13: Garry Kasparov - Avoiding Zugzwang in AI and Politics 01:36:13

Be careful, comrades. Open the doors. Hello. You've found the portal. I'm your host, Eric Weinstein. And today my guest in the studio is Gary Weinstein or Gary Kasparov. I don't know for sure, but there's still no problem.

Gary, it's a huge honor to welcome you to the portal. Thank you very much. So, Gary Kasparov. Let's make sure. My name was changed in 1975 because my father died tragically when I was seven. He was just 39 and

It was just leukemia and they couldn't save him. And I grew up with my mother and her parents. And in 1975, so there was a family decision that, you know, I could change my name and to carry my name of my mother, my grandfather. So that's the story. So since 1975...

I'm known for the world of chess as Garry Kasparov. - Well, I know that you're Garry Kasparov. In fact, there are very few people who need no introduction. You are one of them, and I was tempted to give you almost no introduction at all. - Yeah, but you said you're almost in perfect Russian, so that's-- - You're very kind. - Yes.

Gary, you're known for many things. We could talk about your dominance of the world of chess as world number one for many years, famous from top level play, sort of a streak of dominance like we've never seen. But if anything, it's been really remarkable to watch your career after chess, where you've taken on this incredible role in a very confusing age as a champion of human rights. And I'm not sure...

really, which of the topics I want to hit most, whether it's talking about automation and your famous interaction with Deep Blue. But I think that the thing I want to do is I want to try to avoid some of the questions you get asked over and over again, like who is the greatest chess player of all time? Thank you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm very grateful. So let's try to figure out what that might have crowded out and let's move on to the next sorts of things. So to begin with,

One of the things that I'd like to talk to you about is something that I'm very confused by. When you played Deep Blue back in the late 1990s and the world...

the world watched in a way that it probably hadn't watched a chess match since, uh, Fisher versus Spassky. Is that a fair statement? Yes, it's a fair statement. I think that as was the, the most, uh, visible chess event in history. Right. Uh, because it was not just chess event. It, uh, it was, um, the pinnacle of this human versus machine competition that, uh,

was so fascinating for general public for decades. This match was and is still surrounded by a very thick fog of mythology. Of course. And again, what to expect? It was a machine and it's as people think, oh, it was unique accomplishment because it was a dawn of AI.

Look, Deep Blue was not intelligent at all. It was not more intelligent than your alarm clock, a very expensive one, $10 million a piece.

But the truth is that the machine that played chess in 1997 did not have to be intelligent at all. Because at the end of the day, it's not about being intelligent. It's not about replicating this human process, you know, just following the way we're making our decisions. But it's about making fewer mistakes.

That's something that is so... This is actually the most relevant lesson of 1997 match. And also remind people I won in 1996. And IBM then chickened out. They didn't want to play the third match because probably at that time I was still stronger. Such pussies. Yeah. No, but look, it's a good business decision. As I explained in my book, Deep Thinking, it was a good business decision because they knew that in 1997 Deep Blue was a very powerful force, but

compared to machines today, it was just a novice. Today,

To understand what's happened over the last 20 years, Deep Blue in 1997 was the unique project of IBM with millions and millions of dollars invested in one of the largest corporations on this planet. Today, you can buy a chess engine online and download it on your laptop.

And this computer, this chess device will be much stronger than Magnus Carlsen, the current world chess champion. And if you have specialized hardware for the same engines like Stockfish, Houdini, Komodo, the difference in strengths between these devices, specialized hardware...

And Magnus Carlsen. It's about the same as between Usain Bolt and Ferrari.

Fantastic. So Deep Blue in 1997 was not that good. Do we know if we took that exact software, and you guys keep track of, in some sense, how good something is by these ELO ratings? Yes. So what would its ELO rating today be relative to the top? I think we can just, yeah. Thank you very much for just bringing the numbers because audience always likes numbers. So my highest rating, my peak rating was 2851.

Now, Bobby Fischer's highest rating was 2785, but in 1972. So you always have to remember that, you know, it's the inflation was and still is a factor. Well, it's a relative system. It has nothing to do with chess itself. No, no, no, no. It is basically, you know, you perform well, you add points. You don't perform well, you lose points.

And the point value predicts how likely you are to beat somebody with a different score. If we play against each other, we have the same rating. So that's why, you know, and I do, let's say, I beat you 6-4. So that means I add 10 points. And you take away a little from me. 10 points. Now, if, you know, if the gap between us is 200 points, I think it's 230 points, I should score 80%. I think that's just from the top of my memory.

Got it. So it's predictions based on the difference in our rating. Right. And then so I do better than predicted. So I add points. Worse, I lose points. So go back to my absolute record was 2851.

Fisher was 2785, but remember that when Fisher reached this phenomenal height, there were no players in 2700, and there were very few players in 2600. So it was a big gap. It was a huge gap. So this is 2785 in 1972 probably was over 2900 today.

So they were probably my 2851 in 1999 as well. Magnus Carlsen, highest rating was 2882. Now he's about 2840. So he's still traversing this 2800 category. There are only a few players actually cross 2800 these days. And they're at the range of 2810, 2820. And when I played Deep Blue, I was 2800 plus.

Deep Blue's objective strength was probably 2,700 plus. But it's not about objective strength. It's about how you play in this very game and how many mistakes you make. Now, today, if you have these chess engines on a specialized hardware, that would be probably 3,400. It's amazing. 3,400. It's amazing. Yeah. Again, it's not because they're- But I want to ask this different question, which is,

If we took the exact machine and the software and we took it out of mothballs from 1997, what do we think its ELO rating would be today? The blue? Yes, the old D blue. But old D blue, I said it's this 20...

maybe 2,800, but not more. So Magnus Carlsen would be expected. The reason I ask is that you may- It will be competition. I mean, this is Deep Blue. Again, I could have beaten Deep Blue. If we played the third match, I would be a favorite because I really learned a lot about it. Well, this is the thing that I thought was so inspiring is that you talked about how we learn from these computers, that the humans are getting smarter. It's not about, it's machines made huge progress. Machines today, they are so much-

I'm not sure I can say smarter, but it's more advanced. And because don't forget, Deep Blue was not just a chess project. It was a project of parallel processors. So they had 256 processors. Each of them was a mini computer that could make 1.5 million positions per second. So combined, they could reach phenomenal speeds of 200 million positions per second. 200 million.

Which again, today it's not that impressive. But these chess devices we just discussed on your laptop, they will not be faster than five, six million positions per second. So they're not as fast, but they are far more advanced because they don't have to be that fast. It's not about calculating, because chess is...

Some people don't recognize chess is mathematically infinite or almost infinite game. Functionally infinite from our perspective. Functionally infinite, according to Claude Shannon, one of the founding fathers of computer science, the number of legal moves in the game of chess. 10 to the 40 something? 10 to 46 power. Okay.

46 power. That's again, that's, that's, it's just, this number is just, it's kills the imagination. Right. Exactly. Yeah. So it's not about calculating only, but it's also about quoting what understanding and the, the programs today, they, they are so much advanced. All right. But let me, there's no, there's no, there's no question. It's, you cannot even touch them. So just because even strongest players, you know, they will, they will be badly beaten. Now,

If you have a free chess app on your mobile phone, that's probably as good as Deep Blue, thanks to the Moore's Law.

which is very impressive. But what I really want to get at is the reason that chess matters to us and the reason that we all thrilled to it has to do with its legacy, the way it's interwoven with our society, our culture, our storytelling, even our language. We are constantly searching for chess metaphor. And one of the things that animates us is the poetry of chess. When fathers and sons, for example, would pull out

you know, games of Morphe or something and to try to show something really graceful and beautiful. We'd look to the Evergreen game or the Immortal game or something like that. And it lifts our spirits. And sometimes we're really focused not on who won or who lost, but on the concept of brilliancies. When does somebody do something so unexpected and so daring that they put themselves at great risk and then manage to somehow extricate themselves? What I want to know is,

Are we in a position to program computers for brilliancies and poetries rather than simply brute force? - Okay, let's start with your-- - Assumptions, you can unweave them if you want. - Assumption, no, that's actually assertion of, or your concept of us, because you said a few times, us. Now, at the era of globalization, we should recognize that us look different in different quarters.

The game of chess that you mentioned, it's not the only game of chess that does exist. Sure. It's one that came from India through Persia to Europe. It's one of the versions. But it's India, again, we don't have any records about India. We definitely have a few records about the game played in Persia. The records come actually from the Arab world. So what we know about India,

European chess. Let me call it European chess. It's that the game traveled from the Arab world to Iberian Peninsula. And the first book that presented the compilation of chess studies played by, in old Arab rules, chatranj, much slower game. Because the game of chess always reflected some sort of... It's a military knowledge of its time. And it was King...

allegedly written by King Alfonso the Wise. Its original was kept in Escorial in Spain in 1283.

And then, you know, the current version of chess has been shaped by the end of the 15th century, early 16th century in Spain, with few extra additions in Italy and in France in the next couple of hundred years. That's European chess. That's international chess. Got it. But there is also Chinese chess. Sure. There is Thai chess. Ah.

and some variation of Thai chess. That is, by the way, the closest to original Arab version, chatranj. So that's a very slow version game. And there's a totally separate game called shogi, Japanese chess. By far the most popular game in Japan. Far more popular than Go. And the way this Japanese chess is played probably reflects...

the way the military operations have been conducted over centuries there. One of the key elements there is you always can bring a piece that you took from your opponent back with a parachute move. Oh, really? And most of the pieces, they just move fast and straight.

So the game doesn't have an end game the way we have it in chess. It's all about attacking the king. It's like a slow motion game, but then the moment it's the both sides, they meet each other, that'll feel like a samurai bloodshed.

Okay, so there's like a metaphoric aspect to which kind of chess we play. Exactly, exactly. No, but you said exactly. In the Western world, European, Eurocentric world, chess has been viewed for centuries as like a nexus of human intelligence. So it's saying, oh,

He or she played chess. Wow. Because it was like a mystery. It's not surprising that Alfred Binet, the father of IQ test. So at the end of the 19th century, he was fascinated by the way the chess player's mind was working. So he believed that if he could study the minds of the chess players, the brains of the chess players, he could reveal the ultimate secrets of human intelligence. ♪

By the way, it's not true. It's very flattering for me to say that, but that's the greatest minds who always look at chess as sort of the ultimate test. Have you always been as self-critical as you're being right now? I'm not self-critical. I'm objective. The aptitude for playing chess is nothing else than aptitude for playing chess.

It's like your capital, you have intellectual capital. So you can invest it wisely, you can invest it poorly. - Well, I like the idea that even IQ of course is not intelligence, it's a particular measure of a something.

I don't know if you happen to know him, but I went to graduate school in the same year as a guy named Noam Elkis, who, you know, is... He's the Israeli chess composer, yes. Yes. Yes, yes, yes. Just because I had a book, you know, of just, you know, of the best, it's the, of...

of the best Israeli chess studies. And I just, that's why I recognize the name. Well, yeah, but he was like the youngest full professor at Harvard. It's for him, it was a hobby. Some of the great studies. But he comments on the fact that he can only achieve

the level of chess master, even though he's a grandmaster in problem solving and composing. And so even there, there's like something very mysterious because this is a sort of like a John von Neumann-like level of intelligence. And he's commenting on the fact that he's merely a chess master. And so I found that to be quite shocking and surprising because I know how amazing Noam is. Look, it gets, you know,

I'm making your point. Yeah, but yeah, absolutely. Because it's also about competition. You have to compete. I mean, his great mind feels probably more at home by composing. Right. He's just, you know, he's comfortable with his study. He can think about it. So he can, you know, there's no time pressure. There's no opponent just, you know, across the board. You know, no intimidation. So,

Exactly. So getting back to brilliancies, which I don't want you to avoid. Okay, no, no, no. I'm not going to avoid it because I have a straightforward answer. Do you want to say what a brilliancy is in your own language so that I don't… Before I move to my definitions of brilliancy, I think the answer is no. Sure.

straightforward. No, machines cannot do it for a simple reason. Because you're talking about brilliancy and about creativity. Those are things that, you know, versus brute force. The way machines operate

They have been operating ever since and they will be operating for indefinite period of time. It's based on odds. They know odds. They know patterns. They can operate within this known universe. Something that they know within the rules that either they have been told about those rules or the information that had been provided for them. But they're always looking for the best move. So

Brilliancy based on creativity, and it means that, yes, I can play a very risky, adventurous game. Maybe it could be a brilliant game. Maybe it could be a failure. You have to accept a chance, sometimes significant chance, of failure to create a masterpiece. Machines cannot operate within this. - You don't know how to encode the concept of masterpiece?

Look, you know, Masterpiece is something that's, you know... Is it still subjective is the question. It is still subjective because, you know, some people, you know, it's about taste. Yeah. Some games, you know, people say, wow, it's amazing. Most likely these games are just, you know, they include some kind of sacrifices because people always enjoy seeing that the spirit...

triumphs over material. So when you sacrifice pieces here and there, right, left and center, and eventually you made the opponent's king. That's the most popular concept of masterpiece.

But you can have a very slow motion positional masterpiece, you know, by just adding, you know, just advantage, micro advantage after one after another and strangling your opponent. It could be a mixture of that. So, but again... You, for example, described the current number one, Magnus Carlsen, as a mixture of Karpov and Fischer. Yes. And you...

Fischer was the obvious sort of virtuoso at the level of masterpiece, but you pointed out that Karpov was a master of maximum efficiency of the power of an individual piece to do the most with the least. Yes, absolutely. And Magnus is this lethal combination of two because Fischer, I think it was very rough, but it's sheer energy. He could play until the last pawn. There's this...

basically squeezing, you know, water out of a stone. Now, Carpal was good in getting the maximum effect out of the minimum, you know, resources he had available, but he was not as consistent as Fischer, not so pushy. He, you know, it was more relaxed. So Magnus brings them together and that's,

He has Karpov's ability to maximize the effect of his pieces, but also he will play to the very last point, the very last move as Fischer did. Right. And okay. So I think what you're telling me is that we are not yet able to figure out how to encode the concept of brilliancy so that we may lose to these machines, but that the poetry to be extracted from chess is

at one level belongs to this positional brute force aspect and another belongs to something that's ineffable that we can't quite touch. - Look, yes, it's the,

- And I took your point about the sacrifices that that's a sort of an obvious version of a risk taking. - But it's interesting thing is it's the latest chess computer prodigy, AlphaZero. That's the program run by Demis Hassabis and his team. It's the DeepMind team that is working for Google. They succeeded in beating the best goal players

Then they just, they came up with this concept of alpha zero, which is, you know, starting from the scratch. So the machine knows only the rules, whether it's go, whether it's chess, whether it's a Starcraft, any game. And then, you know, it plays against itself. It learns from its own experience, no human contamination. Which is very funny because one definition of genius is the fire that lights itself. Yeah, but it's, but yes, and it, it, it,

It played against Stockfish, against one of the strongest chess engines, and it beat it convincingly a number of times. But then Stockfish got better. Yeah, but AlphaZero still dominates the game. Now, when we look at these games, that's the first time when I thought, oh, wow, I can learn something from these machines. AlphaZero played chess more aggressively. Contrary to our expectations that stronger machines will play

dollar games, more, you know, just it's the slow games because every sacrifice can be refuted. So that's why machines, they don't take too much risk. But AlphaZero, contrary to our beliefs, you know, played very aggressive chess, sacrificing material and beating stockfish, machine, not humans, by just, you know, always being one or two moves ahead in anticipating what's coming next.

I use the word sacrifice. But for machine, for AlphaZero, it wasn't a sacrifice. AlphaZero, thanks to its massive experience through these 60 million games, 6-0, 60 million games to play against itself. So it generated a bank of data, which provided its better understanding of patterns. So when AlphaZero sacrificed, quote unquote, in his...

We saw it as a sacrifice. For AlphaZero, it was the transformation of a material pawns or pieces into other factors that were more dominant. Position or momentum. Exactly, it's momentum. And it's amazing that it's AlphaZero that had just looked at the fewer positions. It's about 1% of what, when you look at the number of positions analyzed.

versus stock fish. It was far more prescient in understanding what's coming next.

again, playing without the material. Stockfish, you know, it took, you know, one or two moves to actually understand what's coming because it looked... And again, it's not that it's the combination was winning. It's when AlphaZero made sacrifices. Yeah. It was not a forced win because Stockfish would have seen it as well. Okay, but... It was, you know, it was, again, deeper understanding of the game based on... It's a pattern that it was able to design out of these 60 million games. ♪

But in general, I would think about brilliant... Again, imagine me telling you what a brilliancy is. It's ridiculous. I don't know. I don't know either. Exactly. Brilliant games, but it's... But one thing I might define it as is anything that where there would be a body of conventional wisdom and then there's a move that is deeply weird relative to that expectation. So for example...

a move that doesn't seem to develop anything. It's like almost a waste, a throwaway move could also be a brilliancy if it turned out that that unlocked something nobody could see. Yes. Anything that surprises people, it's going to be brilliant. So, you know, maybe one of the most brilliant moves based on your definition I ever made was game 24. I played Anatoly Karpov.

It was a unique moment when you just, you know, I had to survive this game and Karpov had to win the game to retain his title. And it was one point ahead and it was the last game of the match.

and Carpo had a very, you know, potentially very strong attack. And I found a move that was totally illogical. By the way, ever since this game, this idea became part of the defensive concept for Black. But at the time, you know, it was just, it looked so ugly because you don't put these rooks, you know, just...

in a position where it has no other moves surrounded by your own pieces. But it was not about, you know, it's not about attacking. Basically, it was a very good prophylactic move because it...

prevented big threats from White and it had to force Carpenter to start looking for other plans. So, you know, it's, and I was very happy when I just, I remember I made this move because I just didn't understand how else to defend. It just was so much against, you know, what I learned but I made a move and I remember when I just, you know, it's this is, when Carpenter came to the stage, he looked at this and then it's,

another great player. He realized that this move basically killed his attacking, you know, structure. And he had to actually start regrouping pieces, wasting time. And he just, I think it's definitely, it's not just a strong move, but it was so unusual move looking weird, but it shook Karpov's confidence and he quickly made a mistake and lost the game. That's fantastic. Yeah.

Okay. Here's a question that I've never been able to ask. And maybe if it doesn't make sense, you'll help me formulate a better one. I guess when we lost, I mean, checkers was solved. Yeah. Chess, we lost with you in. So go. So. Okay. But the question is after go, I sort of expected something to happen that didn't happen. I expected someone to start trying to create a new game.

which in which humans would still have an advantage that had the deterministic characteristics. And everyone seems so demotivated by this experience. Like what's the point? Why are we, why race? It's like trying to continue to be a better number multiplier in an age of computers. There's no point. Have we become demotivated? Is anyone searching for things that show off and accentuate what humans still do better than any, any machine? Yeah.

it's a very important question and it's just it's uh i think you just uh so it's uh it's like almost home run because it's that's that's a question that's in in different uh modifications i hear all the time since i now speak uh three times a month uh at the conferences it's about ai it's about cyber security and about you know human machine collaboration um and um and about vanity yeah so yes um

The answer is that we're not demotivated. I think we're more pragmatic. We simply understand that it doesn't make any sense because it's not just chess or go. It's a starcraft. It's Texas Hold'em poker.

You name games, you know, and at the end of the day, machines will always prevail. So to make it easier for my audience to understand, I always tell them that every game can be described as a closed system.

And if you build a closed system- Eventually, a computer will always win. Exactly. Okay. That's it. So the human strength is not trying to compete with machines in the closed systems. Because if we know how to do it, machines will do it better. Not because they're perfect. Again, that's important. They will never reach 100% perfection. It doesn't exist in the universe. But they will make fewer mistakes.

So machines will always outperform humans by minimizing number of mistakes. Or it's not just a number of mistakes. Machines do not make blunders. So again, the gravity of machines' mistakes or inaccuracies, it's not as – sometimes humans could do something really stupid. Have you ever looked at the history of electric guitar? No. No.

So you have these very weird players. I'm just going to riff off of your open versus closed games where probably the first great electric guitarist was a guy named Charlie Christian, but he was really playing the guitar and it happened to be electrified. By the time we get to people like Jimi Hendrix and Eddie Van Halen,

Whatever we thought the vocabulary was that we were restricted to in the instrument, they showed us that the dimensionality of play was so much greater than we'd ever considered.

For example, by bringing the amplification into the instrument and making it part of the instrument or with Les Paul creating the instrument as the recording studio, not just as the instrument. And so eventually these become closed games, but there is something about, and to just fit with the theme of this series, the search for a portal out of the closed game into a higher dimensional space where something else is available is

like people talk about hearing eddie van halen for the first time and they're guitarists and they're thinking i have no idea what i'm listening to how do those noises come from that man um are there any sort of innovations like that that uh you think where computers can start looking for ways out of the closed systems into higher dimensions i don't think so i think machines will not be able in a foreseeable future

if not indefinitely, to understand how to transfer the knowledge from one closed system to another. Can machine ask questions? Yes. They just don't know what questions are relevant. - Well, so I give this example quite a bit, but there's a very powerful concept in pure mathematics

of taking square roots of various objects where like with real numbers, it's quite clear what a square root should be. But even when you get to the negative numbers, you end up having to go outside of the real numbers to answer a question about the square root of negative seven. And you can take the square roots of rotations, you can take the square roots of determinants of matrices, and you find these structures that nobody knew were hiding there.

So one of the things we've learned in pure mathematics is that there is a way of going from a closed system into a larger closed system. And that one moment, the closed system reveals itself to be open.

Is that something that you imagine? No, again, I'm not sure it's a legitimate comparison because again, it's decision making. In math, there are answers. In math, it's one or another. You have an answer and it's not a straightforward. It could be just a crook, but at the end of the day, you know that there's a solution. Game of chess is not, or any other game, is not math.

It's not, you know, there's no perfect solution. Well, Hardy disagreed with you. G.H. Hardy wrote that chess is real mathematics, but of a trivial kind in the sense that he didn't mean trivial in that it was easy or that it wasn't beautiful. He meant that it didn't connect to anything else because the rules were artificial. And so what it told you about was simply internal to the world of chess. But again, in math, you have perfect solutions. In chess...

sometimes have perfect solutions but in most cases it's based on your assumptions so is this and it's it's you know the the again machines will always win not because they see the perfect solution

Again, 10 to the 46th power, number of legal moves. But because they make fewer mistakes. So they will be closer to perfection than humans. Right. So whether it's much closer or just closer, it doesn't matter. So they will be always ahead. So same with every other game. So all you need is to provide machine with the rules and machines will start operating, you know, just on their own by creating their data.

Though I have to say that today, AlphaZero is still quite an exception. Most of the machines today, 99%, if not 99.9%, they are doing not transformation, but optimization. Got it. They're still operating with human-generated data. But the future, no doubt, it's for AlphaZero-type computers. They will be... It's like...

computer with AI algorithms. And they will require some form of human guidance. It's like I always call this, you know, the future computer experts, shepherds.

So they will be nudging the flocks of intelligent algorithms one way or another. Got it. But it's still, you know, they will still need to be nudged. So it's, again, moving from one system to another. It's one closed system to another closed system. Will require human guidance. What is very important for us to recognize is that our role percentage-wise is

is shrinking yeah but it doesn't mean that we become uh um uh expendable so actually i think it's we're getting we we could become even more important in this human machine collaboration because we will be deciding how this massive brute force yeah will be moved you know right or left or whatever up and down well if i'm honest about that the way in which i receive what you just said is

that in the short term, I think we become more important because the least interesting things are taken over by the computers. And then if we're smart, we invest in what it is that we do best, which is often this act of brilliance induction, opening a closed system into a larger one, which is temporarily opening it up. And that's exciting. However, I do feel that this is a short-term investment

win for humanity. Define short term to be. Well, I worry that this is on the order of decades, not centuries. For you and me, it's probably not a very short term. That's why I was... Yeah, it's... Look...

Why do we go too far? So this is again, we, you know, the strength of humanity was always to respond to the challenges that we are, that are here now on the table. Right. I don't want us to spend time, I would say, waste our time debating what can happen.

or may happen, may not happen 30, 40, 50 years from now. We have challenges that we should address right now. And I think that it's time for us to understand how we can maximize the benefits out of human machine collaboration. Well, okay. So I had a very funny interaction preparing for my interview with you today, which is that I spoke to two brilliant young women who,

one of whom just released 25,000 new stock photos of people who don't exist generated by her AI. She's a PhD from Berkeley. The other of which is a brilliant musician, but arguably also one of the world's most stunningly beautiful women as a supermodel. And

And I noticed that the ELO system that you use for chess can be used in any situation where if like, if you asked, well, who would, who would people find more beautiful person A or person B, and then you have a prediction. So you could use an ELO system. And I asked my friend, the supermodel, her name is Charlotte Kemp-Mull. Would you be willing to subject yourself to a Kasparov versus the machine type

competition where my other friend will attempt to generate photographs that are even more beautiful than any human being who has ever been. And we could try to figure out what the ELO rating is for simply feminine beauty. Now that's a very different thing than a computational problem.

on the surface. It may be a computational problem under the hood, but what happened when I started looking through the friend's catalog of stock photos is that I could see that you could very easily fall in love with the images that she had generated, even though they correspond to no human being, they were filled with emotion, you know, grace, whatever you, whatever it is that you associate most with being human. And yet she knew exactly how they'd been generated,

from her neural nets. That's pretty disturbing in some ways, would you not say so? - Look, you're talking about images. - Right. - Still images. - Still images. - Still images.

you need just for proper relations, you need more than still images. - Well, that's true, but the idea, she's able to animate a lot of these, first of all, into video. - That becomes interesting. The moment you start animating, that's it. - And then a couple of our friends, Jordan Peterson and Joe Rogan, have put so many hours of data of their voice into the world that we can now generate their voice so that they can't tell the difference between what they've said and what the machines. So we're starting to get to the point

We also have programs that write sports stories simply from the statistics that come off the games in a credible fashion. It's the data. Right. So what's the, but look, you know, what's here is that we've associated various things with our humanity. And I think your point about chess, which I just think is great, is don't make the mistake of holding those associations too tightly because the machines will let you know that

that some of this is not having to do with being human at all. - Yes, it's the decision making process is not, you know, it's not just human prerogative forever. So yes, we used to think that, you know, it's these machines could do all sorts of work, but not, you know, not to challenge

challenge our cognitive skills. Right. At the end of the day, it's what's the difference? So it's this, it's the, it's again, it's machines could help us in just making progress in whether it's in the field of physical exercises or, you know,

mental uh exercises though again it says it's if you look at the statistics is that is this i think it's the um the mckinsey's uh report of 2016 u.s job market showed that you know it's the only four percent of working activities yes required medium human creativity wow four percent yeah so it means that

For over decades, we have been training people to work like machines. And now we're shocked that many of these jobs, they are just, you know, they doom. It's like zombie jobs. They're already dead. They just don't know. Every repetitive job has that characteristic. But it could be. Repetitive jobs does not necessarily, you know, it's a physical one.

You can have repetitive jobs, you know. Well, radiology is the easy one. Intellectually. Right. And when people say, oh, yeah, but many of these jobs, they are just in grave danger. Right. But, you know, thank you for mentioning radiology. Sure. So this is, yes, you know, we know that human-machine collaboration Right. you know, shows better results than either one individual. So that means that, you know, you will have some experts

And from my experience in chess and combination of human plus machines, you don't need the strongest minds. So the most talented players working with machine, but someone who knows enough to give machines so that it's like it's to guide machine, not to interfere with machine superior knowledge. So that's why you may not need a top professor, but maybe an assistant professor, maybe even experienced nurse to work with this machine. Right.

Oh, but I hear, you know, time and again, thousands of jobs, you know, they will be at grave risk. Maybe they'll be lost. And it's just the well-paid jobs. Yeah.

Yes, but what is the other side of this coin? The jobs will be lost, but the cost goes down. More people could have access to that. And when you look at the number of lives that can be saved in this country, or especially in the third world countries, developing countries. So then all of a sudden you understand that it's while certain groups of people could be in danger because their computation and

and machines, they bring in, you know, havoc in our professional routine. But as a humanity, we always win. But isn't it weird how many of us are seeking drudgery, that we wish...

Like you watch what happens when you liberate people and you find that they go back to these games on their computers that they play repetitively. You know, that there's a way in which humans, we had always thought we wanted to be liberated to do creativity, but there's something terrifying about creativity. And many of us actually seek repetitive, uh,

activity which anesthetizes us and arguably um we're happiest when we start behaving in a way that is machine like but again but it's the it brings us back to to us that bring us back to human yes because you know it's the you know it's instead of talking about killer robots the

Terminators, Matrix, and other horrors produced by Hollywood. So that's your neighbors here. So brainwashing generations of... Pay no attention to Boston Dynamics. Yeah, yeah. Look, it's quite primitive. But why don't we talk about...

humans using modern technology to harm other humans because humans still have monopoly for evil. Right. Yeah. And I think it's far more important now to understand how this modern technology that has been designed in theory to make our lives better have been effectively used to undermine the very foundation of the free world.

So what I, that's a great opportunity to transition because if there's anything that I'm more interested in than talking about computers and poetry and all of these things, it's this bizarre moment that we find ourselves in, in the free world where I've never seen anything like this in my life. It appears that there are almost no adults left in the system. It appears to me that there's almost no institution that really cares about ground truth. And it appears to me that we are right now in the process of, of,

sort of abandoning everything we'd built up for the most trivial of reasons. And I don't know whether you subscribe to this, but the transformation of our country intellectually to me, since slightly before the election of Donald Trump till the present moment has been the most unexpected, uh,

singularity in terms of the ability to hold conversations, to analyze what it is that we in fact hold in common. Our sense-making apparatus appears to have been broken down and a large number of people don't even seem to be aware of this. And I don't know exactly

how to explain how many different clusters of beliefs have now cropped up, which appear to be incapable of communicating with each other. Are you seeing the same thing? Yes. Yes. And I've been worrying about it for quite a while. So I wrote the book Winter is Coming just before the presidential elections in 2016.

And unfortunately, it is warning. Nobody understood it. No, nobody wanted to hear this because it seemed that it's just like a big failure.

so far away. The book didn't mention Trump or Syria, but you could read between the lines. That is this, because I already talked about Putin and about his threat to the free world. So his war on the free world, that it was just a matter of time before the techniques that have been developed in Russia and tested in neighboring countries and in other European countries, that these techniques would be used to undermine American democracy.

And also, I talked about the growing vacuum in the world that was a result of the free world led by the United States to depart from its leadership role after the end of the Cold War. So it's, yeah, it's easy to say everything is about Donald Trump. But when you look at the Donald Trump phenomena, it has roots. Well, this is the thing. It's a symptom. It's a symptom that somehow Trump, you know, just demonstrated that the system was already so weak that it could have...

Persons so unqualified to win elections by the rules. I mean, yes, with foreign interference, with other things. But you're exactly right. The adaptive landscape, if you want to take the evolutionary metaphor, was created and then suddenly...

There was a creature that's... Absolutely. But then, before we go to Trump, we should understand why the system was so, you know, it was weak enough. Susceptible. Susceptible, yes. Just to succumb to Trump's... It's not even evil genius. I mean, just intellectually, it's always insulting as to hear what he said. But, you know, the man, so, you know, just it's so...

Not just unqualified, but it's just, if you ask people to describe a potential threat to his democracy 20 years ago, so what could be the image of this villain that would be threatening the very foundation of American Republic? You could come up with somebody very intelligent, very sleek. I mean, more likely you have somebody like Bill Clinton. So that's his type, very intelligent, well-spoken. Charming. Charming, but not Trump.

So, so now let's go back. No, no, no. Just, just so you know, I did write, I think it was in 2013, an essay warning about what I thought was going to come up based on my understanding of professional wrestling and professional wrestling is in some sense, something that mirrors some of the techniques that may have been developed in Russia because the propensity to suspend disbelief, um,

is not well understood by many people who have a rational enlightenment oriented bent. - But it's, I still want to go back to 1992. - Sure. - Because it was the end of the Cold War. It was a moment of the greatest triumph of the free world. Soviet empire collapsed, Soviet Union ceased to exist.

And relatively peacefully, not perfectly. Yes, yes. But amazingly peaceful. Amazingly, yeah. There were a few wars, you know, in the perimeter of the former Soviet Union. There was a demographic crisis. A lot of people died. Yes, there was a very bloody war in former Yugoslavia. But still, you know, the cost, you know, the human cost for collapse of the evil empire was insignificant compared to what people expected, you know, would be the outcome. Exactly. Now...

And in 1992, one of the most popular books, bestselling book was The End of History by Francis Fukuyama. And I have to say, I share the same expectations about, you know, the triumphant, you know,

continuation of the history of the free world and it's liberal democracies won and the rest would be just us doing some great things but never to worry again about threat to the free world coming from dictators and other you know that's what we expected in 91-92

It's not what I expected, but okay. - 91-92? - No, no, no, no. I was terrified by the fact that this is what was claimed because I had thought, how is it that a country like the US, which has needed counterweights in order for it to, like, you know, you and I both have a Jewish component in our background.

There's a weird way in which anti-Semitism, if it's too low, we stop being very Jewish. If it's too high, we're an incredible threat. You have two separate ethnic heritages which show you how vulnerable and precarious life can be. Somehow, what terrified me was the idea that we were going to take a bipolar system, which represented the Cold War, and suddenly remove one part of it

without any plan as to how to manage this. - Yeah, but that's okay. That's a good point. Now, first of all, removing evil component of this dichotomy was a good idea. I grew up in the Soviet Union. What was bad is that it required a new plan. - It did. - It did. And nobody wanted to talk about it. - That's the weird part. - Now I understand. Now being a money, money,

- Morning quarterback. - Morning quarterback. - Okay. - So I know exactly what was wrong. Actually, I knew about it already a few years ago. So in 1991, 1992, it was America's role to start reconsidering its global participation. No Soviet Union, so what's the plan? And one of the most important things was to address the reform of United Nations. Because United Nations was built in 1945 as a success or failed League of Nations.

to prevent an open war, open military conflict between USSR and USA, between two superpowers. It was all about freezing conflicts. And it managed. There were conflicts, but thanks God, you know. It's been ridiculously successful. Exactly. In 1962, it came close. It was a Caribbean crisis, but it was basically for a couple of weeks. There was no real threat of World War III and global extermination. It's been amazingly quiet since 1945. So,

Yes, you look around the world. So this is, you know, the wars actually moved from Europe to other continents. Yes. There was a Korean War. There was a Chinese Civil War. You know, this is then... Look, I hate to say it this way, but Europe is weirdly...

Europe is one of the world's most dangerous places. And we don't think about it that way because we've had this period of stability that has been anomalous. Europe, you know, that had wars for centuries, you know, was pacified. So thanks to these United Nations concept of, you know, finding compromise,

Two systems, yes, they were fighting each other, but mostly proxy wars around the world. Yes, that's why we had these James Bond movies, you know, and sometimes even James Bond cooperated with KGB officers to fight global evil. So it's the, again, we knew how to live in this world. Now, 1991, you're right. So it's just, you know, the Soviet Union has gone. So what's next?

It's the idea that evil disappears, it was dead wrong. Because evil can be buried for a while under the rubbles of Berlin Wall. But the moment we lose our vigilance, it sprouts out. So...

The United Nations that was built to freeze conflicts was not there to solve problems. And we need to start looking for solving problems. We need it, I believe, an organization that would be rather called League of Democracies. Actually, it's – late Senator McCain used it, but I have to say I use it separately. It's an organization where the –

will not be just paying lip service to democracy. So America had to come up with a plan, like in 1946, rebuilding Europe. Right. A global plan of spreading democracy and freedom and... We almost instantly got stupid. Yeah, but it's the... Then it's...

But again, it's a human nature. It's very difficult to tell people that recognize that for nearly half a century, there was an existential threat, potential threat of the nuclear war. And those who remember 1962 crisis and Vietnam War say, oh, wow, it's all over. So why don't we just celebrate? Why don't we get rich? Why don't we just do other things together?

Stop worrying about the rest of the world. You know, sometimes I think that if the Soviet Union collapsed a year later, probably Bush 41 could be reelected. Because I think one of the reasons Clinton won the elections is not just Ross Perot, which was an important factor, but the Republicans lost their big card. So the Cold War was over. So why do we need Bush and an economy stupid president?

motto right one the day we turned inward exactly now it's not it's basically america was still there because it was the only superpower but it lost its you know its role as the you know as the stabilizing factor because look clinton 1992 you know you won the elections in 2000 you know 2001 january he walked away 1992 america was basically in the position to do whatever

Make any suggestions that others had no choice but to accept. In 2001, early, Al-Qaeda was ready to strike. So we missed these years, and also something else happened in these eight years. Russia moved from a very fragile, feeble democracy into the first –

next stage that would be eventually dominated by KGB. In the year 2000, Vladimir Putin became Russian president. The fact is that in nine years after the statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky, the founder of KGB, has been removed from Lubanka Square,

Less than nine years, Vladimir Putin became the president of Russia, KGB Lieutenant Colonel, who immediately said that the collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century, who immediately returned Soviet anthem to make a symbolic gesture, who proudly said that there were no former KGB officers. Once KGB, always KGB, quote unquote. So that was already a warning sign that things changing.

This was another confusion that I had. My model for Russia is two separate things Americans often don't understand. One, it's a barbell culture. It's got the highest of the high culture and the lowest of the low. And two, because of this in some sense, there's a fractal nature to the Putins. It's like Putins all the way down. There's always sort of a look for strength and leadership of a kind of uncomfortable way

Not just at the very top. Yes, but the uniqueness of Putinism, of Putin's regime, was that it was not based on any ideology. Traditionally, Russia always followed some sort of the grand idea, empire, communism. Can I try one and then you tell me why it doesn't work? Dehumiliation.

No, absolutely not. Or unhumiliated. Absolutely nonsense. It's just they used it for, you know, it was a propaganda shtick. You don't think that there was a need to restore some kind of sense of identity? I remember people talking fondly about Stalin. I thought it was very confusing. Because in the last year of Yeltsin, you know, they started, you know, just, you know, playing with this nostalgia. Right. Because KGB was playing a bigger and bigger role. You know, going back to early 90s in Russia...

After Yeltsin shut down Russian parliament in 1993, though I had no sympathy for Russian parliament, and I thought Yeltsin was right because they were full of communists and nationalists, but he ruined just, you know, the balance of power that was just building up in Russia. And it was, again, since 1993, it was all power of executives.

And the Russian constitution that in theory, adopted in 1993, was a good document, gave enormous power to the president if he wanted to abuse it. It was just...

On paper, it looked good, but it almost eliminated the key elements of checks and balances, of the control of the executive power, which in Russia traditionally was dominant force. And in 1994, the first Chechen War already showed that the country was moving in the wrong direction. And 1996 elections was already – it was free but not fair.

And then selecting his successor, which by itself is not democratic process, selecting, nominating him. Yeltsin came up with, and Yeltsin's family, not just immediate family, but family as the group of his advisors, closest oligarchs, the circle of oligarchs. They came up with a KGB lieutenant colonel. So it was more about preserving the enormous wealth that it concentrated at the time.

The humiliation was just for the general public, but it's Russia and Putin, the strengths of Putin's regime is that they don't care about ideology. Putin could become nationalist, could become a sort of the populist, could be imperialist. At the end of the day, he doesn't care what- He wants power and wealth. Exactly. It's more like a mafia state. That's why I say that every country has its own mafia. In Russia, mafia has its own country.

So it's something quite unique. And Putin believes only in power of money. And he just discovered at a point quite early in his presidency that money can buy anyone anything. And that's the problem with the free world. Losing Russia, also losing the Soviet Union as an existential enemy. The free world lost its sense of balance.

So it is it's oh, now let's you know, let's let's make deals. So who cares? We are, you know, we are invincible. Well, we keep looking for our new Soviet Union, whether it's China, the environment, Islamic terror. We're trying to find it. Yes. But the free world, you know, is much weaker. You know, I remember that.

It's a few years ago, I spoke to one of my friends in New York and we talked about, it's after my book was published, "Winter is Coming." And we talked about challenges to the free world. And I said, in 1948, Joseph Stalin wanted to take over West Berlin. He announced a blockade. And Harry Truman said, "Hell, we'll defend West Berlin." It was a biggest, boldest decision that American president could make.

And for 11 months, US and British planes supplied West Berlin with everything it needed to survive. And Stalin decided against shooting these planes. So he knew that Harry Truman was not a man just to play games with. Not to be trifled with. Exactly. And I said, look, Harry Truman faced Joseph Stalin. And this is Russia today. Not Putin, Joseph Stalin. Russia today in 2015 is a pale shadow.

of Stalin's Soviet Union, militarily or economically. And you know what he said quite sadly, you know, signed and said, yes, but America today is also a pale shadow of America of Harry Putin. This is the horrible truth, which is that in a weird way, Putin appears to be relatively, in my way of thinking, one of the most skilled players left on the chessboard.

- No, I just, here I have to disagree. - Please. - I have to defend the integrity of my game. So Putin is not a chess player. - Oh, sorry, sorry, sorry. - He's an opportunist. - I didn't see that I had done that. - No, it's the, Putin doesn't create these opportunities. He uses them. So he grabs them. - Okay, let me say it differently.

Putin's strength is a weakness of the free world. Yes, but KGB had a tremendous amount of know-how. It was resident within that. Yeah, but know-how is fine, but KGB has enormous amount of cash now. Vladimir Putin controls more money than any other individual in the history of humanity. Richest human. When people say, oh, how rich is Putin? Putin is mega-rich.

But it's not the same kind of wealth that Bill Gates or Carlos Slim or Bezos or whoever, because it all depends on him staying in power. But when you look at the amount of money Vladimir Putin can move directly or indirectly, you're probably talking about something like $1 trillion. That's down. $1 trillion. Yeah. It's just you add Russian annual budget, you add Russian hot currency reserves, the oil.

the fortunes of some of the top Russian oligarchs who are connected to Putin. But he's skilled, he's ruthless, he's a single decision maker, and he has this level of control over resources. Yes.

There's no equal to that unless it's the Chinese. No, no. He has more power probably than Xi Jinping relatively to the country because Xi Jinping's resources are just incompatible to Putin. China is much stronger. And I think Xi Jinping and Chinese communists, they're very happy to see Putin creating these problems because it helps them to shift their attention.

China is a strategic threat, if you're using chess language. A long-term strategic threat. So Putin is more of a tactical threat, but right now this is a real threat because if your king is under threat of being mated, you can't think about long-term consequences of the endgame.

- All right, well, so let's hit another chess term and then I'll pull the ripcord if it doesn't work. There's a concept which not everyone knows called Zugzwang, where you are in a situation where you prefer not to have to move because anything you do actually puts you in a worth, but you have to move.

Why do we keep acting as if we're in Zugzwang? Let me go back to what I said a few moments ago. Putin's strength is our weakness. Yes. Putin is good at looking at opportunities and he strikes. Yes.

It doesn't create them, but the moment he sees weakness, it's animal instinct. You know, he goes for kill. Right. So why Vladimir Putin is in Syria? Because America walked away, because America created a vacuum there. So when you look at the global map, why Putin's here or there? Because the free world, you know, blinked, didn't want to interfere. And that's what we learned. I hope, actually I was wrong, had to learn from the 1930s.

If we see rising dictatorship and dictatorship that is challenging the very foundation of our world, and we know we have a choice of confronting it early or postponing the decision, trying to appease a dictator, every day, every week, every month, every year of a delay happens.

pushing the price up well this is what's very scary to me about tulsi gabbard's candidacy which is that she's pushing this concept of regime change wars and she's trying yeah after you i'm you know as the moment you mentioned the name so i almost jumped on my chair i don't i don't understand you know this is yeah i it is the democrats will not allow any any any climate change denial right

Rightly so. How they allow a genocide denier on stage. I mean, she acts like I don't know all about the details of her relations with Assad or Putin, but she's supporting the most brutal dictatorship on the planet. What do you think she thinks she's doing? I don't know what she's doing. And I'm not here in business of analyzing whether she's in a peril or not. I don't care.

What is she saying? And by the way, she has some following. Look at it. You know, she has percentage here and there. She's over the stage and she's not confronted. She's defending Bashar al-Assad, one of the worst dictators who use chemical weapons. She's denying it. I didn't hear any Democrat taking her or not. So wait a second. What?

the hell are you doing here? And it's, and that's again, that's what Putin is. Okay, but Gary, what's going on in some sense is just as you were saying in 1991, 92, we started, it's the economy stupid as if the rest of the world went away. We were going to just abandon all of our opportunities, obligations, what have you. Well,

We're now not capable of formulating an America that makes sense as a continuation of our previous. You said again, this is it's the it's America from 1946 to 1991 was a thing. Well, no, it's just it had certainly no policy that it followed. You had Harry Truman set up certain rules and institutions. And then you had Republicans, Democrats, Republicans following the plan. And it was.

it led to a victory in the Cold War. Because the strength of democracy, it's a strategy, again, using chess terms,

because you can rely on continuity. You can change administrations, but you still have the plan. There could be some deviations. There could be just one way or another. Somebody could be more aggressive, more defensive. But at the end of the day... Well, we were trying to become captains of the same team. Now it looks like we want to be captains of different teams. But going back to 91, 92, American foreign policy became more like a pendulum, shifting from one side to another.

based on who is in the Oval Office. There's no...

Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump. And the rest of the world is watching America. And it's paralyzed in fear. You're looking at a car that's swerving from lane to lane. But people used to know that America is there. Whether it's Eisenhower or Kennedy or Johnson. Nixon, Reagan, Carter, Bush. America was there. All of a sudden.

It's you can no longer rely on America. It's you have massive, it's a vacuum holes. Right. And Gary, you know that no millennials have any intuition of where our passion is coming from. No, no, no. I'm saying something has broken in terms of our collective understanding of ourselves. We are having the most irrelevant, bizarre, non-fact based, non-theory based conversations ever.

Like children. But you said non-fact based. That's one of the problems. That's what Putin's of this world want us to forget, history. So now you're talking about World War II and so who cares? It's not relevant. It is relevant. Oh my God. Because we could see how Putin is basically conquering not territories, but it's actually...

a congruent of minds by conducting very successful hybrid. So let's go to that. What is it that

The Soviet Union and then Russia understands about the human mind that the U.S. needs to understand ASAP but cannot figure out how to teach its own people. Look, I don't think that we can compare Soviet propaganda and Putin's machine, propaganda machine, for simple reasons. Soviet Union had a... An ideology. An ideology. Yeah, yeah, all right. I took your point. It's ideology. Okay. Again, look, my mother, she's 82.

She was born under Stalin in 1937. So she still lives in Moscow. She heard it all. Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Andropov, Gorbachev. And she's watching this television. And she keeps telling me that, Gary, it's much worse than ever. It's much worse than anything. Because before we had some ideals. Yeah, there were false ideals. But it was all about bright future. Every ideology...

It could be horrible idea, even like Nazism. But again, they try to sell you the image of the future. Putin doesn't care about the future. It's the Putin's ideology in Russia. It's more like a cult of death. It's what's surrounded by enemies and you have to rely on. It's a cult of confusion. Everything is confusing. Yeah.

Yeah. And they discovered that, you know, instead of selling an ideology, which is always vulnerable. Right. Because the moment I give you the idea, you say, I'm not so sure. No, you can't even tell what the ideas are. Everything slips through your fingers. It's like Quicksilver. So it's in 2004, 2005. Yeah. So, you know, it's...

they had to make a decision. How to fight Russian opposition on the internet. At the time where I just was about to stop my chess career and as I tried to help Russian opposition. - Your early 40s. - Yes, I'm in the early 40s in 2004, 2005. And they made, call it ingenious decision that's based on the KGB experience. Instead of following Chinese model, firewall, close, just make people starve of information.

traditional dictatorships they said how about doing it's exactly the opposite you know it's it's uh instead of you know closed closing every hole so what about the flood of flooding this information by just you know creating so much information here and there so for people just to get lost and

You can have a private newspaper, front page, one story that everyone must follow, 9 o'clock news. Or you can start, you know, just, you know, dividing this story into many poisonous elements and start spreading them in the true stories. Okay. So this is, that's, you know, it's. Well, this is now all through our country. Is that coming from Russia? Yes. It's this, in 2005. What's the transmission mechanism?

2004, 2005. I know you have a hard stop coming up. I'm going to get super aggressive because I want to get to this. They decided just that they'll start creating these fake websites. Right. When I say fake websites, the real websites. Sure. But they looked like, you know, very liberal websites. They talked about certain things. They could even criticize Putin. Yeah. Some of them, you know, but they always carried a little bit of piece of story here and there. But look, you and I have been talking very critically about Trump and the Republican phenomena as...

inhabiting this landscape. Part of the problem we've had is that the Democratic Party went kleptocratic in the center and started pursuing policies that started like, let's say, widening the Gini coefficient's

So that we had greater inequality and we started experimenting with our own American style of nonsense. So right now we have a situation in which, let me give you my feelings. I've been a lifelong Democrat. I don't trust my party as far as I can throw them. I don't trust the New York Times, Washington Post. I don't trust Fox News and the Republicans, obviously, because that's transparently wrong.

There is no ground truth. There's no place to go. And people are tuning into this podcast. And look, by the way, I'm going to force you to come back to this podcast because we need more time right now. We're mostly talking to millennials and the millennials are hungry because they have an idea of, we came in on this game. We have no idea what we missed. Everything makes no sense. Where can I find some concept of overarching, uh,

continuity to make sense of a world that is disintegrating into wet toilet paper. Okay, let's finish. This is this story about fake news and troll factories. That's what Putin created. That's what KGB created. And they recognize it's far more effective. Let's say they have to deal with Garry Kasparov and his followers. You can go after Garry saying, oh, he's just American agent. He's a bad guy. He's working for CIA, for Mossad, whatever.

Some people will believe. Some say no. He sells drugs. He sells guns. He runs a prostitution ring. Many, many intelligent people say no. He was a great Soviet champion. Probably the most decorated Soviet Russian athlete in history. He says no.

So for them, it's a different story. They managed to create, you know, it's a fake, you know, debate. You have a whole page that is totally, you know, just designed, you know, elsewhere, but it comes to, it's on social media. Somebody says, Garry Kasparov is a bad guy. And then somebody is coming, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. He's a great guy. But, you know, I'm not so sure. And then you have a whole,

- Well, if it wasn't for his drinking problem. - No, no, no. - I wish he'd paid his taxes. - The most typical one was Gary was a greatest champion, but unfortunately he got it's, you know, it's-- - The ego went to his head. - Exactly. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - You understand that some people refer to me as the alt-right. - But I could see-- - Right? Like as if I could possibly be the alt-right. The level of nonsense.

But the level of nonsense because people, again, there's no gravitas. For us to understand what is right is just... What is ground zero where you start counting? Nobody's been kept aside.

you keep a fire extinguisher under glass in case of emergencies. There's no adult that's ready to go when things get bad. They recognize that new social media could offer them enormous opportunities to spread this fake news because there's one way to tell the truth, many ways to lie. So,

So the typical story was MH17, the Malaysian Boeing that was shot by a Russian missile. Right. And they didn't care to provide one narrative that could refute the widespread conviction of Russia. What they did, they spread all sorts of news. And one day on Russian television, on two different channels, they had two competing stories. Right. It was just...

And with experts, with diagrams, again, who cares? If it's a 10 different lives, people say, I don't know, just forget about it. It's a needle in a haystack and they always give you a haystack. In 2015, I said that if

to Facebook that your business model is the honeypot for Russian bear. No kidding. Yeah. Because it was so obvious, you know, it was a real opportunity. So this is how to use it just to affect people's mind with information that could be most, you know, sensitive.

Well, this is a very strange thing is that I know these guys in Silicon Valley. They're very smart in a very limited way. And they are so childlike. But they didn't understand that. I understand that Putin already had a machine. Before he attacked America with this fake news industry. Right. So he already had 10 years. He attacked his own people. 10 years.

Then Russian-speaking minorities in the neighboring countries. Right. Then Europe. So attacking America was just a matter of time. And I don't think Putin would expect it to be so successful because the way the Russian propaganda handled it –

I think they expected Trump to lose elections narrowly. That was the expectation. And that's why Trump already repeated the Russian narrative, rigged elections. How many times Trump said rigged elections, rigged elections? This is the thing that you did, which was very interesting. You said, look, all you need to know to impeach Trump is one thing, which is how he handled Ukraine.

Now, whether I agree with you or I don't agree with you, your point was, look, it's very important not to get caught up in very complicated stories. Let's keep it super simple so that you can just stay on one point. Is that fair representation of your point? I think this, by the way, I think he, he, he, he, um, he, uh,

had other impeachable offenses. Yeah. So, but... But your point was... But if you want to win this battle, because right now, the moment you accuse Trump of numerous crimes, that's, I believe, he committed, it will be very, very easy for Trump's defenders to sort of dilute it by contemplating it was...

That has to do with the corruption in the Democratic side, because you can see that the New York Times and the Washington Post are not behaving as honest actors. And it's very clear at the moment that they're not. You have this different problem, which is

I can't, like, I spend almost all my time criticizing the left, not the right. Not because I think the right is okay. It absolutely isn't. But because if the left continues to pursue these petty, transparent, ridiculous, mini propaganda operations, we've undercut our own credibility in any place that can actually call this out. What I hate most is hypocrisy.

And it's just now, you know, in the next democratic debates, I want to hear one question. Yeah. To every, every, every, every, uh, um, democratic hopeful on stage. Give it to me. With a simple yes or no. Will you, will you authorize sell off, uh, lethal weapons to Ukraine? Yes or no? Because you, Trump is on, Trump is on trial for that. Will you or not? I'm afraid most of them will say no. And that shows a hypocrisy. That's his, again, it's at the end of the day, Trump's foreign policy,

Just don't kill me for that. Not so different from Obama's. Trump, the motivation is different.

but obama retreated because of his beliefs it's like ideological retreat trump doing these things for profit but that's it but unfortunately you know the outcome you don't believe that trump is under direct control of putin or does it matter but that's okay that's it's i said for profit yeah no trump is a russian asset i said it many times yeah and whether he understands it or not it's another story trump is a russian asset i don't even have to know all the details your point is that the incentive structures are sufficient and all

I grew up in the Soviet Union and I can repeat it time and again. I met enough KGB colonels and I know how these people look at you. So the way Putin looks at Trump is the way KGB handler looks at his asset.

He looks at Merkel, at Macron with a contempt. It's a contempt because he believes he can buy anyone on this planet. Unfortunately, they fail to prove him wrong. But the way he looks at Trump, the way he acts, it's this, you know, this wry smile and this smirk. Trump is an asset. He believes that Trump, for some reasons, will do whatever he wants. And by the way, the...

It's the Trump, you know, it's when people say, how can you say that now? OK, I understand that when the Democratic Party asserts that Donald Trump, when somebody inside of the traditional left of center media or political apparatus starts to assert that Donald Trump is under the direct control as opposed to the incentive control.

Like even to advance. At the end of the day, Trump is, look. You're not understanding my point, Gary. What I'm trying to say is there's a problem right now with we can't form a sense making, we can't form a story that enough of us can participate in to start actually dealing with our real problems. We're just in free fall. And whether or not I sign on to everything that you say about Trump or not,

I know that if you and I have enough time, we can at least figure out what we agree on, what we disagree on, what the theories are. We have another common denominator, so that's as clear from our conversation. We may disagree on many things, but at the end of the day, we know where we are, where we stand. So our disagreements would be more of a tactical, not a strategical character. Yes.

So what I'm concerned about is that right now we're a sitting duck because we're not actually, there are no adults that I can find anywhere on the stage. Because again, it's the, again, America has to reinvent itself. America has to reconsider what is America's role.

And again, it says you go back to the democratic debates. They're talking about things that they might be very important. Again, it says, I understand, you know, you should talk about health care. You should talk about other issues that are important, you know, for America long term. But right now, you have the foundation of the republic is in jeopardy.

You have Trump who is, I don't know, I don't want to repeat it. He's a Russian asset, but it's, let's say he's not. It doesn't matter. Your assertion is not that he's a Russian asset in the standard way, Gary. But look at what he has been doing. You know, if he were a Russian asset, what could he do differently? So this is, it's, even his, you know, his famous betrayal of Kurds, infamous betrayal of Kurds.

So he spoke to Erdogan on October 6th. On October 7th, Putin's birthday, he announced the greatest American retreat. And it's for the next couple of days. Russian television was celebrating the pictures from American camps with food on the table, saying Americans were running away because our great leader pushed them out. So another coincidence. I always say I believe in coincidences, but I also believe in KGB.

And when it's, every time, you know, we talk about coincidence and Trump, it ends up with Russia. Gary, why are you still alive? It's a good question. Yeah. So are you here because you're still useful to him?

Look, you know, it's everything now has its price. So again, I try not to be just an easy target. I don't go to places. Gary, I don't believe this for a second. If he wants you gone, he's guiding, have you gone? Thank you very much. So my wife will be very happy to hear that. No, no, no. Come on, you're a grown-up. We're having a grown-up conversation. I'm a grown-up conversation, yes. I know that. So what, you know, I say what I say. At the end of the day, it's the, I have a powerful voice. Yes. But,

Look, if they want me gone, I'm sure they can do it. So it doesn't change anything in my behavior. - Yeah, I noticed that. - Yeah, so that's the-- - But by the way, I just wanna say how much I admire that. - Look, again, it's would it help? So people say-- - I don't think you could do anything else. - No, but it's I have to do it, just do what you must so be. That's what I learned as a kid from Soviet dissidents.

And again, just going back to this, it's not, you know, Trump is a symptom. Trump shows how, you know, following your point, it's how this society, how this great country lost its way. And that's why Trump is, you know, he's still there. So you and I have a mutual friend in Peter Thiel. Were you very surprised that Peter backed Trump? Disappointed.

Yeah. But look, he's a businessman. I understand why he did it. I think it's just, it's a wrong decision. It's bad for the country. So maybe good for his business. But it's the, I mean, from day one when I heard about it, I was...

unpleasantly surprised because I, you know, it's not, again, not just saying things now, you know, from the first day of Trump's campaign. I've been, he's one of the most vocal critics. By the way, speaking about the media, one of the reasons Trump was there is because New York Times and the Washington Post and the CNN, they liked him. He resuscitated their business model. Not only business model.

For 16 years, the Democratic Party has served as the political branch of Clinton Foundation. It was one goal to elect an unelectable woman to the president of the United States. In 2008, she lost to Obama. That had to be it.

But they tried again. Joe Biden would have trashed Trump in 2016. So Hillary Clinton was the only chance for Trump, but they wanted Trump because they knew Trump was the only person she could beat. She was at no chance against a moderate Republican. So they wanted Trump. And that's why Trump got all this free publicity in hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars of free publicity.

And they could have killed Trump when he attacked John McCain. If the CNN of this world wanted to go after Trump in summer 2015, they could have sank this ship, you know, just before it left Harvard.

Another question. Jeffrey Epstein died under bizarre circumstances and the, the amount of follow on on this story, the entire world wants to know, is there a tie to the intelligence community? I don't see papers getting the denials from intelligence communities. I don't see any very significant attempt to talk about whether or not, like all you need is to get somebody to say this person was never an asset. They were never under, under a U S or foreign protection. Um,

What do we learn when things that are supposed to happen because they would sell papers, they're of interest to everybody and they're the natural thing to do, simply don't happen in full view of the world? Do you have an explanation? Do you think this is interesting or not interesting? It's always happened.

before, but we didn't have the same knowledge. So that's the only difference is now there's this people died in people of that type, Jeff Epstein. They used to die in prisons under suspicious circumstances for decades, if not for centuries.

But only now we know about it. But at the end of the day, who cares? Because look, public, you know, it's attention. His murder, suicide or whatever doesn't interest me that much. That's not the issue. The issue is, is that it's like dark matter. You don't detect it directly. You see all sorts of other things behaving bizarrely around it. And so you know that there's something there.

Look, we know it's something there because again, it's the while we have so much information available, again, our attention span is so short that you can move from just one thing to another. So I wonder how many listeners will immediately pick up, who's Jeffrey Epstein?

There were so many scandals, and that's what Trump knows. He knows that if he's tried for one treason thing, it's bad. But if he's tried for 10, it's better. Let me just tell you, we have an amazing audience. The people who are attracted to this show. But it's amazing how many things people forget because you have a new scandal. No, I understand that. But what I'm trying to say is that the people who are tuning into this are people who are sick of...

of being in the Matrix they just they want out and that's why it's called the portal because they're people looking for an exit from the confusion so I'm going to tell you this you are coming back to the show because I am so not finished with you it's been a fantastic when you say it's not finished you know that's we have unfinished business warning I'm not so finished

You and I have unfinished business, Gary Kasparov. Is there anything you want to talk about about RDI before I let you go and send you along your way? No, it's the... After the Trump election, with some of my friends...

I call them refugees from the Wall Street Journal, like Bret Stephens, Max Boot, Mark Lasswell, so those who just couldn't stand Trump. And a few moderate Democrats in New York. So we got together and we decided to come up with an organization. We called it Renew Democracy Initiative. So rdi.org now has a website. You don't invite me?

Oh, I'd be delighted, you know, just this. And the idea was that, you know, and that's I use my own experience, that democracy is under, you know, it's a great danger. It's a great threat when it's attacked from both sides, from radicals. People, sometimes they think that, oh, Hitler won elections in Germany. He never won elections, you know, it's not a majority. The best result of Nazi party in 1932 was just over 37%. Mm-hmm.

But at the same elections, communists made nearly 16. Which means more than half of the German population rejected democracy. So what we saw is that it's Trump's brutal assault on liberal democracy and our freedoms.

But at the same time, we saw the growing power of the far left, so-called progressive wing, attacking the very foundation of the free market. And these two forces, they are just threatening to dilute the very foundation of American society. Well, this is why it's important to get rid of the kleptocracy in our center, because you need a center that is intellectually healthy. I've been shouting for years, for more than a decade. Too big to fail is against the very principle of capitalism.

I mean... I said it many times once. I think it was at the Cato Institute. It's a Milton Friedman Award for Lezik Balcerowicz in 2013. I did a keynote. And I said that if a small business in North Carolina is bankrupt, it goes belly up. So must Goldman Sachs. So it's...

The whole idea that you can use taxpayers' money supporting big corporations because they are indispensable, but they grew up even bigger now. Does that extend to Harvard?

Should Harvard be allowed to fail? Should, for example, the Democratic Party be allowed to fail financially? As you know, Donna Brazile is asserting that Hillary Clinton was essentially the only thing propping up the Democratic Party. I don't know. This is the good. For people who say capitalism failed us, I say capitalism hasn't failed us. We failed capitalism. We are violating fundamental principles of the free market, which is, you know, you bankrupt,

You fail, you're out of business. Somebody else will replace you. That was the whole idea. And right now, it's all about your connections to the government. It's all your connections to those who have money and power. And you could see that money and power, they're just, you know, they are getting closer and closer. It's almost, you know. Which organizations are you putting, other than RDI, what are you putting your faith in? Do you think Soros is a positive force?

So it's a partisan force. That's a problem, you know? The idea with RDI was to bring people from both sides. So we have a board now that brings people from both sides. Two former senators, Heidi Heitkamp and Bob Kerry from Nebraska. So, okay, both Democrats, the Blue Dog Democrats. The idea is this, and we're working with donors. Many of them are just, you know, are funders.

former Republicans, modern Republicans, looking for building something in the center. Because it's the problem of the United States, but also you look at the United Kingdom, look at Europe. The problem is that the radicals on both sides, they're gaining more and more power by dragging people out of the center. It's what I call the phenomenon of Spanish Civil War,

When you have, you know, it's the social, communist on one side and fascist on the other side. And somebody wants to stay in the middle. No, no room. You must take space. It's like an A-frame roof. Yeah. And the A-frame is getting more and more peaked. So the idea is that only the most agile people can dance on the top. It's the American, the two,

party system in America always, you know, served as the shield against radicalism. If one party went too far, like Goldwater, landslide. McGovern, the left, landslide. So right now, you're having elections, potential elections, where you have two radicals. And there's so much room in the center now. Do you have anyone that you like on the Democratic side?

Look, again, it's the way I look at these elections is that it's all about defeating Donald Trump. So you have to make these elections about Donald Trump. You have to look for the best candidate who can win, you know, a win against Trump. There's just that one thing. Who would that be at the moment? Best chance of winning. Statistically,

Amy Klobuchar. It's very clear because she is exactly from the area where the elections will be decided. It's Midwest. She won in Minnesota 2018 re-election by carrying many districts that Trump won in 2016. Again, it's about winning elections. What do you think about if we get these candidates away from this typical CNN-

MSNBC, NPR group. - Look, I used to be a chess player. And this election is-- - I've heard that. - But I always knew that, learned from my mother, it's not just about winning, it's about making the difference. But this election is about winning and saving the republic.

If Trump is reelected, the consequences cannot be... I can't even predict them. NATO will go bust. Trump will withdraw from Europe. And he will destroy every foundation. Well, the game theory of him not worrying about re-election, we have no idea what that looks like. Absolutely. By the way, you have to know that a lot of my audience is split. A lot of them put up with my anti-Trump stuff.

because they believe that I'm at least trying in good faith, right? I don't always understand how they look at this and they say that this is normal. I don't get it. But you see, look, it's just, you know, Trump's ability to corrupt others, you know? I mean, look at Attorney General. Yeah. Attorney General now, it sounds like ideological warrior. Right. When Attorney General uses words left or right, he talked about left, you know, violating the law. That's it, you know? That's...

Trump succeeded already in three years, you know, by destroying, you know, whatever was left of American image abroad and also in the country. Well, we don't have a shared idea of where we are, what's going on and what's relevant. We just don't. That's why, yeah, it's about restoration and that's why you need to make sure that Trump is defeated in this election. And you cannot have a candidate that coming up

It's not about big ideas. Yeah, but it can't only be defeating Trump. I'll just be honest with you. If the left of the United States does not stop with its propagandistic bullshit, there's no way we are going to be able to put things back together. You cannot come up with big socialist ideas because that's Trump's only hope. No kidding. He's praying for Sanders. But it's also a question of denying things. Like if somebody shoots up...

a parade route or something and shouts allahu akbar at the end there will be a democratic attempt to not talk about what the basis we just we can and that's that's going back to the question so i want to hear i want to hear what they say about foreign policy because trump is big trump is on trial now he will be impeached in the house for his you know uh for his crimes you know uh foreign foreign policy related crimes right and they don't talk about it this is

They talk about something else. So the country, they want the country to believe that Trump was guilty, but we don't hear what would be, what would they do differently? Right. But if the Democrats, for example, pursue things where Trump actually isn't guilty, assume that he's both guilty and not guilty of things that he's accused of. Any attempt to prosecute things frivolously, which we will see, right?

is going to result in this loss of trust. We have to do something about trust. And if we don't have some, yeah. Bingo. I mean, trust is important. Gary, you got to come back to Los Angeles. Thank you so much for coming. There's more to talk about, you know, capitalism, socialism, the rest of the world. Look, my bladder can go on forever. It is now 530, which is your heart. Stop. So I'm just trying to take care of you. You'll come back to the portal as our guest, sir? Thank you. Absolutely. Fantastic. Okay.

You've been through the portal with the inimitable Gary Kasparov. It's been an incredible journey. Gary, thank you for visiting us. Take care of yourselves. Be well. Please subscribe to the podcast wherever you listen to podcasts on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, what have you, and go over to YouTube and make sure you find our channel. Click the subscribe button and the bell to be notified when our next episode drops. Thank you very much. Thank you.