0:00 On May eleventh, 1997, Garry Kasparov, the greatest chess player in the world, sat down across from a two-ton IBM supercomputer named Deep Blue and lost.0:11 The final score of the six-game match was three and a half to two and a half.0:17 It was the first time a reigning world champion had ever been beaten by a computer in a tournament, and it was a moment that cracked the world open just a little bit.0:30 It brings us right back to that question we ended on yesterday, about the moments that change everything...0:38 often long before we’re ready to admit it.0:41 May eleventh is one of those days.0:44 It’s a day of new frontiers, of old ghosts, and of the stories we decide to tell ourselves about who we are.0:52 And the stories from this one day are just incredible.0:56 On May eleventh, 1960, Israeli Mossad agents snatched one of the chief architects of the Holocaust, Adolf Eichmann, off a street in Buenos Aires, Argentina.1:08 He’d been living there under a fake name for years, a ghost of a monstrous past.1:14 His capture and trial were a seismic event for justice, a declaration that some crimes have no statute of limitations.1:23 Then you have the birth of an entire industry’s self-regard.1:28 On May eleventh, 1927, thirty-six of Hollywood’s most powerful people, led by Douglas Fairbanks, had dinner at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles.1:39 Their proposal?1:40 To create an organization to honor cinematic achievement.1:45 They called it the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.1:50 And yes, that’s where the Oscars come from.1:53 A dinner party that decided how we would define greatness in film for the next century.2:00 Way back before that, on May eleventh, 1858, Minnesota was admitted to the Union as the thirty-second state.2:08 It sounds like a simple piece of trivia, but it was another stitch in the sprawling, complicated fabric of America’s westward expansion, a story of settlement and displacement that is still being written.2:24 And of course, there are the people.2:26 May eleventh gave us the surrealist master Salvador Dalí, whose melting clocks seem to capture the very strangeness of time itself.2:36 It also gave us the great American songwriter Irving Berlin, who wrote "God Bless America" and "White Christmas"—the man practically composed the twentieth-century American soundtrack.2:50 It also happens to be the birthday of the physicist Richard Feynman, a Nobel laureate who had this incredible gift for making the universe feel both profoundly complex and wonderfully, joyfully understandable.3:07 Dalí, Berlin, Feynman...3:08 a painter of dreams, a writer of anthems, and an explainer of everything.3:14 What a day.3:15 But I want to go back.3:16 Back to that room in New York City in 1997.3:20 Because what happened between Garry Kasparov and that machine, Deep Blue...3:26 that wasn't just a chess match.3:28 We can see that now.3:29 It was a prologue for the world we are living in at this very moment.3:35 To really get it, you have to know that this wasn't their first meeting.3:40 In 1996, Kasparov played an earlier version of Deep Blue and beat it, pretty handily.3:47 He was confident.3:48 He was the king.3:49 He understood the soul of chess, its beauty, its psychology.3:54 A computer, he argued, was just a calculator.3:57 It could process millions of moves, sure, but it couldn't think.4:02 It couldn't feel the flow of the game.4:05 Then came the rematch in 1997.4:07 And something was different.4:10 The machine was stronger, faster.4:12 But that wasn't the scary part.4:15 The scary part was that it was...4:17 weird.4:18 In game two, Deep Blue made a move that was so counterintuitive, so...4:23 un-computer-like...4:24 that it completely unnerved Kasparov.4:27 He was convinced there was a human grandmaster secretly guiding the machine.4:33 He couldn't believe a computer would make such a sophisticated, almost...4:39 human sacrifice.4:40 It turns out, it was probably a bug.4:43 A glitch.4:43 The computer, unable to choose a move, defaulted to a random one.4:48 But Kasparov didn't know that.4:51 He saw a ghost in the machine.4:53 He saw an intelligence that was not only powerful, but alien.4:58 It unnerved him for the rest ofr the match.5:01 That’s the key.5:02 That’s what we were all missing at the time.5:05 We saw it as Man versus Machine.5:08 A contest of intelligence.5:10 But it was really our first mainstream encounter with a different kind of intelligence.5:16 Deep Blue wasn’t playing chess like a human grandmaster.5:21 It was playing chess like a machine.5:24 It didn't care about beauty or tradition.5:27 It didn't get scared.5:28 It didn't get tired.5:30 And in the final, decisive game six, Kasparov, exhausted and psychologically tormented, made a mistake on just the seventh move.5:40 An unforced error.5:41 He basically sacrificed a piece for nothing.5:44 And the machine just...5:46 squeezed.5:47 Relentlessly.5:48 He resigned in less than an hour.5:50 It was a slaughter.5:52 Looking back now, from our world of generative AI and algorithms that shape our lives, that match wasn't about a computer becoming smart enough to beat a human.6:04 It was about a human being unable to cope with an intelligence that doesn't play by our rules.6:11 Kasparov was playing chess.6:13 Deep Blue was just solving a math problem with a board in the middle.6:19 And that, right there, is the story of the twenty-first century.6:24 And at the same time, on that same day just thirty-seven years earlier, you have a story that is the absolute opposite.6:33 It’s not about inhuman logic.6:35 It’s about a profoundly human mission.6:38 The capture of Adolf Eichmann.6:40 By 1960, Eichmann was a footnote for most of the world.6:44 He was one of the main organizers of the Holocaust—the man who managed the logistics of genocide, the timetables for the trains to Auschwitz.6:55 After the war, he vanished.6:57 He used a network of sympathizers to escape to Argentina, got a new identity—Ricardo Klement—and was living a quiet, working-class life, working at a Mercedes-Benz factory.7:10 But some people don't forget.7:13 The Israeli intelligence agency, the Mossad, never stopped looking.7:18 The trail was cold for years.7:20 Then, a critical piece of information came from a man named Lothar Hermann, a German Jewish survivor living in Argentina whose daughter had unknowingly dated Eichmann's son.7:33 The son had bragged about his father's true identity.7:37 Think about that.7:39 The arrogance.7:40 The past never stays buried.7:42 The Mossad put together a team.7:44 They flew to Buenos Aires, set up surveillance.7:48 They had to be one hundred percent sure.7:51 They matched his ear from an old SS photo.7:54 They watched his daily routine.7:57 And on the evening of May eleventh, 1960, as Eichmann was walking home from the bus stop, a car pulled over.8:05 The agents grabbed him, wrestled him into the car, and muffled his screams.8:11 They held him in a safe house for nine days, then drugged him, dressed him in a flight attendant's uniform, and smuggled him onto an El Al flight back to Israel.8:23 It was an act of breathtaking audacity.8:26 An illegal kidnapping on foreign soil.8:29 But it was also a profound statement.8:32 It was a nation of survivors reaching across the globe to hold a man accountable for crimes against humanity.8:40 His trial in Jerusalem was televised.8:43 It was the first time many people, including many Israelis, heard the full, horrifying details of the Holocaust directly from the mouths of the survivors.8:55 It wasn't about revenge.8:56 It was about memory.8:58 It was about establishing a record for history, a record that could never be denied.9:04 So you have these two moments, both from May eleventh.9:09 One is the dawn of an alien intelligence that challenges our place in the universe.9:15 The other is an act of profoundly human will, reaching back into the darkest chapter of history to demand justice.9:24 One is about the future rushing toward us, the other is about the past refusing to let go.9:31 And in between, you have the founding of the Oscars, our attempt to create our own myths.9:37 You have the creation of Minnesota, our attempt to tame a continent.9:43 Each May eleventh is a snapshot of the human project in all its glory and its horror.9:49 We build things, we create stories, we seek justice for unimaginable crimes, and all the while, we invent new minds that may one day replace us.10:00 It’s all happening at once.10:02 It’s always all happening at once.10:05 History isn't a straight line.10:07 It's a messy, chaotic, beautiful, and terrible tangle.10:11 And looking at a single day like this one shows you the threads.10:16 The threads of justice, of creation, of intellect, and of memory.10:21 Our job isn't to untangle them.10:24 It's to see how they're all connected.
