Tucker Carlson just dropped his 2-hour interview with Vladimir Putin, dictator of Russia.
The idea that a former KGB agent with his country in dire straits and probably the biggest American audience he’s going to have access to doesn’t have a game plan and tactics in mind when coming into such an interview is laughable, here’s the video if you want to see what you can pick out for yourself:
Right in the beginning, Tucker notes that Putin is going to spend half an hour talking about history, starting all the way back in the year 800.
What is Putin trying to communicate here?
I would argue that the message is actually nothing. There’s no reason to start out in the year 800, then jump forward to 1800 to mention the 1000th year celebration, then talk about the prince and then how the prince had a regent who was… and so on.
If your country’s future is at stake, and it very well could be, you’d think you’d at least get an editor.
On top of the incomprehensibility present in the content is the “translator,” who has a droning voice, makes awkwardly long pauses, mispronounces words, emphasizes weird words, and ignores pauses where a native English speaker would find them natural.
If your country’s future was at stake, and you’re already clearly doing post-editing, you’d think you’d get a decent translator.
I’m pretty sure with AI tools you could create a more comprehensible result than this in 15 minutes.
On top of all this is the length- thirty minutes doesn’t seem that long, but everything that’s a barrier to argument helps, and most people are not going to go in for thirty minutes of badly translated ancient history.
The point of all this work is to create a nice big black box where we can say that the argument justifying Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is. We can pretend that something was said, that because so much time was spent, and because the argument encompassed all of Russian history from the year 862, it must be very academic and reasonable.
He’s talking about history and he knows so much history, he must be smart and his reasons must be too.
The best part of all this- and I’m going to create a post talking more about this in the future, is that the Russian people’s experience of this interview is going to be entirely different.
Go back to the video real quick and compare Putin’s voice to the translator’s.
In his native Russian, Putin speaks clearly, he has energy and emphasis, and his audience will have a familiarity and relationship with the history that he’s talking about.
With the benefit of “translation,” one message can change significantly, and two audiences can have entirely different experiences of it.
This isn’t a unique trick- again, I’ll be writing about it more soon, but using “translation” to achieve it is definitely unique and quite impressive.