The Jordan Harbinger Show - 360: Garry Kasparov | Deep Thinking for Disordered Times

Episode Date: June 4, 2020

Garry Kasparov (@Kasparov63) is a Russian chess grandmaster, political activist, and author of Deep Thinking: Where Machine Intelligence Ends and Human Creativity Begins and Winter Is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped. What We Discuss with Garry Kasparov: The part chess played in promoting Soviet Russian ideology during the Cold War. What it takes to become a chess champion now compared to 50 years ago and why Garry considers the game “one of the most aggressive forces of psychological warfare.” What can and can’t be applied from chess to politics and decision making. What Garry knows from experience about authoritarian governments and why we need to be vigilant against them now more than ever. Is our civilization poised for progress or ruin now that supercomputers can beat superhumans at tournament-level chess? And so much more… Full show notes and resources can be found here: https://jordanharbinger.com/360 Sign up for Six-Minute Networking — our free networking and relationship development mini course — at jordanharbinger.com/course! Like this show? Please leave us a review here — even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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Start your free trial today. When I saw Putin rising, I just immediately, realized that my country was in great danger and the world as well, because I heard him saying clear and loud, once KGB, always KGB, the collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical disaster of the 20th century. I've been saying for years that Putin was our problem, but eventually it would be everybody's problem. When they run out of enemies in their own country and the economy is no longer serving the world, they look for foreign aggression, for adventures outside of the country to blame enemies elsewhere for the collapse of the economy and social infrastructure.

Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets and skills of the world's sharpest minds and most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you. We want to help you see the matrix when it comes to how these amazing people think and behave, and our mission is to help you become a better informed, more critical thinker, so you can get a much deeper understanding of how the world works, and make sense of what's really happening. If you're new to the show, we've got episodes with spies and CEOs,

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On this episode of the show from The Vault here, will be talking with my friend Gary Kasparov. He's a Russian chess grandmaster, former world chess champion, a writer and a political activist. He's one busy guy. Many people consider him to be the greatest chess player of all time.

And now he's fighting another battle in a different game against Vladimir Putin. One thing I try to do in this interview, and I hope you all agree, is I try to give Gary plenty of space to answer questions and explain the situation in Russia and explain his own mindsets and ways of thinking. It seems to me that far too many interviewers and journalists, they just seem obsessed with showing other people how smart they are, how much they know about the situation.

I tried very, very hard not to do that here. I hope it shows and makes for a better discussion. And if you're not familiar with the Russian situation and the Soviet Union situation, I still think you'll enjoy the heck out of this interview. Gary's brilliant, he's a great thinker, he really does turn everything he does up to 11. There are some interesting stories in this one as well. And if you're a specialist in this area as opposed to a neophyte, I hope you'll find this discussion interesting as I try to hit on different angles about what makes Gary such a unique individual, both in Russian politics, and why he holds a special place on the world stage, especially right now.

Today we're going to learn a lot about what it takes to become a chess champion, what can or cannot be applied from chess to politics in the international game, and, of course, the situation that we're in with respect to authoritarian governments today in Russia and around the world. If you want to know how I meet folks like Gary Kasparov and get upon this show, it's always about the network and I'm teaching you how to create a network, whether it's for your business

or your personal life, your career, or just for your social circle. Check out our course, six-minute networking. It's a free course. You don't have to enter your credit card, there's no upsells. Six-minute networking, it's free.

Jordan Harbinger.com slash course is where you're going to find it. And most of the guests you hear on the show subscribe to this course. So come join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong. All right, here's Gary Kasparov. Gary, it's funny, in the beginning of this interview, you had mentioned, oh, I wasn't sure if the KGB had hacked my phone because we had a little trouble getting connected.

And it was funny because it's very possible that that type of thing would happen to you, right? Look, I was born and raised in the Soviet Union. So I'm used to live under 24-7 surveillance. And then, of course, I was politically active opposing Putin's regime. So I knew that almost everything, if not everything I did and spoke, somehow was. known because Putin is a KGB guy. I want to remind our listeners that it was Putin's direct quote that there is no former KGB, once KGB is always KGB. I prefer to be suspicious rather than sorry afterwards. Yeah, there's some crazy stuff. In your book, Winter is Coming. Great title,

by the way, being a Game of Thrones fan. Yes. Yeah, yes. You know the culture well to which you speak, for sure. Your life is like a James Bond movie with so far less shooting and explosions, but not not by too much. You were born with a different name, though. Gerich Weinstein. Why did you change your name? Or did you change your name? How did that work out? Look, my father was Jew, Kim Weinstein. My mother was Armenian, Clara Kasparova. It was a tragedy in our family. My father died when I was seven. And I lived with my mother and her parents five years after my father died. So we decided just to change my name. People had a lot of speculations that Gary's family, Garish Malar, decided to change his name because it could help him in the Soviet Union.

But trust me, changing from Jewish to Armenian name in Baku in Azerbaijan was not a big deal. Yeah, it's kind of like, oh, okay, which group right now am I going to join that's going to be less of a disadvantage? But it was a practical consideration because I spent a lot of time with my grandfather and he had three daughters. He obviously also wanted to have a son. It was purely family arrangement. I never denied my Jewish roots.

At the end of the day, I grew up in Baku, which was a multicultural city, you may call the southern outpost of Russian Empire. So that's why my native tongue was Russian. By language, by culture, by education, I'm Russian. As you may consider a breed born in Sri Lanka or French born in French Africa. And when the empire collapsed, we all moved from Baku, which became part of independent Azerbaijan, upway north to Moscow, to the capital of the country where I was born. You've ascended to the heights of two incredibly competitive fields, one of those fields being chess,

the other one being politics, and we'll get into both of those. It seems to me that in the USSR, the Soviet Union, you get these impressions in your head as an American kid that they like the communist countries. They take their kids at a super young age. They put them into some sort of training camp for stuff like this. Is that what happened? How close am I to reality here? No. Maybe it's a case in North Korea or in China, though I doubt about China.

In the Soviet Union, there were many programs. I have to say that I benefited from centralized programs of selecting talents. By the way, chess was never part of Soviet educational system. Chess was rather treated in the Soviet Union as the very important ideological tool to demonstrate intellectual superiority of the communist regime over the decade in West. So that's why the primary purpose of the selection was to find great talents and to make sure that the domination of the Soviet chess coup continues from generation to generation. It was not difficult to spot my talent because I was so bright at age seven already.

I immediately went into this network. By age 10, I was already a very strong player, first category player, and I was picked up as one of the students, the youngest students of a famous school run by former world champion, became my mentor, Bickaal Botwittig. When I was a kid, you just sort of play around with stuff. Were you immediately drawn to chess like, this is what I got to do, this is amazing, I'm going to play this all day and all night. We all need a little bit of luck to select what we can do best in our lives. I cannot tell you exactly when this happened that I saw my parents, my mother and father,

looking at the chessboard. It was probably in the winter time, 1968, 1969. So they tried to solve a puzzle from one of the new local newspapers. Even in America, many newspapers carried these little sections with chess puzzles. And I was fascinated by these magical pieces, these very intricate combinations. I couldn't figure out how they move, but eventually I did it. I made even suggestion next day. And that was the beginning of my romance with the game of chess that has been lasting almost half a century.

I love the game immediately. And it was a perfect match. for the way I could make decisions. I wouldn't say I'm very good and many other things. For instance, people believe that I should be great in mathematics. I'm pretty good. It was not my passion. I felt always much more comfortable with history, philosophy, being humanitarian,

which sounds a bit odd to non-professionals because they believe the chess players must be good in mathematics since chess is about calculation. To the contrary, it has many other elements like fantasy, imagination, intuition. I can tell you that making decisions at the chess board was absolutely perfect choice. I couldn't do anything better than in the game of chess. You mentioned that chess helps you make decisions. What do you mean by that? What are you thinking about when you look at other decisions? Do you see a chessboard somehow in your head?

No, it's not just about seeing the chess board in my head. Obviously, I'm out of professional just 12 years. When I was in the midst of my professional career, I could even dream in chess because it was very important just to be fully concentrated. But I even had another book, how life imitate chess, where I spend dozens of pages explaining how we make decisions. We're all different. So the way we make decisions depends very much in our character, on the way we build from our nature. Some people are more aggressive, some people are less aggressive, but just more conservative. So we always look at even the same position from different angles. Some people are just better built to play chess. Some people are better built to do other things.

For instance, I'm very good in anticipating big pictures. I know I'm much, worse in working with smaller details, with micromanagement. And I made sure that my chess playing style would incorporate my strengths and will make a deadly weapon against all my opponents. That's really interesting for me to see because whenever I hear about athletes and things like that, often, depending on the sport, of course, they'll say something like, well, you know, this is just like a game of tennis where I'm negotiating this contract with this other side. Even people who are not necessarily just athletes, and I consider chess a sport for purposes of this conversation. Thank you very much, yes.

That's great to hear that. You probably burn a ton of calories. You do burn a lot of calories. Because of your brain, yeah. Also, because the chess competition, it's typically much longer. It's not just one day. It's normally it lasts for days. Oh, I didn't know that.

Oh, yeah. But look, the typical tournaments where I played, they last a couple of weeks. And when I played World Championship match was Carport, it was three months. And the longest one will play lasted for five months. How is that possible? What are you doing the whole time? Are you playing 20 games at chess or do you just, each move takes three hours? The first match we played 48 games and then we had three games a week with a timeouts. It's a huge pressure on you because even in between the games, you cannot take rest. You're preparing for other games. You still demand the impressions from the previous games.

It's very demanding. I always call chess, you know, one of the most aggressive forms of psychological warfare because you have to dominate your opponent. So this isn't like a basketball game where it's, okay, fine, best out of seven are looking at like soccer, as you probably call it football. You can have a fluke win, even with the shootouts or even in a tournament style, but 48 games, you know who's better after 48 games. Look, it's actually the match was close with no result because that was the last match that was played for six wins for one side, draws not counted. Karpov had a very good start, so I was trailing four to nothing, then many, many draws. and then he won the fifth game, but he failed to deliver the final blow. I began winning, so I won three games, two in the row.

And after game 48, they thought that it was too close, too dangerous. Carpo was exhausted, especially psychologically. He didn't look good because he probably was losing phase that he could win one game, that for many months he couldn't deliver this final blow to me. And they stopped the match, and then we played another match, 24 games next fall. I won that match, and then I won the next match. We had two more matches, and I always retained my titles. So we played five matches with carp of 144 games in total.

That's probably the longest marathon in the history of any sport. This is a strange dynamic, I would imagine, because after you play against somebody for so long, you probably don't like them very much, right? They're dominating you, you're dominating them. But yet you're spending so much time with these people at this elite level that you have to have some affection or at least respect for the other side. Do you get along with people like that,

or are you like, if I never see that Karpov guy again, it's too soon? How do you feel about it? You must respect your opponent, otherwise you will not be able just to perform well. Underestimating your opponent is one of the worst mistakes one can make. Like ink is another story, especially because me and Carpal were very different. He was a darling of the communist system, always protected by the system. His rise was connected to the search of the Soviet authorities for someone who could beat Bobby Fisher, who took the title from the Soviets, which was taken in the Kremlin in early 70s, in 1979,

and Fisher Bitsbasky as a direct insult. The chess was treated as the very important ideological tool. So Karpov got full support. He beat all the players on the way to Fisher. Fisher then walked away, you know, retired, didn't play the match. Carpo became the world champion. And he was on top for nearly 10 years when we met. Though I didn't show my rebellion colors at that stage,

but Soviet authorities could sense that I was not a loyal party soldier as Karpo was. And also, let's not forget, he was Russian, ethnic Russian, and I was half Armenian and half Jewish from the deep south of the Soviet Union in Baku. It was the Kaspian Sea inside where I was born. Harper for decades, even today, he's still a loyal soldier of the regime. He is still a member of the parliament. He has a forted annexation of Crimea. So he's always with the regime.

And irony is that I'm always on other side opposing it. Yeah, you sure are, man. And I'm definitely going to ask you some questions about that in just a few minutes here. First, though, when you were playing chess as a kid, you were always, I think, younger than everybody, right? In most of these matches. Oh, absolutely, yes. I have to say that it was a very strange phenomenon for me

that I entered chess competitions very early age at 7, 8, 9. At that time, my opponents were 15, 16, 17, so they were older. And then at age 14, 15, I entered already professional competitions. I was the youngest participant of the Soviet National Championship in 178 at age 15. So I played in the top field of the Soviet elite Soviet chess. It's a bit strange now, being 54, just looking back and I'm no longer playing. But even as the last few years of my professional chess career, I played already opponents that were younger. Today I'm looking at some of the young players, for instance, the Magnus Carlson, current world champion in the region, who was born at the very end of my last match with Carpola by played in 1990.

Sounds a bit odd, but it tells you how things have changed. Yeah, no kidding. When you were younger than all of your opponents, was that an advantage or a disadvantage? Because I'm thinking you might have had more energy physically, but these guys might be a lot more experienced. Of course, when you face all the kids in the competitions like you 10 and your opponents are 15, 6, and 17, that's more of a disadvantage because they're stronger. You are still not matured. Even with your talent, you cannot compensate for the lack of experience. Now, when you are 1718, and I was already one of the top players in the world, facing older opponents, then it's already balanced. Because on one side, they have more experience, but on the other side, you have more energy. Today, when you look at the average edge of the top players, it went down quite dramatically.

Because today, you don't need to play in the tournaments for years and years to gain the experience that you can actually get by sliding your finger on the screen or just, you know, clicking the mouse. the average professional player at age 15, 16, today, knows much more about Chess and Bobby Fisher 50 years ago. Really? Not because he or she is more talented than Fisher. It's ridiculous to imagine, but simply because the amount of information that is available is there. So Fisher opened new horizons, then was carpal, then was myself, and then other great players. So now you don't have to learn it by playing, by moving the pieces. You can simply look at the computer screen. It doesn't make them better players.

it tells you that they can play different kinds of chess because they learned already from the great revelations and mistakes of the great predecessors. The same, for instance, if you have any college student studying physics, he or she definitely knows more about the subject that Newton or even Einstein. Right. That makes sense. Simply because there's more information is available and there's so many great things happened since these geniuses opened new horizons for us in their respective science. Absolutely. That makes perfect sense. Now, when you were first, starting off, when you were eight or nine and you're playing in these tournaments, I assume you started a few years before that. Were there similarly talented kids, or are you just an outlier

where people are like, what the hell is this nine-year-old kid doing here? It was pretty clear that my talent was unique because I was just making giant's leaps forward. At age seven, I was already a third category player at age eight, second category, nine, first category. And at the end of the year of 1973, I even became a candidate master, which is pretty solid. achievement. So there were other kids still older. I don't think I compete with the kids of my age. By age 10 or 11, I was already considered to be an exceptional player. And by age 12, I became the youngest national champion, Soviet national champion under 18. So by age 12, I won under 18 championships. But by age 13, I won it twice in the row. I was talking to my friend James Altucher, who you know,

and he's a grandmaster of chess. He's been a master of chess for decades or something. He's a legitimate chess player. We played a game of chess with him after the interview. Yeah. And he said you just demolished the strategy that he's been using for decades, and it basically like demolished his game, ruined this master strategy that's been working for him, and he had to rethink everything.

And this was like a game you were casually playing after an interview. Okay. It's a huge gap between player, even of his caliber, and the retired world champion. Yes, of course. I don't think his ego was damaged. I think he was thrilled to be sitting across the table from you. The difference between chess computers,

and I'm not talking about supercomputers, I'm talking about a free chess app that you can download at your laptop. The difference between programs like Stockfish and Commodore best chess engines that are available in an open market and Magnus Carlson, it's probably the same as between Magnus and Altuchel.

Oh, really? You can't imagine how strong are these computers now. If you look at the ELA rating, so basically, Magros is in 2,800 category, 2850. And best computers are playing at something like 3,300 now. Oh, my gosh. The player of Al Dushar's strengths would be at the 22, 2300. Wow. So he's a really strong player, then, no doubt.

He's a good player. Again, that's a legitimate player. It's still, you know, many, many thousand players just between 2800 and 2200, probably tens of thousands of players. But I don't know the exact number. The interesting thing is that chess actually is far more popular today than when Fisher plays faster or when I played carp. This is another misunderstanding. People keep asking me why chess is no longer popular as it used to be.

And my answer is absolutely not. It's much more popular. Simple looking at a number of people who are involved in the game. Look at the kids. A few months ago, I was in National Tennessee at the U.S. Supernational. 5,600 kids from all over the country took place. The reason we don't see it is because if in 1972, there was no CNN, no cable TV, and PBS story about matching Rake, I think, was everywhere. In 85, when I played Carpuff, there was CNN, but it was just the beginning of the cable TV and no internet.

Today, chess, though, being probably 100 times more popular than when Fisher played Spaski, or 50 times more popular when I played Carpac. Chess is a part of the public space that is one million times bigger because of so many other. distractions. So even being much bigger than it used to be, chess looks much smaller in this big picture that has so many other things that are available just, you know, through one click on your mobile device. Of course. And looking at television coverage, it can be huge all over the world, but very few people, at least in the United States, nobody's watching chess on ESPN. It's just not a thing. By the way, in the U.S., even soccer is not very popular as it looks on television, though I think it's one of the biggest games in the country. But because it's not on television,

don't see how popular the game is. And in chess, again, I simply look at the number of kids that are joining the program, the number of schools that adopting the program has a very important educational tool to improve the cognitive skills of the kids, because I have Kasparov Chess Foundation that was formed in the United States 15 years ago, and I have several entities of the Kasparov Chess Foundation around the world. You're listening to the Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest Gary Kasparov. We'll be right back. And now back to Gary Kasparov, at Jordan Harbinger Show. What do you think now that you see things like Deep Blue,

which I think James Altucher actually worked on, supercomputers beating chess champions? Like, how did it feel when you got beat by that? Were you like, wow, this is progress? Or are you like, damn, we're all screwed. These robots are going to kill us? No, it's progress. By the way, I'm always objective about the way I played chess,

whether I won or lost, and I knew that objectivity was a very important element of staying on the top. I'm now just telling people that Whatever is happening with machines, sort of taking over some of the jobs, it's a part of our history, the history of civilization. From early days, not even 100 years ago, people try to come up with machines with some mechanisms to improve living standards and just to make our work process more efficient. And now we could see that machines just moving from manufacturing side, from replacing manual jobs, into some minimal parts of cognition. It's a natural step forward, and I think we have to look for the ways to incorporate it into our working process, then mourning and spreading the doomsay predictions.

Of course, yeah. Look, you're a super fascinating guy. That's one of the reasons I wanted to get you on, especially after I read the book, Winter is coming. Obviously, you don't need to work another day in your life, but instead of coasting it and living on Easy Street, you're speaking out against arguably the most dangerous thing to vocally be against, which is Vladimir Putin. and oppressive regimes around the world? It's probably part of my Soviet education or cultural background. I grew up in this intellectual environment where doubts about the moral validity of the Soviet regime were widespread.

I've been traveling abroad since I was 13, and I could immediately collect this information and just put it together and just to realize that something was wrong in the country where I was born and raised. Then fighting Karpov and Soviet system that was behind him made me even more aware about these challenges. And I believed it was by duty as the young world champion in mid-80s to join the protodemocracy movement that was formed under Gorbachev's years and helped my country to move away from communism into the free world. And then I just thought it was it. In the 90s, I was less active. But when I saw Putin rising, I just immediately realized that.

my country was in great danger, and the world as well, because I heard him saying clear and loud, once KGB, always KGB, the collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical disaster of the 20th century. I saw him as one of the first act as Russian president to restore Soviet anthem, which is a very important symbolic gesture, telling the world. And of course, people who were born in the Soviet Union, that was his call a geopolitical dream. What Putin could do if given the chance. I've been saying for years that Putin was our problem, but eventually it would be everybody's problem because that's what I read in the books about other dictators. When they run out of enemies in their own country and the economy is no longer serving the world, they look for foreign aggression, for adventures

outside of the country to blame enemies elsewhere for the collapse of the economy and social infrastructure. So basically, the changing of the national anthem back to the Soviet national anthem is kind of a metaphor for, hey, guess what? We're going back to Soviet times. You know, it was kind of a statement. It was not yet there because Putin, I think, was quite an opportunistic. And going all the way back to even the 30s when people say, oh, how can you compare anywhere to Hitler? Because I did it many times. I said, look, we're not talking about Hitler from history books. We're talking about Hitler from 1933, 34, 35, 36, and read newspapers. New York Times, London Times, Le Monde, Toronto Star. They all thought about him or being, you know, autocratic leader.

but nobody thought about him being able to start this Armageddon. All dictators, they grab what they allow to grab. They don't ask why. They always ask why not. And the policy of appeasement, hoping that, oh, maybe he will be satisfied with this peace and will not move forward. That was a disaster in the studies, and that's what I've been warning would be disaster with Putin 70 years later.

As I predicted, eventually Putin went beyond Russian borders. So he attacked neighboring countries in 2007, first attack 10 years ago, and Estonia cyber attack. And then he decided that he could start attacking other countries in the vicinity of Russia, so former Soviet Union like Republic of Georgia. And he believed that he was in the position to dictate the terms to the free world, saying that let's go back to the 19th century, early 20th century, where big powers could decide for small countries. Forget about all this consensus, all these arrangements, all these diplomatic negotiations. it's about big guys deciding for others, and I'm not going just to play by the rules.

Sadly, you've been a very accurate profit when it comes to Vladimir Putin. And it's interesting that the regime used to support your chess opponents, and you were on the other side then. You're definitely on the other side now. And it seems like Putin plays political chess really well, so you're just the guy to talk about this stuff. I'm always reluctant to accept Putin as the political or geopolitical chess player. Really?

Look, I always say that I have to defend the integrity of my mind. game. And the reason I'm saying it is that chess is the 100% transparent game. I have my pieces, you have your pieces. So we play the game. I don't know what you have in mind, but I know exactly what resources you can use to do harm to me and vice versa. Now, we're talking about Putin, the dictator. And dictators don't like transparency, they hate transparency. That's why I always say Putin is more likely a poker player. And I have to give him credit, he's a very good poker player, because he doesn't have, he never had a strong hand. In poker, you can win with the weak hand, if you can bluff, if you can raise the stakes,

and if you know how to read your opponent's mind, especially if your opponent is weak or indecisive and misread your intentions, as it happened with Bush 43 and especially with Obama. And I'm not even counting many European leaders. So Putin realized that even with a weak hand, having a pair of five, he could keep bluffing, he will win since nobody wanted confrontation. and everyone believed that by giving up here and there, they could satisfy Putin's appetite, not recognizing that confrontation with the free world for many years or has become Putin's main cheap in the Russian domestic political casino. He has nothing else to offer

to Russian public, but the idea of Russian greatness and Russia being a fortress of goods surrounded by the world's evil and Putin as the white knight, the only one who can protect it. You're arguing that Putin is not a master strategist, but like you said, a poker player who's just maybe playing aggressively in the face of opponents. He's a tactician. He's a tactician. Again, dictators who are in power for so long, they cannot afford luxury of being strategists. Because if you're a strategist, you start thinking long term, but dictator has to survive. And he knows that if he looks weak or too dreamy, he could be shot or stabbed by his own guys. So that's why it's all about, I survive tonight, maybe tomorrow morning, and we'll see what happens. They're very good at that. They could make plans, but these plans just should be connected to what I do tonight, tomorrow morning, to make sure I'm still in the game, and then I'll find something else because he's not abiding by the rules. He doesn't care what happens after him. And this is one of the fundamental problems of the free world facing Putin and other dictators. Because today we keep forgetting that the strengths of democracy is more like chess. We can strategize. We can rely on institutions that will continue, even when the president of prime minister, just goes away and somebody else is in the office. So going back to the 40s, we could see that

many of the key institutions that secured the survival of the free world and eventual victory in the Cold War were built by Harry Truman's administration like NATO, CIA, National Security Council, the Voice of America, the propaganda outlet that helped to work in Eastern Europe and in the Soviet Union, a Marshall Plan for Europe. And it's those for institutions that couldn't bring immediate benefits to the administration, but it was like investing in the future. Many presidents that followed Harry Truman, they just worked not for immediate benefits of the administration, but definitely recognizing that it's an ongoing struggle. And so from Harry Truman and Ronald Reagan, US foreign policy was fairly consistent. There was some deviation, but they knew that there was

an enemy and they had to be vigilant and to keep their act together. And then since 1991, the end of the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet Union, US foreign policy, work more like a pendulum swinging from one side to another, which definitely created a lot of frustration and a lot of anxiety, even joy on the other side, because the bad guys realized that the United States no longer had the same commitment as before. Yeah, there's this irony in all of this where he knows the West will always back down so he can do whatever he wants. This is sort of standard practice for dictators, who it seems like you're saying dictators, even though they say, all right, I'm now in power till 2035.

They're planning that way outwardly, but inwardly they're just trying to survive until the next morning. That's interesting. I had never thought of that. Exactly. And again, he knows that he's in power to the rest of his life.

Now, this is bad news, but the good news he also doesn't know when and how his life will end. Dictators, they know a lot, but they cannot read their own fortress. Yikes, that would be a crazy way to live. Another irony here is that Putin used to root for you in chess tournaments,

when he was in East Germany working for the KGB. Did you know about this? Look, I read it, but it's one of the Putin's colleagues said it. Don't forget that the story was publicized in Russia at the time when it was not clear whether, you know, Putin wanted to be seen as the sort of old-fashioned Soviet guy. Maybe I'm too suspicious to paranoid. Maybe he rooted for me because I was younger and he also was a younger generation. Maybe he thought that it would be good for the country.

I don't know. But I have my own doubts that it was a real story because everything will learn about Putin from sources close to him is kind of a fake story called fake news, which is a typical KGB operation of misleading and misinforming and creating the wrong image. What sort of image would it create to know that he rooted for you back in his KGB days in East Germany? What would that do for his image? It depends on the timing when the story was released.

That's what I said. Right, yeah. Maybe in the 90s, it was definitely because it was New Russia and it was Boris Yelts in time, Democratic Russia. Maybe that was good for him. That would give him sort of better connections to a new government, better image, that he was kind of reformist who he could be rooting for underdog. I don't know, but since I never heard him actually saying that, to me it still could be fake news.

When two people facing each other in a major competition, sometimes it's not political at all and it could be purely psychological, and maybe for some reasons he was rooting for me. Though again, I have my doubts. In 1996, I was in St. Petersburg invited by Mayor Sobchak, Anatoli Sobchak. And Vladimir Putin was his deputy. Sovchak invited me. It was just a few months before elections where Sobchak lost.

And by the way, Putin ran his campaign. That's a lesson he learned from the campaign, that real elections are unpredictable. So that's why Putin never participate in real elections and never participated in any debates in his life. I was there spending two hours with Subtac. I had lunch with him. It's amazing that I couldn't recall seeing Putin's face around,

which is, you know, tells you about the KGB guy. He's one of the top officials in Subchak's town hall. I'm there as a guest of owner, and he's nowhere around. So that's why I have my doubts that if he really was rooting for me, that could be a good opportunity to actually show up and say, oh, hey, Gary, so I'm so happy you're here. Oh, yeah. And since he wasn't there, didn't bother.

Maybe he never cared. Maybe he was there, but I couldn't see him. Because again, if the KGB guy doesn't want you to see him, they can be around without you noticing them. He was under the table the whole time. Plot twist. Yes. It's clear that you bring the same intensity to politics as you do or did to chess.

What did chess teach you about politics, political maneuvering? What overlap is there? That was the first question I've been asked, then asked many times ever since after I left my professional chess in 2005, so whether playing chess would be helpful in navigating in Russian politics. And my answer instantly was no, because in chess, we have fixed rules and unbreakened results. And in Putin's Russia, it was exactly the opposite. Rules change all the time, but results stays the same. Yeah, good point. Wow, I hadn't even thought about it like that, but you're right, the rules seem to be quite flexible. Or there was a phrase that you see here,

nothing is true or nothing is allowed, everything is possible, something like this. Yes, great book. So why is it that you don't want to be introduced as a former Russian presidential candidate? I read that and it just seems like a strange thing to not want on the resume. Oh, when we are talking to an American audience or European audience, the moment you say former presidential candidate, people think, oh, it's a real political battle. The man was engaged in presidential campaign, which means you can create your political party or your organization, you can participate in debates, you can do fundraising, you can meet your

voters, nothing from this menu is available and nothing was available in Putin's Russia. It was more like a statement to demonstrate that you couldn't run against Putin unless Kremlin approves your candidacy. They just stopped me by not allowing me to have a meeting in Moscow because by the rules, you have to bring 500 people in the hall and just you have to register them, they have to support you. I hope you don't doubt that I could afford to rent a proper place in Moscow, which I did. After many refusers, we actually got one. And then, night before our meeting, which was, you know, close to deadline of registration, they just, you know, cancel the contract, returning money, saying, you know, technical reasons. Day after my scheduled

meeting there, they had one of the Putin's puppet running the very same meeting in the very same place. Whatever technical reason they had to cancel your meeting was fixed within a day. They don't care. That's why when you say presidential candidate, it gives wrong impression that in Putin's rush you can compete against him politically. Putin had never participated in a single political debating his life. It's always, you know, him talking to the people like all dictators did. He talks to people, answering the questions that have been selected. Everybody knows that all these so-called direct lines are being rehearsed for weeks. People being selected. Every question has been rehearsed. That sets a way dictator or dictator communicates with his people. So you are never a candidate

because of all the BS involved. I'll be very happy to compete with any of Putin's chronis and, of course, you know, debating with him. But it's impossible because he doesn't debate. He's a He doesn't care. All he wants is to make sure that he pretends that he participates in kind of a political competition. But at the end of the day, whatever the process, he must be a winner at the end. So that's why they change here and there, the tiny details. But at the end of the day, it's all Putin the victorious. Back in the 90s, you were shouting from the rooftops about the fall of communism and the dangers here. Nobody believed you, which sucks. How do you manage the energy then and now of being one of the only ones delivering a very

unpopular slash unlikely message to a bunch of people who don't want to hear it. Look, I don't think I'm alone. The only one. There are many people, many great people, many brave people that marched with me in our peaceful rallies in Mosque in St. Petersburg in other Russian cities. Most of them are in exile, many of them in jails, and some of them are like a great leader. I like Boris Nemt of a former deputy prime minister who was murdered more than two years ago in front of the Kremlin.

These people, they shared my vision of the future of our country since Boris has gone. And there are very few people who, if anyone, is left, who could be as loud and can speak us as myself. And I feel it as my duty to speak on their behalf. Because there are many millions of Russians that have no voice. They live on a dictatorship. And for them taking to the streets or just making protests is risky. It's really risky. I didn't think before that I would have to leave in exile.

But four and a half years ago, I had no other choice but to leave my country since I was already part of the criminal investigation for my political activities. And late Boris Nemtsov gave me his wise advice just to leave the country, saying it better be outside and just to do the job rather than being arrested here. Unfortunately, he didn't follow this advice himself. Yeah, and he ended up dead in his street within the view of the Kremlin. Yeah, it's about 150 yards from Kremlin. And that was more like an execution. Nobody believes that it could be done by anyone rather than by the KGB guys because it was shot in the middle of the bridge that leads straight to the Kremlin gates. There are more video cameras there than in Fort Knox.

And of course, none of them worked at night. Right, they were all off. Oh, they're all off. And so the Kangaroo Corps that actually tried alleged killers that, in my view, they were not part of this crime. They didn't even ask or didn't demand Russian security that controlled the bridge and the cameras. the video footage because they were simply told not available, period. This is the Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, Gary Kasparov. We'll be right back.

Thank you for listening and supporting the show. Your support of our advertisers is what keeps us going. To learn more and to get links to all of those great discounts you just heard so that you can check out those amazing sponsors for yourself, visit Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals. And don't forget that worksheet for today's episode. The link is in the show notes at Jordan Harbinger. dot com slash podcast. And now for the conclusion of our episode with Gary Kasparov.

Jeez, unbelievable. A lot of people that you used to work with for similar causes, such as democracy and Russia, are dead, meeting similar violent ends in Moscow or elsewhere, usually via a hitman. I mean, how concerned are you for this personally? Look, I am concerned, so I, that's why I live outside of Russia, and I try to limit some of my foreign travel, not visiting places where I believe that KGB could have an, and easy ride. That's the question that makes me, and especially my family, very uncomfortable. So we live in New York. I have to go just around the world, just to places where people invite me to do speeches. I have to sort of limit my travel map, eliminating places where I don't feel

secure. Though, of course, we know that Putin's enemies could be in real danger, even in the UK, yet nothing has happened on the U.S. soil. Is it true that you don't fly Russian airlines unless you absolutely have to? That was the case 12 years ago. I tried to avoid flying air afloat when I was in Russia fighting Putin, so recognizing that in a plane you could be offered some food or drink that may not be complementary to health. But now it's all the case. I'm out of Russia for four and a half years, so I don't have to fly air float and don't have to think about it. Yeah, I heard you used to bring your own food on the plane. Living in Putin's Russia, you have to be cautious and just to make some precise calculations about what you do next. But again, I tried to limit my airflow flights.

They were very short flights, so I could definitely make sure that I was out of danger. But it was sort of a minor problem because in 2007, I was arrested first time. Now, spending five days in Putin's jail, that's far more dangerous than air flight. Yeah. That was a first warning. So I was arrested, you know, a few times beaten. And I just realized in 2013, they started this massive criminal case against a bunch of political activists that Even though I was never covered and I could take a lot of risk, but it was too much, especially considering that I had a family and I decided that to follow Boris' advice, Boris Dems for advice in the country.

And even now, though, I mean, looking at what happened to Alexander Litvinenko, who was poisoned with radioactive polonium, which literally can only come from certain places in Russia. Yeah, absolutely. That's got to keep you up at night at some level. I don't drink tea with strangers. It's about being cautious as much as you can. I try to make sure that I limit my contacts with people that I'm not 100% confident to absolute minimum and just to be with someone these meetings. But again, living in the States, I'm fairly comfortable that I can avoid the worst, again, because I don't drink tea with strangers.

So I could probably feel now where the danger comes from. Though, again, this is something that you cannot stop, but I always quote Colonel Abel from The Bridge of Spies, great movie, recent movie. When he was asked by his lawyer, by Donovan. Are you worried? Are you worried? Would it help? Yeah. Would it help?

Exactly. I knew exactly which line you were talking about. Yeah, exactly. You can worry all you want, and that might kill you faster than polonium 212. 210. 210. Oh, well. To be precise.

I was off by two protons or two neutrons. Yes, yes. Looking at the show trials and the telephone justice and things like that, this is something that boggles my mind. Coming from a law and legal background myself, it would just be so humiliating and judges in the United States, as you know, in the West and general, are often at odds with governmental power and authority. It's unthinkable to us as Westerners that a judge would get a phone call from some government lackey minister and make decisions that way or say, oh, I guess there's no evidence of this murder, even though you know that every day when you walk to work, there's 87 video cameras recording you. What are these people doing? Are they just as scared as everyone else?

Are they cronies? I mean, what's going on here with the legal system? It's a dictatorship. I understand it sounds inconsiderable for people who were born and raised and still leave in a free world. That's the judge who looks like a judge. He's not a judge. He or she is a clerk. They're just following instructions.

We had so many cases. There were small cases by current standards. Ten years ago, I called it vegetarian times. Because for chanting down with Putin, you can go to jail for five. for 10 days. Now, you will end up in jail for five years for doing the same. Those are the differences in numbers. It's like quantitative differences. But qualitative differences, they're none because the trial was a mockery from the very beginning. I think one of the key cases was at early days when I was arrested. I had video demonstrating that I was arrested in different place and I was arrested by

the right police. And they had a guy there just lying under oaths, a police officer saying, I arrested him. I said, what do you mean? I never met you. He said, no, I arrested you. So where? Oh, I arrested you at 1.30 at Mayakovsky Square. And I said, but there's a video. I was arrested 45 minutes earlier by riot police at a different square. And then the judge said, no, I trust this guy because he's wearing uniform, full stop.

Jeez. That's in court papers. That's 2007. Now, imagine what's happening now, 10 years later. Right, because Russia only had eight years of democracy, which means that this is already backslid that much more. But it's very important. This is the way that they pretended to follow the law, but at the end of the day, this

is the like a core element of Putin's law. We always trust the man in uniform. And so many people now are in jail. So many people just suffer immensely because the man in uniform in Putin's Russia is always right. That's why it's so much easier to install a dictator than to remove one, because you believe what they're going to say. It's scary.

The politicians that we trust the most to do what they say are often. the dictators and they're the ones who say that they're going to do the most horrible things. And so we have to be really careful with this, even in democracy. Do Russians understand they've lost so many of their freedoms? I mean, I don't mean to sound insulting or condescending, but it seems like nobody would put up with this. And yet I look at the United States as well. And I feel like we've lost a ton of our freedoms. We lose more here and there. And we might just sit back and take it too. In fact, we are. Let's start with the United States. So I live in the United States. Three out of four of my kids, they are U.S. citizens. So that's why I do care of

about the future of this great country. I actually, I can tell you that to the contrary, I think America now is awakening. I think that, you know, we should, believe or not, we should praise Donald Trump for making it clear that the danger was real. For so many years, I've been trying to tell Americans that nothing is for granted.

And I'm saying, oh, it's your problem. In Russia, in China, in North Korea, elsewhere. In America, it's all carved to the stone. Really? Are you sure? It's all about fighting for your freedom, for your rights. And now I truly amazed to see the potential of the country that is awakening. By the way, one of the greatest things that happened is just how the courts, the law courts and an appeal courts, they turn down Trump's.

Refugee ban. Exactly, refugee ban. Okay, Supreme Court may restore it, but it's a legal process. It was, by the way, big shock in Putin's Russia, how to actually interpret it. Because the idea of Putin's and other dictators is to say, America, it's not a democracy. At the end of the day, it's all fake, it's a cover-up. The man wins the elections, it will do whatever he or she wants to do. The man in the White House, whoever sits there, will decide for the rest of the country

and nobody can stop him. Really? Now, you could look at the situation with a travel ban. It was a big hurdle for Putin's propaganda machine because the judge in Seattle just turned down or just stopped this ban, and the judge was not arrested, was not dismissed. And instead of doing something horrible to the judge, Trump administration had to go to appeal court and lost again. That's the demonstration how democracy works,

that the separation of power is not a fake. It's real. It doesn't mean that a country is safe because you have someone in the White House who could still do a lot of damage to the country and probably will as long as he stays in the office. Still, it shows that the checks and balances installed by the founding fathers

are very much in place. But of course, mechanism is rusty and you have to work on it. But it sends a good signal to people in Russia or in other places is that democracy is a living thing. It's an institution that has to be revived all the time. Each generation should add something to make sure that mechanism is functioning properly.

It's a funny paradox that is, again, how to explain to Americans or Europeans in late 80s, early 90s, when the Soviet Union was about to collapse. It was fairly simple process. That's why I predicted it a few years in advance because I could see that the system was exhausted and people didn't want it anymore because the system could provide. anything for them. People looked outside of the Soviet Union, they looked to the West, thinking, oh, the West has democracy and the West has much better living standard. So let's have democracy. Let's vote, and that will bring us higher living standards. Democracy was installed. People voted

for Yeltsin once and twice, but instead of receiving immediate benefits, many of them saw even a harder times. Economic hardship was all over the place. The country was on the verge of collapse. So many of them thought, oh, it was not real democracy because it didn't bring automatically an improvement in our lives. And Putin gradually took over one piece of freedom after another, but because of the high oil prices have been rising rapidly, Putin could build some social infrastructure and offer something in small numbers, but it guaranteed steady improvement of people's lives. And many of those who were born in the Soviet Union and had no ideas about checks and balances and separation of parts. They saw an improvement of their lives. They still kept voting. And that's why Putin believed that preserving the voting mechanism was important for him.

They thought, oh, maybe it's democracy. We live in democracy because we still vote. There's some kind of quasi-political life. But at the end of the day, we could see a steady and gradual improvement of our lives. It's been said, and I think this was in your book, actually, that we have to trust our institutions here in the United States and in the West, and not individual leaders and individual people. because one of the primary differences is between communism and capitalism, or at least between

totalitarian states and democratic states, is that communism, it has this sort of autoimmune disorder that it puts into society, right? It doesn't do the killing itself. It just weakens the institutions, weakens the judges, weakens all of the people and the balance of power so much that then you can't fight off anything else like a dictator or an authoritarian. It's just, there's nothing in place to stop it at that point. You catch a cold and you die. Yeah, absolutely. But also, let's forget that the Trump phenomena is not unexpected because, you know, it happens when the country is frustrated and the country has no vision of the future. People are just upset and they look backward. Most of the Trump voters, they look backward big for this golden days. They're paralyzed. They don't

see any immediate benefits for them in the future. They are willing to buy any story that comes out of populists who just doesn't care about lying and misleading people and just telling them whatever they want to hear. So is it a difference then that we have between appeasing Putin and World War III because I see a lot of isolationist folks trumpeting this trope all the time. Well, you have to either appease him or we're going to go to war with Russia. Do you think that Putin would back down if he was properly challenged? How about reading history books? That's exactly what we heard in the series. Appeasement or World War II. Right. So we got both. Now, appeasing dictator is the way to actually make his appetite so big that he will cross the red line, ultimate red line.

The choice not all that appeasement and a war between appeasement and deterrence, because dictator at a certain point is not strong enough to go full money, because it's not just about him. He has his generals, they have colonels, they have majors, they have other elite members of the elite. They all have doubts. And in 37, 1938, Hitler was not ready to start a war because country was not ready. The top people, top brass or, you know, military brass or top bureaucrats, they had big doubts that Germany could afford a war. But every day, dictator stays in power. Every new concession the free will makes to him creates a new momentum. So he looks invincible. He looks too powerful and nobody can oppose him. And when he

decides to go crazy, there's no one around to stop him. Is there anything left that I have not asked you that you want to make sure you bring home? I have to say that. I'm an optimist, you know, just even looking at the latest development between Trump and Putin. I still believe that humanity has a purpose. We don't know exactly what is a purpose, but things should get better. But it's all about us to make the difference. That's a very important message. It's no one else is going to change things.

Now, people just don't recognize that we are empowered by the great technology. Each of us has a device in our pocket or purse that is thousand times more powerful than create supercomputer in 1976. So so many great things we can do by being engaged. So my message is always, let's get engaged. So we can do many things by promoting new ideas, by creating some new social networks, and making sure that our future will not be decided by crazy paranoid guys that looking always back, trying just to push us in the wrong direction.

Gary, thank you so much. This has been really, really great. Really enlightening. Love the conversation, the overlap. Thank you very much. So, okay, so you are not challenging me for the game of chess, yes. No, I am not going to challenge you to do the game of chess. You'd have to show me what all the pieces do.

That's my level of chess. Great big thank you to Gary Kasper. I've links to his stuff. We'll be in the website in the show notes. Please do use the website if you buy any books or anything like that. It helps support the show. Worksheets for the episode are in the show notes, so you can make sure you understand everything you took away from the show here.

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