum.
Oh, my God.
Yeah, oh, it's so nice.
So funny.
So, yeah, okay.
So, for the rest of his life, right, he claims that he's not a U.S. citizen, and the U.S. citizen in the U.S. claims that he is still a U.S. citizen.
And so, he tries to get asylum.
And it's like he tries to get asylum before.
Robert, wait, wait for this list.
I'm waiting.
I'm waiting.
I am here.
Germany, Cuba, North Korea, Libya, Iran, Venezuela, Switzerland, and Montenegro, all of whom are like, no, fuck off.
Wow.
Libya wouldn't even take him.
Gaddafi would take away.
Omar Gaddafi won't take you.
Well, Bobby Fisher.
To be fair to Bobby Fisher here, this is 2003, Muammar Gaddafi, who's like cozing up to the Bush administration.
So this is the worst time to be asking Gaddafi.
This is the worst time, but he is also.
But still, in North Korea, they love taking people in if it'll piss off the United States.
Yeah, and even they're like, I don't know about this guy.
Yeah, we don't need Korea doesn't need this press.
So, all right.
While he's in like immigration prison, I don't know how to preface this, so I'm just going to read it.
Fisher then announced that he was going to marry Mayoko Watai, his longtime companion.
I could be a pawn sacrifice, he said to the press, but in chess, there is such a thing as pawn promotion when a pawn can become a queen.
Bobby's son is my king, and I will become his queen.
Okay, I got nothing.
I don't know.
So they get married, and after nine months, Bobby's able to assemble like an incredibly elite team of random guys from Iceland.
And because there's only seven people in Iceland, like these random guys in Iceland are able to convince the Icelandic parliament to like give him citizenship.
And so he's able to get like a, I think it's what he wound up getting a good one.
How the fuck did that happen?
Well, here's the thing, though.
He hates Iceland.
Well, okay, I guess that's fine.
He doesn't have to be.
He wants the better citizenships to have.
That's true.
Yeah, it's a good one.
But I don't know.
He somehow finangles this.
Icelandic politics is a joke.
You son of a bitch.
You guys could have left it.
Look, Heisland, if you're out there, give me citizenship.
You'll get all of the benefits of having Robert Evans as a citizen.
I assure you, there's some.
Yeah, we will be compiling a list, which we'll get after you give him citizenship.
Oh, yeah.
No, we'll have a long list.
It's gonna, you're gonna, everyone will be doing real well when I'm a citizen.
I'm gonna bring pride to Iceland.
So, Bobby, on the other hand, hey, he hates Iceland.
He spends the rest of his life just like pissing off all of his friends.
And by the time he dies in a hospital, well, okay, so he doesn't even want to be taken to a hospital, but he's like so fucked up that like his like two remaining friends are like, okay, we're bringing to Osborne and he dies there.
And by this time, he has like very little left.
And okay, this would be the end of the story of Bobby Fisher, except three years after he died.
Sorry?
I said it fucking ought to be.
Yeah, but it's not because he three years after he dies, they have to dig up his body to settle a legal fight about who would get all of his money, which I think should have his body settling.
Well, because okay, so he there's a whole thing where he was like with several people, and I forget which of his like wives kind of or people he was with like claimed that someone that like their son was his son, but it turned out that that son was actually another person's son, and so they had to do they had to dig up his grave to do genetic testing.
Well, yeah, that is that is the story of Bobby Fisher chess.
It's at least funny, it is, yeah.
He I don't, I don't know if getting to live out the rest of his life in Iceland is like what he deserved, but he was miserable.
So sometimes that's all you can hope for.
Yeah, he died very sad.
Well, that's that's mostly what I wanted for Bobby, was for him to die sad because I don't like him.
Sad End for Bobby Fisher00:02:37
Do you have any uh pluggables for us, Mia?
Yeah, I do a podcast called It Could Happen Here.
Um, wow, listen to it, and yeah, I'm on Twitter at it mechr3, and you can find me there doing stuff.
Cool, hell yeah.
Well, that's gonna do it for all of us here at whatever this is: the podcasting emporium of Mr. Magorium.
Um, until next week, don't play chess behind the bastards is a production of cool zone media.
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