In this installment, Dan and Jordan discuss Tucker Carlson's weird new interview with Putin, where Tucker gets an extended history lesson, gets sassed a few times, and then tries to free an imprisoned journalist.
| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
|
unidentified
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I'm sick of them posing as if they're the good guys, saying we are the bad guys. | |
| Knowledge fight. | ||
|
unidentified
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Dan and Jordan. | |
| Knowledge fight. | ||
| I need money. | ||
| Andy in Kansas. | ||
| Andy in Kansas. | ||
| Stop it. | ||
| Andy in Kansas. | ||
| Andy in Kansas. | ||
| It's time to pray. | ||
| Andy in Kansas, you're on the air. | ||
| Thanks for holding. | ||
|
unidentified
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I love you. | |
| Hey, everybody! | ||
| I'm Jordan. | ||
| We're a couple dudes like to sit around worship at the altar of Selene and talk a little bit about Alex Jones. | ||
| Oh, indeed we are. | ||
| Jordan. | ||
| I have a quick question for you today. | ||
| What's up? | ||
| What's your bright spot? | ||
| I think our bright spot today is the same. | ||
| I think so as well. | ||
| It is your hypingness. | ||
| I have hyped, and now that hype shall come to fruition. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So you did the work on this, so I'm going to let you spill it out to the people. | ||
| As is our want, every now and again I do a slight bit. | ||
| Well, it's an awesome delegation of labor in many aspects. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| So we are going to do live shows. | ||
| What? | ||
| We're going on tour-ish. | ||
| Many people have asked. | ||
| They have. | ||
| Why did you go to Scotland and London? | ||
|
unidentified
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Before doing any shows on the U.S. Well, except for Milwaukee. | |
| Except for Milwaukee. | ||
| Because we are who we are. | ||
| And I thought it would be funny, and I thought you'd get your ass kicked in Scotland. | ||
| It was funny, and I did not. | ||
| It was a perfect plan that the Scots fucked up by not beating you up. | ||
| It was the ultimate time for my comeuppance. | ||
| But now that we are going to Boston... | ||
| Right. | ||
| I think there are plenty of people who could kick my ass there. | ||
| That is true. | ||
| So we can talk a little bit about the tour dates. | ||
|
unidentified
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Absolutely. | |
| Tickets will be available on Wednesday. | ||
| We'll post the links to all the tickets. | ||
| You betcha. | ||
| But yeah, so we're going to start in Boston. | ||
| Let's go through... | ||
| This to me is actually... | ||
| I mentioned this to you. | ||
| This is probably an emotional homecoming for me. | ||
| I was really excited for this one, yeah. | ||
| If you ever thought there's a chance I might cry on stage... | ||
| This Boston show is the possible time that's going to happen. | ||
|
unidentified
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Well, there it is. | |
| Because it's in Boston, which I grew up in. | ||
| I grew up in Boston and Cambridge for a number of years before we moved to Hawaii. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yep. | |
| And we're performing at the Middle East. | ||
| We're performing at the Mideast, their Sonya venue. | ||
| This is the venue where the Bostones made their live album. | ||
| This is where Mr. Lif made his live album. | ||
| Many other people. | ||
| But those two are big, huge things that I was in. | ||
| It's so cool. | ||
| Live from the Middle East. | ||
| And you're going to have knowledge fight live from the Middle East. | ||
| Yeah, it is kind of amazing to think about. | ||
| It really is sometimes like when I stop and I go, you know, 15 years ago I was like, man, I hope I'm on stage with a crowd of people. | ||
| And then it is. | ||
| You told me. | ||
| 15 years ago, listening to Mr. Lif's live album from the Middle East, one day you will play at the same venue. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Never would have believed it. | ||
| Never could have imagined. | ||
| Yeah, so we'll be doing that May 14th. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Then on the 16th of May, all of this will be in May, we will be at the Ram's Head in Baltimore. | ||
| Right. | ||
| The 17th will be at the Little Field in New York City. | ||
| New York City. | ||
| I don't know why, but I cannot not do that. | ||
|
unidentified
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Sure. | |
| Because you love paste picante sauce. | ||
| I do, I do. | ||
| Then on the 19th, we'll be the Underground Arts in Philly. | ||
| Philly! | ||
| Philly, where yet? | ||
| Then we're doing a... | ||
| I have one goal in this Philly show. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And that is, I would like to find Ed from the Real World Road Rules Challenge. | ||
| I would like to as well. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yes. | |
| Somewhere in Philly. | ||
| This smiley weirdo. | ||
| Oh man, when he left and they had James or somebody else explain the challenge, not as fun. | ||
| Ed fucking nailed it and loved it. | ||
| Yeah, he brought life. | ||
| Every time he was like, alright, so what we gotta do is we gotta put the thing together with the other thing and then everybody puts it all in the face. | ||
| What joy. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| Amazing. | ||
| Some people think of Philly and they think of hostile audiences and Bill Burr's set. | ||
| Batteries. | ||
| I think of Ed. | ||
| And Santa Claus. | ||
| Then on the 21st, we're switching up. | ||
| We're headed to Toronto. | ||
| What? | ||
| International. | ||
| Yeah, for some reason. | ||
| Well, I think that we have some Canadian listeners. | ||
| I would have liked to do a couple more dates in Canada, but travel-wise, it's kind of... | ||
| Logistical nightmare. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But, you know, doing one there is nice because then they don't have to cross the border. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| If there are people who are in Toronto or around there, we wanted to accommodate as best we could. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's going to be... | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| And then, finally, we will be coming back. | ||
| Because, and mainly because people just assumed we wouldn't do it, we're going back to the X-Ray Arcade in Milwaukee. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| We're closing up the tour in Milwaukee. | ||
| Going back to the scene of the crime. | ||
| It is a delight. | ||
| Yeah, people at the X-Ray Arcade were so great, so wonderful, and the shows were so great that I just thought, fuck it. | ||
| What a great, yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| So, the only other thing about this is people are pretty convinced that we are very popular. | ||
| I don't know that for sure. | ||
| And then the problem is our last shows have all sold out, right? | ||
| So I scaled up in terms of size of venue. | ||
| That might be a mistake. | ||
| The problem that I have is, here's what I'd like. | ||
| Here's what I'd like. | ||
| I would like for every one of these to be like, oh, we were five tickets away from a sellout. | ||
| Because then I can be like, that is the exact size of the venue we need to plan for, we need to do that whole thing. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I don't want them to sell out, and then it's like only five people would have made it. | ||
| Because then the next time I'm like, fuck the venue! | ||
| You know what I'm saying? | ||
| It is true that when things sell out really fast, it's almost impossible to gauge the upper limits of how many people might come to something. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| But yeah, that's a scary proposition. | ||
| And, you know, I don't necessarily... | ||
| I'm nervous? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's always a nerve-wracking affair, especially because, you know, like, we just do this ourselves. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And... | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Yeah, it is like... | ||
| Listen, we don't need to sell out everything. | ||
| We don't need to make a ton of... | ||
| Speak for yourself. | ||
| I don't need to make a ton of money, but I do need that room filled. | ||
| I would like to sell out. | ||
| But, mainly, I just don't want to feel like it was dumb. | ||
| I don't want to feel embarrassed about that. | ||
| Like, oh, we're 80% full? | ||
| That's great. | ||
| That's still a good show. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| But I don't want to be like, oh, well, we should have gone half the size. | ||
| That's not good. | ||
| Because then we've got to reschedule to half the size venue. | ||
| Which wouldn't be the worst thing in the world. | ||
| And there could be worse things. | ||
| I'm excited to see what the turnout and roundabout... | ||
| And what about? | ||
| Yeah, I think it's going to be good. | ||
| I'm excited. | ||
| I think everybody's going to be overjoyed, and I think it's going to be great. | ||
| So look for tickets on Wednesday, but get hyped now. | ||
| So the hype has been paid off. | ||
| We've got double hype. | ||
| We got one hype from last week, we got the announced hype from this week, and then Wednesday we're going to have the sales hype. | ||
| We are basically marketing experts. | ||
| We were born to hype. | ||
| So Jordan, today, as hyped, we are going to talk about the Tucker Carlson, Vladimir Putin interview. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| And I gotta say... | ||
| What? | ||
| I think I fucked up. | ||
| Why is that? | ||
| Well, I didn't account for things going bad. | ||
| Do you mean the interview went bad? | ||
| Yeah, I would say so. | ||
| I'm sorry? | ||
| Not bad in the fun way where, like, Putin kills Tucker. | ||
| Well, that would be pretty good. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right? | |
| Meet interview? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But it doesn't go well. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, I was assuming they'd have their shit together. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| And there would be a coherent presentation that worked for both of their interests. | ||
| Wouldn't that be the idea, right? | ||
| And it really doesn't. | ||
| I'm sorry. | ||
| Did Putin go in there and wing it? | ||
| No. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| So he was going in there fully prepared. | ||
| But I think he was prepared differently. | ||
| He was prepared for not Tucker Carlson. | ||
| I think that they were across purposes a little bit. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And it has a dissonance. | ||
| Dude, there's a propaganda line that Tucker is working towards. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And then there's a propaganda line that Putin is putting forth. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And they're not at odds with each other necessarily. | ||
|
unidentified
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They're parallel. | |
| They're incompatible. | ||
| That's fascinating. | ||
| Not incompatible in a precluding way, but they don't mix. | ||
| Right, right, right, right. | ||
| And it leads to an interview that is mostly Putin holding court and saying nonsense. | ||
| That sounds right. | ||
| And insulting Tucker at various points. | ||
| That's great. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That makes me feel great. | ||
| And then Tucker not really doing much of anything. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Until the end. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Where things take a drastic tonal shift. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| Yeah. | ||
| How do you interview fucking Hitler and drop the ball? | ||
| Well, it's... | ||
| Like, in either direction. | ||
| Do you know what I mean? | ||
| That is an interesting question, and it's something that I don't really know how to process fully. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because... | ||
| The concept of this was the biggest deal. | ||
| It's horrifying, the idea of it. | ||
| And when it's announced that Tucker's doing this, it feels that way. | ||
| Yeah, it should be. | ||
| And then, after it happened and it came out, I really do think there's a bit of deflation. | ||
| Everybody kind of ignored it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, which is even weirder. | |
| But having watched it, I understand. | ||
| I get it. | ||
| I get the deflation, because the people that would wish to push this really hard, I think didn't get what they wanted out of it, and it doesn't really work. | ||
| Amazing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| See, because that's kind of my feeling on this, is like... | ||
|
unidentified
|
I mean... | |
| I don't know if anything similar to this has really ever happened. | ||
| I struggle to find it analog. | ||
| You know what I'm saying? | ||
| Like, I mean, and we can describe, you know, similarities in terms of an interview with George W. during, you know, the height of our horrors, but even then, it's like, he's technically a civilian. | ||
| You know, he's not the dictator of the United States. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| You know, and you can also talk to like 50 other people. | ||
| But, man, this is nuts. | ||
| But it would kind of... | ||
| But it's still just not. | ||
| It's still just not. | ||
| Because you also have to ask, like, is it a propagandist for another nation interviewing Bush? | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| There might have been the case for, like, some British... | ||
| Sure, sure. | ||
| Well, yeah, that definitely counts. | ||
| But it's just not the same. | ||
| No, it's very hard to put your finger precisely on, like, uh... | ||
| I'll tell you why. | ||
| Bush never sent Kerry to a fucking Soviet goddamn work re-education camp. | ||
| That doesn't... | ||
| That helps. | ||
| That doesn't come up. | ||
| No, no, no, no. | ||
| That's strange. | ||
| Yeah, but... | ||
| I'm gonna say... | ||
| And then they drop the ball. | ||
| But I'm gonna say that... | ||
| At the end... | ||
| Tucker does shock me. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| He does ask a hard question. | ||
| Fascinating. | ||
| And that was something that I was not prepared for emotionally, but we will deal with in due time. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| So we'll get down to business on this whole interview, but before we do, let's say hello to some new wonks. | ||
| Oh, that's a great idea. | ||
| So first, impoverished white bread. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| You're now a policy wonk. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
| Thank you very much! | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
| Next, Alex Jones appeared in my dream last night, and I'll never forgive you. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| You're now a policy wonk. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
| Thank you very much! | ||
| And accepted. | ||
| Agreed. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Next, policy wonk and the chocolate bucket of poop. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| You're now a policy wonk. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Next, shout out to anyone listening to this who still plays Titanfall 2. See you on the Frontier Pilots. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| You're now a policy wonk. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
| Thank you very much! | ||
| Next, I wonk, you wonk, he, she, we wonk, wonkology, the study of wonks. | ||
| It's first grade. | ||
| Alex, thank you so much. | ||
| You're now a policy wonk. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| And we have a technocrat in the mix, Jordan, so thank you so much, too. | ||
| I've been listening to your show nonstop and can no longer sleep sober. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| You are now a technocrat. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
| I don't like to hype things, but people are designed to hype. | ||
| I am going to paint once a week on air, and I'm going to let callers call in. | ||
| We'll also take emails and request what you want to see me paint. | ||
| One, two, three, Matt Damon! | ||
|
unidentified
|
Matt Damon! | |
| There you go. | ||
| Party time. | ||
| I'm going to get in your guts. | ||
| And the Nazis, in my view, were thugs that shook people down and did a lot of really bad things. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But they did good things, too. | |
| We're going to stop dissing the Nazis all the time. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I'm thinking about doing some shows, too, where I run the whole thing myself, just hit record, and sit in the dark with just a few candles and candlelight. | ||
| And talk about the nature of the world universe. | ||
| I mean, you know, a big old juicy ribeye, folks, is as good as, you know, sex with your wife. | ||
| I mean, let's just get down to reality here. | ||
|
unidentified
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I'm gonna go Donkey Kong, King Kong crazy in about 45 days. | |
| America sucks. | ||
| We're all racist. | ||
| It's over. | ||
| Doesn't mean I want to go live, say, in some places in Asia where you get off the plane over there, folks. | ||
| They karate chop you. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| Yeah, that's a live show clip right there. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| Serious stuff. | ||
| Is that subconsciously motivated? | ||
| Or was that part of my subconscious in the creation of the new Technocrat drop? | ||
| That's an interesting point. | ||
| Was there a subconscious drive to hype? | ||
| I like it. | ||
| I mean, it opens with hype. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| We start this episode with, I would say, anti-hype. | ||
| The interview that Tucker puts out. | ||
| It begins with a disclaimer that Tucker is putting forth. | ||
| And so here is him delivering that. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| The following is an interview with the president of Russia, Vladimir Putin, shot February 6, 2024 at about 7 p.m. in the building behind us, which is, of course, the Kremlin. | ||
| The interview, as you will see if you watch it, is primarily about the war in progress, the war in Ukraine, how it started, what's happening, and most presently, how it might end. | ||
| One note before you watch. | ||
| At the beginning of the interview, we asked the most obvious question, which is, why did you do this? | ||
| Did you feel a threat, an imminent physical threat? | ||
| And that's your justification. | ||
| And the answer we got shocked us. | ||
| Putin went on for a very long time, about half an hour, about the history of Russia going back to the 8th century. | ||
| And honestly, he thought this was a filibustering technique and found it annoying and interrupted him several times. | ||
| And he responded he was annoyed. | ||
| But we concluded in the end, for what it's worth, that it was not a filibustering technique. | ||
| There was no time limit on the interview. | ||
| We ended it after more than two hours. | ||
| Instead, what you're about to see seemed to us sincere, whether you agree with it or not. | ||
| Vladimir Putin believes that Russia has a historic claim to parts of Western Ukraine. | ||
| So our opinion would be to view it in that light as a sincere expression of what he thinks. | ||
| And with that, here it is. | ||
| So that disclaimer right there is pretty damning in terms of the interview and kind of tells you what you need to know. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| There's three really important things that I think jump out immediately. | ||
| First, Tucker is worried that his audience is going to be super bored by Putin lecturing them about Russian history. | ||
| It is boring. | ||
| They've built him up as this championing anti-woke icon, so they want to hear him do some juicy dunks on cancel culture and LGBTQ folk, not a dissection of history. | ||
| Second, you see how unprepared Tucker was for this interview and how poorly he handled it. | ||
| Which is something he's trying to get out in front of. | ||
| Putin went off on a rant about history that Tucker decided might be a stalling tactic, so he decided to push past it, which annoyed Putin. | ||
| Tucker is trying to preemptively explain a bit of frostiness between him and the subject, which is notable. | ||
| I'm going to throw this out at you. | ||
| We can all take this as you might, but I think it has been a long time, in fact, since Putin has been interrupted at all. | ||
| Well, I mean, he handles it well in terms of, like, he doesn't kill Tucker. | ||
| I mean, yeah, that's kind of the feeling that I would get of him just being like, wait, what are you doing to me right now? | ||
| And I think that because this is being done through a translator, I think there are some difficulties in terms of pacing. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| And so when you interrupt a person and they need a translator, it is... | ||
| Tough. | ||
| Especially if that translator is, again, used to never interrupting god kings. | ||
| So the third thing you notice, you see that Tucker is having to come to the truth, that Putin believes that Ukraine is part of Russia. | ||
| Which is not good. | ||
| And that he should be able to seize it. | ||
| He and the folks in his media sphere have spent years making excuses for and rationalizing Putin's invasion as secretly being about the things they want it to be about. | ||
| Things that serve their underlying narrative. | ||
| He's not conquering anything. | ||
| The whole time they've denied that Putin was motivated by wanting to seize this land because recognizing that means you have to be opposed to his actions and have to realize that Ukraine isn't the only place that he thinks is rightly Russia. | ||
| But now Tucker has gone to see this man himself and has heard directly from him that he believes Russia has the right to Ukraine. | ||
| And Tucker's saying Western Ukraine, no less. | ||
| And Tucker's reaction is kind of to feign confusion. | ||
| In the real world, he needs to fake that confusion because the alternative is to present this interview by saying, guys, we were wrong about Putin. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| I know it felt like we could use him to push our social bigot narratives and project our hopes for a strongman leader onto, but he is not who we pretended to be. | ||
| That guy's nuts. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Tucker would never do that, primarily because the audience he's cultivated is largely pro-Putin, and something minor like wanting to take over a neighboring country, it's not going to shake that. | ||
| So, it's so... | ||
| I don't know, the framing of this disclaimer is so strange to me. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, I understand bookending something with a, hey, Tucker Carlson here, this is the interview that I did with Putin, hope you enjoy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Being like, hey, I thought he was fucking with us when he started talking about 900s. | ||
| That is truly insane. | ||
| Yeah, that is, it is like, I whiffed this one, guys, and here's why. | ||
| I just... | ||
| I guess it makes way more sense in two ways. | ||
| It makes sense in two ways. | ||
| One, Tucker believes himself to be able to straddle the line between bullshit and reality. | ||
| And if you live too long in bullshit, you're not. | ||
| You're just not. | ||
| You're eventually going to buy your own bullshit at least enough that you will believe you're right about some things that you are absolutely not right about. | ||
| So there are some things I'm sure he believed about Putin that he was like... | ||
| Oh, fuck, I lied to myself. | ||
| I got tricked the same way I tricked bullshit people. | ||
| That might well be, but I think an alternative explanation can easily be that you have built up this image of this guy, and you want him to comport to it, and he doesn't. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And he will not. | ||
| And then my next thought is, what did you think he was going to say? | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Like, when Tucker is preparing for this interview... | ||
| What did you think Putin was going to say? | ||
| Did you think he was going to give you something new? | ||
| Did you think he was going to be like, alright, here's the stuff I won't tell my people. | ||
| Like, what are you talking about? | ||
| Listen, Disney is too woke. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I mean, he's... | |
| I know! | ||
| I know! | ||
| Like, this is a dude who has created an alternate reality almost individually. | ||
| Which is enforced on others. | ||
| Which is enforced upon an entire country. | ||
| And you think you're going to challenge that dude? | ||
| That's insane. | ||
| Right. | ||
| He's going to come on and just complain about Tucker's preferred culture warship. | ||
| It's so America-centric. | ||
| AOC is bad for... | ||
| What are you talking about? | ||
| I really enjoyed your interview with Cat Turd. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| What? | ||
| I listen to your show all the time. | ||
| You and Alex Jones. | ||
| So, Tucker begins, and he has, as promised, the first question. | ||
| Why'd you launch this? | ||
| Why'd you do it? | ||
| Bad off the jump. | ||
| Here we go. | ||
| Mr. President, thank you. | ||
| On February 22nd, 2022, you addressed your country in a nationwide address when the conflict in Ukraine started. | ||
| And you said that you were acting because you had come to the conclusion that the United States, through NATO, might initiate a, quote, surprise attack on our country. | ||
| And to American ears, that sounds paranoid. | ||
| Tell us why you believe the United States might strike Russia out of the blue. | ||
| How did you conclude that? | ||
| It's not that America, the United States, was going to launch a surprise strike on Russia. | ||
| I didn't say that. | ||
| Are we having a talk show or a serious conversation? | ||
| Here's the quote. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| It's a formidable serious talk. | ||
| Because your basic education is in history, as far as I understand. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| So if you don't mind, I will take only 30 seconds or one minute to give you a short reference to history for giving you a little historical background. | ||
| Please. | ||
| Goes a little longer than a minute. | ||
| Yeah, I believe that. | ||
| So in fairness to Tucker, Putin did say all that kind of stuff in the speech rationalizing invading Ukraine. | ||
| Yeah, of course. | ||
| He said, quote, I would like to additionally emphasize the following. | ||
| Focused on their own goals, the leading NATO countries are supporting the far-right nationalists and neo-Nazis in Ukraine. | ||
| Those who will never forgive the people of Crimea and Sevastopol for freely making Totally freely. | ||
| bring war to Crimea just as they've done in Donbass. | ||
| If we look at the sequence of events and incoming reports, the showdown between Russia and these forces cannot be avoided. | ||
| It's only a matter of they are ready and waiting for the right moment. | ||
| Right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm not sure exactly what quote Tucker is referring to, but I wouldn't say that he's off on the premise of this question. | |
| But you see how Putin is kind of immediately a dick to him? | ||
| That's not what Tucker was hoping for, I am sure. | ||
| I just find it so fascinating, the idea of, like, that was true then. | ||
| You understand who I am. | ||
| I'm Putin. | ||
| Whatever I said then means nothing. | ||
| That was true then. | ||
| Now I'm telling you what's true. | ||
| And what is true now is also what's true then. | ||
| It doesn't matter what happened. | ||
| That doesn't mean anything. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| How are you insane? | ||
| Tucker is a fascinating... | ||
| This is a stupid idea. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But you see this immediate assertion of dominance. | ||
| I'm literally... | ||
| The fucking dictator of Russia. | ||
| Who do you think you are? | ||
| First of all, the temerity to say this is going to take 30 seconds to a minute. | ||
| Amazing. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| But if you're engaging in an interview, you really don't want the person to be like, we being serious here? | ||
| Is it serious or is this like one of your shows? | ||
| That is so delegitimizing just from the jump. | ||
| Yep, it is. | ||
| If you're Tucker, you have to recognize at that moment. | ||
| Uh-oh. | ||
| Yeah, you... | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I would... | ||
| One, I would never be here. | ||
| Ever. | ||
| No. | ||
|
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|
But... | |
| No, I can't even find any... | ||
| No, my actions in this moment would be attack Putin with a knife, I guess. | ||
| That's all I've got. | ||
| And I think that, having said that, you probably will never be granted that interview. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| And I would be killed long before I ever even got close. | ||
| So, we get into this minute-long discussion of Russian history. | ||
| Yeah, just one minute. | ||
| Let's look where our relationship with Ukraine started. | ||
| Where did Ukraine come from? | ||
| The Russian state started gathering itself as a centralized statehood and it is considered to be the year of the establishment of the Russian state in 862 when the townspeople of Novgorod invited a Varangian prince Rurik from Scandinavia to reign. | ||
| In 1862, Russia celebrated the 1000th anniversary of its statehood. | ||
| And in Novgorod, there is a memorial dedicated to the 1000th anniversary of the country. | ||
| In 882, Rurik's successor, Prince Oleg, who was actually playing the role of regent at Rurik's young son... | ||
|
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|
Excuse me, Supreme Leader, I'm gonna stop you right there. | |
| He ousted two brothers who apparently had once been members of Rurik's squad. | ||
| So Russia began to develop the two centers of power, Kiev and Novgorod. | ||
| So this is not the kind of interview Tucker wanted to have, and I'll go ahead and throw myself on that pile, too. | ||
| This is not the kind of interview I particularly wanted. | ||
| I think it can be very interesting to know about history and understand the forces that shaped how we got from there to here, and even people's... | ||
| Maybe iffy interpretations of some things. | ||
| But I don't care if Ukraine was part of Russia in the 800s. | ||
| That doesn't mean you get to take it now. | ||
| We aren't going to necessarily go blow for blow as Putin lays out his version of the history of Russia because there's an easy way to encapsulate the point he's making. | ||
| And Tucker said it himself in the disclaimer. | ||
| He thought this was a stalling tactic, so he's not in any position to engage with anything Putin is saying about history. | ||
| It's a long, intellectualized pitch for his form of Russian nationalism, which essentially includes claims to areas that were formerly part of Russia. | ||
| Right. | ||
|
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|
And if this is enough of a part of his... | |
| It might be wise to consider what other parts of the world that were formerly Russian. | ||
| He feels the same way about. | ||
| Might be notable. | ||
| It's a pretty big nation at some points. | ||
| Various points. | ||
| Very large. | ||
| From 864 on. | ||
| That was the full thousand years that he just kind of... | ||
| It's true. | ||
| ...knocked over there. | ||
| A lot of stuff happened in that thousand years. | ||
| You know, a lot of stuff was and was not part of Russia during that thousand years. | ||
| At different points. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Change. | ||
| So here's the thing, though. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He has documents. | ||
| Oh, wow! | ||
| You sold me! | ||
| This was what I would describe as a very bizarre moment in the diatribe about history. | ||
| And in 1654, even a bit earlier, the people who were in control of the authority over that part of the Russian lands addressed Warsaw. | ||
| I repeat, demanding that they send them to rulers of Russian origin and Orthodox faith. | ||
| When Warsaw did not answer them and in fact rejected their demands, they turned to Moscow so that Moscow took them away. | ||
| So that you don't think that I'm inventing things? | ||
| Don't care! | ||
| I'll give you these documents. | ||
| Well, it doesn't sound like you're inventing it. | ||
| I'm not sure why it's relevant to what happened two years ago. | ||
| But still, these are documents from the archives, copies. | ||
| Here are the letters from Bogdan Khmelnytsky, the man who then controlled the power in this part of the Russian lands that is now called Ukraine. | ||
| Here, Putin is in the middle of making an argument that way back in the past, the Polish were trying to convince the people who lived in what is now Ukraine to see themselves as a distinct people from the Russians. | ||
| The people who were in power wanted Orthodox and Russian leaders in the area there in Ukraine, which is evidenced by this letter from Bogdan Helminski. | ||
| It's worth noting that Helminski was a Cossack who led a rebellion in that area, which was largely predicated on anti-Semitism. | ||
| Weird. | ||
| He wasn't just opposed to the Polish influence in that region. | ||
| He specifically believed that the Jews were behind the Polish control. | ||
|
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|
Sure. | |
| His uprising, which culminated in the Perisov agreement that made eastern Ukraine part of Russia, included the mass slaughter of tens of thousands of Jewish people. | ||
| Obviously, the point of the story in these documents here is to present an analog to the present day. | ||
| Back then, these folks wanted... | ||
| A Russian and Orthodox ruler. | ||
| They called out to Warsaw to try and get it. | ||
| They didn't get it, so they called out to Moscow, and Moscow fulfilled their desire. | ||
| Today, the people in the Donbass region, and apparently all of Ukraine, want to be part of Russia and call out for Moscow's protection. | ||
| This is supposed to be a historical antecedent to illustrate that Putin's actions in the present day are no different than what's always been done through Russian history. | ||
| Areas around the fringes become decadent. | ||
| Their people call out for Moscow to install Russia. | ||
| Righteous leaders, and Moscow begrudgingly, in heavy quotes, comes to their aid. | ||
| It's strange that Tucker seems to not get this dynamic of what Putin is saying. | ||
| It feels like he would have to be pretty checked out or really convinced that there was no meaning to what Putin was saying for this context to slip by him. | ||
| But here we are. | ||
| I think he really just wanted to pile around and complain about Bud Light cans with Putin, and this is where we've ended up. | ||
| Like, I get it to be surprised by Putin going into a lengthy treaty. | ||
| Sure, sure. | ||
| But to imagine he's doing it for no reason is silly. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There is a point that he's trying to make, and the premise of the question was, why did you invade Ukraine? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| This historical story is an explanation of a rationale for it. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| And Tucker engaging with it as if it's a filibustering technique is strange. | ||
| I don't think it's strange. | ||
| It makes perfect sense. | ||
| Well... | ||
| Because he's Tucker, you know? | ||
| Right. | ||
| This is not something that either of them really understood the other one. | ||
| I think both of them were lying to themselves about who the other person is. | ||
| Because neither of them live in reality. | ||
| Like, they both have created their own false reality that they get to live in and they have infinite power within. | ||
| So why would they ever consider that another person doesn't live within that reality? | ||
| Or that if they don't, they should care. | ||
| I guess there is sort of a distorted relationship that comes from Tucker's engagement with Putin is largely around the, I can use him for this in my stories. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And then Putin's relationship with Tucker is probably like, I could probably use that guy. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| So there's a potential use that Putin has for Tucker, and there's a narrative use that Putin serves for Tucker, and those things aren't really the same. | ||
| In reality. | ||
| Yeah, so long as they are separate in terms of one is in Russia and one is the United States, so long as they are in separate media environments, it doesn't matter if the Putin you have created is it all related to the real one. | ||
| Nor is the same thing true for the Tucker. | ||
| Being forced to interact is a collapsing of the imagination wave. | ||
| Because here's the thing. | ||
| In Russia, it's important to remember that Putin is not going like, I'm going to do an interview with a fucking clown. | ||
| Who interviews Cat Turd. | ||
| He is saying, I'm going to do an interview with one of the most respected journalists in the United States. | ||
| That's what he's telling people. | ||
| And I'm going to disrespect you. | ||
| Absolutely! | ||
| Like, it is amazing to think that, realistically, neither of them had any idea of what they were doing. | ||
| Fascinating. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I think that that is what keeps this from being, like... | ||
| The most dangerous version of what it could be. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
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|
You know what I mean? | |
| Like, I think they both dropped the ball in such a way that makes this kind of impotent as propaganda material. | ||
| Nobody wants to watch it. | ||
| Well, I think some people have been able to rationalize with themselves of like, ha-ha, Putin brought up the... | ||
| Yeah, whatever. | ||
| Whatever it is, yeah. | ||
| You're Slav the Wise. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| Whatever the fuck. | ||
| But like, yeah, I think most people are probably like, eh. | ||
| This doesn't work for me. | ||
| This is the internet now, man. | ||
| This is the internet. | ||
| I'm not going to listen to you, of all people, explain Russian history. | ||
| So Putin has gone on, and Tucker, I think, is a little bit like, can we get to the point? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| If you believe this stuff about Ukraine, historically, then why didn't you invade earlier? | ||
|
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|
Yeah. | |
| And Putin does not appreciate the question. | ||
| May I ask you, you're making the case that Ukraine, certainly parts of Ukraine, Eastern Ukraine is, in effect, Russia has been for hundreds of years. | ||
| Why wouldn't you just take it when you became president 24 years ago? | ||
| You have nuclear weapons, they don't. | ||
| If it's actually your land, why did you wait so long? | ||
| I'll tell you. | ||
| I'm coming to that. | ||
| This briefing is coming to an end. | ||
| It might be boring, but it explains many things. | ||
| I just don't know how it's relevant. | ||
| Good. | ||
|
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|
Good. | |
| I'm so gratified that you appreciate that. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Yikes. | ||
| Tucker is real weak in this moment. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He had to basically just stammer out, I don't see how this is relevant, almost under his breath. | ||
| And I don't think he's wrong to be a little embarrassed to say that, because it's really clear how this history lesson is relevant to Putin's ambitions and motivations. | ||
| The issue is that it's not very relevant to the fantasy version of Putin that the right-wing media has built up. | ||
| They've got a million culture war-adjacent reasons that Putin is fighting off the villains in Ukraine, basically trying to save the West from godlessness and low birth rates. | ||
| And if those are the issues that you really think he's fighting about, the history of Russia from the 800s onward is not really that relevant. | ||
| Focusing on it is actually counter to the version of his motivations that you've built It's not about seizing. | ||
| People who say that that's what he's interested in are warmongers and liars who hate the West. | ||
| And yet here Putin is basically saying exactly that and defending his position with a lengthy treatise on why he's right to take territory. | ||
| Tucker's question, why didn't you do it immediately is really dumb and isn't designed to go anywhere. | ||
| Putin may have not been in a position Yeah. | ||
| And then they invaded Crimea. | ||
| The question from Tucker just seems like him wanting to throw out something to reassert some kind of control over the conversation, which he has none. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There's no control on his part. | ||
| Here's what I find fascinating. | ||
| Now I'm actually extremely interested in this interview in a way that I would never have been if it was an actual propaganda group. | ||
| Dynamically, it's bizarre. | ||
| Almost deserving of study. | ||
| And there's a lot that is coming out that is revealing assumptions that I didn't even think about. | ||
| But if you stop and you consider this conversation, you can see that the real disconnect is the disconnect between Russia and America in terms of age. | ||
| Russia wants shit back. | ||
| If you want to appeal to American colonialism, you go... | ||
| God told me to take it back in God's name. | ||
| You do manifest destiny. | ||
| But we've already taken it back. | ||
| The current state of affairs is us having about it. | ||
| No, no, I'm not talking about us doing anything. | ||
| I'm talking about for Putin to give him the propaganda coup. | ||
| You tell America, you tell Tucker Carlson, like, God said now is the time. | ||
| You just keep hitting God over and over and over again. | ||
| And Tucker can, like, wash away all the other bullshit. | ||
| But you could go for that spiritual aspect. | ||
| Or what Tucker probably wanted is there is a particularly evil deep state in place that we must now seize control over. | ||
| There's the weapon labs in Ukraine. | ||
| He wanted something that fed into those narratives that play. | ||
| And the spiritualism is also one of them. | ||
| Yeah, you can always jump from that stuff to being like, and also the deep state is controlled by society. | ||
| You know, that's what we do. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| I got attacked by a demon one time, he threw me into the ceiling. | ||
| Totally! | ||
| 100%. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| So it is fascinating because that is that type of old world colonialism of like, no, that was ours. | ||
| You can't just take it, you know? | ||
| Whereas America is like... | ||
|
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|
Just because it wasn't ours doesn't mean we can't just take it. | |
| Sure. | ||
| And I think there's an interesting analog to this mentality, too, of like, historically this was a part of our country. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| And that is that parts of your country currently historically weren't. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| So if you're obsessed with this, you should give back. | ||
| No, it is. | ||
| Take away land from you. | ||
|
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|
It is so fascinating. | |
| You don't see people doing that much. | ||
| And it is such a ridiculous idea on its face where you're like, okay, so for a thousand years it was yours. | ||
| Okay, well a thousand years before that it wasn't yours. | ||
| Which one matters more? | ||
| It doesn't. | ||
| Neither of them mean anything. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Just say you want to take control of more people to kill. | ||
|
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|
I don't know. | |
| What's wrong with you, you lunatic? | ||
| Yeah, it's a struggle to figure out what date matters. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So Tucker has an interesting question to this. | ||
| this notion that Putin is putting forth that like, you know, historically Ukraine is part of Russia. | ||
|
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|
We get it. | |
| But then there's other parts of Ukraine that were historically like parts of Hungary. | ||
| We have every reason to affirm that Ukraine is an artificial state that was shaped at Stalin's will. | ||
| Do you believe Hungary has a right to take its land back from Ukraine and that other nations have a right to go back to their 1654 borders? | ||
| I'm not sure whether they should go back to the 1654 borders. | ||
| But given Stalin's time, so-called Stalin's regime, which, as many claim, saw numerous violations of human rights and violations of the rights of other states. | ||
| What? | ||
| In this sense, you can't speak about it, but you have no right to say that they have no right to One may say that they could claim back those lands of theirs while having no right to do that. | ||
| It is at least understandable. | ||
| Have you told Viktor Orban that he can have part of Ukraine? | ||
|
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|
Never. | |
| I have never told him. | ||
| Not a single time. | ||
| That's good. | ||
| So I think that you start to get a little bit of a vibe that there's not really good answers. | ||
| Because his answer was kind of yes and no. | ||
| Well, yeah, I mean, it's a terrible, it's a petulant, whiny question. | ||
| The question is not actually meant to be answered. | ||
| The question is like, clearly you're full of shit. | ||
| You know? | ||
| Oh, can he have the 1654? | ||
| Obviously you don't care. | ||
| Nor do you want that to exist. | ||
| It's a, by your logic, the Orban can take part of it too. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| You're being an asshole, so stop it. | ||
| And he's like, well, I'm not going to tell him he can take that shit. | ||
| Why would I? | ||
| I'm crazy. | ||
| So the dynamic is interesting because that isn't necessarily what you would expect from Tucker. | ||
| And I think part of it is because Putin's being disrespectful to him and he feels his ego a little bit ruffled. | ||
|
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|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| And because he thinks that all of this is a stalling tactic. | ||
| So this isn't even meaningful conversation to begin with. | ||
| Nope. | ||
| So I think that this is kind of like, I'll just throw this out here to push back a little bit. | ||
| As opposed to it being part of a productive analysis of like, This is what you believe about Russia. | ||
| I can tell you this right now. | ||
| If this was the interview that I had with Putin, I would be checking every piece of clothing I ever had for Novichok for the rest of my fucking life. | ||
| Like, every single thing. | ||
| I don't mean to be too rude, but I think I wouldn't put it out. | ||
| No, no, no! | ||
| You can't not, though. | ||
| That's the problem. | ||
| Once you say you've got an interview with Putin, once people know you have an interview with Putin. | ||
| I might have pretended that I was going on vacation to Moscow and, like, I maybe never would have announced that I didn't interview. | ||
| I wouldn't have done that. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| This is not something you put out, but you can't not. | ||
| You're literally interviewing Putin. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It has a momentum of its own. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, Tucker tries to redirect this conversation. | ||
| Because I don't think he enjoys the historical lesson. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| And so he tries, and it doesn't work. | ||
| But many nations feel frustrated by the redrawn borders of the wars of the 20th century and wars going back a thousand years, the ones that you mentioned. | ||
| But the fact is that you didn't make this case in public until two years ago, February. | ||
| And in the case that you made, which I read today... | ||
| You explain at great length that you felt a physical threat from the West in NATO, including potentially a nuclear threat, and that's what got you to move. | ||
| Is that a fair characterization of what you said? | ||
| I understand that my long speeches probably fall outside of the genre of the interview. | ||
| That is why I asked you at the beginning. | ||
| Are we going to have a serious talk or a show? | ||
| You said a serious talk. | ||
|
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|
So bear with me, please. | |
| We're coming to the point where the Soviet Ukraine was established. | ||
| Oh, my God! | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| All right. | ||
| Okay, so you're going to kill me then. | ||
| We're just going to keep going back to what I want to talk about. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So also, Tucker is incredibly wrong there about this idea that you never made this case that Ukraine isn't even really a country. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Which is the point that Putin's putting forth. | ||
| He's been very clear in the past that he doesn't think that Ukraine is actually a country. | ||
| There's reporting on this going back years, and he famously told George W. Bush, quote, You have to understand, George, that Ukraine is not even a country. | ||
| It was at the 2008 NATO summit. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Tucker should have every reason to know that this is Putin's position and something that he said pretty regularly, so it's a meaningless question to ask him why Putin only started saying this stuff in 2022. | ||
| The premise of the question is a lie, meant to force Putin into a hollow gotcha moment. | ||
| But there is no gotcha, except in terms of Tucker's unpreparedness for the conversation. | ||
| And of course Putin talked about being under threat from NATO in the West. | ||
| That's how he made his aggressive action a situation where he was actually the victim, which is a narrative that Tucker is consistently pushed on his own. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's just not fun in the moment. | ||
| And to that point, I made the point on our last episode that I think Tucker is a willing participant in Putin-glorifying propaganda, and he's not being a useful idiot in this whole thing. | ||
| I stand by that, but I don't think he was expecting this. | ||
| He was expecting a pro-Putin interview that stayed mostly in the territory that relates to the curated version of Putin that plays well to the American right-wing audience. | ||
| This is the version that Tucker is desperately trying to get to with questions about being under threat from NATO. | ||
| He's trying very hard to pivot this conversation into territory he knows will fly. | ||
| Meanwhile, Putin's just being himself. | ||
| Blunt, kind of a dick, and making no secret that he feels like he has the right to seize most, if not all, of Ukraine because it's not really a country. | ||
|
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|
Yeah. | |
| And that's... | ||
| Again, I find it so fascinating because in this situation, the obvious thing to do is collaborate on the interview beforehand. | ||
| That'd be insane not to. | ||
| It's insane that Tucker's people didn't talk to... | ||
| It's this fucking... | ||
| Goddamn! | ||
| Jimmy Kimmel pre-tapes interviews and shit! | ||
| You do questions in advance! | ||
| There must have been some... | ||
| Pre-interviewed something. | ||
| There has to have been. | ||
| But somehow... | ||
| See, this like... | ||
| Do you want to do a show or a serious interview? | ||
| I think that wire must have been crossed somehow. | ||
| I think so. | ||
| I think neither of them understood what they meant. | ||
| Putin was like, oh, so a serious interview. | ||
| I will give you a lecture. | ||
| And Tucker's like, when I say serious, what I mean is the other one, but I can't, because I have too much pride, I can't say I'm a fucking hack clown. | ||
| But man, it is like, how is it possible? | ||
| That Putin's people didn't go, okay, well, ultimately, if we put all of the future of this put together, Trump needs to be in the White House for us to have complete and free reign to take whatever we want, right? | ||
| So the idea behind this interview has to be... | ||
| Galvanize the right wing in the United States. | ||
| That's the strategic move for Russia right now. | ||
| How do you not know... | ||
| How do you not have people being like, here's what the right wing fucking loves. | ||
| Feed them this over and over and over again. | ||
| And you'll get whatever you want out of it. | ||
| I think because perhaps the interview is predicated on the idea of a conversation about Ukraine. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I think Putin went in ready to... | ||
| Make his rationalization and justification for the invasion and why it's not really an invasion because they're not really a country. | ||
| And that isn't what it's meant to be. | ||
| It's not what would work best. | ||
| Yeah, it should be. | ||
| This is one of those big moments that should always be hammered home again and again and again. | ||
| No people should have this much power because if you have it for any length of time, you become a fucking moron and an idiot. | ||
| Maybe you should be checking your clothes. | ||
| I will be. | ||
| So Tucker asks about, like, why relations didn't get better between Russia and the U.S. after the Cold War. | ||
| Good question. | ||
| And you've mentioned this many times. | ||
| I think it's a fair point. | ||
| And many in America thought that relations between Russia and the United States would be fine with the collapse of the Soviet Union at the end of the Cold War, that the opposite happened. | ||
| But you've never explained why you think that happened, except to say that the West fears a strong Russia, but we have a strong China the West does not seem very afraid of. | ||
| I'm sorry? | ||
| Is Tucker saying that the U.S., or at least a wide swath of it, is not afraid of China? | ||
| Tucker and his buddies scream about China all the time, and Congress has been holding bizarre hearings to try to ban TikTok because of fears of connections to the Chinese government. | ||
| false premise, namely that the U.S. as an entity isn't afraid of China. | ||
| This is based on a further false premise, which is that Putin has never spoken of why relations didn't get better between the U.S. and Russia post-Cold War, other than to say that the U.S. is afraid of a strong Russia. | ||
| As you might get the sense from the beginning of this interview, Putin has a lot of thoughts about history, and he isn't really shy about sharing them. | ||
| If Tucker thinks that Putin hasn't talked about this stuff, it's because Tucker has avoided learning about the subject. | ||
| And that's a bad position to be in. | ||
| Because when you say this kind of shit, and you're like, well, no one's afraid of strong China, Putin's gonna be like, what the fuck are you talking about? | ||
| Right! | ||
| We have a strong China the West does not seem very afraid of. | ||
| What about Russia do you think convinced policymakers they had to... | ||
| The West is afraid of strong China more than it fears a strong Russia. | ||
| Because Russia has 150 million people and China has 1.5 billion population. | ||
| And its economy is growing by leaps and bounds. | ||
| Over 5% a year. | ||
| It used to be even more. | ||
| But that's enough for China. | ||
| As Bismarck once put it, potentials are the most important. | ||
| China's potential is enormous. | ||
| It is the biggest economy in the world today in terms of purchasing power parity and the size of the economy. | ||
| It has already overtaken the United States quite a long time ago, and it is growing at a rapid clip. | ||
| Let's not talk about who is afraid of whom. | ||
| Let's not reason in such terms. | ||
| And let's get into the fact that after 1991, when Russia expected that it would be welcomed into the brotherly family of civilized nations, nothing like this happened. | ||
| You tricked us. | ||
| I don't mean you personally when I say you. | ||
| Of course, I'm talking about the United States. | ||
| The promise was that NATO would not expand eastward. | ||
| But it happened five times. | ||
| Damn, Tucker, that's gotta burn. | ||
| Putin just took down his whole the U.S. isn't afraid of China premise. | ||
| These two men are at odds about what propaganda game they're trying to play, and that tension is hurting the end product. | ||
| And Putin's just wrong about NATO expansion. | ||
| It's been very well documented and explained that in the proper context, the agreement not to expand was in relation to East and West Germany, not about other countries. | ||
| That said, this is finally a point that he's making that Tucker is likely to want to engage with. | ||
| He has talking points on this. | ||
| The audience is primed to understand it through their lens. | ||
| So hopefully you would think that this is where you get the ball rolling a little bit. | ||
| And not really. | ||
| But it's an opportunity. | ||
| It is. | ||
| Such a like, oh man, do you guys know how much easier it is when you believe in reality and you just share it? | ||
| It's so much easier to have a conversation. | ||
| It's so easy. | ||
| You're just like, here's the outside. | ||
| I agree. | ||
| It's the same. | ||
| Look at that tree. | ||
| Oh, there it is! | ||
| Amazing. | ||
| Yeah, it's... | ||
| I don't even fully know the best words to put on it to describe this kind of dissonance between them. | ||
| But there is just something. | ||
| And who knows how much of it also is just the difficulty of communicating through a translator. | ||
| I imagine that hurts some of the fluidity of conversation. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Totally. | |
| For sure. | ||
| And I think that that can make it more difficult to... | ||
| Ask follow-ups, get the rhythm of conversation going, but I can't account for all of it. | ||
| There's so much more going on. | ||
| And I imagine there's tone that is lost. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Yeah, definitely. | ||
| So there's another thread that runs kind of throughout this, and that is that Putin feels wronged. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Certainly by NATO expanding. | ||
| And then by various people that he keeps bringing up. | ||
| People like Clinton, Bush. | ||
| All sorts of world leaders that have done him dirty. | ||
| No, it's okay to have a paranoid former KGB guy run an entire country. | ||
| That makes perfect sense. | ||
| So he talks a little bit about Clinton here. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| At a meeting here in the Kremlin with the outgoing President Bill Clinton, right here in the next room, I said to him, I asked him. | ||
| Bill, do you think if Russia asked to join NATO, do you think it would happen? | ||
| Suddenly he said, you know, it's interesting. | ||
| I think so. | ||
| But in the evening, when we met for dinner, he said, you know, I've talked to my team. | ||
| No, no, it's not possible now. | ||
| Too many JBS people around. | ||
| Sorry. | ||
| You can ask him. | ||
| I think he will watch our interview. | ||
| He'll confirm it. | ||
| I wouldn't have said anything like that if it hadn't happened. | ||
| Okay, well, it's impossible now. | ||
| Were you sincere? | ||
| Would you have joined NATO? | ||
| Look, I asked the question, is it possible or not? | ||
| And the answer I got was no. | ||
| If I wasn't sincere in my desire to find out what the leadership position was... | ||
| But if he had said yes, would you have joined NATO? | ||
| If he had said yes, the process of rapprochement would have commenced, and eventually it might have happened if we had seen sincere wish on the other side of our partners. | ||
| I like that. | ||
| It didn't happen. | ||
| No means no. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| No means no. | ||
| You don't want me. | ||
| I'm going to go over here. | ||
| Listen, I would have voluntarily given up power like most dictators I know. | ||
| I would have absolutely removed all of the rampant corruption in our government. | ||
| I'm definitely not the richest person in the world by a vast margin. | ||
| I would definitely... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I would have joined NATO. | ||
| That is... | ||
| How can you be that stupid? | ||
| You mean Tucker? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| All of us. | ||
| All of us on this planet. | ||
| It is kind of amazing that Putin's still alive. | ||
| That's incredible to me. | ||
| To nail it for that long whenever you're the most killable person. | ||
| Alive right now. | ||
| You know what was nuts? | ||
| I didn't even realize this. | ||
| I was reading an article about him, and it was like, he's 70. Yeah. | ||
| He's 71 now. | ||
| That's shocking to me. | ||
| It's amazing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It is amazing that he has not been killed. | ||
| Because it's just, you feel like you have to. | ||
| The moment that a guy got poisoned on a plane and they made a documentary about it and then the idiot went back and they put him in a prison forever, you're like, well, this guy, I don't think he's going to give up power ever. | ||
| No, he's probably going to join NATO. | ||
|
unidentified
|
If only Bill Clinton had let him. | |
| Amazing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Amazing. | ||
| And you can see there's the seeds of something that Tucker is really going to enjoy in that story, which is that Bill Clinton, the elected leader, was like, hey, maybe this is possible. | ||
| And then his team said no, which is the deep state. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| There's these kernels of things that could be worked with. | ||
| So useful. | ||
| But they aren't going to be used to their greatest potential because there is something that is not working between these two dudes. | ||
| So weird. | ||
| And some of it is probably just personal disrespect because, uh... | ||
| Tucker uses a poor word choice here when he's talking about this not getting into NATO thing. | ||
| Why do you think that is? | ||
| Just to get to motive, I know you're clearly bitter about it. | ||
| I understand. | ||
| But why do you think the West rebuffed you then? | ||
| Why the hostility? | ||
| Why did the end of the Cold War not fix the relationship? | ||
| What motivates this from your point of view? | ||
| You said I was bitter about the answer. | ||
| No, it's not bitterness. | ||
| I have never felt bitterness. | ||
| We're not bride and groom, bitterness, resentment. | ||
| It's not about those kind of matters in such circumstances. | ||
| We just realized we weren't welcome there, that's all. | ||
| Okay, fine. | ||
| But let's build relations in another manner. | ||
| Let's look for common ground elsewhere. | ||
| Why we received such a negative response, you should ask your leaders. | ||
| I can only guess why. | ||
| Too big a country with its own opinion and so on. | ||
| Okay, so you have an answer. | ||
| Yeah, that sounds right. | ||
| You don't want me in your club, that's fine. | ||
| That's fine. | ||
| I don't want to be in your club anyway. | ||
| Look, we gotta still play in the same park, you know? | ||
| We gotta find a way to get along somewhere. | ||
| I'm totally fine that you don't want me in your club. | ||
| You know... | ||
| I'm not bitter. | ||
| I find... | ||
| You're bitter. | ||
| I find it interesting that we can be unhappy with a country that's too big and has its own opinion. | ||
| I feel like there's only one opinion that really matters. | ||
| It's a big opinion. | ||
| It's a big one. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, I feel like there is a boldness in Tucker saying, you're bitter. | ||
| There is! | ||
| I'm genuinely surprised by how much of a dick he seems to be. | ||
| I think they just genuinely don't like each other on a personal level. | ||
| That's kind of the sense that I would take away from this. | ||
| Based on Tucker's career and the things that he... | ||
| It seems like he... | ||
| Would like Putin quite a bit. | ||
| Likes the idea of him. | ||
| But then when Putin starts off the interview being like, we're going to be big boys here? | ||
| We're going to be serious? | ||
| He did seem... | ||
| And then spends half an hour rambling about... | ||
| Not rambling. | ||
| I mean, he has a coherent point. | ||
| But talking about Russian history. | ||
| Boring history. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think Tucker feels... | ||
| And every time Tucker's tried to redirect the conversation, he's been like, shut up now. | ||
| I am going to talk about this and then we'll do whatever you want to do. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I think that Tucker's probably like... | ||
| I fucking don't like this guy. | ||
| I think it feels personal. | ||
| Yeah, I can't imagine, you know, I can't imagine Tucker being used to being literally and possibly the second fiddle. | ||
| You know, Tucker's not used to that. | ||
| He hangs out with Cat Turd and the guy who says he had sex with Obama. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| Power imbalance. | ||
| This is a power imbalance. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's severe. | |
| Again, it's why this is so historical, and yet this is insanity. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| What is happening in this world? | ||
| The premise of this and the reality of it are entirely disconnected. | ||
| It's so hard to make the twain meet. | ||
| The last time we talked about how, like... | ||
| It seemed like 30 years ago stuff made sense, and then the past decade has just been absolute madness that you can't explain. | ||
| I think this might be one of the pinnacles of absolute madness that I can't explain. | ||
| Like, this is truly insane, and kind of no one cares, and also kind of it's amazing, and also this is the most boring thing I've ever... | ||
| I don't know what is happening with this world, man! | ||
| Yeah, I had to sit with a lot of that while I was preparing this episode. | ||
| I believe it! | ||
| It was a strange headspace. | ||
| Yeah! | ||
| So, Putin complains about U.S. support of people who are being invaded by him? | ||
| Sure, sure. | ||
| I repeatedly raise the issue that the United States should not support separatism or terrorism in the North Caucasus. | ||
| But they continue to do it anyway. | ||
| And political support, information support, financial support, even military support came from the United States and its satellites for terrorist groups in the Caucasus. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Not you. | |
| I once raised this issue with my colleague, also the President of the United States. | ||
| He says, it's impossible. | ||
| Do you have proof? | ||
| I said yes. | ||
| I was prepared for this conversation, and I gave him that proof. | ||
| He looked at it, and you know what he said? | ||
| I apologize, but that's what happened. | ||
| I'll quote. | ||
| He says, well, I'm gonna kick their ass. | ||
| We waited and waited for some response. | ||
| There was no reply. | ||
| I said to the FSB director, write to the CIA, what is the result of the conversation with President? | ||
| He wrote once, twice, and then we got a reply. | ||
| We have the answer in the archive. | ||
| The CIA replied, we have been working with the opposition in Russia. | ||
| We believe that this is the right thing to do, and we will keep on doing it. | ||
| Just ridiculous. | ||
| Well, okay. | ||
| We realized that it was out of the question. | ||
| Forces in opposition to you. | ||
| So you're saying the CIA is trying to overthrow your government. | ||
| Of course, they meant in that particular case the separatists, the terrorists who fought with us in the Caucasus. | ||
| I feel like you're not being specific. | ||
| That's who they call the opposition. | ||
| Yeah, he's talking about the U.S. supporting groups fighting back against Russia's 2008 invasion of Georgia. | ||
| In reality, Putin was the one who was supporting separatists in the Abkhazia and South Ossetia regions as a pretext to invade, just as he has with the Donbass region in the case of the current war with Ukraine. | ||
| It's almost like there's a pattern, but I'm sure there's some good explanation involving something that happened in the 900s that'll make this all okay. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| These people are just insane. | ||
| It doesn't make any sense. | ||
| It just doesn't. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Wild. | ||
| It is. | ||
| But I imagine... | ||
| So here's what I imagine, all right? | ||
| Psychologically, if you're Putin... | ||
| You have to constantly be justifying an impossible-to-justify position. | ||
| There's no reason for anyone to have as much power as Putin does. | ||
| Ever. | ||
| For any reason. | ||
| I imagine at some point it becomes background noise, the need to justify. | ||
| See, so that's why it has to be a constant... | ||
| If I am not proving to myself that this is mine, then I could lose it. | ||
| Right? | ||
| That has to be it. | ||
| It has to be a constant, I could lose this at any second. | ||
| So there has to be ironclad historical rationalizations and justifications at every turn I've been wronged. | ||
| That may be. | ||
| Fascinating. | ||
| So one thing that Putin has been very clear about is that he wants a joint missile defense system in the region. | ||
| And so he talks about that here a little bit. | ||
| I propose that the United States, Russia and Europe jointly create a missile defense system that we believe, if created unilaterally, threatens our security, despite the fact that the United States officially said that it was being created against missile threats from Iran. | ||
| That was the justification for the deployment of the missile defense system. | ||
| I suggested working together, Russia, the United States and Europe. | ||
| They said it was very interesting. | ||
| They asked me, are you serious? | ||
| I said, absolutely. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't remember. | |
| It is easy to find out on the Internet when I was in the USA at the invitation of a Bush senior. | ||
| It is even easier to learn from someone I'm going to tell you about. | ||
| I was told it was very interesting. | ||
| I said, just imagine if we could tackle such a global strategic security challenge together. | ||
| The world will change. | ||
| We'll probably have disputes, probably economic and even political ones, but we could drastically change the situation in the world. | ||
| He says, yes, and asks, are you serious? | ||
| I said, of course. | ||
| We need to think about it. | ||
| I'm sold. | ||
| I said, go ahead, please. | ||
| Then Secretary of Defense Gates, former director of CIA and Secretary of State Rice, came in here, in this cabinet, right here at this table. | ||
| They sat on this table. | ||
| Me, the former minister, the Russian defense minister on that side. | ||
| They said to me, yes, we have thought about it. | ||
| We agree. | ||
| I said, thank God. | ||
| Great. | ||
| But with some exceptions. | ||
| So twice you've described US presidents making decisions and then being undercut by their agency heads. | ||
| So it sounds like you're describing a system that's not run. | ||
| Like a dictatorship? | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's right, that's right. | |
| What man should have unilateral power? | ||
| I'm not going to tell you the details because I think it's incorrect. | ||
| After all, it was confidential conversation. | ||
| But our proposal was declined. | ||
| That's a fact. | ||
| So, it's been reported pretty widely going back to at least 2000, predating even Bush's time in office, this joint missile defense stuff. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It was also something that Putin suggested many other times, and the sticking point is generally that Putin wanted a guarantee that the missile defense systems would never be used against Russia's missiles. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| This has been a non-starter for obvious as well as practical reasons, like a treaty like that would need to be ratified by the Senate, which would be an enormous hurdle that probably would never get cleared. | ||
| But you can see in that clip there's two dynamics really at play. | ||
| Putin is airing out these grievances and coming off a little bit complainy. | ||
| Meanwhile, Tucker is trying to do whatever he can to inject his business into the conversation, as he did there, trying to weave in a point that would bring things into this deep state. | ||
| Presidents suck! | ||
| Gotcha. | ||
| And the deep state is secretly in control of the United States. | ||
| This is the fertile territory for Tucker. | ||
| The system is broken because the deep state broke it. | ||
| Yeah, because our elected leader isn't the one who's making the decision, as you're saying, unilaterally. | ||
| It's these deep state people. | ||
| Putin acknowledged Tucker's point, but then carried on with his own line of thought, which goes to show that someone who is boring and has actual power will beat someone flashy who has pretend power every time. | ||
| Every time. | ||
| And yeah, it feels like there are these moments where Tucker is trying to be like, alright, now let's play this ball. | ||
| Let's play this ball. | ||
| Come on. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Come on. | |
| Something. | ||
| Come on. | ||
| Yeah, because the answer to that, of course, is Putin, you're a lying piece of shit. | ||
| Nobody can trust you ever, and nobody can because you've proven yourself to be untrustworthy. | ||
| Even if you're telling the truth, you can't be trusted. | ||
| Like, that's the end of our conversation, though. | ||
| That's the problem with it. | ||
| I don't believe a single word you say. | ||
| What? | ||
| Even and especially when it's true. | ||
| Little old me. | ||
| Yeah, I can't. | ||
| You have proven yourself that way. | ||
| What is the point of this conversation other than to see how interesting your lies are? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Right? | ||
| I guess that's sort of my look at it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| My glimpse. | ||
| So we get to the 2004 Ukrainian election. | ||
| And Putin has some thoughts about that. | ||
| 2004. | ||
| 2004. | ||
| How? | ||
| The first time he won after President Kuchma, they organized a third round, which is not provided for in the Constitution of Ukraine. | ||
| This is a coup d 'etat. | ||
| Just imagine, someone in the United States wouldn't like the outcome. | ||
| In 2014. | ||
| Before that? | ||
| No, this was before that. | ||
| After President Kuchma, Viktor Yanukovych won the elections. | ||
| However, his opponents did not recognize that victory. | ||
| The U.S. supported the opposition, and the third round was scheduled. | ||
| What is this? | ||
| This is a coup. | ||
| The US supported it and the winner of the third round came to power. | ||
| Imagine if in the US something was not to someone's liking and the third round of election, which the US Constitution does not provide for, was organized. | ||
| Nonetheless, it was done in Ukraine. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So, Leonid Kuchma had been president of Ukraine from 1994 to 2005, and he was a leader that was oriented towards Russia, generally. | ||
| He was a friendly leader. | ||
| There was an election to name his successor in 2004 that came down to Viktor Yanukovych and Viktor Yushchenko, which Yushchenko won. | ||
| That was bad for Putin, since Yushchenko was aligned towards NATO and being a part of Europe, as opposed to being closer with Russia. | ||
| Putin doesn't believe that Ukraine is a real country, but that's fine, as long as the leader of the country... | ||
| a potential problem. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's worth noting that when he was running for president, someone poisoned Yushchenko with dioxin. | |
| many fully understand to be an assassination attempt. | ||
| No! | ||
|
unidentified
|
But as we learned on our last episode, Putin has said that they do not have a habit of such things. | |
| Putin is saying that there was an unheard of third round of voting that took place in 2004, and he's kind of right. | ||
| What happened is that there was a normal first round where someone would need to get over 50% of the vote to win. | ||
| Did not. | ||
| No one got that much, so they went to a runoff, which is the second round, and that was just between Yushchenko and Yanukovych. | ||
| This second round of voting was plagued by what you might call irregularities. | ||
| Oh, yeah? | ||
| For instance, in the Donetsk Oblats, where Yanukovych is from, they reported like a 98% turnout, which is insane. | ||
| So weird. | ||
| And a massive jump from the first round. | ||
| And 97% voted for him, too. | ||
| So crazy. | ||
| Further, poll watchers from Yushchenko's side were expelled from many polling stations on the eastern side of the country, and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe said that there were more violations of election law than they could list off in the time that they had in a press conference. | ||
| The eastern side of Ukraine. | ||
| Geographically, that seems closer to... | ||
| To Russia, yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| Public outcry led to a challenge of the results of the runoff that got to the Ukrainian Supreme Court, who threw out the results and ordered a new runoff, which you Yushchenko would go on to win. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So it is true that a third round of voting did happen, but it was done according to Ukrainian law and because there were massive problems with the runoff election. | |
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But it's fun to see how Putin is essentially poking at Tucker here with the, can you imagine if someone didn't believe the results of the election in the U.S.? | |
| Tucker probably had a rough time figuring out if he should agree or disagree with that. | ||
| Like, how do I play this ball? | ||
| Am I being fucked with right now? | ||
| The interesting thing here is that Putin would have had no problem if Yanukovych had won that election, and in fact congratulated him on the win before it was overturned, because he knew that Yanukovych would be friendly to Russian interests. | ||
| Ukraine isn't a country to Putin, so he can't possibly care about the integrity of the voting system. | ||
| He just cares that whoever is leading the non-country is beholden to him and not the West. | ||
| That is so interesting because I think we're going to have an almost identical situation here. | ||
| Not identical. | ||
| I mean a similar situation wherein essentially the Supreme Court will come down to decide the election. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Like, in the situation that the Supreme Court chose, the Supreme Court had to say that the results of the election are thrown out because it's bullshit, right? | ||
| Now, here's what I find fascinating about that, comparatively, is that if you hear the arguments at the Supreme Court for keeping Trump on the ballot, the Supreme Court justices are all like, hey, listen. | ||
|
unidentified
|
If we stop this, you don't know what's going to happen. | |
| Anybody could get fucking thrown off the ballot. | ||
| You know what I'm saying? | ||
| If you fuck with me! | ||
| You know, like that kind of thing. | ||
| And it is, in essence, if Ukraine was like, well, we would throw out the results of these elections, but we're worried people will be mad. | ||
| And then throw out the results of that election next time, you know? | ||
| So we'll not do our job. | ||
| Then in that essence, then yeah, it would have been... | ||
| It would have been him. | ||
| It would have been Russia's Ukraine. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| And we're about to have Russia's United States. | ||
| Well, that's a pessimistic view. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| We'll see how the Supreme Court decides. | ||
| We will see. | ||
| So there is this coup that happened in 2004 in Kiev. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it's weird because if you're listening to this interview as it goes on, Yanukovych gets thrown out. | ||
| After he wins the other election, he gets thrown out in 2014. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| So 2004 and 2014 are both times that Yanukovych got wronged. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And there is a lack of definition between a coup in 2004 and a coup in 2014. | ||
| And it's hard to keep track of what is being argued. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| But I think that this one is about 2004. | ||
| And then there's a little bit of sass. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| As the Americans requested, Yanukovych did use neither the armed forces nor the police, yet the armed opposition committed a coup in Kiev. | ||
| What is that supposed to mean? | ||
| Who do you think you are? | ||
| I wanted to ask the then US leadership. | ||
| With the backing of whom? | ||
| With the backing of CIA, of course. | ||
| The organization you wanted to join back in the day, as I understand. | ||
| Oh, shit! | ||
| You should thank God they didn't let you in. | ||
| The fuck is this? | ||
| Although, this is a serious organization. | ||
| I understand. | ||
| My former vis-a-vis in the sense that I served in the first main directorate, Soviet Union's intelligence service. | ||
| They have always been our opponents. | ||
| A job is a job. | ||
| Hey, man. | ||
| Can you stop being such a dick? | ||
| I'm gonna say this. | ||
| I'm gonna say this. | ||
| I know who should have done this interview. | ||
| Nick Cannon, because Putin is wilding out right now! | ||
| I mean, in the terms of the world that this is taking place in, that is severely dishy. | ||
| I am shocked by how whiny and petty and bullshitty this is, considering the... | ||
| Significant amount of power on display here. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Two men. | ||
| And it's not even necessarily the power that's on display. | ||
| It's the power that's implied by both of them. | ||
| The power that's owned by both of them. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Is subsumed into... | ||
| These two people are whiny and pathetic. | ||
| It does not come off well for either of them, I think, through most of it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I hate, I hate, hate, hate. | |
| That it is 100% true. | ||
| Every asshole in this country has a million times the courage of every elected leader on this fucking planet. | ||
| And especially the ones who don't get elected. | ||
| How do you quantify courage? | ||
| Just getting through the day without whining like a loser to Tucker fucking Carlson! | ||
| Well, most of us don't have the opportunity. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| So, we get to the actual, the war business. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And would you be surprised to learn that Putin's really the one trying to stop the war? | ||
| I am not surprised to learn that. | ||
| It was they who started the war in 2014. | ||
| Our goal is to stop this war. | ||
| And we did not start this war in 2022. | ||
| This is an attempt to stop it. | ||
| Do you think you've stopped it now? | ||
| I mean, have you achieved your aims? | ||
| No, we haven't achieved our aims yet, because one of them is denazification. | ||
| This means the prohibition of all kinds of neo-Nazi movements. | ||
| Tell me more about that. | ||
| And it was not our initiative, because we were told by the Europeans, in particular, that it was necessary to create conditions for the final signing of the documents. | ||
| My counterparts in France and Germany said, how can you imagine them signing a treaty with a gun to their heads? | ||
| The troops should be pulled back from Kiev. | ||
| I said, all right, we withdrew the troops from Kiev. | ||
| As soon as we pulled back our troops from Kiev, our Ukrainian negotiators immediately threw all our agreements reached Istanbul into the bend and got prepared for a long-standing armed confrontation with the help of the United States and its satellites in Europe. | ||
| That is how the situation has developed. | ||
| But he seems to be conveniently leaving off the entire period of the start of the invasion to the Istanbul negotiations. | ||
| What about it? | ||
| Seems like he's giving a thorough... | ||
| That happened then, but it didn't happen then, because I'm telling you about how it didn't happen then, now. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hmm. | |
| Istanbul negotiations took place on March 29th and 30th, 2022. | ||
| This is over a month into the war, and maybe pulling out of Kiev was part of creating conditions where there could be a negotiation, or it might have been because they couldn't hold Kiev and Ukraine was putting up counteroffenses. | ||
| It's not like they had a comfortable control of Kiev and graciously moved out. | ||
| They were repelled. | ||
| But here we kind of have the difficulty of Tucker doing this interview. | ||
| Putin has presented himself as someone whose actions are about trying to end this war, and Tucker has said as much in his show. | ||
| Maybe not literally those exact words, but that's the messaging. | ||
| If anybody is at fault to continue driving this war on... | ||
| It's Ukraine, the United States, the deep state. | ||
| However, in the course of this interview so far, Putin has said that Ukraine isn't a real country and that he should be able to seize it as part of his historical version of Russia. | ||
| That motivation runs... | ||
| to how Tucker has presented this in the past, and it creates a little bit of tension that is unresolved. | ||
| This is an optics problem for Tucker that he's been trying to rectify by attempting to steer things towards red meat-type talking points for his audience, and Putin's just not playing ball. | ||
| Because he doesn't have to. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Amazing. | |
| For him propagandistically, if he were to. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| But I think that he just didn't think that that's what this interview was. | ||
| He just did. | ||
| I mean, it makes you wonder, because it's in the same way. | ||
| You know, you can't have this much power. | ||
| You become an idiot. | ||
| You become a moron. | ||
| You don't get told the truth by anybody. | ||
| So what you actually believe is not reality, regardless of what it is. | ||
| You know, even if you are awesome at understanding reality, you simply cannot. | ||
| So what he believes is actually happening... | ||
| Is incomprehensible. | ||
| Like, I can't know ever what he truly, not even truly, I mean, just what he thinks is going on from a day-to-day is not reflective of reality. | ||
| But here we have, in this instance at least, we have that there was a coup in 2004 and 2014, and this war started in 2014 because they threw out Yanukovych, and then there was a not-Russia-friendly power in place, and that starts the war. | ||
| It's Ukraine's fault for not having not-friendly Russian leaders that they wanted. | ||
| They exist at the sort of pleasure of Putin. | ||
| And if they have an unfriendly leader, well, then that's... | ||
| They don't exist at the displeasure of Putin. | ||
| So that's kind of where we're at. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| But we got into the denazification. | ||
| That came up a little bit. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right, right, right. | |
| And so that's an interesting concept that gets explored a little bit. | ||
| Well, I just want Zelensky to come. | ||
| We sign things together. | ||
| He wears a pair of underpants that I give him, and then he goes home. | ||
| Why does everybody get worried about this? | ||
| So Tucker actually does ask, like, what is denazification? | ||
| Right. | ||
| But what is part of my English? | ||
| What is denazification? | ||
| What would that mean? | ||
|
unidentified
|
What is that? | |
| I just want to say it now. | ||
| It's an important question. | ||
| Densification. | ||
| That is what I want to talk about right now. | ||
| It is a very important issue. | ||
| Denazification. | ||
| After gaining independence, Ukraine began to search, as some Western analysts say, its identity. | ||
| And it came up with nothing better than to build this identity upon some false heroes who collaborated with Hitler. | ||
| I have already said that in the early 19th century when the theorists of independence and sovereignty of Ukraine appeared, they assumed that an independent Ukraine should have very good relations with Russia. | ||
| But due to the historical development, those territories were part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Poland, where Ukrainians were persecuted and treated quite brutally as well as were subject to cruel behavior. | ||
| There were also attempts to destroy their identity. | ||
| All this remained in the memory of the people. | ||
| When World War II broke out, part of this extremely nationalist elite collaborated with Hitler, believing that he would bring them freedom. | ||
| The German troops, even the SS troops, made Hitler's collaborators do the dirtiest work of exterminating the Polish and Jewish population. | ||
| Hence this brutal massacre of the Polish and Jewish population as well as the Russian population too. | ||
| This was led by the persons who are well known: Bandera, Shukiewicz. | ||
| It was those people who were made national heroes. | ||
| That is the problem. | ||
| And we are constantly told that nationalism and neo-Nazism exist in other countries as well. | ||
| Yes, there are seedlings, but we uproot them. | ||
| And other countries fight against them. | ||
| But Ukraine is not the case. | ||
| These people have been made into national heroes in Ukraine. | ||
| Monuments to those people have been erected. | ||
| They are displayed on flags. | ||
| Their names are shouted by crowds that walk with torches as it was in Nazi Germany. | ||
| So I'm struck by this explanation of denazification, and the thing that it brings to mind is the attempt to take down statues of Confederate generals in the United States. | ||
| I was thinking the exact same thing, yeah. | ||
| It seems to me that the idea of some of your folk heroes being Nazi collaborators is not great. | ||
| And yeah, maybe you should reassess that and take down some of those statues. | ||
| But is that a cause for war? | ||
| How would anyone in Tucker or Alex's audience respond to Canada invading us because we won't get rid of Confederate flags on buildings? | ||
| And that some people celebrate slave owners. | ||
| Oh, man. | ||
| Just wait until Canada finds out how many schools are named after Woodrow Wilson. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh. | |
| You have no idea. | ||
| Honestly, I would think that anyone on the far right hearing Putin's explanation of denazification, I would think they would think it sounds like woke bullshit. | ||
| Leaving aside that Putin's version of this is not accurate, based on the political inclinations of the American far right Putin-supporting crowd, they should really oppose this denazification. | ||
| At very least, they should reject it as a pretext for justifying a war. | ||
| If we're on the subject of looking up to problematic people, Putin was just trotting out a letter from Bogdan Helmensky earlier as evidence for the historical desire by people in modern-day Russia to be ruled by Orthodox and Russian leaders, not by the Polish power in the time. | ||
| And if you recall, that dude killed tens of thousands of Jewish people in his uprising. | ||
| This presents a problem, because Helmensky wasn't around during World War II times, but was a vicious anti-Semite who was considered by parts of Ukraine to be a folk hero for his role in the uprising that would throw off. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So it's fine there. | ||
| Putin is upset about people like Bandera and Chekhovich being considered national heroes despite their involvement with the Nazis in World War II, but he has no problem with Helmetsky because this isn't actually about denazification. | ||
| It's about opposition to actual sovereignty for Ukraine, and the Nazi stuff is just a really good excuse. | ||
| And I'm not going to pretend there isn't a lot of history in Ukraine that's fucking messy, and many national heroes have some bad baggage. | ||
| It doesn't do any good to ignore those historical issues, but at the same time, this is not a cause for war. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| This is absurd. | ||
| I mean, every historical issue is held by every country. | ||
| I don't know many that are like, hey, guess what? | ||
| We're free of baggage, guys! | ||
| We did it! | ||
| Right. | ||
| So the idea of, here's your problem, we need to take care of that for you, is insane. | ||
| Until you take care of your own shit. | ||
| I mean, I don't know if you've ever met this guy named Jesus. | ||
| He had things about planks. | ||
| He was like, get that shit out of your ass! | ||
| But I mean, the idea of Russia being like, hey man, Ukraine's history is problematic for us, so we're not going to deal with it, and we're going to head over there. | ||
| It just seems really strange to, like, I think obviously that there should, you know, it would be good to reconsider. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| There's a reason there are no heroes to the Squatch. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Deal with them as they are, not as some sort of fantasy version, you know, warts and all, that kind of thing. | ||
| But I hear this and try and look at it through the prism of the right-wing audience that, you know, this would be meant to get to. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I feel like they would be like, fuck this guy. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| I mean, imagine somebody being like, hey. | ||
| Thomas Jefferson was a rapist. | ||
| He was. | ||
| That's what he did. | ||
| He raped people. | ||
| So then people wouldn't be like, oh, we should take statues down or not name stuff after him. | ||
| Or not quote shit like that. | ||
| That's what I'm saying. | ||
| So if you are going to do it, you have to understand that if you did it to one of their guys, they wouldn't care. | ||
| Or they'd be pissed off at you. | ||
| Probably. | ||
| So Putin goes on about this denazification, and Tucker asks, you know, you gotta give it up when there's something to give it up to. | ||
| He asks a pretty good question here, but I think he was expecting a different response. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I say that Ukrainians are part of the one Russian people. | ||
| They say, no, we are a separate people. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay, fine. | |
| If they consider themselves a separate people, they have the right to do so. | ||
| But not on the basis of Nazism, the Nazi ideology. | ||
| Would you be satisfied with the territory that you have now? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, no. | |
| Let's finish. | ||
| You asked a question about neo-nazism and denazification. | ||
| I will finish answering the question. | ||
| Just ask the question about neo-Nazism and denazification. | ||
| See, that's a pretty good question from Tucker there, because it does get to the heart of this fake explanation for the invasion. | ||
| If this is truly about denazification, then you can achieve that without taking any territory. | ||
| So, it should stand to reason that Putin should be perfectly satisfied with the existing borders. | ||
| It's unsurprising that there's not an answer to that question. | ||
| And I'm guessing that Tucker thought there would be an immediate yes. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| Of course I don't want to take more territory. | ||
| Which is, it makes sense for Tucker because this is the first time where he's like, well, at the very least, he's not going to be honest with me about this. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Like, that is the first thing. | ||
| Of course I can ask this question knowing that he will give me the lie. | ||
| Instead, the answer is, I'm talking, jerk. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely! | ||
| It's amazing! | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, in terms of the evidence presented of this very, very serious, top-level, everywhere Nazi problem, is that guy who got a standing ovation in Canada. | ||
| The President of Ukraine visited Canberra. | ||
| This story is well known, but being silenced in the Western countries. | ||
| The Canadian Parliament introduced a man who, as the Speaker of the Parliament said, fought against the Russians during the World War II. | ||
| Well, who fought against the Russians during the World War II? | ||
| Hitler and his accomplices. | ||
| It turned out that this man served in the SS troops. | ||
| He personally killed Russians, Poles and Jews. | ||
| The SS troops consisted of Ukrainian nationalists who did this dirty work. | ||
| The president of Ukraine stood up with the entire Parliament of Canada and applauded this man. | ||
| How can this be imagined? | ||
| The president of Ukraine himself, by the way, is a Jew by nationality. | ||
| Really, my question is what do you do about it? | ||
| I mean, Hitler's been dead for 80 years. | ||
| Nazi Germany no longer exists. | ||
| And so, true. | ||
| And so, I think what you're saying is you want to extinguish or at least control Ukrainian nationalism. | ||
| But how? | ||
| How do you do that? | ||
| By extinguishing or controlling Ukraine. | ||
| It's very simple. | ||
| Listen to me. | ||
| Your question is very subtle. | ||
| And I can tell you what I think. | ||
| Do not take offense. | ||
| Go fuck yourself. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| This question appears to be subtle. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It is quite pesky. | |
| You say Hitler has been dead for so many years. | ||
| All right, I'm listening. | ||
| 80 years. | ||
| But his example lives on. | ||
| People who exterminated Jews, Russians and Poles are alive. | ||
| And the president, the current president of today's Ukraine, applauds him in the Canadian parliament, gives a standing ovation. | ||
| Can we say that we have completely uprooted this ideology if what we see is happening today? | ||
| That is what denazification is in our understanding. | ||
| We have to get rid of those people who maintain this concept and support this practice and try to preserve it. | ||
| So this is referring to the incident where a 98-year-old man named Yaroslav Hunka was invited to the Canadian Parliament when Zelensky was visiting. | ||
| Right, we recall. | ||
| Yes, he was given a round of applause and a standing ovation, only for it to later come out that he fought for the Nazis in World War II. | ||
| All of this was due to irresponsibility by the House of Commons Speaker Anthony Rota, whose office has claimed that Hunka's son contacted them and asked if he could attend the speech. | ||
| Rhoda accepted the request and then took it upon himself to single Hunker out for a round of applause to the surprise of Justin Trudeau, Zelensky, and Hunker's own family. | ||
| They didn't know that was going to happen. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| After the details of Hunker's war history were reported, Rhoda resigned from... | ||
| from office and everybody issued embarrassed apologies. | ||
| Good call, yeah. | ||
| This was not a matter of Ukraine celebrating Nazis as much as it was an instance of the Speaker of the House of Commons making a grave error which played directly into the propaganda that Putin's regime has used to justify their invasion. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What you see here is pretty interesting though because Tucker has a decent question that he's asking which is going nowhere. | |
| He's asking in essence what does denazification entail? | ||
| What are the steps to doing this? | ||
| Instead of getting an answer you see Putin ignore the question and continue down his path or generally describe what he sees as the problem with no mention of what the solution is. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Because the solution is control. | |
| Yeah I mean I'm taking over Ukraine. | ||
| I don't know how to be more clear without telling you the truth. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The general sense that you get from this interview is two men both not getting what they want. | ||
| All of the pieces are right here to be a messaging and narrative bonanza, but it's just not coming together right for either of them. | ||
| Putin's too stubborn and boring for Tucker to use correctly, and Putin is entirely off in terms of what the right messaging should be for an interview like this. | ||
| It's not adversarial enough to pretend to be real journalism, but on the same page, it's not really potent propaganda either. | ||
| It's weird. | ||
| It is like maybe there's just the central... | ||
| The central reality for Putin is he is not used to talking to people who don't inherently understand that he can kill them. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| He's used to talking to world leaders, but that's different. | ||
| You look at them as equals. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Tucker's out of his station. | ||
| This is somebody who's not an equal who believes that Putin can't kill him, which is unusual for Putin. | ||
| Probably. | ||
| I imagine that that's a very difficult... | ||
| Like, lane to change into once you're so used to people believing that you can kill them at all the time. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| You know? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And so Tucker tries to get specific again. | ||
| He tries to, like, what does this entail? | ||
| What is denazification in practice? | ||
| Jesus. | ||
| And I don't think we get an answer. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| My question was a little more specific. | ||
| It was, of course, not a defense of Nazis, Neo, or otherwise. | ||
| It was a practical question. | ||
| You don't control the entire country. | ||
| You don't control Kiev. | ||
| You don't seem like you want to. | ||
| So how do you eliminate a culture or an ideology or feelings or a view of history in a country that you don't control? | ||
| What do you do about that? | ||
| You know, as strange as it may seem to you, during the negotiations in Istanbul, we did agree that We have it all in writing. | ||
| Neo-Nazism would not be cultivated in Ukraine, including that it would be prohibited at the legislative level. | ||
| Mr. Carson, we agreed on that. | ||
| This, it turns out, can be done during the negotiation process. | ||
| And there's nothing humiliating for Ukraine as a modern civilized state. | ||
| Is any state allowed to promote Nazism? | ||
| It is not, is it? | ||
| That is it. | ||
| Well. | ||
| We are! | ||
| Huh. | ||
| Is there anything that would allow a, like, disallow a Nazi from running for office in the United States? | ||
| No. | ||
| I don't know if there is. | ||
| Well, I mean, you know. | ||
| Maybe if you were, like, a literal member of the Nazi party or something, that might be a party that's banned. | ||
| Well, that's a question that I wondered a long time ago, which is, you know, we... | ||
| Negotiated peace with Germany. | ||
| Did we ever negotiate peace with Nazis? | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Are we still at war with Nazis and not Germany? | ||
| Can I still go kill Hitler? | ||
| Hitler's obviously still alive in Argentina. | ||
| Can I go kill him? | ||
| Putin did sort of imply. | ||
| Maybe not dead. | ||
| Maybe not dead. | ||
| Yeah, I don't know. | ||
| It's interesting. | ||
| I mean, obviously, if your goal is just for them to ban... | ||
| Nazis in the legislature or whatever. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Cool. | ||
| Well, I mean, first off, obviously, you cannot become president if you are not from or born in the United States. | ||
| So that's first off. | ||
| But I don't know how you would fight for the Nazis otherwise. | ||
| Well, I mean, from Putin's perspective, if that's his goal, he's not going about it well. | ||
| No. | ||
| No. | ||
| This doesn't... | ||
| Yeah, see, that's kind of, that's just, one of the reasons that this is so strange is that there are only two conversations that can truly be had between them, which is we're lying on the same page or we're telling the truth on the same page. | ||
| They can't be both lying and telling the truth on separate pages. | ||
| Well, that's insane. | ||
| But that's what it is. | ||
| That's why we're dealing with insanity! | ||
| Yeah, there's different genres of lies. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah! | |
| And I pronounce that fancy on purpose. | ||
| So, Tucker asks if there's going to be peace talks. | ||
| What are we doing? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't know. | |
| Tucker's trying to negotiate peace. | ||
| Weird. | ||
| Will there be talks and why haven't there been talks about resolving the conflict in Ukraine? | ||
| Peace talks. | ||
|
unidentified
|
They have been. | |
| They reached a very high stage of coordination of positions in a complex process, but still they were almost finalized. | ||
| But after we withdrew our troops from Kiev, as I have already said, the other side threw away all these agreements and obeyed the instructions of Western countries, European countries, and the United States to fight Russia to the bitter end. | ||
| Sounds true. | ||
| Moreover, the President Ukraine has legislated a ban on negotiating with Russia. | ||
| He signed a decree forbidding everyone to negotiate with Russia. | ||
| But how are we going to negotiate if he forbade himself and everyone to do this? | ||
| So that Istanbul agreement wasn't finalized, so there's no going back on it that was done by Ukraine. | ||
| They didn't enter into that agreement, in some part because Western countries asserted that they had their support, but equally because they had no faith that Russia would adhere to the terms, and because it would have been impossible for them to actually agree to it. | ||
| Zelensky banned Ukrainian citizens from having negotiations, but not with Russia, specifically with Russia while Putin is in charge. | ||
| There's no ban that Zelensky can make that would ban other countries from engaging in negotiations, and there's no reason that random citizens should be trying to negotiate with Putin. | ||
| It's an absurd complaint for Putin to have here, honestly. | ||
| It's very bizarre. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, it is so much... | ||
| Like, I don't know how to understand people. | ||
| Who just have no check on themselves. | ||
| Do you know what I mean? | ||
| And it's the same thing with Alex. | ||
| It's the same thing where it's like, if you have no check on yourself for a long enough period of time, you can't keep it together long enough to do something that makes sense. | ||
| Again, Putin and Tucker together right now should be working on creating... | ||
| The next Trump dictatorship. | ||
| So then Russia, China, and the United States are all the three largest powers, all of which have an alliance based upon a fascist false democracy kind of idea. | ||
| Right? | ||
| That's the idea. | ||
| That gives Russia freedom, China freedom, and then the United States has to deal with Trump. | ||
| You know? | ||
| We have to suck it up. | ||
| That he's doing this with Tucker is insane to me. | ||
| I agree with you, and I think that that would be... | ||
| Of the agendas that both Tucker and Putin have. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It has to be. | |
| And have illustrated. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I think the reason why that expectation that you have is not being in any way really fulfilled is that Tucker is trying to weave towards those narratives. | ||
| You'd think? | ||
| He is. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| With the deep state stuff. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Some of these things are attempts to weave into that. | ||
| And then on Putin's side, he doesn't think that that's what this interview is. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| You know, he's there doing an interview about Ukraine, generally, and he's basically doing a history lesson about why he's right to take Ukraine because it's not a country, and then complaining about everybody who's done him wrong in all these talks and this weak denazification excuse. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, like, he doesn't... | ||
| That is Alex. | ||
| If he were there in, like, the capacity of, like, let's... | ||
| Spit some shit. | ||
| Then maybe it would go differently. | ||
| Maybe it would. | ||
| It is so much... | ||
| Man, malignant narcissists just have this thing, you know? | ||
| Like, listening to Putin go on and on about his legal cases. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| You know? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| These people, like the Clintons, Hillary is in together with them, the deep state to get me under the Sandy Hook thing, you know? | ||
| It's like, this is the same shit. | ||
| It's similar. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So, he said that Zelensky has banned negotiation. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| And Tucker follows up with, like, well, you would be negotiating with... | ||
| The United States, right? | ||
| I mean, it wouldn't matter. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That would be the idea. | |
| Well, but you wouldn't be speaking to the Ukrainian president. | ||
| You'd be speaking to the American president. | ||
| When was the last time you spoke to Joe Biden? | ||
| I cannot remember when I talked to him. | ||
| I do not remember. | ||
| We can look it up. | ||
| You don't remember? | ||
| No. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Do I have to remember everything? | ||
| I have my own things to do. | ||
| We have domestic political affairs. | ||
| Well, he's funding the war that you're... | ||
| Well, yes, he funds, but I talked to him before the special military operation, of course. | ||
| And I said to him then, by the way, I will not go into details, I never do, but I said to him then, I believe that you are making a huge mistake of historic proportions by supporting everything that is happening there, in Ukraine, by pushing Russia away. | ||
| I told him, told him repeatedly, by the way. | ||
| I think that would be correct if I stop here. | ||
| What did he say? | ||
| Ask him, please. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Yeah, that has that general character of, like, the Alex stories, too. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Like, the, like... | ||
| I'll leave it at that. | ||
| Yeah, I gave them everything that they needed to know. | ||
| I told them everything. | ||
| I'm the one who's really trying to be... | ||
| I'm trying to be nice to everyone. | ||
| I mean more along the lines of, like, relaying secretive information and then be like, I'll stop right there. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| You've told half the story. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You're fucking acting like you're being some kind of having decorum. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| It's ridiculous. | ||
| I'm going to stop there because it's better for you to imagine the details than it is for me to tell you the incredibly boring and uninteresting ones. | ||
| Exactly, exactly. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, Tucker asks the question of, like, hey man, bro, this looks like it could get bad. | ||
| Like, this whole thing, it looks like it could spill into World War III. | ||
| I think that is one of the interesting things about that exchange. | ||
| I think Tucker legitimately forgot for a second that Putin has met far more than one president. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know? | ||
| And they don't mean anything to him. | ||
| Not much. | ||
| Yeah, the presidents are meaningless to him because they're going to be gone and he's going to be there. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There's a permanence. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So, yeah, this could get into World War III, though, bro. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| From the outside, it seems like this could devolve or evolve into something that brings the entire world into conflict and could initiate a nuclear launch. | ||
| And so why don't you just call Biden and say, let's work this out? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Are you stupid? | |
| What's there to work out? | ||
| It's very simple. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So he did say that. | |
| We have contacts through various agencies. | ||
| I will tell you what we are saying on this matter and what we are conveying to the US leadership. | ||
| If you really want to stop fighting, you need to stop supplying weapons. | ||
| It will be over within a few weeks. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| And then we can agree on some terms. | ||
| Before you do that, stop. | ||
| What's easier? | ||
| Why would I call him? | ||
| Yeah, that's pretty clear. | ||
| I mean, I think anyone who's paid any attention knows this is pretty much his position. | ||
| Yeah, I mean... | ||
| We will win, and then we'll talk. | ||
| I will say... | ||
| I will say that one of the ways to keep from getting slammed into your locker is to accept the swirly. | ||
| Just take it, and then take it for the rest of your life, forever, and I won't throw you in your locker. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Stop fighting back, and then this will be over. | ||
| Well, it won't ever be over. | ||
| Well, it will. | ||
| Well, I mean, one part of it will be. | ||
| The rest of it will never be over. | ||
| Probably not. | ||
| But it's all just bullshit. | ||
| It's all fake bullshit. | ||
| This idea that Russia is going to take any other country or attack anybody else. | ||
| It's all bullshit. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I love it. | |
| Do you think... | ||
| NATO is worried about this becoming a global war or a nuclear conflict? | ||
| At least that's what they're talking about. | ||
| And they're trying to intimidate their own population with an imaginary Russian threat. | ||
| This is an obvious fact. | ||
| And thinking people, not Philistines, but thinking people, analysts, those who are engaged in real politics, Just smart people understand perfectly well that this is a fake. | ||
| They're trying to fuel the Russian threat. | ||
| The threat I think you're referring to is a Russian invasion of Poland, Latvia, expansionist behavior. | ||
| Can you imagine a scenario where you sent Russian troops to Poland? | ||
| Only in one case, if Poland attacks Russia. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Because we have no interest in Poland, Latvia or anywhere else. | ||
| Why would we do that? | ||
| We simply don't have any interest. | ||
| It's just threat-mongering. | ||
| Well, the argument, I know you know this, is that, well, he invaded Ukraine. | ||
| He has territorial aims across the continent. | ||
| And you're saying unequivocally you don't. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Absolutely. | |
| It is absolutely excluded. | ||
| It is absolutely out of the question. | ||
| You just don't have to be any kind of analyst. | ||
| It goes against common sense to get involved in some kind of a global war. | ||
| No, that's true. | ||
| I mean, it is bad news to get involved in a global war. | ||
| I can't tell you how many political leaders I know who have gotten involved in a fucking global war. | ||
| So while it is true that it may be unlikely that Putin would invade Poland for very clear logistical reasons, there's absolutely zero reason to take what Putin or his administration say at face value. | ||
| On January 10th, 2022, his deputy foreign minister, Sergei Ryabov, nope. | ||
| Ryukhov said, quote, there are no plans or intentions to attack Ukraine. | ||
| There is no reason to fear some kind of escalatory scenario. | ||
| Then Russia invaded Ukraine a little over a month later. | ||
| Sure there is that. | ||
| Even closer to the invasion, Putin said himself, quote, the facts are that Americans are artificially whipping up hysteria around an alleged Russian plot for the invasion. | ||
| In 2014, just before invading and annexing Crimea, Putin explicitly said he was not going to annex Crimea and, quote, we will not go to war with the Ukrainian people. | ||
| There seems to be a bit of a habit of lying, particularly around invasion stuff that creates a credibility gap for Putin on this issue. | ||
| I'm going to tell you, I think most invasions during my lifetime have been based on lies. | ||
| And people saying they're not about to do it. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And not for nothing, in 2014, it was reported that former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko had a private conversation with Putin where he threatened to invade Poland, Romania, Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Whether that indicated any actual ambition to do that or if it was just some good... | ||
| I mean, there's a part of me that says this has nothing to do with anything. | ||
| It doesn't particularly want Ukraine at all. | ||
| And that, realistically, every foreign war is about domestic politics. | ||
| If that makes sense. | ||
| Do you know what I mean? | ||
| I hear the words. | ||
| Something about this means, you know, in the 80s, Russia wasted trillions of dollars on Afghanistan. | ||
| Then America did. | ||
| Then Russia did. | ||
| Then America did again. | ||
| And now I think we're doing the same thing in Ukraine. | ||
| I don't think this has anything to do with resolving conflicts at all. | ||
| I really think rich leaders of countries just fucking have to do this shit to justify to themselves why they exist. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| So maybe it's not so much a matter of I need to control this or this doesn't need to be mine, but it needs to be mine. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know? | ||
| Right. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So, Tucker has another question about Chuck Schumer. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Schumer said that maybe troops might need to get sent to Ukraine. | ||
| Great. | ||
| Love it. | ||
| But not really. | ||
| That's not what he said. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| One of our senior United States senators from the state of New York, Chuck Schumer, said yesterday, I believe, that we have to continue to fund the Ukrainian effort or U.S. soldier citizens could wind up. | ||
| fighting there? | ||
|
unidentified
|
How do you assess that? | |
| This is a provocation and a cheap provocation at that. | ||
| I do not understand why American soldiers should fight in Ukraine. | ||
| There are mercenaries from the United States there. | ||
| The bigger number of mercenaries comes from Poland. | ||
| With mercenaries from the United States in second place and mercenaries from Georgia in third place. | ||
| Well, if somebody has the desire to send regular troops, that would certainly bring humanity to the brink of very serious global conflict. | ||
| This is obvious. | ||
| So, this Chuck Schumer thing is exactly like what... | ||
| Tucker was reporting about Lloyd Austin previously. | ||
| If you let Putin win in Ukraine, eventually NATO countries will be threatened and will be forced to send troops. | ||
| So I think it's a little bit of a mischaracterization. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, essentially the idea is... | ||
| Although, I mean, it is an admission that where we are is circumstantial based on time. | ||
| Okay, so here's the good news. | ||
| We're not at war with Russia. | ||
| Bad news is, if they win, we're at war with Russia. | ||
| If they win, we could be. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well... | |
| You know, there is a scenario where NATO countries aren't encroached. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| But, I mean, that's kind of the question, right? | ||
| In order to make sure that we don't all get... | ||
| Dragged into a NATO versus Russia war. | ||
| NATO has to win the war in Ukraine with Russia. | ||
| You know? | ||
| Like, it makes no sense. | ||
| It's very stupid. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| But it is what it is. | ||
| War is all stupid. | ||
| War is all stupid. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And what is it good for? | ||
| Absolutely nothing. | ||
| Say it again. | ||
| I will. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Someday. | ||
| So, you know, in response to this notion of sending troops, Putin has a little bit of a, come on, guys. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Don't you have anything better to do? | ||
| You have issues on the border, issues with migration, issues... | ||
| Now we're doing it? | ||
| Yeah! | ||
| That's what you're supposed to be here for! | ||
| Come on, man! | ||
| America sucks! | ||
| So you should fight in Ukraine? | ||
| Wouldn't it be better to negotiate with Russia, make an agreement, already understanding the situation that is developing today, realizing that Russia will fight for its interests to the end? | ||
| And realizing this, actually return to common sense, start respecting our country and its interests, and look for certain solutions. | ||
| It seems to me that this is much smarter and more rational. | ||
| Come on, guys. | ||
| You got your own problems? | ||
| See, I truly believe, I truly believe this is a good idea. | ||
| And it is, if any nation declares war... | ||
| The first person who should die should be the president or the king or whatever. | ||
| Just auto? | ||
| Automatic death. | ||
| If you want to declare war, boy, it better be worth killing yourself. | ||
| The price of admission? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yep. | |
| The ticket? | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| No, and it's just 100%. | ||
| If it really is worth doing, then it's worth dying for, and you're the first person to go. | ||
| Well, I mean, you are the same person who suggested that presidents should have to be killed after their terms. | ||
| I think world leaders have too much power, and there's almost no way to check it. | ||
| That's what we're living through, is unchecked power from world leaders. | ||
| The Supreme Court's a joke. | ||
| Congress is a joke. | ||
| The president is a thousand years old. | ||
| It is ridiculous to have these people have this much power. | ||
| There is an overpoweredness. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So it is very much like if you're going to have checks on this type of power, it has to be absolute and it has to have nothing to do with votes. | ||
| It has to be like complete machine style. | ||
| Hey, no, I agree with you. | ||
| We should fight this war. | ||
| I think you are right. | ||
| That is true. | ||
| You still have to die. | ||
| It doesn't matter if you're right or wrong. | ||
| You still have to die because it's worth dying for. | ||
| I see the beauty of the point that you're making in a literary sense. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| But I think in terms of the real world, I don't know how much that works. | ||
| I mean, I think it would. | ||
| I think it would cut down on a lot of war. | ||
| I think it would also probably preclude a lot of people from taking action when maybe they need to. | ||
| I would be interested to see if that's the case. | ||
| I don't know if we'd ever know. | ||
| I think for a fact, we never will. | ||
| Yeah, probably not. | ||
| So Putin has given the, come on, guys, why? | ||
| And then Tucker takes the opportunity to ask a pretty direct question that he's hoping will fuel some of his conspiracy narratives. | ||
| Who blew up Nord Stream? | ||
| You for sure. | ||
| I was busy that day. | ||
| Nate, do you have... | ||
|
unidentified
|
I did not blow up North Stream. | |
| Thank you, though. | ||
| You personally may have an alibi, but the CIA has no such alibi. | ||
| Did you have evidence that NATO or the CIA did it? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well... | |
| Well, you know... | ||
| You know, I won't get into details, but people always say in such cases, look for someone who is interested. | ||
| But in this case, we should not only look for someone who is interested, but also for someone who has capabilities. | ||
| Because there may be many people interested, but not all of them are capable of sinking to the bottom of the Baltic Sea and carrying out this explosion. | ||
| So that's a no, then. | ||
| I'm interested. | ||
| I like that. | ||
| I like that answer because that answer is... | ||
| Whoever I decide did it. | ||
| Kibono. | ||
| Could be you. | ||
| Today it'll be you. | ||
| Today it was you. | ||
| And then tomorrow it will be somebody else, depending on whether I need it to be them. | ||
| Yeah, that to me doesn't inspire confidence in the accusation. | ||
| You know, like, this is, this is, like, do you have evidence of this? | ||
| Who would like to do it? | ||
| I, this is why... | ||
| You only talk to people. | ||
| If you are a person who wants to lie constantly and never tell the truth and be full of bullshit, you really should run your own country and only talk to people who are afraid you're going to kill them. | ||
| It makes things easier. | ||
| Yeah, man. | ||
| So Tucker asks a follow-up to this, which again, somewhat to his credit, but I think that he wants different answers than he's getting. | ||
| I am shocked by this because I do think that it's so personal and petty on the part of Tucker. | ||
| I think some of it is motivated from that place. | ||
| But he asks, if you have evidence, why not provide it? | ||
| Put it out. | ||
| But I'm confused. | ||
| I mean, that's the biggest act of industrial terrorism ever, and it's the largest emission of CO2 in history. | ||
| Okay, so if you had evidence, and presumably given your security services, your intel services, you would, that NATO, the U.S., CIA, the West did this, why wouldn't you present it and win a propaganda victory? | ||
|
unidentified
|
In the war, propaganda has already been In the war of propaganda, it is very difficult to defeat the United States because the United States controls all the world's media and many European media. | |
| The ultimate beneficiary of the biggest European media are American financial institutions. | ||
| Don't you know that? | ||
| So it is possible to get involved in this work. | ||
| But it is cost-prohibitive, so to speak. | ||
| We can simply shine the spotlight on our sources of information, and we will not achieve results. | ||
| It's never been clearer to me than that exact moment that Putin has no evidence that the CIA or US or NATO was involved in blowing up the Nord Stream pipeline. | ||
| That is the most... | ||
| Like, that's not even a great... | ||
| You could just say yes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Just say yes! | |
| I'm not saying it's impossible that any of those entities were involved in blowing it up, but his answer screams, I have no evidence, but... | ||
| I'll be damned if I'm ever going to say that. | ||
| Yeah, why would I ever say that? | ||
| It's too expensive to do propaganda war. | ||
| I can't imagine why you wouldn't just... | ||
| Yeah, show it to me. | ||
| Here it is, Tucker, from the archives. | ||
| Yeah, it doesn't matter if it's real or not. | ||
| You've got Russian people who deepfake shit on the regular. | ||
| You trotted out this letter earlier. | ||
| You clearly have some preparation of sources. | ||
| Who fucking cares, yeah. | ||
| So, that's a no. | ||
| That's how I'm taking it anyway. | ||
| I will take it that way as well. | ||
| So Tucker wants to know, what are the teams in the world? | ||
| And here, I think that, you know, he's trying to get his... | ||
| You and me, the United States. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right, right. | |
| You know, we got Trump, you making this power alliance, Bolsonaro's still in power, Orban. | ||
| You know, we got these people. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And then the deep state demon folk or whatever. | ||
| That's what he's hoping will come out of this. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| But Putin doesn't even bite. | ||
| Oh, boy. | ||
| If we're now a multipolar world, obviously we are. | ||
| Can you describe the blocks of alliances? | ||
| Who is in each side? | ||
| Listen, you have said that the world is breaking into two hemispheres. | ||
| A human brain is divided into two hemispheres. | ||
| One is responsible for one type of activities, the other one is more about creativity and so on. | ||
| But it is still one and the same head. | ||
| The world should be a single whole. | ||
| Security should be shared rather than a meant for the golden billion. | ||
| That is the only scenario where the world could be stable, sustainable, and predictable. | ||
| Until then, while the head is split in two parts, it is an illness, a serious adverse condition. | ||
| It is a period of severe disease that the world is going through now. | ||
| So what are the teams? | ||
| Creativity. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And then chopping your head in half. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Logic and creativity. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I find this just a non-answer. | ||
| It's just... | ||
| I feel like there's a lot of that. | ||
| There's a lot of non-answers in this. | ||
| I'm going to say that I think we're going to have to go back to the pervasiveness of movies. | ||
| Coloring real life. | ||
| Because I do also think Tucker is like, listen, James Bond villains are supposed to be cool, and you are not cool. | ||
| You're a dork. | ||
| You're shit. | ||
| This is trash. | ||
| So this non-answer thing just keeps recurring. | ||
| Like, here's another instance. | ||
| You're describing two different systems. | ||
| You say the leader acts in the interest of the voters, but you also say these decisions are not made by the leader, they're made by the ruling classes. | ||
| You've run this country for so long, you've known all these American presidents. | ||
| What are those power centers in the United States, do you think? | ||
| Like, who actually makes the decisions? | ||
| Say the deep, say CIA, say something like that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't know. | |
| God damn it! | ||
| America is a complex country. | ||
| Conservative on one hand, rapidly changing on the other. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Who knows? | |
| I feel like Tucker really wanted... | ||
| An answer there that works for him. | ||
| You see these setups of these questions, like... | ||
| He wanted Putin to say, I know damn well that NATO and the U.S. blew up the pipeline, whether or not he presents that evidence or not. | ||
| He wants that to be firmly stated. | ||
| When you say the teams, who are the teams? | ||
| Talk about our conception, our right-wing media conception of these teams. | ||
| We talk about the elites. | ||
| Who are the elites? | ||
| You know damn well what the answer is supposed to be. | ||
| And these answers aren't coming. | ||
| No. | ||
| No, it is like... | ||
| Tucker, you came to power by saying inflammatory, bombastic things, alright? | ||
| I came to power by being in the KGB, saying lies and uninteresting things to people's faces, and then murdering them when they're not looking. | ||
| Do you not understand why I'm not giving you a good interview right now? | ||
| In Russian, how do you say, we are built different? | ||
| We just do things differently, man. | ||
| We just do things differently. | ||
| We got a different vibe. | ||
| Yeah, and this could have all been really smoothed away by, you know, a little bit of... | ||
| Just pre-interview shit. | ||
| Some kind of direction that this should take. | ||
| Seriously. | ||
| I can't believe that fucking Jimmy Kimmel would have done a better interview, but it would have. | ||
| Probably. | ||
| Well, it wouldn't happen, because people reject that interview. | ||
| Yeah, probably. | ||
| So, we get back to the notion of... | ||
| You know, my favorite late-night TV host. | ||
| You are as good as Letterman ever was. | ||
| So we get back to the question of negotiations at the end to the war in Ukraine. | ||
| And who does actually have the power? | ||
| That's a good question. | ||
| Do you think Zelensky has the freedom to negotiate a settlement to this conflict? | ||
| I don't know the details. | ||
| Of course, it's difficult for me to judge. | ||
| But I believe he has in any case. | ||
| He used to have. | ||
| His father fought against the fascists, Nazis, during World War II. | ||
| I once talked to him about this. | ||
| I said, I'll kill you! | ||
| What are you doing? | ||
| Why are you supporting neo-Nazis in Ukraine today, while your father fought against fascism? | ||
| He was a front-line soldier. | ||
| I will not tell you what he answered. | ||
| This is a separate topic, and I think it's incorrect for me to do so. | ||
| But as to the freedom of choice, why not? | ||
| He came to power on the expectations of Ukrainian people that he would lead Ukraine to peace. | ||
| He talked about this. | ||
| It was thanks to this that he won the elections overwhelmingly. | ||
| But then, when he came to power, in my opinion, he realized two things. | ||
| Firstly, it is better not to clash with neo-Nazis and nationalists because they are aggressive and very active. | ||
| You can expect anything from them. | ||
| And secondly, the US-led West supports them and will always support those who antagonize with Russia. | ||
| It is beneficial and safe. | ||
| So he took the relevant position despite promising his people to end the war in Ukraine. | ||
| He deceived his voters. | ||
| But do you think at this point, as of February 2024, he has the latitude, the freedom to speak with you or your government directly about putting an end to this, which clearly isn't helping his country or the world? | ||
| Can he do that, do you think? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, why not? | |
| He's... | ||
| Why not? | ||
| He considers himself head of state. | ||
| He won the elections. | ||
| Although we believe in Russia that the coup d 'etat is the primary source of power for everything that happened after 2014. | ||
| So the implication that Tucker is trying to get Putin to reinforce here is the idea that Zelensky is being forced to continue the war by Western forces who just want to fuck with Russia. | ||
| Putin does a good job of his non-answers here, but it seems like the general takeaway is yes. | ||
| Zelensky does have that power. | ||
| He just doesn't want to stand up to Nazis because it's too hard. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And that doesn't work, really. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Zelensky's weak is only useful insofar as it's... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Used by the West to do stuff. | |
| Zelensky's week to his own people is pointless. | ||
| That just means he should be replaced, I guess. | ||
| And this is supposed to be more like deep state kind of stuff. | ||
| And he's saying, no, Zelensky, he was elected. | ||
| He's got the power there. | ||
| He can do what he wants. | ||
| And you start to notice, like I said, I brought this up before, but there's this manner of speaking that's a habit of telling a private conversation that he's had with someone and then gets to the point where someone else... | ||
| I think you nailed it right on the head that is like... | ||
| It's better for you to imagine the rest of this. | ||
| Well, because I asked, here's what I asked Zelensky. | ||
| Zelensky, your father fought the Nazis. | ||
| Why are you on the Nazi side? | ||
| And he said back to me, are you fucking insane? | ||
| Have you lost your goddamn mind? | ||
| Are you out of your fucking mind? | ||
| This is the real world. | ||
| Do you not know what the fuck we are doing here? | ||
| It's not appropriate for me to continue this story. | ||
| Yeah, that's better. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Stick with that one. | ||
| So, obviously, another selling point for Putin in the right-wing media is this idea of his religiosity. | ||
| We heard that. | ||
| That in the Lauren Witzke interview that Alex did on our last episode, there's this idea of him bringing in the church. | ||
| That's what you got to do, Russian Orthodox. | ||
| And so Tucker really wants to get into that here. | ||
| He wants to talk about the church. | ||
| Did you know that Zelensky banned Christianity? | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You've described the connection between Russia and Ukraine. | ||
| You've described Russia itself a couple of times as Orthodox. | ||
| That's central to your understanding of Russia. | ||
| You've said you're Orthodox. | ||
| What does that mean? | ||
| For you, you're a Christian leader by your own description. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So what effect does that have on you? | |
| You know, as I already mentioned in 988... | ||
| Oh, God! | ||
| Peter himself was baptized, following the example of his grandmother, Princess Olga. | ||
| Then he baptized his squad. | ||
| And then, gradually, over the course of several years, he baptized all the Rus. | ||
| It was a lengthy process, from pagans to Christians. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It took many years. | |
| But in the end, this orthodoxy, Eastern Christianity, deeply rooted itself in the consciousness of the Russian people. | ||
| Usefully. | ||
| When Russia expanded and absorbed other nations who profess Islam, Buddhism, and Judaism, Russia has always been very loyal to those people who profess other religions. | ||
| This is her strength. | ||
| This is absolutely clear. | ||
| I lie to people and then kill them when they're not looking. | ||
| Do you not understand me? | ||
| The main values are very similar, not to say the same in all world religions I've just mentioned, which are the traditional religions of the Russian Federation. | ||
| By the way, Russian authorities were always very careful about the culture and religion of those people who came into the Russian Empire. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah, they're the pinnacle of religious tolerance. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah, totally. | ||
| You know, when I remember my Cossack history, I seem to recall them being very open and honest about their feelings vis-a-vis murdering a lot of people. | ||
| Well, a lot of that wouldn't even be relevant if he didn't bring up the 900s. | ||
| There is that. | ||
| There is that. | ||
| It's his own fault. | ||
| But yeah, even in the present day, there's intense religious intolerance. | ||
| I mean, intolerance is fucking astonishing. | ||
| We discussed that on the last episode, a number of elements of that. | ||
| And it's pretty wild for this to be just presented and be like, yep, this is what it is. | ||
| No pushback whatsoever. | ||
| You know, now that you teased it at the beginning, that at the very end it changes. | ||
| And it is like, I can feel... | ||
| Me, personally, like, I could only handle being lied to this much. | ||
| Sure, it'd be frustrating, and after someone's been a dick to you. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| But, like, you're Tucker, so you're coming in fully prepared to be, like, the whole thing is a lie. | ||
| Of course I expect you to lie. | ||
| It's not gonna bother me. | ||
| I expect you to lie in the ways that work for me. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| To have lasted this long without being like, alright, I'm done with this shit. | ||
| Fuck it. | ||
| Let's go. | ||
| Let's be real, then. | ||
| If you're not going to do the right thing... | ||
| By which I mean the most evil thing I can think of. | ||
| I don't actually even think that that's the turn that I'm talking about. | ||
| It's not too far off, but you'll see. | ||
| I think that there's a reason that things went the way they did. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And it's not so much... | ||
| It is a hard question, but I also really think Tucker thought it would go a different way. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| We'll see. | ||
| See, because for me, right now, I'm in this space of like... | ||
| Listen, I did my best. | ||
| Fuck you. | ||
| Let's do this. | ||
| You know, let's go. | ||
| You've been an asshole to me. | ||
| And guess what? | ||
| You can't... | ||
| Kill me yet. | ||
| You can't kill me yet. | ||
| So, fuck you, world leader. | ||
| But you know me. | ||
| I want to piss on world leaders' faces all day. | ||
| Would you like this non-poisoned Fabergé egg? | ||
| The idea of being supplicant to that fucker. | ||
| Well, there is a sense that you get that ramps up a little bit more. | ||
| Especially, you know, because the first hour, or half hour, excuse me, is this history lesson. | ||
| And then, you know, towards the back end, you do see him... | ||
| Tucker trying to inject his stuff. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, this is an opportunity for you to say the things that will play to the audience. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right, right, right. | |
| And then just falling, or like, non-answer answers. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know, there is a slight frustration that is probably building. | ||
| But I don't think it boils over in the way that you might normally expect someone to. | ||
| Yeah, and it is another example of if it were a Greenwald and Alex, Greenwald will just give you the answer. | ||
| You'll say something and Greenwald will be like, yeah, it was really great that what you meant to say was blah, blah, blah. | ||
| But that's because there isn't really an inherent power imbalance between the two of them. | ||
| It is this power imbalance where you can't just be like, hey, Putin, that was great. | ||
| Now what you meant to say, you know? | ||
| Let's reframe the question. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So all religions in Russia are actually united under patriotism. | ||
| Coexist. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's why everybody wears the bumper sticker. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And then Tucker asks a strange question that I think is, like, I think it would be impossible for anybody, world leader, even dictator or not, to answer. | ||
| People who profess different religions in Russia consider Russia their motherland. | ||
| They have no other motherland. | ||
| We are together. | ||
| This is one big family. | ||
| And our traditional values are very similar. | ||
| I've just mentioned one big family, but everyone has his /her own family. | ||
| And this is the basis of our society. | ||
| And if we say that the motherland and the family are specifically connected with each other, it is indeed the case, since it is impossible to ensure a normal future for our children and our families unless we ensure a normal, sustainable future for the entire country, for the motherland. | ||
| That is why patriotic sentiment is so strong in Russia. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| Can I say that the one way in which the religions are different is that Christianity is specifically a nonviolent religion. | ||
| Jesus says, turn the other cheek, don't kill. | ||
| How can a leader who has to kill of any country, how can a leader be a Christian? | ||
| How do you reconcile that to yourself? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Whoa. | |
| You can't. | ||
| The end. | ||
| Jesus said that shit! | ||
| Never mind! | ||
| I was wrong! | ||
| Once we own the world! | ||
| Since the coup d 'etat and the hostilities in Donbass begun, that's when they started. | ||
| And we're protecting our people, ourselves, our homeland and our future. | ||
| As for religion in general... | ||
| You know, it's not about external manifestations. | ||
| It's not about going to church every day or banging your head on the floor. | ||
| I don't actually believe any of this shit. | ||
| It is in the heart. | ||
| It's in the heart. | ||
| Yep, I make it up. | ||
| Deep in here. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So that's an interesting... | ||
| First of all, it's an interesting question for Tucker to throw out because it's impossible. | ||
| It's an impossible situation to negotiate. | ||
| You cannot. | ||
| Like, that's the answer, is you can't. | ||
| But if you're the leader, you can't say that. | ||
| Right, but I think that Putin's non-answer answer there is actually probably as good as you can do, which is define everything as self-defense, and then all aggression is justified in the religious context. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| What? | ||
| You can't defend yourself? | ||
| No, of course you can. | ||
| Now, I mean, admittedly, we don't live there, and it's other people, and they have their own government, and their own borders, and their own... | ||
| Self-defense. | ||
| But it's self-defense, because they used to be us. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| And now, they're not. | ||
| Uh-huh. | ||
| Let me tell you about... | ||
| But guess what? | ||
| They still are. | ||
| Let me tell you about 900 AAD. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Oh, man. | ||
| Yeah, it is such a fun... | ||
| It is such a fun truth of, like, listen, if you've read the book... | ||
| You know you can't. | ||
| The answer is you cannot do those things. | ||
| You can't be both. | ||
| But no world leader can be like, well, I read the book and it turns out I can't be a Christian. | ||
| Sorry. | ||
| That would be weird. | ||
| I believe in the religion and I do all that stuff, but I've given up the actual chance of a relationship with God and Christ in order to lead you as people. | ||
| That would be a strange thing for them to say. | ||
| It would be a strange thing for them to say. | ||
| But I think that this is one of the instances of, like, that is about what Tucker would have wanted as an answer from that. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Which is, it plays up the importance of religion, it justifies... | ||
| You know, being a Christian leader and still being at war. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| That works pretty well. | ||
| And I think that it goes off rails. | ||
| Yeah, sort of a crusade, holy war type thing, yeah. | ||
| Well, this next clip is probably my favorite moment in the entire interview. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So Putin's saying that, you know, the West is more pragmatic, whereas the East has more spiritual things going on. | ||
| Sounds right. | ||
| And so Tucker asks a follow-up question that is just like, I don't even know how to describe it. | ||
| Just something falling. | ||
| It's just a balloon deflating. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Western society is more pragmatic. | ||
| Russian people think more about the eternal, about moral values. | ||
| I don't know, maybe you won't agree with me, but Western culture is more pragmatic after all. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I have a chance to today's "Zолотом миллиарда"I'm not saying this is bad. | |
| It makes it possible for today's golden billion to achieve good success in production, even in science and so on. | ||
| There's nothing wrong with that. | ||
| I'm just saying that we kind of look the same. | ||
| Do you see the supernatural at work as you look out across what's happening in the world now? | ||
| Do you see God at work? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Do you ever think to yourself these are forces that are not human? | |
| No, to be honest, I don't think so. | ||
| My opinion is that the development of the world community is in accordance with inherent laws, and those laws are what they are. | ||
| It's always been this way in the history of mankind. | ||
| Some nations and countries rose, became stronger and more numerous. | ||
| And then left the international stage, losing the status they had accustomed to. | ||
| There's probably no need for me to give examples, but we could start with the Genghis Khan and Horde Conquerors. | ||
| I think we should start there. | ||
| And then end with the Roman Empire. | ||
| Great idea. | ||
| It seems that there has never been anything like the Roman Empire in the history of mankind. | ||
| Sure, sure. | ||
| There's nothing quite as juicy as that moment where Tucker is like, do you see God at work? | ||
| Nah. | ||
| Nope. | ||
| Not particularly. | ||
| This is so much like... | ||
| It is so much what I've talked about with the... | ||
| Different factions of Christianity, you know? | ||
| Oh, the religious right is all this stuff. | ||
| Yeah, but if you actually got a Catholic and a Southern Baptist to, like, talk about what they believe at each other, they don't believe any of the same shit, you know? | ||
| Like, this is Tucker and Putin. | ||
| They have doctrinal differences. | ||
| Oh, oh, shit. | ||
| We don't believe in the same shit at all. | ||
| But the problem is that, you know, especially through various avenues of the right-wing media, they've presented Putin as this guy who's fighting the new world. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| And they have the same ideas about, you know, divine battles and stuff like that. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Tucker apparently has been fighting demons with Alex. | ||
| And so this question is really meant to, like, pay off that. | ||
| Just give me something. | ||
| And instead it is a complete rejection of the premise. | ||
| Just no clue what they're dealing with. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's just like, no, I think that history has trends and people... | ||
| Amazing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| This is kind of like... | ||
| I don't know if I would call it refreshing so much as, like, I suppose it would be refreshing for a moment to fall off a waterfall, you know? | ||
| To be on the edge and then go and then be in the air and be like, wah! | ||
| Ah, this is cool. | ||
| You know, and then you die. | ||
| Like, that's kind of how I feel about this. | ||
| Like, I feel like, yeah, they should lie to each other and feel mad and hate each other. | ||
| That's fun. | ||
| And then we die, you know? | ||
| But there is a moment of, I think, you gotta feel... | ||
| You know, I don't feel bad for him. | ||
| But you gotta feel bad for Tucker in the moment where Putin says, nope. | ||
| Nope. | ||
| Do you see the supernatural at work? | ||
| Fuck no. | ||
| See, that's a moment where I don't feel bad for Tucker. | ||
| That's a moment where I feel like Tucker would be 100% justified in being like, excuse me. | ||
| I am mad at the crew. | ||
| This is their fault. | ||
| I should have seen this shit coming. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So he's talking about, Putin is talking about, you know, he mentions the Roman Empire. | ||
| And this prompts, somewhat out of nowhere, Tucker to ask about the AI Empire. | ||
| Oh, for God's sakes. | ||
| It took five centuries for the Roman Empire to fall apart. | ||
| Let's just get off history. | ||
| Anything. | ||
| Computers. | ||
| The difference with what is happening now. | ||
| Is that all the processes of change are happening at a much faster pace than in Roman times. | ||
| So when does the AI empire start, do you think? | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| You're asking increasingly more complicated questions. | ||
| To answer them, you need to be an expert in big numbers, big data and AI. | ||
| Mankind is currently facing many threats. | ||
| Due to the genetic researches, it is now possible to create a superhuman, a specialized human being, a genetically engineered athlete, scientist, military man. | ||
| There are reports that Elon Musk had already had a chip implanted in the human brain in the USA. | ||
| What do you think of that? | ||
| Well, I think there's no stopping Elon Musk. | ||
| He will do as he sees fit. | ||
| Nevertheless, you need to find some common ground with him. | ||
| Search for ways to persuade him. | ||
| I think he's a smart person. | ||
| I truly believe he is. | ||
| So you need to reach an agreement with him because this process needs to be formalized and subjected to certain rules. | ||
| The answer there is like, you gotta get that Elon Musk guy in check. | ||
| That guy's gonna do some crazy shit. | ||
| I know! | ||
| I can't help but think, like, this was the perfect... | ||
| This made my waterfall thing make perfect sense. | ||
| Because I feel like we just died. | ||
| I feel like we just died. | ||
| That was my feeling whenever he's like, you know, Elon has some good ideas. | ||
| We're fucked. | ||
| Let's just stop. | ||
| But he's also very clearly saying, left to his own devices, this is going to be bad. | ||
| You better regulate that shit. | ||
| He's a fucking idiot. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| Which also kind of runs counter a bit to a lot of the larger, you know. | ||
| I mean, it all goes back to that question that Tucker was asking about the two teams. | ||
| Putin, Musk, all of them are supposed to be on the same team. | ||
| He's being like, you gotta check that guy. | ||
| Yeah, it is interesting because their false realities are both in response to a different reality. | ||
| Putin's false reality is in response to a real politic kind of like, how do I maneuver world events? | ||
| And Tucker's false reality is in response to like, how do I make liberals mad? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| It is a little different. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| So now we get to the point where I am saying this shit changes. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Tucker decides to ask his last question. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| And this last question is something I never necessarily would have expected him to come out with. | ||
| I appreciate all the time you've given us. | ||
| I just got to ask you one last question, and that's about someone who's very famous in the United States, probably not here, Evan Gershkovitz, who's the Wall Street Journal reporter. | ||
| He's 32, and he's been in prison for almost a year. | ||
| This is a huge story in the United States, and I just want to ask you directly, without getting into the details of it or your version of what happened, if as a sign of your decency you would be willing to... | ||
| Release him to us and we'll bring him back to the United States. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We made so many good deeds, that I think we've destroyed the whole limit. | |
| We have done so many gestures of good will out of decency that I think we have run out of them. | ||
| We have never seen anyone reciprocate to us in a similar manner. | ||
| However, in theory, we can say that we do not rule out that we can do that if our partners take reciprocal steps. | ||
| So this has not been a hard-hitting interview at all, and I think that it's kind of a dud for both Tucker and Putin, but this was not something I expected. | ||
| You saw, my mouth was open. | ||
| Jaw on the floor. | ||
| I genuinely did not. | ||
| That was nuts. | ||
| Tucker is straight up asking Putin to release an American journalist. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hostage! | |
| Yeah. | ||
| For fun! | ||
| And Putin is basically saying that he'll release him if the price is right. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, what are we talking about? | ||
| It's a hostage situation, not a legitimate arrest that this person's gone through. | ||
| This is bold for Tucker to try. | ||
| But imagine if it had worked! | ||
| I mean, that would be... | ||
| I mean, there's a certain amount of fun with that. | ||
| Of like, why not? | ||
| I mean, the guy could literally just say, yeah, fuck it. | ||
| You can have him. | ||
| What does he care? | ||
| I think that Tucker was really hoping that that's what he would do. | ||
| Yeah, maybe if I catch him off balance, then he'll just be like, I don't really care. | ||
| And he would recognize the propaganda value of that. | ||
| Totally, there would be a win. | ||
| But what Tucker doesn't realize is that would also make... | ||
| Putin looking incredibly weak. | ||
| Real politic. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You can't just go around releasing hostages to any old journalist that quote-unquote tries to interview. | ||
| And I need to get something for this hostage that I have. | ||
| Otherwise, I would have released him already. | ||
| Otherwise, it's not really a hostage situation. | ||
| I'm just keeping a guy at my house. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Now, here is where there's a distinction between, I think, what Tucker's doing and something that hits... | ||
| More in the realm of Hard Question. | ||
| Hard Question is talking about this and being confrontational about it. | ||
| What Tucker is doing is trying to create an incredible scene where he gets this guy released. | ||
| 100%. | ||
| This is about Tucker being a hero. | ||
| There's a showiness to it as opposed to just highlighting an issue because it's the first thing he asks is, will you release him to us so we can take him home? | ||
| Amazing. | ||
| Which, I mean, the impetus isn't wrong. | ||
| No. | ||
| I guess. | ||
| I mean, at that point, though, that's not a serious question. | ||
| You know? | ||
| It is like... | ||
| Boy, it's a long shot. | ||
| You might as well be like, hey, you want to participate in a stunt? | ||
| Actually, you don't even really need to give them back. | ||
| Hey, would you... | ||
| It's like a proposal at a baseball game. | ||
| As a show of your decency, would you agree to withdraw from Ukraine? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, it is so much that. | ||
| Like, yeah, fuck it. | ||
| I'll say yes, but I'll change my mind in two seconds. | ||
| This isn't real. | ||
| It's not. | ||
| Tucker had no reason necessarily to bring up Evan Gershkovic. | ||
| No, he really didn't. | ||
| There is no reason to, based on the premise and the entire track of this interview, but he did. | ||
| And that is a choice, and it's a choice that I cannot not commend in some way. | ||
| I mean, I suppose, I don't know. | ||
| There's something real fucked up about this, because one, Gershkovic isn't a real person now. | ||
| Not to Tucker. | ||
| If he'd saved his life, Tucker would just call him every week and be like, you know, your life belongs to me. | ||
| Tucker's a fucking insane, malignant narcissist psychopath. | ||
| I'm not sure if it's that far or whatever, but it does reveal something, and that is through this entire interview, Tucker has been sitting on a very clear awareness that Putin has imprisoned a journalist for the sake of using them as a hostage negotiation. | ||
| So he has that awareness in his mind. | ||
| He's having this sort of impotent, bizarre conversation. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| That's weird. | ||
| Yeah, that is so weird. | ||
| That is so weird. | ||
| I mean, okay, well, it does make sense if you actually believe somehow, some way, that Putin is a good guy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Ugh. | |
| Which is insane. | ||
| Or would be enough of a calculating person to recognize the value in appearing to be a good guy. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Especially with this interview being set up to make it look like Putin is the good guy. | ||
| He's not the aggressor. | ||
| He's the one trying to make peace. | ||
| He's the one trying to be the hero, right? | ||
| That's the premise established through Tucker's coverage in the past and a lot of the picture that's been allowed to be painted. | ||
| Then Putin knows Americans and our movies and loves that shit. | ||
| And when Tucker does this, Putin will be like, you know what? | ||
| I am the good guy. | ||
| This will prove it. | ||
| This will prove everybody in America is lying about Russia. | ||
| That'll make Trump the president, etc. | ||
| You know, all of that stuff. | ||
| Right? | ||
| It's so short-sighted. | ||
| It's so stupid. | ||
| It doesn't recognize that, okay, now he releases him. | ||
| That means that he's been holding a journalist hostage for a year. | ||
| And he can just flippantly decide to release him for PR purposes. | ||
| And that's an additional problem that Tucker had to have every reason to know this wouldn't work. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So what was he doing? | |
| That's why it drops my jaw. | ||
| The issue of release him to us is really where the rubber meets the road and where things are a little different for me. | ||
| Like demanding he be released. | ||
| Is one thing. | ||
| Release him to his family. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Release him to us now so we can put it on TV. | ||
| And we can take him back and have a big crescendo for this thing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Uh-huh. | |
| It's just, it's weird. | ||
| Be part of our show. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's what it is. | ||
| Are we doing a show or a serious thing? | ||
| Are we doing a show or a serious thing? | ||
| And you said serious thing like a fucking idiot because you think that you're lying the right way to a liar. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mm-mm-mm. | |
| Amazing. | ||
| Can't bullshit it a bullshitter. | ||
| Amazing. | ||
| So the issue is that Putin believes that Gershkovic was spying. | ||
| He was arrested for espionage. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And so this is discussed. | ||
| And Tucker is like, he's not a spy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, obviously. | |
| What are you talking about? | ||
| What is happening? | ||
| I think what makes this, and it's not my business, but what makes this difference is the guy's obviously not a spy. | ||
| He's a kid. | ||
| And maybe he was breaking your law in some way, but he's not a super spy and everybody knows that. | ||
| And he's being held hostage in exchange, which is true. | ||
| With respect, it's true. | ||
| And everyone knows it's true. | ||
| So maybe he's in a different category. | ||
| Maybe it's not fair to ask for somebody else in exchange for letting him out. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Maybe it degrades Russia to do that. | |
| You know, you can give different interpretations to what constitutes a spy, but there are certain things provided by law. | ||
| If a person gets secret information and does that in a conspiratorial manner, then this is qualified as espionage. | ||
| And that is exactly what he was doing. | ||
| He was receiving classified, confidential information, and he did it covertly. | ||
| Maybe he did that out of carelessness or his own initiative. | ||
| Considering the sheer fact, this is qualified as espionage. | ||
| The fact has been proven. | ||
| As he was caught red-handed when he was receiving this information. | ||
| If it had been some far-fetched excuse, some fabrication, something not proven, it would have been a different story then. | ||
| But he was caught red-handed when he was secretly getting confidential information. | ||
| What is it then? | ||
| Are you suggesting he was working for the U.S. government or NATO, or he was just a reporter who was given material he wasn't supposed to have? | ||
| Those seem like very different. | ||
| Very different things. | ||
| I don't know who he was working for, but I would like to reiterate that getting classified information in secret is called espionage, and he was working for the U.S. Special Services and some other agencies. | ||
| It's a pretty chilling picture we're getting here right at the end of this interview. | ||
| In the span of the last, like, ten seconds of that clip, Putin deflects a question from Tucker about whether he thinks that Evan was a spy or just a journalist saying, I don't know who he works for, only to immediately after that say he was working for U.S. Special Services. | ||
| That's weird. | ||
| I really think that the First Amendment people who love Putin so much really need to take a hard look in the mirror. | ||
| It seems very strange that someone could possibly watch this interview and not come out with their feelings about both dudes seriously diminished. | ||
| Tucker looks very foolish and kind of incompetent through most of the interview, but I would be dishonest if I didn't say that this was a moment that I would not have predicted. | ||
| I would not. | ||
| And I wouldn't have predicted it from any mainstream journalist. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Probably. | |
| That's for sure. | ||
| It's a legitimately tough question that he's posing to Putin. | ||
| The rest of this has not been very intense, and Tucker's had zero control over the interview from the jump, but you've got to give it a point where there's a point deserved, and pushing back on this is probably pretty... | ||
| Fucking scary. | ||
| This is one of the wildest, I think, interviews that I've ever halfway heard. | ||
| Well, I think if you heard the whole thing, you'd be more bored. | ||
| I would be far more bored. | ||
| I mean, yeah. | ||
| This is so much one of Putin's stories. | ||
| As long as you don't listen to the interview, your imagination of the details is way better. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But at the same time, what this exists at from a distance, if you don't microscope this... | ||
| I just, I find it so fascinating that both of them have kind of come to the conclusion that this should just be, you know, we'll just let this one fade into the dust. | ||
| You know? | ||
| Yeah, I can understand it. | ||
| I do too, but at the same time, it just seems like there should be a different result. | ||
| I think the result should be a legitimate reassessment of the American right wing of their opinions about Putin. | ||
| 100%. | ||
| I think Tucker accidentally created a portrait of somebody who's a blowhard, believes he deserves to take Ukraine, and is hostile towards journalism. | ||
| It is so funny because it is like... | ||
| I'm getting my red dawn up. | ||
| I'm feeling it, you know? | ||
| I'm feeling my, like, Russia's not taking... | ||
| Like, I'm feeling it in there. | ||
| Just listening to Putin lie to me. | ||
| I'm like, fuck yeah, we'll fucking Reagan all the way! | ||
| You know, like, it's that bad. | ||
| And somehow the right wing is like, this is the good guy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Amazing. | |
| It really is bizarre to not reconsider. | ||
| I mean, how can you hear this and even lie to yourself about the lies? | ||
| The lies themselves are fucking horrifying. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So... | |
| Putin's saying, hey, look, we're negotiating this shit. | ||
| I'm not going to give him to you. | ||
| That kind of thing. | ||
| What are you talking about, you child? | ||
| And I think through Putin's conversation that he has around trying to justify why this person was a spy. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I think Tucker gets a little bit of a second wind in him. | ||
| Maybe a first wind, honestly. | ||
| Let me tell you a story about a person serving a sentence in an allied country of the US. | ||
| That person, due to patriotic sentiments, eliminated a bandit in one of the European capitals. | ||
| Eliminated a bandit? | ||
| During events in the Caucasus. | ||
| Do you know what he was doing? | ||
| I don't want to say that, but... | ||
| I will do it anyway. | ||
| He was laying our soldiers, taken prisoner, on the road and then drove his car over their heads. | ||
| What kind of person is that? | ||
| Can he even be called human? | ||
| But there was a patriot who eliminated him in one of the European capitals. | ||
| Whether he did it of his own volition or not, that is a different question. | ||
| I mean, that's a completely different, I mean, this is a 32 year old. | ||
| He committed something different. | ||
| He's not just a journalist. | ||
| I reiterate, he's a journalist who was secretly getting confidential information. | ||
| Yes, it is different, but still. | ||
| I'm talking about other people who are essentially controlled by the US authorities, wherever they are serving a sentence. | ||
| There is an ongoing dialogue between the special services. | ||
| This has to be resolved in a calm, responsible and professional manner. | ||
| They are keeping in touch, so let them do their work. | ||
| I do not rule out that the person you refer to, Mr. Gershkovits, may return to his motherland. | ||
| By the end of the day, it does not make any sense to keep him in prison in Russia. | ||
| We want the U.S. special services to think about how they can contribute to achieving the goals our special services are pursuing. | ||
| We are ready to talk. | ||
| Moreover, the talks are underway. | ||
| And there have been many successful examples of these talks crowned with success. | ||
| Probably this is going to be crowned with success as well. | ||
| But we have to come to an agreement. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I hope you let him out. | |
| Mr. President, thank you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You I also want him to return to his homeland at last. | |
| I'm absolutely sincere. | ||
| But let me say once again, the dialogue continues. | ||
| The more public we render things of this nature, the more difficult it becomes to resolve them. | ||
| Everything has to be done in a calm manner. | ||
| I wonder if that's true with the war, though, also. | ||
| I guess I want to ask one more question. | ||
| Wait. | ||
| And maybe you don't want to say so for strategic reasons. | ||
| But are you worried that what's happening in Ukraine could lead to something much larger and much more horrible? | ||
| And how motivated are you just to call the U.S. government and say, let's come to terms? | ||
| Fuck you! | ||
| Not at all! | ||
| What are you fucking talking about? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Go away! | |
| I already said that we did not refuse to talk. | ||
| We're willing to negotiate. | ||
| It is the western side, and Ukraine is obviously a satellite state of the US. | ||
| It is evident. | ||
| I do not want you to take it as if I'm looking for a strong word or an insult, but we both understand what is happening. | ||
| This is such a wild end to the interview because it doesn't tonally match the rest of this at all. | ||
| Tucker is taking the reins and it almost feels like he's been emboldened by asking about releasing this journalist. | ||
| And I think a big part of that is that in order to justify jailing a journalist, Putin throws out this wild story about a patriot killing a bandit and being arrested. | ||
| This is so disconnected from the issue at hand, which is telling, and it shows weakness in Putin's position, needing to grasp that far to make excuses. | ||
| That mentality runs counter... | ||
| the story about the war that's been told through all of right-wing media, including Tucker's work, and it's dissonant with this interview itself. | ||
| That could be a really decent moment but Putin's able to undercut it by saying, come on, man, we both know that Ukraine's a puppet state in the United States. | ||
| Yeah, I was going to say, yeah. | ||
| And Tucker can't argue with that because he said that a ton of times. | ||
| He's the one who said it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
This is one of the reasons why Tucker is ill-equipped to do this interview, because he can't really follow through with points that can get around Putin's dodges. | |
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He's hamstrung by his own narratives, and it undercuts what is... | |
| Potentially, like, a pretty tough moment there. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| This is another part of... | ||
| This is just fascinating, where Tucker tries to do the throw-to-commercial-type wrap-up, where he says, thank you for your time, I hope you let him out, and Putin laughs and keeps talking. | ||
| Putin wasn't going to let Tucker have that sting, so he goes on, and Tucker needs to reassert his power, so he launches into that question about the war. | ||
| And Putin's inaction on negotiating an end to it. | ||
| This is somewhat confrontational, but you kind of get a clear sense of this path of conversation. | ||
| Like, if it hadn't have happened, then Tucker wouldn't have asked that question. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Which is weird. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| You know, it does still have so much of the feeling of it being personal. | ||
| Yeah, he couldn't... | ||
| I don't even know if that one was thought... | ||
| I think if somebody shows weakness in an interview, Tucker just can't not. | ||
| Especially someone who's being a dick to him. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| I think that there's a lot going on, and a lot of it is based on feelings. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| I mean, this is definitely one of those, like... | ||
| This is one of those Napoleon scenarios where it's like, listen, you gotta kill him. | ||
| You can't exile him to an island, because if he's still alive, he's gonna come back. | ||
| You gotta take him out. | ||
| No, you can't get off that island. | ||
| You can't get... | ||
| Yeah, you can't let this happen. | ||
| And Putin will not stop. | ||
| There's no reason for him to. | ||
| What about a Ghosts of Mars situation? | ||
| There's just no, you know, it's like, there's just one thing to do. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Or let him take over everything. | |
| Well, Tucker has some rejoinders. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| That he can throw in. | ||
| And that is like, hey man, of course Ukraine's a satellite of the United States. | ||
| Yeah, obviously. | ||
| We're already past that. | ||
| But then, what does that imply? | ||
| Dozens of billions of U.S. dollars are going to Ukraine. | ||
|
unidentified
|
There's a huge influx of weapons. | |
| In this case, you should tell the current Ukrainian leadership to stop and come to a negotiating table, rescind this absurd decree. | ||
| We did not refuse. | ||
| Sure, but you already said it. | ||
| I didn't think you meant it as an insult because you already said correctly. | ||
| it's been reported that Ukraine was prevented from negotiating a peace settlement by the former British prime minister acting on behalf of the Biden administration. | ||
| So of course there's a satellite, big countries control small countries, that's not new. | ||
| And that's why I asked about dealing directly with the Biden administration, which is making these decisions, not President Zelensky of Ukraine. | ||
| Well, if Zelensky's administration in Ukraine refused to leave the negotiations, Well, if the Zelensky administration in Ukraine refused to negotiate, I assume they did it under the instruction from Washington. | ||
| If Washington believes it to be the wrong decision, let it abandon it. | ||
| Let it find a delicate excuse so that no one is insulted. | ||
| Let it come up with a way out. | ||
| It was not us who made this decision. | ||
| It was them. | ||
| So let them go back on it. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| It's everybody's fault. | ||
| Boris Johnson did say that Ukraine shouldn't accept the terms of Putin's deal, but there's no evidence that he strong-armed them into that position at all. | ||
| Ukrainian representatives indicated they were inclined not to accept the deals Russia was offering, partially because they had no reason to trust that Putin would live up to his end. | ||
| But now we've entered into a somewhat paradoxical world. | ||
| Ukraine is a satellite country of the United States, so there's no reason for Putin to try to negotiate with them. | ||
| But also, Zelensky wouldn't have made that decree that Ukrainians can't negotiate with Putin unless the U.S. told him so, so there's no reason to try and negotiate with the United States either. | ||
| Putin knows that Ukraine and the United States aren't going to concede to his demands, so this becomes a very convenient way to argue that no negotiation is possible. | ||
| No negotiation on his terms is probably possible. | ||
| That is probably true. | ||
| And because he doesn't get to dictate the terms, it's everyone else's fault for not playing into his shit. | ||
| They're making excuses. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, at this point, there's no way to view it as anything other than existential for Ukraine. | ||
| So there's no stopping the war unless Ukraine exists, and there's no stopping the war unless Ukraine doesn't exist. | ||
| So, that's that. | ||
| That does seem to be that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, Tucker asks a clarifying question that is like, okay, let's just be clear. | ||
| You want a settled end to this war, right? | ||
| With the ownership of the world. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| So I just want to make sure I'm not misunderstanding what you're saying. | ||
| I don't think that I am. | ||
| I think you're saying you want a negotiated settlement to what's happening in Ukraine. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| And we made it. | ||
| We prepared a huge document in Istanbul that was initialed by the head of the Ukrainian delegation. | ||
| He affixed his signature to some of the provisions, not to all of it. | ||
| He put his signature and then he himself said, we were ready to sign it and the war would have been over long ago, 18 months ago. | ||
| However, Prime Minister Johnson came, talked us out of it, and we missed that chance. | ||
| Well, you missed it, you made a mistake. | ||
| Let them get back to that. | ||
| That is all. | ||
| Why do we have to bother ourselves and correct somebody else's mistakes? | ||
| Sure! | ||
| You may notice a very important detail that Putin's just kind of casually glossing over, namely that the Ukrainian side hadn't agreed to all the terms of the agreement at Istanbul. | ||
| Boris Johnson didn't force or force Ukraine or Zelensky into anything, and he's come out very aggressively against this accusation. | ||
| It all stems from a Ukrainian negotiator who said that when Johnson visited Kiev on April 9th, 2022, he said that Ukraine, quote, shouldn't sign anything with them at all, and let's just fight. | ||
| Yeah, obviously. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He didn't say what Putin's claiming here. | ||
| That's an embellishment, to put it politely. | ||
| He also said that the whole denazification thing was a charade that Russia was using to hide its primary concern, which is making sure that Ukraine doesn't join NATO. | ||
| This comment from Arihami is what the whole narrative is hinged on, even when it's coming from the head of the belligerent state in this negotiation. | ||
| Putin doesn't have more evidence of this past what you'd hear on Infowars. | ||
| It's really weird. | ||
| There's no more evidence being presented. | ||
| It's the same shit that goes on in right-wing media. | ||
| It is. | ||
| It is a testament to the completeness of information control in Russia. | ||
| You know? | ||
| Where it's like, you can be this lazy. | ||
| I mean, if you give it ten years here, you can be this lazy. | ||
| Trump was that lazy. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| And people still believe him. | ||
| People believe all the bullshit he says, so why not? | ||
| I think when you are a charismatic, attempted authoritarian or authoritarian, you kind of get away with a lot. | ||
| Yeah, I don't, I mean... | ||
| It is childish and stupid to think that there is a settlement with Putin. | ||
| There's a settlement with Russia. | ||
| That's fine. | ||
| Russia's people. | ||
| There's no settlement with Putin. | ||
| Because if you settle with Putin now, then five years from now, Putin spent five years building up a military so he can take back your shit. | ||
| Or you spent five years building up a military, in which case everybody wasted five years of time building up a military to continue a conflict that's going on now. | ||
| So it's stupid. | ||
| And is, like, if past his prelude, going to continue as long as there is not a Russia-friendly leader in Ukraine. | ||
| Because he doesn't believe Ukraine's a country and he thinks that it's all fake. | ||
| Right. | ||
| There is no end to the war so long as Putin is alive. | ||
| That's it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Unless... | |
| There is the sort of negative end to the war, which is... | ||
| Putin wins. | ||
| Installing a permanent dictator, the Russia-friendly dictator in Ukraine. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| Yep, that's it. | ||
| So here's where the interview ends. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And it's sort of a fake optimism on Putin's part. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| They have driven the situation to the point where we are at. | ||
| It is not us who have done that. | ||
| It is our partners, opponents, who have done that. | ||
| Well, now let them think how to reverse the situation. | ||
| We're not against it. | ||
| It would be funny if it were not so sad. | ||
| This endless mobilization in Ukraine, the hysteria, the domestic problems, sooner or later it will result in agreement. | ||
| You know, this probably sounds strange given the current situation. | ||
| But the relations between the two peoples will be rebuilt anyway. | ||
| It will take a lot of time, but they will heal. | ||
| I'll give you very unusual examples. | ||
| There's a combat encounter on the battlefield. | ||
| Here's a specific example. | ||
| Ukrainian soldiers got encircled. | ||
| This is an example from real life. | ||
| Our soldiers were shouting to them, there is no chance, surrender yourselves, come out and you will be alive. | ||
| Suddenly the Ukrainian soldiers were screaming from there in Russian, perfect Russian, saying, Russians do not surrender, and all of them perished. | ||
| They still identify themselves as Russian. | ||
| You have learned the wrong lesson, sir! | ||
| What is happening is, to a certain extent, an element of a civil war. | ||
| Everyone in the West thinks that the Russian people have been split by hostilities forever. | ||
| No, they will be reunited. | ||
| The unity is still there. | ||
| Why are the Ukrainian authorities dismantling the Ukrainian Orthodox Church? | ||
| Because it brings together not only the territory, it brings together our souls. | ||
| How dare you, you fucker. | ||
| Ha ha ha ha ha. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Ha ha ha. | |
| Huh? | ||
| Shall we end here, or is there anything else? | ||
| No, tell me more about Souls. | ||
| I think that's great. | ||
| Thank you, Mr. President. | ||
| No, I think that's great. | ||
| Jesus fucking Christ. | ||
| Yeah, so the optimistic sort of beautiful flowery end is this'll all be fine because we're all Russians anyway. | ||
| I mean, the idea that that doesn't tell you everything you need to know and basically nullify any possible value the previous two hours could have had. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It speaks loudly. | ||
| Listen, at the end of the day, what's important is I've already won. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| And it's just a basic reality. | ||
| What matters is that all of you, everywhere, are fucking wrong and stupid. | ||
| And I am smart and strong and I am good looking as well. | ||
| The people in Ukraine have been tricked into thinking they're not Russian. | ||
| And that is what we must beat out of them. | ||
| Yeah, man. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Yeah, it's something. | ||
| It's something. | ||
| So after all this, there's a little sting that plays at the end. | ||
| And I don't know if this is just on every Tucker episode or whatever, but it felt really weird after this one. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Thank you, Mr. President. | ||
| Free speech is bigger than any one person or any one organism. | ||
| Societies are defined by what they will not commit. | ||
| What we're watching is the total inversion of virtue. | ||
| That's it! | ||
| That's the story. | ||
| I was thinking... | ||
| That is apt? | ||
| Wrongly? | ||
| That is so wrong it is apt. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Something that's so bizarre about this is that this interview... | ||
| If slightly more confrontational, and if it had some of the vibe that came around in the end, asking about the jailed journalist, if that came from someone who wasn't Tucker, this interview probably works very negatively against Putin. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| But because it's Tucker, it's... | ||
| But see, this is what's so great about this. | ||
| Because this ends every conversation, every argument from now on about this type of thing. | ||
| It's so great, what I love about this. | ||
| Inexplicably, right? | ||
| This proves definitively the reason that Tucker was chosen is because there is no downside. | ||
| There's no bad outcome. | ||
| This is a neutral outcome. | ||
| This is a zero. | ||
| Which is not what you want. | ||
| Yeah, you would prefer a plus 100 in the win column, but ultimately, this is as bad as it could get, which is nothing. | ||
| So if you are going to say, like, oh, well, should we talk to Alex? | ||
| Should we talk to Joe Rose? | ||
| Should we do any of this stuff? | ||
| If you are talking to him... | ||
| This is you. | ||
| You're Tucker. | ||
| You are nothing. | ||
| The reason you are allowed to talk to them is because you pose zero threat. | ||
| And that is the answer. | ||
| So if you are a Krasenstein, go fuck yourself. | ||
| You pose zero threat. | ||
| Destiny. | ||
| Zero threat. | ||
| Pathetic. | ||
| What's interesting is that you have zero threat even when you're doing something that is nominally threatening. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, which is why they choose you for it, because it is the appearance of something real that is not real. | ||
| Well, because also... | ||
| It's a deepfake, if you will. | ||
| But I think part of it, too, is that Putin has a clear understanding that in order to be against Putin, Tucker would have to change a lot of narratives, admit he was wrong about a ton of stuff. | ||
| He would have to do the one thing he cannot do. | ||
| Right, and so you kind of have the interviewer in a position where even if you do ask, Oh, totally. | ||
| And it's not for lack of trying. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No! | |
| Because Tucker did try. | ||
| That's what's so fascinating about it. | ||
| He tried to weave things in those directions. | ||
| Do you see God at work? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah! | |
| Who are the teams? | ||
| Yeah! | ||
| Who are the elites? | ||
| Please talk about the deep state. | ||
| You know, he tried to weave into those conspiracy territories, and Putin just didn't. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And... | ||
| Here's what I wish. | ||
| That's weird. | ||
| Here's what I would like. | ||
| I would like, because I don't believe that I will ever have agreement with the far right on stuff. | ||
| It seems doubtful. | ||
| But what I do think we can agree on is that if somebody's a giant loser, we just go, ah, that's a giant loser. | ||
| And you have watched Tucker and Vladimir Putin be giant losers. | ||
| So they're both giant losers. | ||
| It seems loser-ish. | ||
| It's loser shit! | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's weak sauce! | |
| God, I'd be such a better dictator than Putin. | ||
| I'd be so great at it. | ||
| I would dictate the shit out of things. | ||
| I don't think you would. | ||
| I'd be like, oh man, let's not fight this war. | ||
| It'd be not hard. | ||
| And then I'd be killed immediately. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| I'd be dead. | ||
| Well, I mean, I guess it really then comes down to the question of how do you define a good dictatorship, you know? | ||
| One that's dead. | ||
| Oh. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, in that case, yeah, you'd be great. | ||
| I'd be great at it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| You know, I struggle with this. | ||
| Because, on the one hand, you have to ask yourself, like, does Tucker come out of this looking like a good interviewer? | ||
| And I think the answer is no, with a very, very small window. | ||
| With a strange caveat. | ||
| With a small window that is even still ruined by his clear interest in the spectacle. | ||
| Self-promotion, yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's not ruined, but it's tainted, let's say. | ||
| Sure, sure, sure, sure. | ||
| So I think not. | ||
| I think Tucker doesn't come out of this looking... | ||
| Again, with that slight exception. | ||
| Because I do think that that would take a lot of nerve to pull the trigger on that. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Sitting across the table from Putin. | ||
| I think it would be easier, honestly, like legitimately, serious talk, it would be easier for me to try and kill Putin than it would be to ask that question. | ||
| Because that's a scary question to ask unless you're holding a fucking knife to Putin's throat. | ||
| You don't really know how the ball's going to break. | ||
| It could go any way and Putin kills people. | ||
| So that... | ||
| You know, does deserve a tip of the cap in some way. | ||
|
unidentified
|
True. | |
| But still, despite that, the rest of it is not good interviewing. | ||
| No. | ||
| It's not driving points home. | ||
| It's not interesting. | ||
| No. | ||
| He let him hold court for half an hour about Russian history and then seemed to not understand the point until reflection, which is why he had to add this disclaimer at the beginning. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So then you ask yourself, does Putin come off looking strong? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| And I think not. | ||
| No. | ||
| To whom? | ||
| Is this? | ||
| Do you know what I mean? | ||
| Like, I understand before this, I assumed that this was for the right wing to... | ||
| The American right wing, particularly. | ||
| Yeah, for the American right wing to solidify their support around Putin. | ||
| That seems like the only reason to do this. | ||
| And especially because coming forward is the idea that if Trump is elected, we're going to go fuck off NATO. | ||
| So this should be essentially preparation for everybody on the right wing going, yes, it's totally fine to throw out the past 80 years of orthodoxy and become pro-Russia, right? | ||
| It seems like that would be why you do this, because the end goal, or the fruits, as it were, of creating a portrait of Putin that is like... | ||
| I'm going to call journalism spying. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Totally. | |
| I believe that I have the right to take Ukraine, and something in the 900s onward is the rationalization for that. | ||
| That does not work, and it runs counter to the established sort of positions in this right-wing media space. | ||
| Like I said, this is making me Swayze. | ||
| This is absolutely 100% a, like, when you listen to this, your Red Dawn should get lit up and you should go, like, America. | ||
| Like, this is, again, one of the few jingoistic things that I will allow myself. | ||
| And this is the only situation where it's useful. | ||
| But it's so weird. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It is weird. | |
| When you reflect on it, it... | ||
| I don't understand it. | ||
| It can't be a win. | ||
| Except for, you know, obviously, a lot of people watched it. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| It drove a lot of traffic in the immediate. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good? | |
| Well, certainly, you know, on some level, if you are recognizing that a lot of the content is going to be ignored by people, and maybe people will just passively watch it or whatever, it does raise your stature a bit if you're Tucker. | ||
| Obviously. | ||
| You interviewed Putin. | ||
| You're interviewing Cat Turd and the guy who claims he had sex with Obama. | ||
| And then you jump to Putin. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Big difference. | ||
| Yeah, and that's not to say that he hasn't had big guests. | ||
| In the past, but this is kind of a different echelon. | ||
| This is nuclear weapons unilaterally level guest. | ||
| Yeah, so that does raise your stature in some sense, but the actual product of it, if you mean this interview to be taken seriously, it should facilitate a pivot. | ||
| It should facilitate a changing of position of like, hey... | ||
| This guy, maybe we had his intentions wrong all the time about Ukraine. | ||
| Maybe we should reconsider some of these other things that we've been selling you. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| But it's not doing that, I don't think. | ||
| Okay, have you seen any reaction to it? | ||
| Not a ton. | ||
| So you texted me... | ||
| I mean, leaving Alex aside. | ||
| Sure, sure, sure. | ||
| Well, yeah, I mean, obviously I haven't seen that response either. | ||
| But leaving... | ||
| No, you texted me like... | ||
| Did you see any of this interview? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And we both had a weird little moment where we're like, no, and that seems crazy. | ||
| Yeah, because oftentimes there will be something that happens, and we knew that we were going to cover this in advance when it was announced. | ||
| And so a lot of times you can't avoid big news. | ||
| It is literally Super Bowl Sunday. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Today. | ||
| I forgot about that. | ||
| Yeah, I know. | ||
| Me too. | ||
| We were listening to the radio. | ||
| My wife dropped me off. | ||
| Do you remember the fucking post-Super Bowl Obama interviews? | ||
| Where it was like, or was it the Super Bowl halftime thing, or was it the pre? | ||
| I don't remember. | ||
| But it was like, the biggest thing on the planet was the Super Bowl, and that's why Obama was right next to it, you know? | ||
| It's that kind of thing. | ||
| Tucker tried to scoop the Super Bowl. | ||
| And this is... | ||
| It's supposed to be of that stature. | ||
| Yeah, it doesn't feel like the response has lived up to it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And that's probably a testament to the content of it being kind of flipped. | ||
| It really sucks. | ||
| They fucking shit the bed. | ||
| Man. | ||
| I think what's amazing about this is I don't think at any point in my life I would ever have expected something like this to happen. | ||
| Do you know what I mean? | ||
| Sort of. | ||
| My understanding of the geopolitical world, even at younger ages, still would have been like, well, they're not going to do that. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Then, add on top of that, they're going to do that potentially dangerous thing, and then fail. | ||
| So spectacularly, the world kind of ignores it? | ||
| That's the part that I'm wrestling with. | ||
| We see this as a failure on both sides, because I don't think either comes out looking better, but that's where we have to reassess. | ||
| Have we mis- assumed what the goal is? | ||
| Or what the terms of failure are? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I don't think that's the case. | ||
| I think it's possible that we're wrong in terms of what they thought they were trying to get, but if they were trying to get something different from what we would have been trying to get, then they were wrong about what they're trying to get. | ||
| Do you know what I mean? | ||
| There's only one valuable thing out of this, and that is the right-wing loving Putin enough to exit NATO. | ||
| I think based on a lot of the behaviors that you see displayed by Tucker throughout the interview, it seems like that is still his intention of trying to get down that road, and that road is not being gone down by Putin. | ||
| Amazing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Which... | |
| Maybe he had the strategic difference of opinion or whatever. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| But this was very weird. | ||
| This was very weird. | ||
| And I don't know. | ||
| There's a part of me that feels like... | ||
| I kind of regret covering it, almost, because it is kind of like a wet blanket or something. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right, right, right. | |
| But at the same time, it's going to be such a piece of lore and stuff with Alex and InfoWars that it's something that is not really avoidable. | ||
| Here's why. | ||
| One, I think I kind of, I don't regret at all. | ||
| Maybe regret was a strong one. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, I think that's not quite the word. | ||
| I think there's two things that make this actually very, very good. | ||
| One, this is so weird. | ||
| It is very weird. | ||
| But uniquely weird. | ||
| In a weird that I don't know if I've ever experienced before. | ||
| And two, this is ripe for the type of wet cement. | ||
| This is the type of interview, because it's a dud, because people aren't going to pay attention to it. | ||
| In six months, do you remember when Tucker interviewed Putin and Putin said all the things that you did want to hear him say? | ||
| Right, there could be. | ||
| Do you know what I mean? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, that is the type of thing where I think we are uniquely situated to fight against this specific case. | ||
| It may be. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| That's an interesting perspective. | ||
| Because fucking, none of these fucking bloggers, the Guardian doesn't have the ability to do that shit. | ||
| Well, a lot of them do a fair amount of good fact-checking and such. | ||
| They do a good job at what they can do. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They can't swear and have you call for Putin to die. | ||
| They really can't, which I do think is odd. | ||
| You could, back in the 40s, you could be like, fucking kill Hitler! | ||
| So, we come to the end of this, and, well... | ||
| Your mileage may vary. | ||
| It is what it is. | ||
| It is what it is. | ||
| But we'll be back for another episode. | ||
| But until then, we have a website. | ||
| Indeed we do. | ||
| It's KnowledgeFight.com. | ||
| Yep, we're also on Blue Sky. | ||
| We are on Blue Sky. | ||
| It's KnowledgeFight. | ||
| Yep, we'll be back. | ||
| But until then, I'm Neo. | ||
| I'm Leo. | ||
| I'm DZX. | ||
| Clark. | ||
| I was thinking about trying to do the theme from Tetris, but I don't know if that's in poor taste. | ||
| Is it? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I don't think it is. | ||
| No. | ||
| I love Tetris. | ||
| You do? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You're really good at it, too. | ||
| I can beat anybody. | ||
| It's fucking creepy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I take all comers. | ||
| Bring it on. | ||
| It's not creepy. | ||
| It's impressive. | ||
| I don't know why I said creepy. | ||
| I think because it's supposed to be avoiding a compliment to you. | ||
| I will take on everybody at the X-Ray Arcade. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's true. | |
| Everyone. | ||
| I will beat you all at Tetris. | ||
| I'm not going to do that. | ||
| I'm not going to do that. | ||
| You would. | ||
| Nah, probably not. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Woo! | |
| Yeah! | ||
| Woo! | ||
| Yeah! | ||
| Woo! | ||
| And now... | ||
| Here comes the sex robots. | ||
| Andy in Kansas, you're on the air. | ||
| Thanks for holding. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello, Alex. | |
| I'm a first-time caller. | ||
| I'm a huge fan. | ||
| I love your work. |