#461 — Dictators Always Tell You What They'll Do

Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you're not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers, so if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. I am here with Gary Kasparov. Gary, thanks for joining me again. Thanks for inviting me. It's great to see you. So I I think it's been, something like five years, four or five years, six years maybe since we've spoken. A lot has happened, but still, we were speaking under the shadow of, Trump and Trumpism, I think each of the times we spoke. I think our first conversation was in 2016 and then, then maybe, like, 2022. I think that's where we were. Yeah. So then about four years. Well, first, just to introduce you properly, many people will know you as, one of the greatest, chess masters, of all time and, world champion for many years. And but maybe we'll return to the topic of chess at some point. But now you're you're currently the, the chairman of the Renew Democracy Initiative, and, also, you have a Substack, the nextmove.org, which is associated with with that foundation, and where you write. Tell people, what what does the Renew Democracy initiative do? What do you what are you focused on? I mean, I I think we can guess from the title that you care about democracy, but what specific problems are you focused on at the moment? Yeah. I also pretty active on the other side of the, Atlantic, so in Europe where this most of, my colleagues in Russian opposition located. And, Renew Democracy Initiative, was formed in the 2017 after Trump's first victory in the presidential elections. It was quite kind of friendly group of individuals. Some of them are more Democrats from New York. Some of them, like, the group I call the refugees from the Wall Street Journal, like Brett Stevens or Pax Boot. And, I called for them just, you know, trying to figure out, sir, what's next because I could smell the danger. It's probably because I was born and raised in the Soviet Union. I knew what was KGB, not from the books, but from personal experience. I also fought Vladimir Putin. I saw the second rise of KGB and, how we took over my country, Russia, after we had a period of very, fragile, so nascent democracy in in in the nineties. And, I could see that these are some very troubling signs in America. So the idea of RDI was to actually to point these potential problems, actually challenges to to the Americans because what I didn't like especially was the polarization. It's …