Thinking Sideways: Chess, AI, and Smarter Decisions with Jen Shahade

20:46James Altucher:What's another example where the three choices role sort of helped your life? Well, I mean, sometimes I definitely make the wrong choice entirely, which I know would resonate with you, James, because you're not a big fan of people spending all their money to buy a house. One example for me was when I was trying to decide what house to buy, I was really sucked into this process because it's so much fun to look at houses. It's so much fun. It's like you just feel like you're learning all about real estate and you're also thinking about all these different possible lives. And I don't know if you've gone house hunting recently or you like the process at all, but it's also just really fun to look at the places with no furniture in them.

21:31Because everything feels like this like massive party, you can imagine, and like just having like a fun party there. And so when I was in this process, I got really sucked in to two auctions in particular. And it kind of blinded me to the fact that maybe I just shouldn't buy a house at all. And I should, you know, pick the third option, which is like pulled off on this and, you know, continue to rent or even just like travel the world and store my stuff somewhere. I was pretty young when I bought my first house.

22:01James Altucher:And, you know, but that's really interesting though. Like sometimes people miss the completely offbeat third choice, which is that you are stuck into this paradigm of I'm either going to buy a house or not. But then there's this third choice, which is I can just not even live anywhere. I'll just store all of my stuff for a year and travel the world or, okay, maybe financial considerations aside, maybe just live in Airbnbs, a different one every month in a different part of the city while you have your regular job. Like, who knows? There's like, there's, there's offbeat choices that I think people forget to, to make.

22:37Yeah. And actually the example that you gave, like it actually can be as expensive as renting or buying, not necessarily more because the travel is offset by the fact that you don't have to, you know, have a home base that you're funding while you're not there.

22:52James Altucher:Or Airbnbs. It's offset by you don't have to buy furniture and pay utilities and stuff like that. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So I feel like this way of thinking is really valuable. You have a great example that I want you to describe, which is the Stanford $5 experiment, where I really love the decision made by the winning group. Oh, right. Yeah. This is one of my favorite examples of, you know, psychological experiments. So a business professor from Stanford, Tina Selig, she has all of these experiments in creativity and developing creativity. And in this one case, she told her students in a business class to each, they each were going to get a$5 envelope, an envelope with$5 in it.

23:37And the challenge, this$5 challenge, was to make as much money as possible. and the gimmick was that you had to spend the$5 within two hours of opening the envelope, right? And they had the weekend to do this. And so some groups were very straightforward about the problem and try to, you know, buy items with the$5 and resell them and make a small profit, right? If you have a year to do this, you could be like the paperclip guy. You turn the paperclip up into a million dollars, but with two hours, these gains are going to be relatively limited, right? And now some other groups realized, so they got kind of like the second stage and they realized, wait a second, this$5 is a red herring.

24:19Like$5 is almost no money. We should just use the weekend to sell our time, right? So we could like pump air into tires or babysit, you know, find some other way and then just open the envelope with the$5 and add it to whatever we made with our time. But the winning group came up with something really brilliant, which was that they knew that at the end of this process, they were going to have to present to the Stanford Business School class how much money they made and how they did it. So they sold their presentation time to an advertising company and then they won, made much more money than any of the other groups.

24:59just a really brilliant idea of creativity. I'm kind of seeing that sometimes by reframing the question, you can get a much better answer.

25:08James Altucher:Not only reframing the question, but forcing yourself to have more options, to think meta in terms of your options, like not just, oh, here are the ways I could spend$5 to make more money, which was kind of like that first stage you mentioned, but what is every component of this problem and what can be sold? and which of these components can be sold. There's the money I'm getting in the envelope. There's the weekend time. And then there's this amazing thing, this ability to present to Stanford students, which many of the groups probably didn't even think that that was an asset that they had. Yeah, because it's like a baseline if you go to a school like that.

25:45Everybody is probably kind of assuming that that's normalized. But in the world at large, of course, it's not. And that's like the value of prestige is very high. And I actually, again, to bring up AI because it's always in our minds, I feel like the value of prestige and reputation is only going up because it's harder to cold call people now in some way, right? Because a lot of people are more heightened to the concern of scams and AI writing and AI content. And I think that being trustworthy now has really risen in value.

26:22James Altucher:Yeah. And so, you know, for yourself, you're like this, essentially an athlete, like a mental athlete, chess, poker. Like, let's say someone wants to emulate what you're doing. Oh, I'm going to be a chess player. I'm going to be a poker player. Like what, what kind of basic skills other than chess, the specifics of chess, other than the specifics of poker, what do you think you had to learn or at least deal with as you were, you know, going on to be a champion of both of these activities? How many skills? Definitely one that came rather naturally to me is the ability to focus. But for many people, that'll be a hard one.

27:00The ability to focus 100 % when you're playing, because that's your moment to shine. I think a lot of people see something like a test, a presentation, a chess game, a poker game is like where you're just going to be tested on your knowledge. No, no, no. It's much more than that. It's an athletic performance where you need to bring your energy in order to do more than what you studied, right? That I think is a really crucial skill that just kind of came more or less naturally to me. Like I feel like when I won my various titles in chess and poker, oftentimes I was not the most knowledgeable player at the table.

27:36But if you look at me in like these pictures, you see like I'm like completely locked in, as they call it now, in the zone. And I feel like that gave me like an extra couple hundred rating points, honestly. It makes you really tired, though. There's always a cost. That's a key skill. And people are really noticing now that with the advent of massive distraction on cell phones, that this skill is more and more important. The ability to completely focus. I'm actually looking at my bookcase over here, and I see the book Deep Work by Cal Newport, which is all about this, that as people get more and more distracted, the ability to lock in is of increasing value because it's a rare skill.

28:20James Altucher:Yeah, that's a really good point. That right now, I mean, again, there's AI, there's the internet, there's all these things that distract us. And because of that, you can identify these skills that can very, I don't want to say easily, but there are basic skills that can help you stand out, like focus being one of them. And so how do you lock in? How do you get more focused in general? Well, like I said, it comes naturally to me when I play chess. And that's why I love teaching chess to children. Because I feel, actually grown-ups too, for chess, it's almost like an incubator of flow. Like for the flow experience, meaning that you're completely absorbed by whatever you're doing.

28:55I think chess can really bring it to people very, very easily at a very young age. As long as you like chess. If a child likes chess, once they start playing, the size of the board and the mental challenge that it presents is honestly like the perfect incubator for flow. And so you will just like kind of automatically feel that. And then say you give up chess a couple years later, fine. But what I'm hoping is that that child remembers that feeling and is able to emulate it at different stages in their life. If you're older and you struggle with the flow because not as much because you don't know what it feels like, but it's like harder to reach because of distractions.

29:36I think that's where you want to really look at your cell phone diet and see if you can come up with systems to get yourself away from your phone and your notifications in the periods of the day where you're finding flow most easily. For many of us, that's in the morning. You want to protect your morning. Sure, you might have to check your email in the beginning of the day because it's part of your job. But if you can find a two-hour slot, like it's very common, 9 to 11 a.m. People are very, very locked in. Their brain is kind of like really flowing. That's a time where you want to put your phone aside and your email aside and try to do something that you really care about.

30:15And for me, actually, one thing I've started doing is a lot of my interviews that I'm doing for my book, I do on my phone. And one reason is because that blocks all notifications. so yeah exactly so i'm doing this interview with you now and people could be texting me about all sorts of stuff you know something could be happening in the the world the global politics but it's it's not gonna pop up i'm not gonna get any notifications and that's the kind of system people want to create like in my book i talk about how tim urban a podcaster and writer uses a chess clock, even though he doesn't really play chess, to measure out flow states.

30:52And what he does is he sets a clock in the beginning of the day for four hours to do deep work and four hours to do other stuff, like emailing, chatting. I think he works from home, so washing the dishes and listening to music, whatever, right? And that he hits the clock for the deep work when he's locked in. And then when he's taking a break, he hits the other side of the clock to kind of try to divvy up his day like that.

31:19James Altucher:Yeah, similar to the, and you talk about this in the book, but similar to the Pomodoro technique, which assumes you can focus for at least like 40 minutes, then you take a 10-minute break and whatever. Yeah, yeah. I think those, the Pomodoro didn't work as well for me, but because I just feel like because the chunks are relatively short, sometimes like the process is a little distracting, but the point is there are kind of permutations of this and you can kind of try what works best for you. If you had to learn like a new skill right now, like not chess, not poker, but any other skill. What would be, what would be the, how would you think about it?

31:53James Altucher:Like, how would you start yourself off learning this new skill? Well, yeah, it's interesting because I'm one of those people who had never written a line of code before. In the last couple months, I've been kind of working with Claude on various projects and it's been so amazing because not only do I get to see things come to life, but through this process, you learn about coding. And so that's giving me some thought into adult education and how you can pick something up. So that, I guess, like, suppose I wanted to learn another language, which I would like love to do. I speak some Spanish, but I would love to learn like Arabic or Chinese.

32:30I think what I would do is I would start by coming up with a strategy to find something that I already love, like chess or poker. and to watch chess and poker broadcasts in that language. So that would definitely be my first step. And I would like... That's where you never got it that way. Yeah, and I think I would absorb a lot that way because I already know what's happening in a chess position. So I would be able to kind of see what they're saying and it would like match my brain. And then I would definitely work on used spaced repetition and vocabulary drills with an LLN. And I would probably personalize it.

33:07That's the nice thing about LLN, that you can create your own... training materials quite easily. And that helps you because when you create your own training materials, it makes it more personal to you.

33:17James Altucher:How would you do that? Like, how would you ask it to come up with personalized training materials? Well, you could create like a simple code for like a, you know, chess and poker vocabulary drills, right? And then, yeah, I mean, honestly, you'd have an HTML file like an hour later that you could continue to edit. So then you would learn about coding as well as whatever we're trying to learn, which is a lot of fun. And honestly, I read a study by the Harvard Business Review a couple of weeks ago that's now going viral in all the different major publications. There's something about it in the Financial Times and Wall Street Journal.

33:55I've seen it everywhere now. And it's basically the idea that AI is making people more tired and more overworked. And it sounds negative, but I'll say there is also a positive. The reason for this is because it's kind of putting people in this deep work state for a higher percentage of the day. Because the AI ends up doing some of the grunt work. And so you end up kind of like in the more absorbed state longer. And that's very tiring, you know? So that's something to think about.

34:24James Altucher:It's really interesting because you can, it's very, like, let's say I want to learn something. So I ask AI the first question. It gives me three or four paragraphs. There's something I don't understand. Now I have the next question. It gives me another three or four paragraphs. There's something I don't understand. so I can keep diving in. And this is kind of like how you talk about the flow state in the book. I'm always just, I'm hitting kind of like the very, not beyond what I can understand, but at the very top of my level of understanding. Oh, here's something I don't understand. Here's the first thing I don't understand.

34:56James Altucher:So it's right above my skill level. I could start to keep asking about it so I could remain in that flow state while asking questions to AI for much longer because I'm directing it. Exactly. It's very tiring. And that's one interesting thing I found about when I was trying to play chat GPT and chess and kind of understand more about chat GPT and Claude or Gemini via playing chess against them. For your viewers who might not know this, because it's a little bit surprising, the LLMs are very bad at chess. So they're like less than a thousand level. And the reason is that they've never tried to extend their intelligence to chess in the way that they have with math.

35:34So it's not like they've plugged in a stockfish engine or allowed the AI to consult stockfish or the LLMs to consult stockfish. So they're really just basing their chess moves on pattern recognition and probabilistic output. Like what would probably be the right move if you play knight takes d7? They know the rules of chess, but it's very hard for them to make good moves over an extended period of time. and what I noticed was that it started to cheat against me when I made certain captures against it

36:05James Altucher:how would the tool for cheating be the cheater well what it would do is like suppose I play against catchy pt and I play like queen takes d7 and I'm just winning a free knight because like their knight is already gone it's gonna it's gonna say like knight takes d7 I'm like wait you don't have a knight anymore. And it's like, oh, sorry. And so this is quite typical. So it's basically confabulating. It's saying like most games of chess history, if you play queen takes d7, I usually have a knight to recap for that queen, right? So I don't this time, but usually I would. So that's the move I'm going to try to play until you correct me.

36:44So that's kind of more like confabulation than cheating. And confabulation is usually a word to describe people who have gaps in their memory. And they try to fill in the sequence with the most likely explanation, right? Happens a lot when we try to remember our dreams. Happens with people with memory gaps. But even when we try to remember a dream, a lot of times we're confabulating. We don't really remember it. We might remember like two things from the dream. And then we just kind of like make a story to thread them together. That didn't actually happen in the dream. So this is kind of what the LLM is doing.

37:17But what really struck me is that after I played these games with it and it kept hallucinating, cheating, confadulating, whatever you want to call it, I had this idea that I would now try to play it and play like a ranked beginner, like 200 level. Just play the worst mode as possible. And so I did this. And what happened now was that the LLM cheated, but in my favor. So it brought me up to its level. Yeah, so I tried to get like fool's mated. And then it was like saying like, it didn't give you checkmate. It was like, oh, I can play like, I already put my pawn to G4. And it was like, oh, you can play G3 here.

37:57So it's almost like it was making me its level, no matter what. And that's something people have noticed is probably the biggest promise of AI for education is because there's a lot of dangers, of course, with it that will converge, that'll damage the teaching profession. There's definitely some dangers, But I'd say like the number one positive, especially with adult education, is that it meets you where you're at. It's very, very good at that.

38:22James Altucher:Yeah, I think, you know, the AI in general is programmed, or not programmed, but it wants to say things that you're going to like. Because then you're going to continue talking to it. So it's going to want to be at your level. It's not going to want to be too high above your level because then you'll go somewhere else for your information. and it's not going to want to be too low because then it's not useful for you. So it's always trying to make you mildly happy. And that's the focus of its responses. And that's why it's so good at teaching things at a beginner or intermediate level. Because many topics, it's just not good enough to teach the best in the field.

38:59So obviously, it's not going to be able to do that. But if you're trying to learn something that you never got a chance to study in high school or college, like math, coding, anything like that, suddenly you can basically take the 101 class and have it personalized to you, which that's pretty cool.

39:17James Altucher:And you've been using it for coding. So let me ask you, I'm a coder. I went to school for programming and my first few jobs out of school were, I went to grad school for this. I went my first few jobs outside of school for programming, but I've never used Claude or any kind of AI coding. So let me just ask you, like, how do you do it? Like, so I go to Claude and I say, oh, write me a program that, you know, is an e-commerce site. Then what happens? Does it write the code? What do I do with the code? I'm asking like very basic questions here. Does it create a place where my store exists? Or what do you do?

39:52We generate an HTML file, basically. And then you can continue to tweak the HTML file. And then if you want to do some things that are more complex, I do pretty basic projects like creating like chess games or mini games and things like, for instance, I created versions of my online chess games that I created years and years ago, like hula chess and roulette chess. And then I also created a...

40:16James Altucher:And where does the code now, like, does the code run? Like, where does the code live? Well, because I have a personal website, I can always just stick them up there. If you don't, then there are all sorts of platforms like where you can like... I mean, you might as well just get yourself a personal website and then stick them there. Yeah, that's probably the best thing to do. But there are also places where you can put your games and your websites to test them as well if you don't want to make that investment. But you can just test it on your browser too. So that's pretty fun. And one thing I made was just for my social media.

40:49I was kind of like, for some reason, Canvas sometimes can be counterintuitive to me. And so I was like, oh, I just want to make my own thing where I can just create my own quotes and stuff just so it's very fast and I don't have to navigate. This, that it's really good at too. It's not the greatest designer though. So I feel like you do need like some design skills or some visual assets that you like that you can use when you try to make things with it.

41:16James Altucher:But it'll get better at that though, probably. Probably, yeah. Yeah. Also, maybe it's good that like there's a lot of concerns with IP theft, lots of lawsuits. So if you can actually use your own photos and images that you generate as like the backdrop for something, I think it's probably the safest because you never know when there could be like a crackdown. And maybe that's one of the reasons why the images are so basic that it generates now. I'm not really sure. But yeah, that's kind of how I go about it. And I've really learned a lot. I've only been doing this for a few weeks. Apparently, Claude really just really stepped up the game with this so that somebody who's never studied this can really start working with it right away.

41:59They call it vibe coding. One of my sub stacker that I just discovered talked about this and says that once people realize how powerful it is, they tend to have like a short state of mania because like all those ideas that have kind of been incubating through their adult life that they just would never be able to do because they don't have the skillset, suddenly they can just do it. And that's really empowering.

42:39James Altucher:You mentioned cheating earlier, and you talk about cheating in the book. And obviously, I think in April, Netflix is going to have this documentary about Magnus and Hans Niemann and the whole chess cheating scandal. Why did you talk about cheating in this book? So this is a book about decision-making. What's the relevance to cheating? That's a great question, because that's what my editor said, too. Fun story is that I used to have an entire chapter on cheating. And she was like, this is more about life skills. How is cheating a life skill? And because obviously I'm telling people not to cheat, right?

43:11I'm telling people why not to cheat. But she thought it was a stretch that like putting a bunch of stuff about cheating in a book where the whole thesis was don't cheat and like don't be paranoid. She thought it was a bit of a stretch. So what we did actually is we kept some of it, but we put it in a chapter about ambition. And the idea is that if you are overly ambitious and you forget your real values and like why you're trying to achieve the stuff that you can, you're very vulnerable to temptations like cheating, right? If you believe in the process and becoming the best version of yourself, then not cheating is going to become very, very natural to you because why would you cheat?

43:48And so what I did for this book, which I really love, was I talked to some cheaters, some reformed cheaters. So people who cheated in chess and then they had a change of heart, they realized that what they were doing was bad and they quit cheating. And one thing that all the cheaters had in common, I would say, because there was a lot of differences as well. But one thing they had in common was they tended to think a lot of other people were cheating. So this is quite common. If you think that other people are cheating, you're more likely to cheat because you feel like it's kind of like a wink wink.

44:25Everyone's doing it. If you don't do it, you won't be able to keep up with the others, right? In the same way that like steroids in some sports, a lot of the excuses have been everybody's doing it. Nowadays, AI use and writing papers in college is apparently just, you know, complete so rampant that they can't even assign essays anymore, right? So this was something you found. And when people decided to quit cheating, a lot of the time it was just because they got caught. and sometimes they also realized the potential impact could be much, much greater than what they originally intended. So for instance, one of the cheaters cheated online and he realized that somehow work could get out to people in his IRL circles and it could damage his reputation in real life as well.

45:17And so there are different reasons that people quit, But I found it interesting that there is usually a common thread that they believe there is rampant cheating.

45:27James Altucher:That is interesting. And, you know, I want to just for a second pretend there are positive aspects to cheating. And one of them might be just figuring out how to cheat and not get caught. Let's say even in real life cheating. Because the Hans Magnus case really involves, did Hans cheat in real life? And it's actually an amazingly difficult problem. You have to be really creative because I guess the room they were playing in had no windows or a very small window. And how would one cheat? It's a very difficult problem to figure out. Well, yeah, I don't think that Hans cheated. I don't think so either, by the way.

46:09Okay, yeah. But if you did want to cheat, let's just say like hypothetically, before the Magnus Hans incident, the measures against cheating were much less harsh. So it was easier to cheat. Like, for example, they used to have a real-time broadcast. So the exact time that you're making a move on a chessboard, it would be broadcast to millions of people on the internet, which can include, of course, Stockfish, Lila, all the strongest chess AI in the world. So if you had a bad actor, like relaying back to somebody via beads, more likely in somebody's ear than in other parts, or in their shoe, you could, like, in real-time relay...

46:49via Morse code or by some sort of code, what the best move is. And yeah, that's, I think, a serious concern. That could definitely have happened. Now with the broadcast delay, it seems much, much harder. I don't really know how you could do it with the broadcast delay.

47:04James Altucher:And you know, one thing that came out was that Hans did cheat when he was younger online, not in real life. We don't know of any case where he cheated in real life. But when he was younger, like, I don't know, 13, 14 years old on chess.com, and his argument there was that he wanted to get a higher rating so he could challenge himself against higher rated players. I mean, I would say that is unethical and he shouldn't have done that. Oh yeah, that's actually really common justification for cheating. And some of the cheaters I spoke to in the book, they're anonymous, but of course, Hans was not one of them.

47:36A lot of them use the same justification. They said they wanted to play against stronger players so that they could become stronger and that then their level would catch up and they wouldn't have to cheat anymore. And you can see that same kind of logic with people who might cheat or lie on a resume, hoping to get a job, thinking it doesn't matter. Once they get the job, they'll be able to make up for these lies that they told in a resume. So it's also a very, very common justification.

48:01James Altucher:Well, also it could be, like in some areas of life, it could be a method of learning. So one of my daughters was going to do an open mic for stand-up comedy. and I told her an idea, which was take a joke, which has worked for other comedians, like steal a joke and do that joke and see if people laugh. And if people don't laugh, it means you're the reason because we know the joke's funny. In this case, it would be the joke rating part. She doesn't have to focus on the joke rating part because that's been done because she's stealing a successful joke. And she, and so she isolates the delivery part.

48:39James Altucher:So if it doesn't work, she knows she has to work on the delivery. If it does work, she should probably work on her writing and not her delivery. So, so, so I think, and of course her response to me was, well, that's, you know, you can't do it. You can't steal a joke. And I'm like, this is not, you're not going on Netflix here. You're just doing an open mic at a comedy club. There's no real downside for you. So, So sometimes the same idea, or another case where cheating happens is in magic acts. So a magician, if I'm, let's say you're picked out in an audience and I'm a mentalist trying to figure something out about you.

49:14James Altucher:Well, I'm on the stage, so I'm not Googling who you are, but perhaps other people in the audience who are working for me are Googling who you are, and they'll make hand motions or do something, i.e. they're cheating, to kind of signal me information about you. So some areas of life, the same techniques that would be considered cheating in chess could actually, you know, enhance learning or provide ammunition for a career or whatever. It's funny, the magic example, I think. I feel like that's not exactly cheating, but the example about your daughter. It's not cheating in magic, but the same thing would be cheating in chess.

49:51Yeah. Sometimes there's a victim, though. Like in Magic, there's no victim. Like the audience is not a victim. They're just kind of like, they're confused about how it happened. And maybe some of them realize, some of them don't. Whereas if you're cheating in chess, you're the person who's getting cheated is the victim. And their confidence might be a little bit damaged. They're a little bit upset. They've been studying and they're just losing to this lower rated player. And I've seen it happen. I've seen people who get cheated live. You just, you know, because you find out later that it's a banned account.

50:20And I remember watching one person where this happened and they were frustrated. They were just like, man, they played so good. I thought I was good at this opening. It's gaslighting. You're gaslighting the people that you cheat against, I think.

50:34James Altucher:And even in real life, let's say I'm playing a kid and for whatever reason, the parent is allowed in the room. Depending on what side, sometimes I'm thinking, oh, if the parent is on the left-hand side, the kid maybe gets some information and the parent's on the right. Just the concept of cheating really could get me down. particularly when I'm playing kids for some reason. Yeah, no, the fear of cheating is really abhorrible also because it stops you from thinking clearly and from getting that flow's day, which is one of the beauties of jazz. I think in a comedy, I feel like, is there like some famous jokes that people all tell, like the aristocrats joke?

51:11James Altucher:So there is some jokes that are made, basically. I've actually seen, and this is going to be astonishing, but I've actually seen Jerry Seinfeld steal almost word for word a George Carlin joke. So it happens in comedy, but it's very rare. Yeah, but I think the difference there is like the, I think it would be an interesting experiment if she reveals to the audience what she did at some point. But just doing it and not crediting, I mean, you say that it's not like you're on Netflix, but the thing is people go backwards in time if she becomes really successful in comedy. They could like dig up this video or something.

51:47So I can see like the fear and the reputational cost, which we saw in the case of Hans Niemann, right? Like he was doing this cheating before he became famous. And then, you know, the chickens came to roost when he beat Magnus in a big game. And that's actually like something that one of the cheaters in my book said. It's like, you realize that you're doing it in what seems like a low cost game. But then later, if you become successful, like suddenly people are bringing this up in the same way that people who become really successful sometimes get quote unquote in trouble slash at the rec for cancellation for some tweet they made offhand, like, you know, a dozen years prior.

52:25James Altucher:Do you think Hans actually got better in chess because of this scandal? I mean, he's like top 20 in the world now in chess. It's kind of astonishing because he was just, he wasn't even a GM at the beginning of COVID and he just like shot up and then there was this scandal and then now he's like a top 20 player. He's like practically, you know, candidate level. Yeah, I mean, he's super ambitious and honestly he was able to do something that I think is quite admirable which is take the good from the scandal which was all this massive attention. There were a lot of Han stans. There were a lot of people who took his side because they thought that, you know, there was never any evidence that he cheated and he had a lot of haters and a lot of lovers and he was able to just kind of like focus on the positive and, you know, become this like mega star and, you know, it's been a pretty incredible, I think, show of his scrappiness.

53:15Now, I still think the one thing about it is like, I feel like when he cheated, the times that he admitted to cheating, it was already the chess was becoming more popular online. And there was potentially money to be made by having a high online chess rating. So I still feel like it wasn't meaningless games. And that's the one thing I don't like. I don't like that when he talks about it, he says like these games are meaningless because, you know, they're not meaningless to the people who got cheated. So sometimes that's like, the one thing when I see the interviews, like he did an interview with Pierce Morgan and he's saying it's meaningless.

53:52It's like, you know, you can own up to it and say like, yeah, I cheated. I was younger then, I don't know. And like one of the cheaters in my book says, he says that he steals like tournament chess where you play a person and you sit in front of them and you look into their eyes. He feels like it's a church. He wouldn't cheat there. It's like so spiritual. The online chess, that's removed. and he didn't feel that way about it. But that as time passes, you see these formats becoming closer and closer together. So I feel like that's a completely legitimate explanation. I didn't see it as real chess.

54:27Now I do. Like, why can't people just admit that they made a mistake?

54:33James Altucher:Well, and to your point, there is a victim. Like, it's oddly, losing to a cheater is different than losing because you never have a chance. like it's really disheartening to at the end of a game like what the heck just happened there like I never once had a moment to breathe even and if you play them multiple times and you lose each time and you never once have a chance at any of these games it's like what I was saying earlier like even when you blunder a game you usually have you know some chances afterwards there's usually some upside you know oh I lost a piece but now I have a tiny bit of compensation to play but against a computer there's nothing and against a human that you don't know as a computer it's it's very disheartening so so being a victim to cheating is very painful online but i was just wondering if the if the skills of cheating in chess could be used for for other things like like again in this example of a of a magic act or or in the stand-up comedy situation but you know one one other thing in your book that i thought was very interesting is and there's many things that are interesting but this is another one is it's very you say you You mentioned how the best players spend more time trying to falsify their moves, meaning trying to, before they make an actual move, they try to prove to themselves that the move is bad.

55:55James Altucher:And, you know, Maurice Ashley, you give an example on The Daily Show, and Maurice is a grandmaster. He says he's always aware that he's got an opponent. And I think weaker players don't always play that way. Exactly. And that's kind of one of the genesis of my title, Thinking Sideways. that if you think too many moves ahead in life or in chess, you're often forgetting about the world, the other guy, all the things that your family members, your boss, all these people that what they could be thinking and what they might be reacting. And that is why it's so important to be flexible and to try to steel man your various arguments, your chess moves, your ideas.

56:35And yeah, it's really a fascinating show. And the way they tested this, by the way, in chess, there was a couple of research studies and there was also a whole book written about this. They actually had players look at a chess position and speak out loud. And they measured the number of times that a player would try to falsify their moves and consider their opponent's options. And it was a direct correlation between the strength of the player and the amount that they did this. all the way up to super grandmaster Mickey Adams, who was the co-author of a book about this effect.

57:09James Altucher:Yeah, and I'll give you my own personal example from this. I was once talking to Jan Gustafsson, who's like a 2650 grandmaster, and he showed me a chess problem. And I gave him an answer and he said, oh, that's correct. And I was all proud of myself. But then I think I was sort of lucky because then he just starts asking me questions like, what if this? What if this? What if this? And these were questions I hadn't considered at all. And I just, again, I was right, but I didn't really have all the answers to his questions. I just happened to have kind of gotten the right move. There was some instinct, but I saw how he thought was much different than me.

57:44James Altucher:He was trying very, very hard to prove the answer wrong, you know, asking questions that I hadn't even considered. And that made me think he had a very different style of thinking about moves than I had. Oh, yeah, Jan-Jus Dussin, one of the great chess commentators and also chess-opening bureaucratian. Yeah. And again, in life, it's really important. Like, I think entrepreneurs don't think of this a lot. Like, they think of a good idea, but they don't think of all the ways the idea could be bad. And so they might spend two months, six months, two years pursuing an idea without really trying to falsify the idea.

58:20Yeah, although you probably need a mix of both because otherwise you wouldn't... There's a lot of things you wouldn't do in life if you thought only about the bad things that could happen. I feel like in an organization, you need teams where there's somebody like that and you actually give power and responsibility to that person.

58:37James Altucher:Yeah, so how do you overcome that? How do you find the balance? How do you find the balance in life? It's really hard because that can freeze you, that type of thinking in life. And I think part of it is compartmentalizing it so that you're not thinking about all the things that can go wrong all of the time, but that you are trying to give it its due and then move on and have this delusional confidence that everything's going to work out. and be also aware that you're going to make mistakes despite this skill. Because in chess, like if you try to prove why everything is wrong and, you know, think and think and think and think about this, you will lose on time.

59:13So you actually have to make moves. And to use another life skill that I think we can learn from AI, one thing I really noticed about AI is they're constantly telling you to do things. You know, like the whole cliche of just do things, very popular phrase in Silicon Valley now, right? just do things. And I noticed that when I sometimes talk to AIs about different ideas and about like, you know, different things that I want to do, they're always like, just do it, just do it, you can do it. And they're also very quick. Like if you keep asking about it, like you should have sent that email already.

59:47Why are you still talking to me about this? And I find that very interesting. I'm like, for some reason, their data is showing them, their vast amount of data is showing them that people should make decisions more quickly, like a chess player. We can't just sit around and think forever. We have to actually make moves or we will lose on time.

1:00:08James Altucher:It's a really good point because I think what computers show in chess, and this is probably true for every life decision really, is that most decisions are pretty good, which is why they don't have to overthink it. Like you mentioned in the book, how Magnus Carlsen, the best player ever, has basically said, hey, you should try to checkmate your opponent in three moves, the so-called scholars made, which is a really, we used to think, like we would grow up learning, this is a really bad way to play. But actually, if you put it in the computer, why it's still kind of ahead, even after you make these lousy three, first three moves, why it's still like a little bit, it's even basically.

1:00:43James Altucher:It wasn't, it didn't really ruin your game to try to checkmate in three moves, but, but you'll learn, you know, really fast as a kid. Oh, I love that thought by Magnus. And, you know, as a poker player, it made so much sense to me after I heard him say it to my son who was in a class and Magnus said, yeah, go for the form we've made. And the coach was like, but the idea there is that you want to have this philosophy of winning. You want a child to want to win. You don't want to like try to abstract everything and say like, oh, you know, you shouldn't try to checkmate your opponent quickly because technically there's like like a slightly better opening where your position will be better and you'll learn more if you continue to do this.

1:01:27Like, sure, that makes some sense. But there's also a way in which a child wanting to win is something we should celebrate because if they keep that spirit, they're going to keep playing chess longer because they're going to win more.

1:01:38James Altucher:Yeah, and I think, by the way, I think this is a really good life skill. You see like Elon Musk starting businesses. He's like, yeah, let's make a rocket ship to fly to Mars. Like, it sounds insane. Just like checkmating someone in four moves in chess seems like it should be an insane thing to do. And yet it kind of is a starting point for ambition and curiosity and learning and so on. So it's a good way probably to make decisions. It's like, yeah, go for the gold while you can and then back up and learn from that. Absolutely, absolutely. One thing I write about in my book, actually also for the inspired by Magnus and all of his equity-driven kind of work when he plays chess, is this idea of when you're being successful in life, being relentless and like working really hard.

1:02:26Because I think there's so much attention paid to like resilience and grit and like continuing to work when you fail. And that's important. But I think even more important what I noticed in my career is that sometimes when you're having a tough period, you just have to get through it, you know? But the other type where you're having like a golden zone, that's actually where you should go really, really hard because your spirit is so strong and people can kind of vibe on success. They feel it. And that's where you have much more opportunities. And I think that like instead of celebrating, sometimes I look back at my life and I'm like, when I had that win or I had that win, instead of celebrating, I should have just kept going, kept going, kept going.

1:03:09So celebrate when you fail and work harder when you win.

1:03:13James Altucher:Yeah, that is really interesting. Well, look, Jen, you've been author of so many great books. Chess Bitch, Chess Queens. What was the instructional one called? Play? Play Like a Girl and Play Like a Girl. Play Like a Girl, yeah, I love that book. And you sent that book to me like 10 years ago for my girls, I really appreciate it. Now this one, Thinking Sideways, such a great book. I've seen lots of different books about decision-making. This is so great how you interweave all the stories and your real life experiences with very concise explanations of the research and studies and actual recommendations of what to do to take advantage of this research in real life.

1:03:51James Altucher:Such a great book. I highly recommend it. You know, as always, we've known each other a long time from the chess world. Thanks once again for coming on the show. Thanks so much for having me. You are such a thinking sideways guy. So I'm really flattered that you like the book because it's written about people like you and you are mentioned in it. So thanks again for having me, James. Yeah, no, I appreciate it. Thank you.

1:04:43James Altucher:We'll see you next time. and Gladiator. Are you not entertained? And TV shows like Survivor, SpongeBob SquarePants, The Fairly Odd Parents, and Ghosts. Pluto TV is always free. Huzzah! Pluto TV. Stream now. Pay never. The Bleacher Report app is your destination for sports. Right now, the NBA's heating up, March Madness is here, and MLB is almost back. Every day there's a new headline, a new highlight, a new moment you've got to see for yourself. That's why I stay locked in with the Bleacher Report app. For me, it's about staying connected to my sports. I can follow the teams I care about, get real-time scores, breaking news, and highlights all in one place.

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