Welcome to Talk Message. I'm Isaac Dober. Today's guest, Gary Kasparov, the former chess grandmaster and now big critic of Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump and pretty much everything about U.S. Russia relations. And he's got a lot of criticism to go around. He says George W. Bush and Barack Obama both helped enable Putin's rise as a world player, cause it action

through inaction, getting played by Putin at pretty much every step of the way. Half Jewish,

half Armenian, Kasparov as a teenager, became an international celebrity while traveling the

world and a symbol of Soviet pride back home.

Chess got him involved in politics and both got him involved in pushing hard for open democracy.

He tried to run against Putin's temporary presidential placeholder, Dmitri Medvedev, for the presidency in 2008,

but was barred from the ballot by the kind of authoritarian regime technicality built to block opposition

and had to do with not renting the right-sized space to gather supporters.

And he ended up boycotting the election entirely.

Now, he lives in New York, but I caught up with him at a conference recently in Lisbon called the Web Summit.

Kasparov was there in his role with a group called Avast, trying to get more attention for

how state-sponsored propaganda and fake news is working.

That conversation is one that's paralyzed American politics, I told him.

So he said to me, you can lose the war, even if you have an overwhelming advantage, militarily, economically, technologically, if you don't recognize you are at war.

Back when I was playing a lot of chess as a kid, yeah, there are even a couple of weeks

at chess camp in my childhood.

Kasparov was the biggest thing around.

We talked about what I learned as the basic lesson of the game, be able to think just

one move ahead and you're going to be better than most of the players out there.

Of course, he was the grandmaster, so he pointed out that it's even better if you can think two or three moves ahead.

So I asked him what he makes of all the talk of Trump and Putin is playing chess

or three-dimensional chess.

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