Hi, I'm Bill Crystal. Welcome back to Conversations. I'm very pleased to be joined again

today by Gary Kasparov, with whom we've had several, I think, very interesting, and many

people think very interesting conversations about topics ranging from his own history as

a chess champion and his leading a democracy movement in Russia, his leaving Russia, unfortunately,

having to leave Russia, and then his work on artificial intelligence as well. And Gary

Dow runs two pro-democracy, pro-human rights organizations, the Renew Democracy Initiative

and the Human Rights Foundation, spends most of his time fighting for democracy not just

in Russia, but around the world and against the authoritarian wave. So, Gary, thanks for

joining me again. Oh, thanks for inviting me.

So let's talk about Russia, and then we're broadly about authoritarianism, and how to

fight the authoritarian wave in pro-democracy, but Russia, you wrote a book, Winter is coming

in 2015, I think, and we've discussed that. And so, I mean, here we are six years later,

it's not better, right?

No, it's not better, but as expected. So, we probably should spend a bit of time describing

what better means for Russian terms, you know, Putin's six-year-older, so his biological

time is ticking, hopefully. But we know that dictators are, you know, they could stay just

for a long time, so they, unfortunately, they're aging well. And the same time, I think it

just, it's the, any illusions people had about Putin's regime, they've gone. So, in 2015,

when the book was released in 2016, I had a huge problem, and actually, we discussed it

in our conversation, to communicate the story about the true nature of Putin's regime.

Yeah, just to say Putin was a dictator, you know, could spark an outburst of your counterpart,

say, no, no, no, no, no, no, that's, yeah, it's just a kind of managed democracy. Yes, it's

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