From the Archive: Garry Kasparov on Deep Blue, Fear, and the Future of AI

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This isn't your average business podcast and he's not your average host. This is The James Altucher Show.

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Presenting The Archive, classic episodes that remain timeless. The raw, unfiltered conversations from the early days in which people shared their failures and showed us exactly how they rebuilt everything from the ground up.

**Garry Kasparov** (1:29)
Fear of making a mistake always guarantees your mistake.

**James Altucher** (1:33)
Why is that?

**Garry Kasparov** (1:34)
Because it paralyzes you. Game of chess is a game of choices, so you have to make decisions.

**James Altucher** (1:43)
How can you hypnotize yourself in daily life to avoid this fear?

**Garry Kasparov** (1:48)
No. Look, I think fear is always with us. I don't believe when people say, oh, this man, this woman, they don't have fear.

**SPEAKER_1** (1:57)
We all do have our fears.

**Garry Kasparov** (1:59)
The question is how we can handle it. In the cases where you don't have a clear preference, you know, you go with your sort of natural instincts.

**James Altucher** (2:16)
I want to do a brief intro here. This is, you know, I've done several hundred podcasts with all sorts of people, but if people ask me over the past several years, who is the number one or two person you would absolutely love to have on the podcast is Garry Kasparov, former world, you were like number one in the world in chess for 20-some years, and world champion for most of that.
I've been following your career since, I don't know, 1982

**Garry Kasparov** (2:43)
What is the same generation?

**James Altucher** (2:44)
Red Fighting Chess, I'm 2200 rated, so I always was keeping track of you. Not you.
I'm an ant on the floor compared to you, but world chess champion for so many years, and you were for a while the coach of the current world chess champion, Magnus Carlsen. Now you wrote your latest book, Deep Thinking, for the first time you wrote about this famous or I would say infamous match from 20 years ago.

**Garry Kasparov** (3:11)
Two matches, 1996, 1997

**James Altucher** (3:12)
Two matches, Deep Blue versus you was the first time a computer, and this one was owned by IBM, first time a computer beat the world chess champion in a match, and ever since the computer was invented, it was kind of considered iconic that if a computer could beat chess...

**Garry Kasparov** (3:27)
Holy grail, holy grail.

**James Altucher** (3:29)
Yeah, it was the holy grail. If a computer could beat the world champion in chess, then there's AI, and you were there, you were the world champion at the time.

**Garry Kasparov** (3:35)
I was the holy grail.

**James Altucher** (3:37)
You were the holy grail. And I want to say, I was in the audience for that match in 1997, and in 1989, I was...

**Garry Kasparov** (3:46)
You also watched the match in 1989 when I played with this team?

**James Altucher** (3:49)
I was office mates with Feng Xu. So I played on Chip Test before it was renamed Deep Thought, and I would play against openings, you know, and on...
So I know all about, from beginning to end... IBM offered me a job to work on Deep Blue. Wow! And you know why I turned it down? I turned it down because of a girl. I stayed in Pittsburgh. Big mistake. I should have worked on Deep Blue and been part of the team that won. But this book was so interesting. Why did you write it now, 20 years later?