Mike Baker Breaks Down Tucker Carlson’s Interview With Putin

What do you think we learned from the Putin Tucker interview, speaking of Russia? Um well, Putin's a douchebag. I think that I took that away, but I see I had a preconceived notion. Putin, those are your priors. Yeah, that was I was something I walked into the interview with. Um Like I I don't I don't know. I I think I understand why Tucker wanted to do it aside from just 160 million views or however many he got, right? I mean, that was sure to be a a winner. Um in in just the ratings. Uh I don't think it revealed anything clever or new about Putin's mindset. He's a smart cat, right? So, he knew what he was going to say, how he was going to act, what he was going to look like, you know, every I mean, he's a very calculating individual, right? He's survived Russian politics, right? For this long and at the top, right? Um you don't do that by being a [ __ ] right? Or or or stumbling into an interview with Tucker Carlson, right? Who's not exactly Lex Luthor, right? I mean, so that you know, again, that's and that's not but I'm listening to Tucker. He's a smart guy. I'm just saying that it's not like it was it was not like some Marvel, you know, movie where the the two evil minds got together. Putin's a very calculating, clever individual. So, I don't think we I I mean, from my perspective, I didn't learn anything new about him. Yeah. Um Look, this idea that somehow we have no interest in Ukraine and we should just, you know, close the curtains on it. Um yeah, Ukraine, great courage for 2 years. We all loved it. You know, I'll keep my bumper sticker on the car um for Ukraine. And now we walk away because we don't care anymore, because we're tired of it and we want to, you know, do something and we spend that money back. We course we should spend the [ __ ] money at home, right? We got a lot of infrastructure problems and resource we should do. But we also have concerns over there. And so I think the you know, I'm I'm amazed at the speed with which it happened. But you could argue that about a lot of things. Yeah. The speed at which the support fell off? Yes, the speed at which it fell I mean look again, I I don't mean to jump all over the place, but Hamas rolls into southern Israel, slaughters 1,200 people in probably the most medieval display of brutality that we've seen in our lifetimes, right? Uh which everybody agreed was was incredibly brutal. And in record time, it's Israel's fault, right? Because they've gone into Gaza to try to destroy the Hamas which has been doing this which has always been in existence to destroy Israel. And so yeah, and of course you don't want civilians to die. But Hamas has spent you know, going on a couple decades now embedding themselves inside that population knowing that every time that there is a conflict civilians are going to die knowing that that's going to drive the narrative. That's what they do. So the speed with which that happened, the speed with which we've gotten fatigued in Ukraine, you know, it all kind of comes back around again to this this whole idea. Novelty, desire for something new. Yeah, I am you know, I I knew that the Putin Tucker interview was going to be a big deal and I sort of prepared myself for yeah, this like cataclysmic meeting of you know, like west and and and and Soviet and I and then I I don't know. I came away from it kind of just being like oh. Uh uh just the very Yeah. unenlightened, kind of unimpressed, I think. You know, you have this 30-minute treatise, monologue, soliloquy at the start about this is the history and this is why we feel this way and so on and so forth. And you know, Tucker is a he's a very competent interviewer. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Usually. And I you know, I I don't know how difficult it must have been and this is something that people are never really going to see the intermediary of a translator between the two adds a degree of complexity that can really it's like fighting a southpaw or something. It's you know it throws you off your step a little bit. And that sounds silly but you know No no they use that to I mean that's always been the case. You always use a translator to your advantage right? It gives him more chance to say something back to do whatever right? Yeah very interesting. But no I just it was a but and now Navalny's dead. Yeah and that's the next and that happens what a week maybe 10 days after he sits down with Tucker. Yeah no it it and it's he doesn't care right? I mean we we imagine that that Russia cares what we think about them and how they're portrayed and we imagine that Xi worries about how China You mean like they've got a a brand equity dashboard somewhere and they're like what's our current rating? Oh we're at 4.4 stars on Tripadvisor. What is that the old Q rating or the Q factor and how popular are we? Uh they they really don't care. In part not so much Russia but more China because they've got the longer view right? They've they they look way down the road compared to how the the West tends to do it but um I think the the parameters of what they were allowed to do Carlson and his crew when they went in were pretty hard and fast right? As you can imagine there's a lot of back and forth that goes into that. cuz he was well for it. Yeah. He was two hours late which is apparently like par for the course with him. he was riding a tiger. He was doing something. He was he was fighting a bear. Yeah yeah. So a couple of them. But yeah if if Carlson had like born in on born in on Gershkovich right? Evan Gershkovich who's sitting in in jail or Paul Whelan or you know um and and and in in a more aggressive fashion. Said okay well where is your evidence? With with Evan that he's been engaged in espionage. How about that? You know, when are you actually going to do something about an actual, you know, open, transparent effort to discuss his case? You know, if you'd if you'd if he had gone in on that more. But that wouldn't have been allowed to happen, right? That wasn't that was wasn't part of the the agreed-upon, you know, playing field. So I just I didn't think we're going to get anything new and I I didn't feel like we we did. Again, I understand why he did it, had the interview. But anyway, but the Navalny situation um sudden death syndrome. You're in a forced labor camp. Like just Yeah, above the Arctic Circle. Being alive being alive is a surprise. Like the death isn't the surprise thing. It's like, "God, he lasted 2 and 1/2 years." Yeah, he went for a walk. And then he didn't feel well. That was their original comment. You know, he went for a walk and then he didn't feel well. You cuz cuz that's what you do above the Arctic Circle. Go for a walk. Go for a walk. And and then, you know, there was some comment he had bruising around his head and his chest. And their their response was, "Well, he hit his head when he fell on his chest. repeatedly. And then the chest was when they were trying to revive him. It's So, from a Russian perspective, it was it was exactly what you would expect. And whether he was poisoned or whether they, you know, they they you know, it was blunt force trauma or whatever. The outcome was probably always inevitable with Navalny because he was always a threat. And What's the give the 30,000-ft view for the people who who don't know his background, Navalny? Who was he? He's a I'm trying to remember the year that he kind of really first surfaced. Um And I'm I'm I'm drawing a blank, but he um he most not most recently, but he became sort of a critic of uh of Chechnya. He became a critic of some of the governance in Chechnya and then the corruption. He started um being more vocal about primarily about corruption issues, right? And then he fed off of that. I'm I'm really oversimplifying it. But he had to be careful about how he was doing that obviously because you get you get sideways with the Russian regime pretty quickly. But he started to gain a following because he was one of the few people who was actually getting out and talking about things that people, you know, I suppose in the back of their minds were thinking, yeah, there's probably some corruption going on here in the Russian government and and around the region. And eventually he he went to run for mayor. And that didn't end well, right? He didn't he got convicted or charged with business corruption. Now it was kind of the first salvo that Putin fired at him, I think in in in effort to say, hey look, just shut up because I think, you know, you're going to find this is not going to go well for you. So, it was business corruption. You see that in China, too. Anytime somebody gets sideways with she, usually it's a corruption charge. It's a it's a some type of malfeasance on the business side, yeah. So, um and then they disappear. So, Navalny made a bid for for mayor of Moscow feeling like that's where you could make a change, right? I think his his real mindset was if you if if he could get that post, then he really could perhaps longer term influence change in Russia. I mean, he was he's a proponent of democracy. Then then then disinformation started to get in there. There was a lot of movement from the Putin regime uh painting him in, you know, a lot of different ways, right? Saying, okay, you're you're you're far right, you're an extremist, you're all sorts of things started to come through. Um and then it kind of all went sideways. He eventually ended up I think it was 20 19 2020. Um he was uh on a flight, got sick. You know, Novichok was the nerve agent that they used. Which is serious [ __ ] Serious [ __ ] invented by the Soviets. Um and uh so he almost died from that. He was out of the country. And then to his credit, after he recovered Okay, I'm going to come back straight back. Yeah. Yeah, so he flew back, he got arrested before even really got anywhere near, you know, passport control. They just picked him up. And and that was pretty much it. But during during this period he had started to do YouTube. Mhm. And he was flying drones, not him, his team were flying drones over the top of Putin's billion-dollar compound Yeah. and releasing stories that he's just got like an army of hookers and pole dancers and stuff just cycling their way through this place and looking at all of the money and this is where it's being spent. But they're, you know, full on like what in order to be able to go as far as they did, it looks like pretty high-grade technology to be able to capture this sort of stuff. Yeah, I mean you can it's, you know, again, drones being what they are nowadays. Yes. I don't know. I like that. I like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. real character. I know, I um So, yeah, the the drone technology has changed everything, right? And it's so accessible. Right. Uh you don't need much. A few bucks will get you a drone with a camera that you can, you know, get some really good footage of. So, but you're right. You know, talking about his his his uh his lavish lifestyle and his spending that irked Putin on a on a personal level, right? And Putin only cares about one thing, right? Right? Which is maintaining power. Same with Xi. And you maintain power by keeping the people under control, right? So, social unrest is the one thing that these guys all fear the most, right? Including the mullahs in Iran and and and you know, Kim Jong-un, although he lives in kind of a fantasy world of uh North Korea, but So, Navalny um you know, at at at a certain point he you know, it was it for him it was inevitable, I think, that this is where it was going. I remember watching it unfold at the time after this guy's been popped with nerve agent and then it slowly recovers and then starts doing his YouTube stuff again and this is getting in days tens of millions of plays and it's not even it's only in Russian, right? There's maybe you can maybe translate it into British subtitles or English subtitles or whatever. And uh and then he's like, "I'm not scared of you." Like, you should be. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. You should be scared. And I as soon as he got on that plane, right? To go back to the motherland, that was at some point within the next 5 years you're probably going to be dead. Yeah, and I think that I can see the calculation that he and his his, you know, his wife, I'm sure, and and probably his close cadre made that the most impact he can have will be in country, right? I mean, it's one thing to be a dissident outside the country. You know, China's got a number of those, even though the Xi regime tries to track them down and change their minds. Um but um I think Navalny probably spent a fair amount of time, who knows, but it's speculation, but I suspect he spent a lot of time uh on that calculation. Can I have more impact outside the country or inside the country? And uh to his credit, he you know, he flew back knowing, I think, exactly what was going to happen. In other news, this episode is brought to you by Element. Stop having coffee first thing in the morning. Your adenosine system that caffeine acts on isn't working for the first 90 minutes of the day. So, your morning coffee that you have upon waking is completely pointless, but salt acts on your adrenal system and that is what is active. So, taking Element first thing in the morning, will help you to feel more awake, have less caffeine throughout the day, and be more energized. It'll help to regulate your appetite, curb cravings, and improve your brain function. It's a science-backed electrolyte ratio of sodium, potassium, and magnesium, and it tastes fantastic. This orange salt in water first thing in the morning is gorgeous. It is my favorite way to start the day. I wouldn't be doing it if I didn't love it. Now, I was using this product long before they were a partner on the show. 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