#58 — The Putin Question

I am talking with Gary Kasparov, the former world chess champion, perhaps the most famous of modern times, and now a great critic of Vladimir Putin's Russia, and great critic of the failures of american and european foreign policy with respect to Russia. Needless to say, this is a very timely conversation given the man who will soon occupy the Oval Office and given the people he has appointed to advise him. And so, without further preamble, I give you Gary Kasparov. I am here with Gary Kasparov. Gary, thanks for coming on the podcast.

Thanks for inviting me.

Listen, it's really an honor to get to talk to you. I'm sorry we can't do it in person, but we will be forgiven any audio hiccups here. We're doing this by Skype, and you are half a world away, and it's late at night over there. So again, thank you for taking the time to do this.

Okay, thanks. For more on technology that we can do it staying 1000 miles away from each other.

Yeah, there's a lot to talk about. There are really two broad areas that I want to touch with you. The first I want to get into is politics, obviously, and the recent russian influence on our presidential election. The second is that we have to say something about the future of intelligent machines, because I've been talking a lot about artificial intelligence on the podcast, and while you will go down in history for many things, one of those things will be that you were the first person to be beaten by a machine in an intellectual pursuit where you were the most advanced member of our species. You will have a special place in history, even if that history is written by our robot overlords. We have to talk about that. But we'll get into politics first. And you've written a fascinating book entitled winter is coming. You argue several things in the book, but generally you claim that free and open societies like our own have grown weaker especially because we no longer think in terms of spreading our values to the rest of the world. Many people consider this a return to some kind of humility and political realism, but you consider it a failure of nerve. And I must say, I agree with you there. Your specific claim is that while we're now facing many threats and many which we seem ill prepared to deal with, the worst of these threats is coming from Vladimir Putin and his current Russia. So perhaps you can just start there with your political thesis.

Yes, let's start with the title of the book, winter is coming. I have to confess, I'm a fan of Game of Thrones, and I even read all the books, and I thought the title was very appropriate because it could indicate two things. One is that the history is not developed on a linear basis, and it was somehow a delayed response to Francis Fukuyamo, the end of history in 1992, the best selling book. And I have to admit that in 1992, I shared the same optimism, thinking that liberal democracies have won and the rest would be just a bright future. So it's all up to us to build this future. And the evil has been defeated once and for all. So I think we yet to recognize that the evil doesn't disappear. So it probably happens in the books, fairy tales, but in real life, the evil could be buried temporarily under the rubbles of Berlin Wall. But at one point, it sprouts out, especially if we lose our vigilance and if we turn to be complacent. And also, the idea of the title was, again, reflecting the motto of the House of Stark in Game of Thrones, is to indicate that this is not a winter, this is not a climate change. This is not just change of temperature, but this is something that happens again because we are grown weaker, because we don't understand the threat that is coming to hurt us and maybe to destroy our way of life. But it depends on us, whether this winter is long or short, whether it's devastating or the effect is minimal. So it's like a warning. So that's why I thought the title would be appropriate. And to my surprise, and I published few books. And, Sam, I'm sure you know the publishers, they always come up with ten different suggestions, trying to shoot away your original title. I mean, this time they accepted the title, recognizing that it had merits, but they were very cautious, and they almost rejected the subtitle. They said, oh, Vladimir Putin and the enemies of the free world. Is it about Cold War? Is this old language that may scare people off? I said, yeah, it's a cold war because winter is coming. And now when I talk to my publisher, they're very happy that they actually agreed to have Vladimir Putin and enemies of the free world.

I can imagine on the title of.

The book, because when they asked me, what about advertising? How are you going to do it? Because it was really just a very short cycle for writing and publishing, me and Meg Gringert, my co author. So we approached them in January 2015, and I said at our first meeting that I would like the book to be published in October. They asked me whether I meant October 2016. I said no, 2015, because I hoped that the book would make difference for upcoming presidential elections, and it could help to shape debates of foreign policy between candidates from the major parties. And they were not sure that you can do it because they said, there's no time for advertising. And I said, look, as long as you have Putin as a centerpiece of the book, he will definitely create enough conflicts to make sure that the book will be always on the front page. Again, unfortunately, this prediction was right. And I have to say that things that I predict in the book, they turn to be even worse than I thought, because probably we live in a time when everything happens much quicker, so the time flies faster than it used to be.

I would just want to stop you there, Gary, for a second, because I want to get into Putin specifically in some depth. But you use this term evil, which I want to flag for a moment, because, unfortunately, this term has been really undermined in intelligent conversation. Many people just don't believe in evil.

Sam, it's actually a great point. Thank you very much for actually raising this point. Because if we now look at american politics, the partisanship, it reached such a level where people from two major parties consider their opponents evil. And you're right, the word evil has been used and overused in a political debate between people who disagree on many issues but still share the same core values. They all represent different wings of liberal democracy. And what I wanted to emphasize in the book, and again, thanks for raising this point, is that we are being attacked by people that are. Again, let me use this old cliche, cold work cliche, the enemies of the free world, because they do not share the same values. And one of the fundamental differences between us and them is we believe in uniqueness of human life. So the one person dead, it's tragedy for people like Putin. Hundreds of thousands dead. It's just a demonstration of strengths. It's just statistics that proves that they are on the winning streak by spreading their influence. So we have to realize that despite all the differences between different political groups and activists in the free world, we're still united by values. That makes us very different from the other side of the world, where I could apply world evil, because it really threatens the way of life. The very foundation of the free society and value of human life is one of the things that brings together Putin, IsiS, al Qaeda, iranian mullahs. They could look different, but at the end of the, they believe in something that is not modern, something that pushes us back to the past. And for those who are saying, oh, unlike Soviet Union, Putin's Russia is no longer an existential threat to the free world because it doesn't have the same ideology, my response is that probably you're right. But the soviet project, though it was condemned by history, it was marked by repressions, by bloodshed, by devaluation of human life, it was still a project about the future. It was a futuristic project based on wrong assumptions about human nature. That's why it failed. But it was still about the future. While