Chess Grandmasters Burn 6,000 Calories on Tournament Days

That was the toughest part about the real long dives that we did. Like every time stuff went into the 9-10 hour range, it's like you're not eating anything. Right. Right. You come out and you're haggard. No, I can imagine, man. That's gotta be fucking hard. Just, when I do the UFC and I don't really eat for like 6 or 7 hours, it's hard. It fucks with you. Yeah. Your brain is just, your brain's like, hey man, this is not working well. We need some extra stuff. Something's missing. What's missing? I should eat something. Occasionally I'll get a hot dog or something when I'm doing those, but that's just that. That's just sitting there talking. Yeah. Which, you know what's incredible, how much burns off energy is playing chess. They did these, they had these world class chess players in these world championship events and they found out they were burning thousands of calories just sitting there playing chess because they were all losing weight. And they're trying to figure out why are these guys losing weight? Like what's happening over the course of this tournament, you know, of a couple of- Yeah, they're just sitting there. But their brain is firing. Look at that, 6,000 calories. Robert Sapolsky, our guy- That's insane. Who's the Stanford professor who we've had on the podcast, who studies stress and primates at Stanford University, says that a chess player can burn up to 6,000 calories a day while playing in a tournament three times what an average person consumes in a day. Damn. They've figured this out fairly recently because a lot of these guys are losing shit loads of weight. That's wild. Yeah, your brain. I wonder like, I don't think commentary burns off anything near what a chess player burns up but I wonder what it does because you are thinking all day while you're watching the fights, I wonder how much I'm burning because dude, when I get out of there, I eat like a fucking wolf. Could you take your whoop strap? Do you have it on usually? Yes, I do. But it's your heart rate. Your heart rate isn't going up. Well, also the whoop strap is measuring, yeah, it's measuring your heart rate and it's also, I mean, based on your activity, I don't think it's going to know like mental because I don't think their heart rate is jacked. They're burning 6,000 calories a day just sitting there. Oh yeah, it's going to measure calories burned off of your physical activity. Right, not like burning activity. Right, it's an additional thing. Well that's also like different exercises that are physically taxing and also mentally taxing. They have to be consuming more calories. Oh yeah, like I was saying about the dives, like I've done dives that are 6 to 12 hours long and you get out of the water and I'm sitting there, like I'm using my brain a lot. But it's also cool to fuck and I've come out of the water a couple times and lost 8 plus pounds. Wow, in the water. In the water. Dude, that's nuts. Yeah, it's nuts. Where's it going? Out. So I'll be coming to part of the ocean? I guess. I don't know. Right? You're pissing out a lot of liquid. Losing water to the ocean while you're in the water. Oh yeah. You could get dehydrated while immersed in water. Yep. It says that Polar, that company that Polar Straps, there's like it's a popular one too. They tracked a chess champion, 21 years old in October. He burned 560 calories in two hours of sitting and playing chess, which is about the same amount as Roger Federer would burn in an hour of singles tennis. Really? What? That's an hour of working out. That's about what I do, like an hour of an elliptical is about 560, 600. But I would feel like Federer just hopping around all that plyo, jumping back every 20 seconds. He's super efficient. That's true. Bernard Hopkins when he used to box. Yeah. Super efficient. Yeah. Sustained elevated blood pressure. I wonder if chess is the pinnacle of things that you do that aren't physical in terms of movement, but are incredibly calorie taxing. I wonder if that's the number. That's a very complex game. Oh my God. That, and maybe like brain surgery. Yeah. It's not really moving, but you're like concentrating so hard for hours and hours at a time. Yeah. Yeah. Well, there's certain things that you do though after it's over, you're just fucking exhausted and starving to death. Like when I do two shows a night after it's over, I'm so hungry and that has to be something like do two hour, 10 hour, 15 minute sets because you're thinking and you're managing it while you're doing it. There's a giant audience there and you got to be fucking on point. Oh my God. Yeah. I think the UFC makes me more hungry, but it's also like six hours, seven hours in a day. And you're probably moving around a lot too. Yeah.