Down The Rabbit Hole: Chess, Economics and Podcasts

Chess has been a key component of my life for last 30+ years. I started playing chess at the age of 9 and since then I’ve been playing/learning chess whenever possible. Chess has also helped me in multiple ways in other walks of life as well. For example, during my campus interview in Engineering, one of the questions was on chess (if interested do check my blog on my campus interview experience). During the interview I was asked a question on Sicilian Defence.

I stumbled upon Lex Fridman’s podcast because of chess. He interviewed Magnus Carlsen and Botez Sisters and because I watch a lot of chess related videos, it appeared in my feed. And since then Lex Fridman podcast has been my facourite.

The same thing happened recently. I saw an interview of Vishy Anand by Tyler Cowen. One of the other recent interview of Vishy Anand by sports journalists Ayaz Menon and one more person was a disaster. It showed the importance of having the right interviewer to bring out the best out of the guest. Ayaz is a Cricket journalist but he simply didn’t know anything about chess and hence the interview remained very superficial. On that backdrop I came across interview by Tyler Cowen. The interview was fantastic! Check it out if you like Vishy Anand or Chess.

What struck me at that time was how knowledgable Tyler Cowen was. So I dug deeper and found out that Tyler is actually a very strong chess player. He was New Jersey champion at the age of 1 (he is 61 years old now). He then left chess and focussed on academics. Tyler is now a renowned blogger and Economist! I had read articles on Marginal Revolution; but I didn’t know that Tyler is one of the people behind it. Economics is another subject I immensely like. So finding a person at the intersection of Chess and Economics was just awesome!

Then I started going through Tyler’s podcast “Conversations with Tyler” on Youtube and Spotify and found that he has interviewed many amazing people I follow – such as Garry Kasparov, Seth Godin, Ray Dalio, David Rubeinstein, Niall Ferrguson, Tim Harford, Sam Altman, Daniel Kahnmein, Eric Schmidt, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Balaji Srinivasan, Peter Thiel, and Raghuram Rajan!

It was like going down the rabbit hole! It was exactly the same with Lex Fridman. I discovered his podcast through Chess and I’m still trying to go through many of the past episodes. Now I discovered Tyler’s podcast, again because of chess!