I'm Addicted to Chess, and How Oil Prices Influence US Elections

Good morning,

I’d like to try something new at the top here. If you’re into simply scanning headlines, or prefer extra reading, then I have a present for you.

Each week, I am going to highlight three stories I saw that I found to be important, compelling, or fascinating right at the top, just like this:

The September 17th Weekly Three:

• NASA is Appointing their first ever Director of UAP research (UAP = new name for UFO’s) in conjunction with a new independent report on UAP instances.

• MDMA Therapies are inching closer to US approval for the treatment of PTSD.

• Special Counsel Jack Smith is seeking a 'narrowly tailored' gag order against Trump before trial. Which if anything, is just going to make Trump even more vocal in the media (but maybe that’s the point).

First time reader? Consider signing up (its free):

Have a topic or story you’d like to see me write about and react to? Shoot me an email at [email protected] 

Everyone Loves Chess

As of writing this, I have played exactly 1,124 games of chess on Chess.com over the past year, about three games a day. Now, that might’ve been the lamest thing you read all week, but I’m actually just following a pretty large population trend.

According to the most popular chess website, Chess.com, chess matches have skyrocketed in the last 3 years.

On January 20, 2023, in one single day, a grand total of 31.7 million matches were played, with as many as 1 million games played every hour most days since. That is bonkers for a game that is 1500 years old, and not some newly minted AAA console game from a top video game publisher.

But what exactly is creating this exponential growth in Chess play? There have been few key drivers:

1) COVID Lockdowns While some people in lockdown adopted a dog, or moved in with a significant other a little too soon, a lot of people picked up a chess habit. In one of the earliest wave of new players, Chess.com saw 1.5 million new subscribers in April of 2020.

2) Queen’s Gambit The highly popular Netflix series released in October 2020 followed quickly on the heels of that initial uptick in online chess popularity. The show’s popularity helped balloon the number of daily players on Chess.com by millions, and furthermore is attributed for why chess set sales jumped 87% as well as for the whopping 603% increase in chess book sales.

3) The Creator Community Capitalizing on this fast evolving and highly engaged audience, streams of games for top chess talent like Magnus Carlson, or more casual play on streaming sites like Discord or YouTube have provided easily accessible channels for watching chess.

So it’s been the perfect storm of lockdown boredom, pop culture trends, and technology that’s amplified a game that’s achieved centuries long staying power.

At the core of this relatively simple board game, and perhaps why it’s been so engrossing, is just how new every single game feels due to the combination of piece movements and squares on the board.

While every game begins the exact same, once each player makes their first move there are about 400 possible board setups. But once each player has each made their second move (say a knight to C3 or pawn to G4) the number of possible games skyrockets to 197,742. And after just three moves the total explodes to 121 million. Most games take each player close to 30-50 moves to complete, so the number of theoretical games out there just might be greater than the number of atoms in our universe.

In short, chess is like a puzzle, if a puzzle could fight back. With each move, the game evolves. But after you play a certain number of games, you begin to recognize certain combinations of moves, certain board setups that you’ve learned to exploit. That’s why its so addicting.

Anyways, anyone want to play me?

How Gas Prices Influence US Politics

The cost of filling up your car might be creeping back up soon. If you’re having Deja Vu at the gas pump, you’re not alone.

Gas, and the crude oil it derives from might just be the most influential resource impacting our day-to-day lives. Beyond filling up our personal vehicles, oil quite literally pushes the world economy forward, enabling the movement of vast hoards of consumer goods across the globe.

Because of how influential it is, gas prices are one of the first costs we notice when it begins to climb. In fact, the price of gas sticks with us so clearly, that it may even influence how we feel about the direction our country is headed.

Back in October 2022, the Washington Post reported on some interesting data: as gas prices rose, approval for President Biden, and optimism about the country, dropped in concert. While not necessarily a logical correlation, it’s not hard to imagine how the dramatic rise of a good purchased on a weekly basis could lead people to question the leaders in charge of our country. Gas prices rising by 20%? Damn, Biden and Congress must be shitting our economic bed.

But I think there’s a bit too much nuance lost in this conclusion. While yes, of course the White House does have a level of control on the supply of crude oil in the US, and thus a level of influence on the price of gas, the truth is that a huge portion of our crude oil supply is highly reliant on how Saudi Arabia (our #2 source of oil behind good ol’ Canada) and other major oil exporters in OPEC are feeling at any particular moment.

And right now, the oil market is experiencing a tight squeeze.

As reported in Insider, Russia's Deputy Prime Minister said on X (Twitter) that “Moscow had agreed with its partners from the OPEC that it would bring in further output cuts soon.” They had already cut their supply of crude oil by about 500,000 fewer barrels of crude a day in August, and 300,000 less in September, with more cuts on the horizon.

But Russia is only one player in the global oil market. By far the most dominant exporter of oil is of course Saudi Arabia who exports about 17% of the worlds oil, and they are not afraid to wield their supply like a blunt foreign policy instrument for bludgeoning western politics. How else would they fund their bevy of ambitious domestic projects, like their 105 mile long line city in the desert, or Cristiana Ronaldo’s $315m Al Nassr football salary (the Saudi Wealth fund owns a majority stake in the club).

In fact, Saudi Arabia has historically leveraged its oil exports to build its influence in the Middle East, and ensure US operations in the region align more closely with Saudi interests. Back in 1973 for example, the Saudi Kingdom led an Arab oil boycott of the US to retaliate for our nation’s support of Israel in the 1973 Arab-Israeli war.

To quote Paul Atreides in Dune, “he who can destroy a thing, controls a thing.” And while in Dune that resource is a drug called Spice, in our little corner of this universe that “thing” is oil reserves, a fifth of which exist in Saudi Arabia.

But there is some change in the wind on this front. While it still remains cheaper to import crude oil than it costs to produce our own, the US is setting records for oil production. What this indicates is a general push by our country to strive towards greater energy independence, and away from the shadows rival countries can cast with their oil supply.