Achieving greatness requires immense sacrifice. Nobody knows this better than perhaps professional athletes or, as author and journalist Brin-Jonathan Butler reveals, chess players. Butler joins host Chris Hedges to discuss his book, The Grandmaster: Magnus Carlsen and the Match That Made Chess Great Again and how the history of chess’ greatest players is riddled with psychological dysfunction.

Butler invokes famous chess figures such as Bobby Fischer, Peter Winston and Magnus Carlsen to demonstrate how those who reach the top do so at the expense of their humanity. Referencing Fischer’s famous victory over Boris Spassky in 1972, Butler explains how Fischer was not satisfied because “it’s not enough to murder your opponent, you need to compel their suicide.”

“That was a very common sort of narrative throughout all the top levels of chess, how often the metaphor of blood execution, murder, blood on the board was commonly used,” Butler adds.

The level of obsession that develops within the best chess players transforms into an addiction, similar to one with drugs, alcohol or gambling. Despite it being a fun, challenging game for most, for others who have a propensity to become addicted in such an obsessive way, it must be cautioned with. Butler says, “For that narrow group, which I think comprises the people at the top because you have to be that way, it’s not only sort of recommended that you be this way, there’s no other way to qualify for that top zone unless you happen to be this relentlessly devoted.”

“How do we understand now if we don’t understand 1948 or 1917 or all the things that happened during the British Mandate?”

This is a central question Micaela Sahhar, author and educator, asks while dissecting her book, Find Me at the Jaffa Gate. Sahhar reframes these monumental events in Palestinian history through an intimate, granular lens of her own family’s displacement during the 20th century.

Sahhar joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report, sharing more personal narratives, revealing how her family lived through the pivotal moments that shaped modern Palestine.

“To grow up as a diaspora Palestinian,” Sahhar explains, “ is to be equipped with a particular kind of superpower, which is to understand the enormous rift between a dominant culture and what you know to be true from the people you love and trust.”

Filmmaker, author and journalist Antony Loewenstein documents how Israel has used Gaza as a weapons showcase. Spyware, killer drones, robot dogs and other weapons are debuted in Gaza and field-tested on the civilian population, demonstrating their effectiveness to regimes around the world that await their chance to purchase them.

Loewenstein joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to chronicle what he has learned from writing The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World and producing The Palestine Laboratory, a documentary based on the book.

“I think the whole idea of what Israel…has been showing the world, I say two things. One, what weapons you can use to murder, kill, target Palestinians but also how to get away with it. I think Israel sells that concept,” Loewenstein explains.

As spyware companies like Pegasus and Paragon and arms companies like Elbit and Rafael see business boom, Loewenstein argues countries have a moral imperative to end trading with Israel. These same technologies perpetuating the genocide in Gaza, Loewenstein explains, will come back to haunt the citizenry of purchasing countries.

“All these governments around the world, whether they’re so-called democratic or repressive, are obsessed with these tools. They can’t give them up. They’re desperate to listen to their opponents, to the journalists, to activists,” Loewenstein remarks.

“It’s very hard for these regimes to give them up because there’s no regulation. There’s just none. It just doesn’t exist.”