Tucker Carlson / Vladimir Putin Interview

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Curious as to whether anyone has watched it yet.

I'm a bit over 1:40:00 in. My take so far - Putin's making a lot of explicit / positive claims that can be responded to at length, both with respect to the status of Ukraine as it pertains to Russia and diplomatic blow-ups from the US and allies side.

Where I think it will get interesting is the commentary afterward. I've got Konstantin and Francis (Triggernometry) queued up and I'll watch over the next few days to see if any others come up.

It feels like it was a weighty interview, at least in terms of zeitgeist. It'll be interesting to see if this either indirectly ends up being one small step of many to de-escalation in the region or whether it ends up in a much deeper and more extended conversation about Russia's situation and what they'd need to do in order to redeem relations with the west.

The interview:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fOCWBhuDdDo

yes, i know, some 166M on X, almost 10M on yt viewers
funny how they scheduled a surprise biden-presser at the same time
as well as summoning hillary out of the woodwork

curiously....

Not really interested in watching the whole thing.

Have seen a few clips. Seems like Carlson didn't really know what he was getting into - just encountered an Eastern European grandfather who liked telling long rambling stories, when he was expecting a Western politician who wanted to speak very carefully. Some hilarious moments like Carlson asking Putin if he sees God's hand in the beauty of the world and Putin just saying "not really, no".

Not much chance of anything greater coming from this. Russia isn't interested in de-escalating, they're interested in undermining Western (especially American) support for Ukraine. If they wanted to de-escalate, they wouldn't arrange for Putin to be interviewed by a clown - in fact I don't think arranging an interview even with a credible, rigorous interviewer would do anything to help with that, there are so many other steps they could take (like, you know, pulling out of the war they started). We didn't learn anything about Putin that we didn't already know, Russia's been pumping out propaganda with the same message for years now.

^
This.

Watching Bozo interview John Gotti for nearly two hours seems like a waste of time for most of us.

But if Travern and Tech wanna "watch it so we dont have to" and report on any highlights...go right ahead!

It would have been easier to "interview" Donald Trump; he is probably in lock-step with Putin. I'm sorry about that; Trump would have to clear it with Putin first before he said anything so he might as well go to the source.

I think it's just as helpful if this interview outs him as a liar. Point being it's there for open examination and those who'd want to cling to the illusion that he's better than our leadership can have their illusions dashed (at least those who are reachable).

I'm mostly interested in these kinds of things to see what downstream effects they have if any. Pretty much anything I don't see often or seems like an anomaly catches my interest for similar reasons.

Here's a follow-up, Tucker Carlson being interviewed about his interview with Putin. It's pretty much what I thought - that Tucker wanted to bring people something not predigested / pre-masticated by editorial boards and advertisers but something that better reflected reality. He gets into Biden, his advisors, Kamala Harris inviting Zelenski into NATO while Russian troops were on their boarder, and the myopia he sees in DC policy wonks which in a weird way he describes as being stuck in the model that Hitler and Chamberlain set and doesn't take internal and regional pressures seriously enough as a separate matter.

In this interview Putin cited Poland as the cause of WWII because they didn't give in to Hitler's territorial demands.

The overall gist of the above interview was to talk about different roads to peace and it sounds like we could say 'Get out of Ukraine and we'll set a firm treaty as to who can or can't join NATO' and set a firm treaty with various BRICS nations signing off as spectators, or that at least could be a significant part of the negotiation.

I'd agree that we should not appease the guy but should see if its possible to stop the current trajectory by diplomatic means which don't involve ceding a ton of Ukrainian territory, better yet any.

I mean, I don't think Carlson is wrong to attempt to interview Putin (although I don't think he's as suited to the task as someone like Andrew Neil would have been). But Putin hasn't been shy about expressing these views. My suspicion is that anyone interested enough to watch the interview will likely have heard the same arguments already, and come to conclusions about them.

I think the additional use, aside from people who hadn't gone through the lengths you mentioned above to understand the situation may have their curiosity perked by the interview. There's also the issue where - for as much as I get why propaganda happens, ie. a lot of people are slow, you really don't want your society's brightest or even above-mid to be holding cartoon caricatures of national opponents - largely because you won't take them seriously enough and that'll quite often bleed into really bad foreign policy choices when what we have for policy makers is increasingly including monetary elites rather than performance elites - ie. the former being the same people who were filled up with the same propaganda we use to instruct those who can't think for themselves (and scary enough - that might include many policy makers at this point).

This is where 'ends justifies the means' thinking bothers me - people tend not to manage the side-effects of propaganda and the like, they seem to just let it go and prefer to pretend that the side-effects aren't there. I feel like the world's getting too complicated, a level of geopolitical complexity that we probably haven't seen since before the start of Communism vs. Capitalism (end of the 19th century, early 20th) or John Gray's 'return to normal history', for strict black-hat vs. white-hat thinking or Christian good vs. evil thinking in media narratives. I'm not even sure those things were great before, maybe it was a convenient frame during the cold war but it's not where we're at and those sorts of narratives will make us dumber, and by making us dumber the outcomes will likely be dumber as well.

I guess I'm just not sure that people who (understandably) have avoided thinking about the issue will now pay attention to a long-form interview. Maybe I'm underestimating Carlson's appeal.

I don't think there's a Russia / Ukraine interest vs. disinterest gene that sets a maximum number of people who'll be interested or assures that 100% of people who will be interested became interested in March 2022. Some people had natural curiosity about the conflict because they already cared about world events, others didn't, still others will have had enough things happen in the past few years where they may not have been interested before but became interested. As typically self-absorbed as most people are I'd actually anticipate that more people will only care about the conflict if it directly impacts them in some way - so that would probably be more people getting interested over time.

I also don't think there needs to be anything 'special' about Tucker Carlson. The only thing he brings is a large audience and a lot of people who've heard of him. Otherwise if Carlson's politics didn't smash the interview into Fox News box or into a Republican propaganda piece - ie. if there's anything unpasteurized media-wise people will still be able to make their down decisions and it wouldn't matter whether it was Tucker Carlson, Glenn Beck, Don Lemon, Matt Lauer, Rachael Maddow, etc.. who gave the interview in that case. Some of those people obviously would never have done this interview so that probably selects more for a Carlson, a Beck, etc. but I think the point still stands.

Kids, this is what we call foreshadowing. WW3 will start when Poland refuses to give in to Putin's territorial demands.

IMHO he won't take Ukraine let alone Poland.