Obsession, Chess, and the Myth of Mastery | James & Dirk Jan ten Geuzendam on the "New in Chess" Podcast

25:07Yeah, I think just on a personal level, I think solving problems that other people had where I enjoyed the problem solving. So whenever I've tried to start, I've had many more business failures and successes. and I realized whenever I was trying to do a business that I didn't love, I didn't love what I was doing. Like sometimes you do a business just because you think, oh, I'm gonna make a lot of money doing this. Whenever you have that view, at least for me, it never works. So my very first business that I started, which was in the 90s, I was making websites for entertainment companies. So music labels, movie studios, I was making their websites.

25:46Nobody was making websites then. This was the 90s. People barely knew the web existed. and so I was making these websites, solving their big problems because every company at that point needed a website and didn't have one and I enjoyed the creativity of it and the innovation of it and it was cutting edge and any business that I started, I always felt like if I'm adding value in an area that I love so I enjoy doing it, then it's going to work. One time I made a site, it was like a dating website and I didn't have any interest in it And of course it failed instantly. Or another time I started a company simply because I had an idea and everybody wrote a check to fund the business, but I was not interested at all.

26:30I thought I'm going to just make instant money and it immediately failed. And this is true for chess too. Like if you're not obsessed, you're not going to get better because the person who is obsessed, you're competing against millions of people who are obsessed. They're going to beat you. There's no talent that's going to beat obsession. And it's the same thing in business. The demand for money is so great that you're only competing with people who are obsessed. So if you're not as obsessed as they are, you're going to lose. You've also written about that. I mean, you're writing a chess column where you're talking about your experiences.

27:02You've written successful books. Is it something that came automatically to translate your thoughts into books? Yeah. So earlier in the early 90s, I was in graduate school for computer science at a great school in the U.S. Carnegie Mellon University. And I got thrown out. And the reason I got thrown out was because suddenly I wanted to be a writer. And so I would write all day long. I was, again, obsessed. And I was not good because it takes many years. Like now everybody can write on the computer and on the web and post on LinkedIn and they're a writer. But it's very hard to be a good writer and to communicate well.

27:41But that was writing novels? Yeah, I was trying to write the great American novel like every young kid. And so I was just writing all day long. And I was working on chess computers in grad school. So it was fun. But I loved the writing more at that time. Even though it was all bad, you know, there's that optimism of youth where you think everything you do is good and you're talented. I mean, I was definitely fooling myself. But I wrote four horrible novels, dozens of short stories. But I built the skill. So later on, when, you know, maybe there were ebbs and flows in my career and I would get back to writing, I was obsessed again, and I started writing book after book.

28:21There was a period, you know, 20 years in a row, I wrote one to two books a year. But one thing I realized the most is, and this reminds me of one thing in chess, vulnerability was the currency of writing. Like when you talk about things that nobody wants to hear about somebody who was the greatest basketball player in the world, and then is, you know, the greatest at whatever else they do in the world, people want to hear about problems. And I realized I wanted to write about, you know, I wanted to write about going broke. After I sold my first business, I went broke and was depressed and suicidal and struggling with it.

29:00And I didn't think I could ever bounce back. And I had two babies to raise. And it was a very shameful period of my life. And then later when I wrote about it, I realized my audience was 10 times more interested in that than anything about financial stuff or whatever. So I realized vulnerability is definitely the currency of success in writing. And I remember reading about Capablanca. He wrote, I forget which book he wrote about that, or maybe it was My Chess Career or Chess Fundamentals. Every game in the book was something he won. Then he wrote another book to write about his losses. Everyone criticized, you didn't write about your losses.

29:36And it's very important to realize there's no shame in being relatable. Everybody has loss. Everybody suffers. And they don't want to see that you suffer because they take joy at it. They want to see that you suffer because they want to know how you got out of that. And they want to see that Capablanca, for instance, he lost games too, but then this is how he got better because everybody loses games and they want to know how to get better. Everybody has some point where they're having money problems or health problems or career problems, and they want to know how to get out of that because it seems like you can't when you're in the middle of it.

30:09And just knowing if someone could write, you know, persuasively and in a storytelling way, that this is how I got out of it, then people relate and they appreciate that. Once again, just like in business, you've delivered value and that pays off. So that then writing had new life for me and I spent many years writing in that style until once again, I succumbed to the addiction of chess. Yeah. But let's say you're writing about failures and about misery, but there is a lesson to be learned at the end. I mean, there's light at the end of the tunnel always. Yeah, I mean, but that's the thing. Sometimes the scary thing is sometimes there isn't, right?

30:49Because eventually we die. So part of going for success is that it's not guaranteed. A lot of people think there's something now that I call failure porn where people write about failures and then it almost becomes too obvious that at the end of their failure, they're going to be successful. And that's what they're really writing about That is not their failure, but they want to brag about their eventual success. And the thing about failure, there's always the risk that you can't come back. And you have to deal with that. There's still no reason to be unhappy because this happens to everyone. You still have to find ways to have well-being in your life and relationships and health as much as you can.

31:23And make the best of the hand that has dealt you. And I never knew every time I failed that I was going to, because it happened more than once where I went broke. I somehow was just as successful at making money as I was at losing money. So I went broke many times. And, yes, it gave me more confidence that I could bounce back, but it was very difficult each time. Acknowledging that and writing about that also was important for me. You know, it's difficult to bounce. It's not impossible, and here's how I did it, but it's difficult, and people have to respect that. Yeah. What is clear from your writing is that you love writing.

31:59Yeah, thank you. I mean, you can see that. So you wouldn't call your books self-help books? No. What would you call them? I would call them more like narrative nonfiction. Literally nonfiction sounds too ego, but narrative nonfiction is where I'm just telling my story. And if other people get benefit from it, then it ends up in the self-help section. And I leaned into that a little with some of my books. I wrote a book called The Power of No, which learning how to say no, which is very hard for me, improved my life. And that was a natural fit for the self-help section. But in general, I think my books are, particularly those that, when I started writing those kinds of books, they were hardly categorized.

32:36So I would write many stories, and then sometimes I would distill them into lessons, but often the story themselves were the lesson. And I would say I became, you know, again, and I forgot who said it, maybe even it was Magnus, but someone asked, what is talent? There is no innate brain thing that makes people very different, but obsession, the ability to obsess on something, I think is what creates talent. because I would say with writing, I became more obsessed with that than I was with chess. When I was really moving up in writing, I probably read at least a book a day, and then I would try writing in the style of the author.

33:17Then I would go to the library, I'd read the literary criticisms of that book, so I would see what other people thought of that writer in that book. And I would just do this every day for years, in addition to writing about 2 ,000 or 3 ,000 words a day as a discipline. You don't have to do that forever, but there has to be some period of obsession. People then say, well, I don't really feel obsessed about anything. How do I find what it is that I could be passionate about enough that I'm obsessed? And then I think also you have to read a lot and expose yourself to a lot to know what you're going to be obsessed with.

33:50So for instance, a lot of people love stand-up comedy. They love watching stand-up comedy and they always tell themselves, boy, it would be great if one day I can do stand-up comedy. but they never do it because it's a very scary thing. As scary as it is to do public speaking, it's a hundred times scarier to do standup comedy where it's a room full of drunk tourists and you have to somehow viscerally make them laugh even though you have no idea about them, they have no idea about you. It's very scary. But I did that once and then I became obsessed. Like it touched something in me that, oh, I have to have that feeling again.

34:26And, you know, like an addiction. and you know that was another thing you know for about six years every night sometimes twice a night i would do stand-up comedy and then again i i completely stopped it well the pandemic happened and then chess happened yeah and then i rationalized chess like oh i'm gonna write a book about the experience of taking a 27 year break and being older and now getting good at chess again i'm gonna write a whole book about it i realize now it was just rationalization who knows if i ever write that book. Yeah, yeah. Of course, not everyone has to be obsessed about something.

35:01It's what we see in the chess world. I mean, there's some people who are obsessed, others they just love the game, they're just happy to play a game. But as you said, after 27 years of abstention, you returned to chess. Well, what sparked that return? Honestly, it was probably the Queen's Gambit. And I saw the reverence everybody had, like, oh, that was such a great show. do you know any chess players? And I'm thinking, I'm a chess player. And then I started playing a little bit of chess again. And I was playing on ICC, which was back in like 1992, 1993. That was a place on the internet that I had helped start.

35:38It came out of Carnegie Mellon, professor I knew wrote the code. I was one of the first administrators. I wrote some of the code for ICC. And so I started playing on ICC and I was losing. And I'm like, I don't understand how could I be losing to people of this rating. I'm 100 points, 200 points higher. What's going on? And I figured, oh, okay, maybe openings have changed a little bit, so I just need to refresh my openings. And by the way, at this point, so Gary Kasparov had been on my podcast several times and we would occasionally talk on Zoom or the phone or whatever, and he was like, why are you using ICC?

36:14And I'm like, well, what else is there? That's the only place to play chess online. He's like, no, no, no, use LeeChess or chess.com. And so I started using those, and I was like, oh, yeah, this is. So now we're talking for years ago? Yeah, more like 2020, 2021, right after the Queen's Gambit show. And I started playing on Lynch's, and I could not believe I was losing as much as I was. I'm like, what is going on? And I remember my wife got so upset at me. One time, we're going to a party, and she says, we got to go. And I was playing. You go first. I'm just going to play a little more. Because I can't stop.

36:50on a 20-game losing streak. I just never showed up at that party. She came back hours later, just so upset at me. Then I figured, okay, well, I need to replicate what I did when I was younger, which is I'm going to get a coach, I'm going to watch videos, I'm going to read books, and I'm going to take it seriously again. I had just written a book called Skip the Line, and part of the book was about learning things quickly. And I said, I'm going to use the techniques that I wrote about to learn things quickly to just get back to my old strength in chess. And so I did all this. I did all the techniques that I had written about and that I said I was going to do.

37:24It's just been a journey. I remember I was watching Eric Rosen's videos. He was the first streamer I was watching. And he has such a great style as a YouTuber and a streamer. And I wrote him and he wrote back and said, sure, I'll give you lessons. And I wanted to learn the Stafford Gambit. It seemed like the perfect way to win every game. And I realized this. So I started taking lessons with him. And a very nice guy, very generous person. And I realized several things all of a sudden about my brain. A, I could not remember anything he was showing me. Like, because he would show me the Stafford Gambit.

38:02And I would play a game. I would immediately forget all the moves. I wouldn't remember any of the moves. And then just on calculating, I, oh, it always looks so easy. He's calculating the mate in seven on the Stafford Gambit. And I used to be pretty good at calculating when I was 17, 18 years old. I remember I was making all these blunders. And blunders are normal, but I was making more than I thought I should make. And so I started thinking, what changes in the brain as you age? And I realized a lot of things change. And just to continue that story, I started jumping from chess coach to chess coach.

38:40But you were also consulting scientists in the field. Yeah, I mean, I was definitely involved in the discussion about education and learning. And I was talking to lots of neuroscientists about what happens. I mean, the benefit is I have this podcast. So anything I wanted to learn, I would just call the best in the world at that field. And I've had on in my podcast, whether it's Gary Kasparov or, you know, in America, there's basketball is the favorite sport. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is the best basketball player in history. I would have him on. I would have on the best entrepreneurs, Richard Branson, Mark Cuban.

39:15I would have, you know, everybody, every field I would have, I'd have the best writers on, amazing writers. And so anytime, so I would have neuroscientists on like Andrew Huberman, you know, what changes in the brain as you get older? A lot of things change. Just very simply, your power to calculate does go down. The neurons, they just get tired. They slow down. They're already operating very fast, but even just a slight slowdown puts you at a disadvantage to younger people. And your memory also goes down in part because, of course, you have many more responsibilities, many more things kind of taking up the real estate in your brain.

39:51But also when you're younger, if you're passionate about something or obsessed about something, the connection between those neurons that you're memorizing or that are being used for memories in the areas that you're obsessed with, they form these sheaths around them so that the connection stays very strong and fast. And that sheath starts to weaken and your ability to form those new sheaths that made out of this material called myelin, that weakens and you just become less capable of remembering. And I can still remember things from when I was a kid, even games from when I was a kid, because those still have that almost cement-like sheaths around them.

40:30But now I played a game last night at this tournament. We're all sitting around playing chess. I can't even remember the game. I wanted to remember it. I sacked the queen against the grandmaster. I was doing well, but can't remember the game. Yeah. So now you know why that is. So what do you do to solve that? Because you still have that ambition to go back to that rating of 27 years ago. Right. So that goes down. So what goes up? There is something that age gives, which is your pattern recognition, believe it or not, goes up. People call it wisdom. Like, oh, I've been in this situation before.

41:05This is how you handle these situations. I've seen other people in this situation. This is how you handle these situations. Oh, this person is not treating me well. Well, now I know from wisdom and many years of experience, spend less time with that person as opposed to trying to please that person, which is maybe when I was younger, I would try to do. In business, there's a thousand examples where wisdom helps you benefit. Like, oh, I see these two partners having a minor argument that you would not even think about, but this tells me not to invest. Because if they're arguing in front of a potential investor, what happens behind the scenes?

41:40But this you learn from wisdom and from experience. And so in chess, you gain that too. Now I'm making a guess, but it tends to be that players with more positional ability and a more intuitive style of play tend to survive longer than the ones that are brutal attackers and tacticians and never really learned that positional style. Like you think about someone like Ta. Ta was, of course, the best attacker, most brilliant tactician. But what gave him survivability into his 40s and 50s was he was Karpov second for a long time in the 70s. And that gave him that positional ability all of a sudden.

42:20So he suddenly had a new life. Like if you look at his later games, they're not as tactical. They're more Karpov-like. And that's what gave him his strength into later years. But the question is, what you lose as good as what you gain in terms of intuition and positional knowledge and so on. And it's a very hard question to answer. I think the answer used to be maybe, which is why Smith-Sloff in 1982 or 81 could play in the candidates matches or Korsnoy into his 60s could play at a very high level. But now there's so much knowledge that younger people have because of computers. And there's so many more ways to train calculation and tactics and so on.

43:07I don't think the wisdom is enough to counter, what you gain in other kinds of knowledge is enough to counteract what you lose in that raw chess power. By the way, an interesting statistic. What's the peak age for a mathematician? What would you say? 23? Yeah, it's like 23 to I think 25 technically. And how they measure that is, I guess, based on when they write their peak paper that gets the most references. What do you think is the average age for a historian or the peak age for a historian where they do their best work? 58. 69. 69. So it is similar for writing, and similar for the arts and writing disciplines, because that requires a historian says, oh, this event's happening now might be like these events in World War I or the decline of Rome.

43:56They're able to connect the dots more on the many, many millions of things they've learned. So I think in order to regain strength when you're older, you have to really study a lot more positional. You still have to maintain and study constantly the calculation because you lose it so fast. And rather than understanding, it definitely is an argument for you can't memorize lines in openings, but you really have to understand at a deep, deep level the positional ideas and the openings you play. And that's the only way I've been able to survive at all. But it takes a lot more work, actually. So have you ever seen a chess player take a break and get back to where they were?

44:39The rare exceptions of professional players leaving and then coming back like Matthew Sadler. The only one I was thinking was Matthew Sadler. That's the only one I could think of. But I also consider him some kind of a miracle. It's the same as in the old days when people were talking about Kochenoi and young players when they got into their 30s. They would say, yeah, well, okay, things are not going really well now, but you see, Victor Kochenoi would, and I thought, dream on. Because Victor is one of a kind. It's rare. And Sadler, if you look at him, his style of learning, you can see. So he's written many books since coming back into play.

45:17He stopped for about 10, 15 years. I forget the number. But he then read his book recently on the Queen's Gambit declined. So you can see for him to come back, he had to dive so deeply into the openings he plays. He could write a book on it, talking about every single idea. And then, of course, his famous book on computers, or two famous books on computers, Game Changers being one of them. he studied the positional styles of the computers and then broke them down chapter by chapter so that gave him an extra edge that he was studying state-of-the-art positional knowledge i mean the kind of positional knowledge that magnus also has studied to stay at the top and he was studying this before everyone else studied them the the positional styles of alpha zero so that gave him an edge like accumulating wisdom that no one had yet had so i think that helped him to eat.

46:06He's a miracle, but his style of learning and his curiosity helps him as well. And again, I can't think of anyone else at that level who came back to basically back to where he was. Yeah.

46:31what i find fascinating is that let's say chess has been used as a model for improvements in computer science and i mean let's try it with chess first and then we go on to the other things. The way you're writing about how to get back your old rating feels like a study in cognitive decline or prodigies. I mean, everything that has to do with exceptional minds and the growth and the decline of the mind. Yeah, because think that when you're young too, you lean into the things that are good. So young people, and I'm talking about people in their 20s, but now you see kids, the young people are good at tactics.

47:09They're really good at tactics and their memories are great. So they don't even know that they need to study positional stuff because you can get to 2200, 2300 memorizing openings. Yeah, you'll know the ideas a little bit like, okay, King's Indian, I'm going to do F5, F4, G4, checkmate. And then they have the tactics to do the mate. So then when you're older and that attack no longer works for whatever reason, you have to realize, oh, maybe I need to open the seat pile too. And I got to be a little careful now because the computer has already told the kids all the checkmates that happen, and they don't checkmate it anymore.

47:42So there's a lot more knowledge to memorize. But again, you can counterbalance it somewhat if you remind yourself that, oh, I never learned all these ideas. Like, I've learned so much more about chess since coming back than I ever... I didn't know what it meant. Oh, here's a weak white squares. I didn't care about that as a kid. Okay, I'm just going to use tactics. I don't need to know what white squares are. But now you need to know tactics could be generated by exploiting, if you have the bishop here or they don't have the Y squared bishop, you could exploit that. I didn't know anything to get 2 ,200 back then about all that stuff.

48:18But now you really need to study things in chess that you never studied before. Well, chess is, by many people, it's held in high esteem. They see chess players as cerebral, super men and super women. What is special about chess players? I mean, you've met the best players in the world and talked to them, asked them lots of questions. What is special about them? First off, the game playing mentality is always interesting. You see various subcultures around games like chess, poker, even backgammon. And it's an exciting thing when you meet people who play games professionally because it's such a wonderful thing.

48:56You don't have to go into an office and you see these people traveling around the world playing tournaments in Monaco or Amsterdam or all the most exotic places in the world. And you think that must be a great life. And it is probably, but they're dealing with their own frustrations. In every game and sport, there's such an extreme hierarchy where your pay is and your benefits from it are completely related to where you are in the hierarchy. And so there's a certain frustration. But I would say, in general, chess players are very curious people. They're very excited to learn about new ideas. Take someone like Vichy Anand.

49:35He has also defied, I mean, he's almost as old as I am, and he's in the top 15 in the world. And I think he's benefited from making that transformation that you have to make when you go from young to older, which is being a mentor. And you take what you learned, and now you're able to transmit it to the next generation. And that's a natural role as these parts of the brain change because you have that wisdom. But I think what's helped him is that he sees the games that the younger people play and that he fuels his own play. He is able to maintain because as much as he's mentoring the younger people, I am very sure he is seeing their games and they're teaching him without them realizing it, how to stay back in, they're teaching him how to stay in the top 15.

50:20So he's benefited a lot from that. but in general I think chess players on the one hand at some level there's an addictive quality to chess there's very much an addiction-like quality to the obsession but they're all very curious like we see in the hotel where this chess tour is playing the chess players after a full day of playing in the best chess tournament in history some of them are playing card games with anybody in the hotel they just love playing and I didn't want to say the actual doing. I didn't want to expose anyone. But yeah, they're playing this game of Avalon, which I have no clue about.

50:58And I can't understand what the attraction to that is over chess. But they're very playful and they want to enjoy life. Yeah. Well, as said in your podcast, The James Aldershire Show, you have the most interesting people in all kinds of areas, in science, politics, whatever. I mean, I've discovered many great people that I had no clue about that were on your show. You also had Kasparov and Judith Polgar and Hikaru Nakamura. What did you want to know from them? You know, I don't know because I think I just, because they're heroes. You know, sometimes it's hardest to interview a hero. And so I was so scared when I interviewed Kasparov because I grew up on his real tenure as world champion.

51:45And Judith Kasparov, was intimidating. Oh, so intimidated. and I'll just mention one thing which is that so I got to know him through the podcast and we became friends and then we were all my wife and his wife and we all became Facebook friends and Dasha, Gary's wife really enjoyed when I would post writing when I would post an article or a story, something I'd written she would always like it, she would comment and eventually I guess Dasha and my wife said we all have to get together for dinner and I said to my wife, no, there is no way I'm having dinner with Gary Kasparov. It's one thing having a podcast.

52:25I'm just going to be quiet the whole time. I'm going to be too intimidated. I'm not going to be able to eat my food. But it was okay. We did get together. It was partially what I said, but it was also partially we enjoyed it. There were some light moments as well. Yeah, well, I don't know about light moments. There were a lot of Gary moments, and then I had fun talking to him about his different experiences and so on. But I think I wanted to learn though, the same thing I want to learn now, which is what is the source of all this immense talent and skill? And I don't think they know the answers because when you're so much into it, you don't necessarily know how to transmit what other people should do.

53:05Like I remember saying to Gary, and this was not a private conversation, it was on the podcast, the very first podcast we did, I said like, well, when you were seven years old. You went to the Bob Vinnick school. You were clearly a great young player. You were a talent. You went to the Bob Vinnick school with other young kids. And I said, what then did separate you out so that you became the most talented and the most skilled? What extra thing did you work on that really made you the best? And he was like, no, no, no, no, no. I was always the best. So, you know, they have a lot of confidence in size.

53:43And, you know, For Judith, the thing that stands out is she said, the best training I've ever did was blindfold training. So that was interesting, just the visualization aspect for her. And you see when she comments now, obviously she doesn't use a computer. And the ideas she has are so out of this world when she's commentating. And it's an inspiration to watch her comment. And Hikaru also had, he learned so many ideas when he was young because his father was a chess coach and a strong chess player. and I don't know if he really knows what it would be like if he didn't have that experience. No one knows what it would be like if they didn't have the experiences they had as a kid.

54:20So sometimes that's hard to get my groove in terms of interviewing chess players. You've done it many times and you do such fascinating interviews with chess players, but you're able to talk in a historical context like what were you thinking in this? I should probably do more of that when I'm talking to them. Well, I'm wondering when you're speaking about Hikaru, is that, well, he's obviously a brilliant chess player, But to my mind, he's also shown that he has entrepreneurial talent. I mean, what he's been doing in the past years, I think it's exceptional for a chess player. Yeah, and I think he took that view that, you know, I remember, and you were with me, this was a year ago, we ran into Hikaru in the hotel restaurant, and Hikaru and I scheduled the thing.

55:02And I forget the exact comment. I said something like, you know, could be the best in the world, or something about being the best in the world. And he said, no, no, never. And here's someone who at that moment was the second best player in the world, but he really almost felt down a little bit. And I think when he got into streaming, it was his way of having a full life because he had spent his whole entire life trying to be number one. And maybe for brief moments, forget about rating for a second, maybe for brief moments or periods of time, he was number one, But Magnus was always there. They grew up at the same time.

55:43Magnus was number one. He was number two. And I think to have a full life, he wanted to get rid of that need in himself. And so he switched to streaming. And of course, the streaming allowed him to relax about chess. I wouldn't say he ever really took a break. Let's say he took a couple year break. But he roared back amazingly to number two in chess. I think he started getting distressed maybe in the late, I'm trying to remember the interview now, but maybe in the late 2019, 2018, he felt like he was no longer in the top 10 perhaps. Maybe there was a moment, I forget. But after streaming for so many years and it gave him a new approach to chess, a new way of looking at it, a new way of explaining it to people that it A, relieved the pressure and B, maybe taught him something about chess.

56:31And now he's clearly number two. He's been number two now for like two or three years. Well, yeah, but that's the chess playing. but let's say the business aspect. I think that he saw things early on that other people saw much later. Don't you think he had a talent for that? Yeah, he definitely had an insight. I mean, at first he started streaming, he was saying, just to pass the time during the pandemic. But then he started to take it seriously and he became, he's very good. Like you can see people listen to him not just because he's one of the best in the world. I'm sure many people who watch don't even know he's one of the best in the world.

57:08But you can see his ability to explain what he's doing while he's doing it. He'd be playing one minute chess and he's still able to explain very clearly, very lucidly what is happening in the game in such a way that, and by the way, he doesn't talk to the lowest echelon. He respects the listener. He's talking actually chess at a very high level, but just in a very clear way at a very high level. He's not dumbing it down at all. And he's very successful at that. He's the best streamer in the world. I mean, I think he's incredibly talented at it, but talent I now believe is a result of obsession plus hard work, and he's developed.

57:46I would say when I watch his first streams to his streams now, it's a thousand times better. So that was a skill he developed because he loved it. So talent is obsession plus hard work. I believe that's true, yeah. Yeah. You know, and I've been trying for years to figure out what's in the brain that will make someone talented, and there's nothing. I talked to Anders Ericsson about this. So Anders Ericsson is the scientist who came up with the 10 ,000 hour rule. If you do something with 10 ,000 hours, you'll be the best in the world or among the best. And that theory in itself has been disputed, perhaps correctly.

58:19And it's been really researched in the chess world. There's a lot of scientists in the chess world who have studied that. I would encourage you to read the papers of Fernand Gobet, who's a former Swiss national champion. and he's an IM, but he really became a GM of chess science. And he worked with Andrews Erickson. But Erickson believes there's no talent, no such thing as talent. And he came on my podcast. And at first I disagreed with him, but now years later, I think I agree. I think talent is that combination of being obsessed enough to do the hard work that lightens up whatever needs to happen in the brain to be great at chess or any area.

58:58Yeah. Well, you've mentioned it several times that you're writing these columns and you're, while you're working hard on your chest, you're meeting people because you signed a book deal about that. Or at least there is a publisher who wants you to write that book. You expressed some doubts if that book was ever going to appear. What are the chances? Well, one way or the other, I will do a book. You know, so I was talking to Robert Greene. Robert Greene wrote the book, The 48 Laws of Power. He wrote a book called Mastery, which in that he talks a little about chess, but he talks about mastery of all different skills.

59:35He's a great writer, great storyteller. And I was telling him when I was doing that, I was on this quest to get back to where I was when I was younger. And he's like, oh my God, you need to write this book. And then he was saying this, he said, you could send me notes if you want, I'll help you. But this is a book that this journey you have to write about. And about a year later, I called him and I said, you know, I think I failed. I think I'm never going to get back to where I was. And I said, I don't think I can write this book. And he's like, are you an idiot? Like, you've already done it. You've already been on the journey.

1:00:13And you're not a kid. You don't need to be, you know, Michael Jordan never got back to where you're older. It's different. Life is different. You don't need to do that. And people don't even necessarily want to read that. They want to read the journey. Not that you had this big celebration at the end. And I'm still coming to grips with what he said, honestly. I still don't know if that's true or not, but it rings true. And I just don't know how to, it's in the back of my brain thinking about how to do that. But it is true in a sense. Like when I started playing chess, I'd go to tournaments, I'd play some games, I'd win or lose and either go home happy or cry.

1:00:49And that was it. That was chess for me. And I had lessons. That was also chess. And I had friends. You build a subculture of people in chess. I go to Washington Square Park and play in the park with people, and that was part of my life. But now my experience as an adult, after years of different types of careers, my experience is totally different. Here we are at Norway Chess, the strongest chess tournament in history, and I see Magnus over there, Hikaru over there. I say hi to these chess players, my heroes. I interviewed Vichy Anand on stage the other day. I'm commentating for the TV broadcast today.

1:01:26Your experience as an adult also includes these other things that make life rich. To that extent, my experience now, I've far exceeded my expectations. I've had dinner with Gary Kasparov. When I was a kid, I just cut with scissors out of the paper the latest Karpov-Kasparov game. That was my experience with Gary then, as opposed to having dinner with Magnus, as we did last year, or doing a podcast with Hakara or talking to Judith Poldar. What an amazing thing. And that's how enriching it is to explore something as an adult compared with doing something as a kid, particularly if you have the same obsession.

1:02:03So that leads me to a place like this. Yes. Well, I must say, you keep surprising me. One of the things that you told me was that you're going to organize a tournament. I mean, why? And what is that going to be like? Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of things that are cheaper than people realize. For instance, I just wanted to have some tournament that's called the James Alderture International. So I paid for the banquet room in a hotel. A hundred tables could fit in there. You pay for a few other things, a few thousand dollars. And now it's the James Alderture International happening in a few weeks.

1:02:39There's like 10 grandmasters playing in it, a bunch of international masters. I am, of course, playing in it. And that will be another experience. And you have to kind of like seek out experiences too. You can't just say, well, wouldn't it be nice if I did stand-up comedy? You go to a comedy club and say, hey, how could I do this? And then they'll do it. You wrote me a few years ago, hey, would you like, because I already had written some, I'd written many books and now I was getting back into chess. So it was natural. You wrote me and said, hey, would you like to write for New England Chess? Of course I would.

1:03:11It was my favorite chess magazine 30 years ago. So of course I'm going to do it. And same thing when they asked me to come here. So you kind of have to lean into these experiences and seek them out a little bit. Like if you love something, seek out the highest experiences you can seek out. And they're there. There's no one else buying for them because everyone else stays home. And chess ultimately has helped so many areas of my life. I got into college because of chess. I got into graduate school because of chess. I got my first job because of chess. I've raised money for businesses because of chess.

1:03:44There's so many ways chess is added to my life and still continues to now. So it's been such an amazing adventure. And I think that's what my friend Robert Green was referring to when he says, you already had the journey. You can now write this book. Which, again, I'm still trying to agree with him because I feel like, oh, I need to get back to my rating. But I know he's right at heart, but I just have to figure out how to connect the dots to write it. Yeah. Well, I'm very grateful that that journey gave me the opportunity to meet you, James, and to have this talk today, which I enjoyed immensely.

1:04:19We could go on for a while, but I think you still have other work to do today. You have to sit next to Vishy Anand and to commentate. And what a thing. We're going to comment. Vishy, Anand and I will be sitting next to each other and commentating on the game that Magnus Carlsen will be playing. At what point, and I'm telling you, I'm planning this. At some point during that time, I'm going to say, Vishy, Vishy, how wrong can you be? And just to be able to say that to Vishwanathan Anand, five-time world champion. Yeah, I'm sure he will appreciate that. He's got a great sense of humor. Yes. So thanks a lot, James.

1:04:55It's been a delight and a pleasure. Great, Dirk. Thank you.