Welcome to Breaking Down Patriarchy. I'm Amy McPhee, All the Best. On today's episode, we'll be talking

about patriarchy in the worlds of chess, gaming, and streaming. And I'm thrilled to be interviewing

one of the world's experts on these topics, Alexandra Botes. Welcome to the show, Alexandra.

Amy, thank you so much for having me. It's been really cool to hear about where

this podcast has been so far and where it's going and delighted to be a part of it. I'm so excited

to have you. We in our family have known who you are for a long, long time. My husband,

Eric, as our listeners know, runs chess.com. And Alexandra's name has come up through many years.

You and Eric are friends, Alexandra, and colleagues in the world of chess. So, but just, I guess,

your formal bio, and you can correct me if I miss something, Alexander, but Alexander Botes is a

chess and variety content creator, a former

competitive chess player and member of the Canadian national team. And she's now a Twitch

streamer and YouTuber. And I'll add, she's also a Stanford graduate. And yay. And a worldwide

influencer really and a huge role model for girls in chess and gaming everywhere.

So it's really an honor to have you, Alexandra.

And I wonder if you could just start the conversation by telling us kind of who you are, how you grew up, where you grew up, and a little bit about what makes you who you are.

Yeah, absolutely.

So I grew up in Canada to a family of Romanian immigrants. And

in Romania, there was much more of a chess culture than there is in North America. So my

grandma passed on the game to my dad, who then taught me and later my sister how to play as well. So I started playing chess

when I was about six years old, and I had some good results in tournaments and won a national

championship for my age group when I was eight or so. So my dad decided to, you know, push me in the

game to keep playing. And then we moved back to the U.S. later.

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