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The Current Transcript for August 17, 2017

Host: Megan Williams

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Listen to the full episode

Prologue

[Music: Theme]

SOUNDCLIP

We’re at the very beginning stages of a very brutal and bloody conflict. We are in an outright war against jihadist Islam, Islamic fascism.

MEGAN WILLIAMS: It's a voice that may not be immediately familiar to you, though his ideas and influence you've almost certainly seen at work in the world today. Steve Bannon, advisor to President Trump. He's even been called Trump's brain. But as the Trump presidency reels from crisis to crisis, some are saying it's time for Bannon and his ideas to go. So just who is Steve Bannon and what does he believe? The author of a new book about this controversial courtier joins me first up. Then the Grand Master of chess, Garry Kasparov. He admits he lost to a computer—IBM’s Deep Blue—but does he think it was intelligence behind the computer’s win?

SOUNDCLIP

I don't think that you can call Deep Blue intelligent. It was as intelligent as your alarm clock, though losing to a $10 million alarm clock didn't make me feel any better.

MW: A conversation with Gary Kasparov about the nature of intelligence machines—looking ahead a few moves to the shape of the world to come. That's in half an hour from now. I'm Megan Williams and this is the summer edition of The Current.

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Are Steve Bannon's days in the White House numbered?

Guest: Joshua Green

SOUNDCLIP

I like Mr. Bannon. He's a friend of mine. But Mr. Bannon came on very late. You know that. I went through 17 senators, governors and I won all the primaries. Mr. Bannon came on very much later than that. And I like him. He's a good man. He is not a racist, I can tell you that. He's a good person. He actually gets a very unfair press in that regard. But we'll see what happens with Mr. Bannon. But he's a good person and I think the press treats him frankly, very unfairly.

MW: That was President Trump on Tuesday giving a less than full throated endorsement of his chief strategist Steve Bannon. Yesterday in an interview, Bannon criticized white nationalists, calling them

MW: Now there's been a lot of speculation over the past week or so that Steve Bannon's days are numbered at the White House. What are you hearing?

JOSHUA GREEN: Well, it's not clear. There are certainly a group of advisers—Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner, I think chief among them—that have been trying for a long time to push Bannon out. And I think that many of them thought that the Charlottesville riot and the death of the young woman allegedly by this white supremacist would help give some momentum to that push. And it did seem like Bannon was on thin ice, but then Trump came out and gave this this press conference yesterday that wasn't even supposed to be about Charlottesville. It was supposed to be about his infrastructure plan. And he came in and the angry confrontation that he had with reporters where he reverted to his claim that both sides are to blame for this, was really channeling Steve Bannon's views. And to me, that suggested that Trump does not sound like somebody on the verge of firing Steve Bannon.

MW: And yet he also said during that press conference that Steve Bannon wasn't in contact with him during at least that initial statement.

JOSHUA GREEN: It's unclear whether or not that's true. I don't have first-hand knowledge of this, but other press reports that have said that Bannon and Trump spoke by phone in the days after Charlottesville. I don't know what Bannon's role was in that first statement, but it seems pretty clear that contrary to the claim we've seen in some news reports that Bannon is off on an island and has been kind of cast out of Trump's inner circle. That certainly doesn't seem to have been the case over the past few days.

MW: Well, knowing what you know about Steve Bannon, which is quite a bit, what do you think he would have advised Trump to say?

JOSHUA GREEN: Bannon would tell Trump and probably did, that Trump shouldn't have to apologize for these people. Trump didn't organize the rally. They weren't there in Trump's name, although many of them were chanting Trump's name and many of them were clearly his supporters. But Bannon objects to the mainstream media's way of going to politicians and saying will you condemn this and then if they don't, saying well, why won't you condemn this? Are you complicit? Do you support it, et cetera.

MW: But he went beyond that sort of a defensive approach to actually blaming what he called the alt-left. It wasn't just sort of a stance of saying look, they're not my responsibility, the white nationalists. Why would he do that? Is there a political calculation there being made?

JOSHUA GREEN: I don't think Trump makes political calculations. I think this is all purely emotional and there were left wing Antifa protesters who were counter marching against the Nazis and there were some violent skirmishes. So technically I think Trump has a point that there were other people there committing acts of violence. The problem Trump has—and this is the blind spot I think that Bannon has too—is that to make a moral equivalency between Nazis who are protesting to celebrate racism and anti-Semitism with people who are there to march and object to Nazism, I think is a horrible thing for a president to do. But if you look at Trump in the way he behaved even outside the context of white supremacy and Nazism, he is simply loathe to condemn his supporters, any of his supporters no matter what. And we saw this during the campaign when protesters would get beat up at Trump rallies. You know instead of condemning them, in one case in a North Carolina rally, Trump actually offered to pay for the attackers’ legal bills. So on one level, he just loves the idea that people are standing up for him and support him and he doesn't want to criticize them when the media or outside forces claim that he should.

MW: Mhm. Tell me about the relationship between Steve Bannon and the so-called alt-right.

JOSHUA GREEN: Well, it's not entirely clear what that is, I mean Bannon famously said at the Republican convention to a reporter from Mother Jones that Breitbart News, where at the time he was the executive chairman, was “the platform for the alt-right.” And that's taken by a lot of people to mean that Bannon and Breitbart were somehow leaders in the alt-right or members of the alt-right. I don't think that's what he meant. What Bannon meant instead was that Breitbart News was a place for non-mainstream conservatives to collect and gather. I think in Bannon's mind, that included libertarians and paleo conservatives and some groups that don't have racial and religious resentment at the heart of their worldview. But it did also include people on the white nationalists, white supremacists and even neo-Nazis. At the time, Bannon was very proud of the idea that he was leading this movement of ragged outsiders who were going to storm the fortresses of the mainstream GOP, which is in fact what Donald Trump did. But the term has since come to take on different connotations—alt-right has. To me the pivot point was a speech that Hillary Clinton gave in August of 2015 shortly after Bannon's hiring, where she introduced the term alt-right into the mainstream political discourse in a way that it really hadn't existed before then. And the point of Clinton's speech was to try and tie Trump to alt-right racists and to some of the uglier headlines on Breitbart News because he just hired Steve Bannon to run as chairman. And so she gave this speech and talked about the hate and all the offensive things and people coming up from the furthest reaches of the Internet and try to tar Trump by association, get him to fire Bannon and renounce this stuff. And Trump of course refused. And although this led to a raft of coverage in the media about the alt-right and what is the alt-right, it didn't actually hurt Trump's poll numbers at all. And Bannon tells me in the book—we had an interview in September—where he said yeah, you know, I polled. Clinton's charge in this racism stuff just doesn't matter.

MW: Did it help Trump's numbers?

JOSHUA GREEN: Trump's numbers improved after the speech. I don't know that you can draw a direct line and say they improved because he refused to condemn racists. There were other things going on in the race at the time and of course Clinton herself was an actor in all this. But refusing to condemn it and in giving his kind of winking approval of it in the images that Trump chose to tweet and the people that he chose not to renounce or not to renounce right away like David Duke, the former Klan leader, certainly don't seem to have cost him any politically. And I know that Bannon believes that Trump's refusal to do this actually energized a large group of people, even beyond racists who thought okay, here is a guy who is not going to bow to the demands of political correctness and the Washington system and that's a guy I can get behind as president.

MW: Right. Now in your book, you talk about how Steve Bannon in a sense crystallizes or lends a cohesive thought to President Trump. How are you seeing Steve Bannon's philosophy playing out in the presidency?

JOSHUA GREEN: Well, it plays out most clearly on the issue of immigration. This hostility toward refugees, illegal immigrants in the country, immigrants who want to come in including legal immigrants and the very severe crackdown on immigration enforcement laws—the arrest and deportation of immigrants who wouldn't have been targeted and deported under previous presidents. All I think is a clear sign of Bannon's influence. That's a very important part of his world view.

MW: Now getting back to the reports that Trump may be considering firing Steve Bannon, I mean how much will the base support for Trump care, particularly the alt-right care, if Donald Trump fires him?

JOSHUA GREEN: I think that the alt-right would be very upset because Bannon rightly or wrongly is seen as being their man in the White House, the avatar of this kind of nationalist populism that I think has a much broader appeal than white nationalism. Bannon is also known to be the true believer in the ideologue in Trump's White House in a way that no one else really is, right? I mean Jared Kushner doesn't have a clear ideology, political ideology. I don't think Gary Cohn, a former Goldman Sachs exec and Democrat isn't going to carry that banner forward. So I think if Bannon were to get fired, it would potentially be problematic for Trump's political standing, partly because it's so low to begin with. He's sunk to 34, 35 per cent in most polls. The people who have stood by him are these hard core believers that Bannon thinks are essential to Trump's political success. And so if Bannon were to leave or get pushed out, it's possible that number could sink even lower. And then it's not really clear who would support Trump or whether he had any protection at all, not just from Democratic attacks but whether his own party would turn on him.

MW: Right. Now there have been a number of media reports that Donald Trump is not happy with your book. Why would that be?

JOSHUA GREEN: [Laughs] Yes. There was a front page story in the New York Times that said Trump was unhappy about the book because it gives Bannon coequal billing on the cover. The cover image is Trump and Bannon. Of course both their names appear there and as one worried Bannon ally pointed out to me, “Bannon's name actually appears before Trump's on the cover.” Well, the one thing we know about Trump is he does not like to share credit and he hates the idea that Bannon is this Rasputin figure or a puppet master, which for the record I don't argue that he is in my book. I think the relationship is much subtler and more complicated than that. But the idea that this book is out there and that Bannon has become the focus of attention again, I think is something that bothers Trump a great deal and that Bannon's enemies inside the White House are pointing out to Trump again and again in hopes of getting him angry enough that he fires his chief strategist.

MW: Any sense of how Steve Bannon feels about the book?

JOSHUA GREEN: As you might imagine, we don't talk as much these days as we used to [laughs] But I know that right before he came out, he was very upset about it for all the reasons you'd expect—the fact that it raises his profile in a way that Trump is sure to notice and not approve of. But I talked to some of Bannon's friends in the week or two after the book came out—it's been out for about three or four weeks now—who said once the book came out and was well-received and well-reviewed and Bannon didn’t get fired, he was pretty much okay with it. I think on some level he likes the idea that he gets a little credit for Trump's victory, so long as it doesn't cost him his job in the White House.

MW: Let's talk a bit about Steve Bannon’s past. In your book you outline how he went to Harvard Business School. He worked for Goldman Sachs and he's wealthy. How does that square with his working class populist message?

JOSHUA GREEN: Well, he comes from working class, blue collar Irish Catholic Democratic roots. He was born into a Navy family in Richmond, Virginia. So he doesn't have the kind of gilded background that a Donald Trump or a Jared Kushner would. He went to Virginia Tech. He spent years in the Navy. He really was a blue collar guy until he went to Harvard Business School in the 1980s. Even there, although he had the Harvard Business School credential, he was older, he hadn't come up through a lot of the same prep schools that classmates there had, so he was able to succeed in that world and after that in Goldman Sachs and Hollywood and be quite successful both financially and professionally. But on some level, I think he was wearing a mask. And if you talk to people who knew him well back then, he had pretty much the same politics—that wasn't the focus of his life at the time—but once he made a lot of money and had the means to do so, he sold his investment back in Hollywood and became a conservative documentarian and filmmaker and eventually moved over into tea party politics, Sarah Palin and Breitbart News, which led him to Trump.

MW: Right. And how did that happen? How did he make the switch over to Breitbart?

JOSHUA GREEN: Well, as Bannon tells the story to me in the book, he had his first big film that he did himself was a movie about Ronald Reagan called In the Face of Evil based on a biography by a conservative writer and scholar named Peter Schweizer. And Bannon bought the rights to this book, made a documentary film about it and screened it at a conservative film festival in Hollywood back in, I want to say 2004, 2005. And afterward, out of the audience came Andrew Breitbart, who was a famous conservative media figure provocateur who Bannon just became smitten with. Breitbart was a real character. He worked for Matt Drudge. He was a media figure who was always doing crazy things and getting attention, almost like a merry prankster. And Bannon just loved the fact that this guy seemed to understand how to manipulate the media. They became fast friends and when Breitbart died suddenly in 2012, Steve Bannon wound up taking over his site, Breitbart News.

MW: How does Breitbart influence Republican politics after he takes over the site?

JOSHUA GREEN: Breitbart’s way of exerting its influence was basically to attack these Republican establishment leaders and the first real sign of its power was in 2015 when John Boehner, the former Republican House speaker was forced to resign. That was basically due to the rebellion that Breitbart and its allies helped launch, including its allies in Congress helped launch against Boehner. It cost him the speakership. A little while later, Eric Cantor who was Boehner's successor, was defeated in a Republican primary that nobody saw coming by this populist right wing challenger in a Republican primary. So this is really when Breitbart came onto my radar. And looking backwards at the story of Trump, it really isn't that surprising that having knocked off these prominent establishment politicians, that Breitbart and this brand of right-wing populism would go on to have a real effect in the Republican primaries, which of course it did because Trump, with help from Bannon, was able to defeat the 16 other Republican candidates, all of whom were thought to have better odds of winning the nomination than Donald Trump was at the outset of the primaries.

MW: Mhm. Now we don't know yet whether or not Steve Bannon is going to last in the White House, but what will be his legacy so far, do you think?

JOSHUA BROWN: Well, I think his legacy so far is that he really is the ideologue and the architect of what I consider to be the most shocking opposite in US presidential history. Bannon joins Trump's campaign in August of 2016 and manages to get Trump focused on this idea of populism, but also on the idea of attacking Hillary Clinton. And Bannon had spent literally years coming up with lines of attack and ways to go after Clinton that he was then able to hand over to Trump and we all saw the results on November 8th when to everybody's surprise, it was Trump walking out on the stage on election night as the president-elect of the United States.

MW: Mhm. And we're seeing the results now.

JOSHUA GREEN: Are we ever.

MW: Are we ever, yeah. Josh Green, thanks very much for speaking with us today.

JOSHUA GREEN: Thanks so much. It was my pleasure.

MW: Joshua Green is a political analyst for CNN and a correspondent for Bloomberg Businessweek. His new book is titled Devil’s Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump and The Storming of the Presidency. He was in New York City. The CBC News is next. Then he was the world's preeminent chess player, laid low by a chess playing super computer. But 20 years on, Garry Kasparov is rethinking his rage against the machine. The grand master in conversation after the news. I'm Megan Williams and you're listening to The Current.

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ENCORE | Defeated by a computer, world chess champion Garry Kasparov embraces artificial intelligence

Guest: Garry Kasparov

MW: Hello. I’m Megan Williams and you’re listening to the summer edition of The Current.

[Music: Theme]

MW: Up next, going deep with a chess grandmaster.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: Call it a blow against humanity. After six games over nine days, Deep Blue, the IBM computer beat Garry Kasparov, considered to be the best chess player in the history of the game.

VOICE 2: And woah. Deep Blue, Kasparov.

VOICE 1: The great Russian champion was not a graceful loser.

MW: It’s been 20 years since that epic battle between man and machine. That news report was from 1997—Garry Kasparov versus the IBM computer Deep Blue. The Russian grandmaster and former world chess champion is undoubtedly one of the greatest players in the history of the game. But it is that battle against a faceless opponent that he will perhaps be best remembered for. A year earlier, he had defeated Deep Blue, but the rematch belonged to the computer and it certainly seemed at the time that the future did too. Garry Kasparov reflects on matches against Deep Blue and much more in his new book. It's called Deep Thinking: Where Machine Intelligence Ends and Human Creativity Begins. Garry Kasparov spoke with Anna Maria Tremonti in Toronto last May.

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: Welcome.

GARRY KASPAROV: Good morning.

AMT: When you look back at that loss, they called it a blow against humanity. Was it that?

GARRY KASPAROV: I guess it was an exaggeration, but obviously it was a milestone in the history of computer science. And we should remember that the founding fathers of computer science like Alan Turing or Claude Shannon, they believed that if machine could beat human champion in chess, that will be a moment for artificial intelligence. In fact, they were wrong because I don't think that you can call Deep Blue intelligent. It was as intelligent as your alarm clock, though losing to $10 million alarm clock didn't make me feel any better. I want to be very cautious when people keep using this term “artificial intelligence” because we have to agree on the definition. Do we mean by saying AI, result or the process? Deep Blue reached the result. By the definition of its output, it was intelligent. It played world champion level chess. But when you look at the process, it offered us very little input into the mysteries of human intelligence.

AMT: And you actually won the first competition against Deep Blue the year before.

GARRY KASPAROV: Yeah, yeah. People don't recall it.

AMT: That's why I'm saying it. I’m putting it on the record. [laughs]

GARRY KASPAROV: But I think if you look at the milestones, I think the game one of the first match that I won eventually—I lost this game—that was a real milestone because the moment machine could beat the world champion in one game. The rest was you may call matter of technique. It's a matter of time. The signing was already on the wall and analyzing the games of that match—and I used modern computers. And I have to tell people that the free chess app on your mobile phone, it's probably stronger than Deep Blue today.

AMT: Is that right, huh?

GARRY KASPAROV: Absolutely. Because these machines are just getting stronger, faster. And what's happened with chess, the game could be crunched by brute force once hardware got fast enough, data base got big enough and algorithm got smart enough.

AMT: It's interesting that you say that because we have spoken here to Geoffrey Hinton who is seen as the godfather of artificial intelligence and he's at the University of Toronto and now has some association with Google as well. But he talks about the fact that when he was first starting to work on that, the machines just weren't fast enough and now they are. That part of when it comes to artificial intelligence, it's about the capacity of these machines.

GARRY KASPAROV: Yes and no. Absolutely, machines getting faster. That's why they could solve many other problems. Though chess as most of other games is mathematically infinite, the number of legal moves in the game of chess is more than number of atoms in the solar system. But it's not about solving the game. It's about beating human opponent and we're all vulnerable because we don't have the same steady hand as machine does and inevitably we’ll make mistakes or even inaccuracies that are not so important when one human face another human. But with machines, you'll be punished instantly for making a mistake. Though when I just looked at our games, analyzing them today, I found that not only I made mistakes but also Deep Blue made quite a few mistakes, which shows that machine’s progress is very natural. So they're incessantly getting better and better.

AMT: Well, in fact you make the point that one of the reasons it beat you in ‘97 was because they looked at ‘96 when you beat it and they reprogrammed a bit, right?

GARRY KASPAROV: It’s not about reprogram. I recommend they read the book because while I'm very complimentary about IBM science and the team that was behind it, then I still have many questions to the corporation and the way they organized the event because only one player in the match was under tremendous psychological pressure.

AMT: And I'm talking to him.

GARRY KASPAROV: Stupid, stupid mistakes. Stupid mistakes I made, the result was that I couldn't cope with the pressure and I would say questionable behaviour of the organizers.

AMT: They called you a sore loser.

GARRY KASPAROV: I said in the book I am a sore loser, yes. But you can’t stay on top for 20 years if you’re not a sore loser. You have to take it almost as a physical pain. And I blame myself for making these mistakes. But also now 20 years later, I could see that some of these mistakes were inevitable because I wasn't ready for a match win or lose. For me, it was still very much a great social and scientific experiment and I have been treating IBM in the process of preparing for the match as more like a partner than an opponent. And just when I got my wakeup call about harsh realities that IBM wanted just to win the match and didn't care much about continuation of this experiment, so that was too late.

AMT: How was playing chess against a computer different than playing against a human?

GARRY KASPAROV: Oh. When I first sat against Deep Blue across the chess board in 1996, first match, I was the world champion for more than 10 years. I played, I think, 182 games in the world championship matches and hundreds of other games against top grandmasters. And I knew my opponents. I knew what to expect from them. I knew what to expect from myself. I used to watch their body language and looked straight in the eyes to gauge their intentions and to measure their plans. And then I faced Deep Blue. It's so different because you don't know what to expect. This is something that literally comes out of a black box. And the psychology—which is a very important element of any human game—just is no longer there. In fact, actually it's there but there's only one way because you could be under pressure. You could make mistakes. Deep Blue doesn't care what happened in the previous game. It doesn't even know what's happened one move before. So there's so many things that could work for you in a “normal” chess against other humans. They are just either not working or are working against you when you face the faceless.

AMT: How did you prepare for that?

GARRY KASPAROV: That was a big question because not in 1996 or even in 1997, I had any access to Deep Blue games. In 1996 it was natural because there was a [unintelligible] of the machine. Then we had an agreement that I would look at the Deep Blue games in an interim period. But then there was a mistake in or slip in the contract and IBM pointed out that the contract referred only to the official games played by Deep Blue, which meant that all the games played in the lab of training games—and that's the only games Deep Blue played—were not available to me. So I still didn't know what to expect and it’s quite a challenge for someone like me who used to prepare a lot, analyzing the games of my opponents, facing again, black box because I didn't know what was there. No games. It was quite tough. So after winning the first match, losing the second one, I wanted to play the rubber match, the decisive match, but IBM decided to retire the computer.

AMT: Hmm. Yeah. Okay. How do you prepare physically for that?

GARRY KASPAROV: Physically for the Deep Blue or for other?

AMT: And for others. What was the physical preparation like?

GARRY KASPAROV: Oh. I kept myself in shape for my entire chess career. And even by the late nineties, I was in my thirties, so much older than most of my young opponents. But I kept winning tournaments because I was in excellent physical shape. I knew that there's always the correlation between your health and your physical shape that could give you confidence and your performance at the chessboard.

AMT: What was it, push ups? What were you doing?

GARRY KASPAROV: Hundred and seven. My personal record.

AMT: Hundred and seven push ups before a game? Before a match?

GARRY KASPAROV: No, no, no, no, no. It’s my personal record.

AMT: Oh, okay.

GARRY KASPAROV: You’re asking too much.

AMT: Okay. Well, that’s impressive too.

GARRY KASPAROV: Chess is quite a physical sport. When you play for two weeks and more and games could last for six hours, that takes a lot of your strength and it puts you under constant pressure.

AMT: Physically exhausting as well as mentally exhausting, yeah. Okay. Well, let's keep talking about artificial intelligence. You know there's an expectation that intelligent machines will displace workers. What do you think of that fear? Because you've been spending a lot of time looking at this.

GARRY KASPAROV: I'm surprised that people are surprised because that's the history of our civilization, history of progress. Machines replacing farm animals. Machine replacing manual labour. Now machines are coming after people's college degree and Twitter accounts. And that's why everybody is talking about it. But there's nothing wrong about that. I would say it's excellent news because every profession eventually should feel this pressure or else humanity will cease making progress. Machines will take over more menial parts of cognition and that will help us to boost our creativity and curiosity, by the way, let's not forget about beauty and joy. So we can do a lot of things if we keep pushing the horizons, if we're looking for new challenges. I would say machines won’t make us obsolete. Our complacency might. It's a new challenge for us but I think it's a great challenge because if machines are getting smarter, we are getting smarter and intelligent machines can help us to turn our grandest dreams into reality.

AMT: Did it take you a while to feel that way? I've read somewhere that you actually wanted to rip that Deep Blue apart.

GARRY KASPAROV: No, no, no. No, look. The reason I stayed on top for 20 years is because I was very good at analyzing my mistakes and coming back with new ideas. And after that match in 1997, while licking my wounds, I looked for an opportunity to combine human skills and machine skills and I came up with a concept I called advanced chess, when humans plus machine could play against another human plus machine. And there are many now games played on the Internet, what they call freestyle Internet where people could get together with machines and play against other humans that are using different computers. And what's happened that chess proved to be another perfect field to test human plus machine combination, which I believe is the future because there are so many things that we can combine—the machine’s brute force of calculation, machine’s algorithms. But on other side we have our experience, we have our strategic overview and look, we have purpose. Machines don't have purpose. We have passion. So there are many things that could go together and I think this kind of artificial intelligence that people are afraid of, it’s a way, way to go. I don't want people to be overwhelmed by these dystopian views promoted by great movies like The Terminator or The Matrix.

AMT: I am wondering how you are watching and reacting to these big cyber malware attacks—the WannaCry ransomware and the use of computers for that kind of thing.

GARRY KASPAROV: That's very natural. You have hundreds of millions of billions of people with access to computers and Internet and even if you have one per cent of those that would like to use it for crimes or other illegal activities, you already have few millions of experts trying to go after you. It's another reality. Every new technology, every step of the progress has been accompanied by illegal activities, by attempts of some to get an advantage over you. And these cyber attacks, they will become part of our life and we just have to realize that we need to think about it seriously and we have to understand that combining privacy and security will be more and more difficult.

AMT: You are also a human rights advocate and I'm wondering how—

GARRY KASPAROV: I am.

AMT: I'm wondering how you see computers, the misuse of computers by government. You've raised concerns about government use of computers and artificial intelligence to threaten freedoms. Talk to me about that.

GARRY KASPAROV: That's one of the greatest challenges for any democracy when you just have to look at the privacy and security. Now this problem’s moved to digital era. I think it's wrong to expect that our data could be protected 100 per cent. Data collection is inevitable, whether it's by the government or by the big multinational corporations. The question is what will be done with this data. And here in Canada or in the United States or in most European countries, you're still protected by the legal system, by the rules, by the courts. While in countries like Russia, Turkey, Iran, China, if your information is available to the government, you'll be prosecuted with disrespect to any legal restrictions, even if they do exist. So I think it's about what the government can do with this information and we have to look more at that site. How can we limit the government's use of this information because it will be collected anyway? Let's be honest. It's going to happen because we want our data to be protected, but at the same time we want governments to make sure that the hacking attacks—that by the way could be far more dangerous because the hackers, they don't respect any rules and if it's the states like Russia or China, they will just go after you, after your data with malice intent.

AMT: Let's talk a little bit more about Russia. There have been a lot of accusations against President Putin that he and his intelligence agencies are using cyber warfare to undermine democracies in the West. What do you think that endgame is about?

GARRY KASPAROV: It's a part of Putin's plan to stay in power endlessly because since the Russian economy is falling and he doesn't expect it to get better. Nobody thinks that oil will go back to 100 dollar plus price tag. He needs to justify his stay in power and confrontation with the free world is a very important element of that. Putin needs confrontation. Putin needs to spread chaos and attacking democracy as an institution helps his propaganda machine in Russia to demonstrate that democracy is what? It’s a cover up. Everything is rigged and dismantling the aura of democracy as an important part of the human progress helps Putin and other dictators to send the message domestically that people shouldn't go to the streets demanding for elections.

AMT: You know all about this. I said you ran for president. You actually wanted to run for president in Russia. They wouldn't let you run. Am I right?

GARRY KASPAROV: Running for president in Russia, it's quite an exaggeration because in countries like Putin's Russia, you cannot participate in political life the same way you can do it here in Canada. You cannot register a political party. You cannot do fundraising. You cannot campaign openly. The only debate in Russia is debate with riot police on the streets. So my campaign in 2007 was just to bring attention to the fact that even if you wanted to run, you will be stopped by rules that are imposed by the government to make sure that nobody who is not approved by Kremlin could get to the ballot.

AMT: Where do you live?

GARRY KASPAROV: In New York, Upper West Side.

AMT: Do you spend time in Moscow now or can you not do that?

GARRY KASPAROV: I left Moscow four years ago because I know now that trip back to Moscow will be one way trip to me.

AMT: Yeah. That says a lot about human rights in Russia.

GARRY KASPAROV: Look, it's a dictatorship. I think it's amazing that people are still asking about the nature of Putin's regime after what he did in Ukraine, after what he did in Syria and not even saying after what he did in Russia, Russia proper. And now he keeps attacking other countries. It's not only the United States. You can look at Europe—France, Great Britain, now Germany. Putin keeps raising stakes because again, he knows only the confrontation could help him to justify he stay power.

AMT: So how do you process the news today, the news yesterday from the Washington Post that President Trump shared classified intelligence information with the Russian foreign minister on ISIS?

GARRY KASPAROV: Are you surprised?

AMT: Well, they're denying it.

GARRY KASPAROV: No, no, no. They said—unless I'm wrong—but the statement from the White House from General McMaster, the head of National Security Council was that neither sources nor methods have been released.

AMT: That’s right. But the Post is saying they got enough information that the Russians can figure it out.

GARRY KASPAROV: I guess that's typical for Trump. He was bragging. They talked about Syria. Trump, I think again, as Obama administration has mistakenly looking for Russian cooperation in Syria, though Putin has no interest in helping Americans there. And Trump was bragging about some of the US operations there and I'm not surprised that in the process of all this conversation trying to impress his counterparts, he revealed—I think it was unintended, but it's typical for Trump. He’s uncontrolled. He could tweet it and then had Lavrov and Russian ambassador Kislyak. So he told them something that I've no doubt has been already used by Russian intelligence to identify the source on the ground and to turn it into their advantage.

AMT: You think Trump has actually been good for a lot of Americans.

GARRY KASPAROV: Trump effect was good for many Americans because for many years, I've been talking to Americans about problems with human rights elsewhere and many of them shrugged their shoulders, had dismissive reaction. That’s happening somewhere else in Russia, in Iran, in China. Never in America. Uh-huh. Welcome. Now they realize that as once Ronald Reagan said: freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. So Trump effect, I think, will have a long term positive impact on bringing young Americans into politics. People now are learning about US Constitution, about the foundation of the Republic independent judiciary and by the way, one thing that worked in favour of all human rights activists in the world is the clash between Donald Trump and US courts. I could see how Russian propaganda machines stumbled. After Trump signed the executive order, American court, just a judge from a backward state simply just overruled. And instead of arresting the judge, Trump had no choice to go to the Appeal Court and lost again. So for countries like Russia or Iran, that tells that for ordinary people, that democracy and separation of power works and this is quite an important message. So I think the conflict between Trump's ego and personality and US political institutions could produce good results both in America and outside, though of course we can expect such blows because the man definitely is not qualified for the job.

AMT: What's next for you?

GARRY KASPAROV: I’m still engaged in promoting the game of chess through Kasparov Chess Foundation across the world. I’m engaged in promoting human rights as a chairman of human rights foundation. I keep writing books. I'm doing more and more speeches because people are concerned about the future of AI and the future of humanity. So there are many things where I could apply my experience and my own intelligence and the life is busier than ever.

AMT: Do you see the world through the prism of the strategies that you learned in chess? Like for such a long time and from such an early age, you learned to think very strategically.

GARRY KASPAROV: I try to apply my chess knowledge, what I learned from the game of chess, to analyze different situations around the world. And I have to say that we are now in a great need of the long term strategy. That's one of the biggest challenges for the free world, that after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, there was no strategy to replace the strategy that helped win the Cold War.

AMT: Garry Kasparov, thanks for coming in. Nice to talk to you.

GARRY KASPAROV: Thanks for inviting me.

MW: That was Anna Maria’s conversation with chess champion and human rights activist Garry Kasparov. After Deep Blue defeated Kasparov, the IBM computer was retired and never played again. But IBM engineers did start work on another machine. Watson eventually went on to challenge Jeopardy champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. Watson won the tournament, but not before giving this curious response to a final Jeopardy round. The category was US cities. I’m Megan Williams. Thanks for listening to the summer edition of The Current.

SOUNDCLIP

HOST: Here is the clue.

[Sound: Game ding]

HOST: Its largest airport is named for a World War II hero, its second largest for a World War II battle. Thirty seconds, players. Good luck.

[Sound: Jeopardy music]

HOST: We come to you, Ken. You had 2,400 for this final going in and you wrote down “What is Chicago?” That is correct and you wagered $2,400. That doubles your score—4,800. Down to Brad now. He had 5,400. I have to feel that he came up with the correct response. Did he? Yes. And the wager? $5,000 takes you up to $10,400. Now to our leader, Watson, going into final—36,681—and the response was “What is Toronto?” with a lot of question marks, which means of course, that Watson had many, many doubts. And the wager? How much are you going to lose? Oh, you sneak.

[Sound: Crowd laughter and applause]

HOST: Nine-hundred forty-seven dollars.

[Sound: Crowd laughter and applause]

[Music: Ending theme]

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August 17, 2017 full episode transcript

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