YouSaid · the spoken record

Fiona Hill

lines on the record: 244
first: 2022-11-04
most recent: 2022-11-04
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“To Henry Kissinger for that defense policy board, and we planned bloody weeks on this thing, PowerPoints were created, teams of people were brought together. And, you know, people were practicing this. We had all these different people there. And I said, look, Henry Kissinger's an academic and a former professor. And, you know, I happened to, you know, kind of watch him in action. He's going to like. Know five seconds in if we're lucky we get that far, ask us a question and just throw off our entire presentation. What is it that we want to convey? And that's exactly what happened.”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not going to wait there, so I give this long explanation. I've got to get to the point. And then I've got to then choose for myself what's the information I'm going to impart to you. After the 20 things I think are important, you know, okay, I've got 20 minutes. Maybe I only get two minutes. Maybe, you know, you get called out. And somebody kind of interrupts, something happens. I'm going to get one minute, two minutes I mean, I want to remember I had to give a presentation when I was in government.”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That would be the larger, you know, thinking of the funneling in information from the presidential administration, from the National Security Council. It looks like he made that decision with a handful of people. And then having worked in these kinds of environments, and it's not that dissimilar, you filter information up. So think about, you know, you and I are talking for hours here. If you were my basically senior official and I'm your briefer, I might only get 20 minutes with you. And you might be just like, you know, looking at your watch the whole time and thinking, hang on a second, I've got to go and I've got this meeting and I've got that meeting. And yeah, your point.”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He learned something about the questions that people ask, the way that they ask them. You know, so he's kind of soliciting information himself. And if he's cut off from that information because of circumstances, then how is he formulating things in his head? And again, getting into, you can't get into his head, but you can understand the context in which he's operating. And that's where you worry, because he clearly made this decision to invade Ukraine beyond the back of most of his security establishment.”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He's not preserved, and he was sort of trained in operations and contingency planning. Sergei Shigu, the defence minister, is a civil engineer, was the former minister of emergencies. He wasn't a military planner. Somebody like Gerasimov, the head of the chiefs of staff, maybe a military guy in this case from the army, but he's also somebody who's in a different part of the chain of command. He's not somebody who would spontaneously start, you know, telling Putin things. And Putin, you know, comes out of the FSB, out of the KGB, of the Soviet era, and he knows a way that, you know, intelligence gets filtered and worked. He's probably somebody who wants to consume raw intelligence. He doesn't probably want to hear anybody else's analysis. And he thrived in the past of picking things up from people. I've taken part in all of these meetings with him gone for hours because he's just collecting. He's collecting information. He's sussing people out. He wants to know the questions they ask.”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think a lot of us worry, I mean, us who watch Putin about what kind of information is he getting? Is it just the information he's seeking and gathering himself that fits into his worldview and his framework? We're all guilty of that, of looking for things to our social media preferences. Are people just bringing to him things that they think he wants to hear, like the algorithm, you know, kind of like the Kremlin working in that regard? Or is he himself tapping into source of information that he absolutely wants? And remember, he is not a military guy.”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Different viewpoints and maybe a kind of more eclectic diversified set of information he would meet with people. You've heard all the stories about where he had once called up Mashagessen, you know, and had to come in, obviously, a very different character as a journalist and a critic. We've heard about Benedict from Eko Moscovy, the radio program, the editor who Putin would talk to and consult with. He'd reach out people like Ludman Alexieva, for example, the head of Memorial. He had some respect for her and sometimes just talk to her. For example, all of that seems to have come to a halt.”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Obviously, he was in a bubble, different kind of bubble from most of us. I mean, most of us are not bubbles with multiple kind of palaces and, you know, the kind of the Kremlin. But we've seen so much, obviously a lot of this is stage, that isolation, you know, that kind of making it very clear that he's the csar, the guy who is in charge making all the decisions, one end of a table and everybody else is at the other end. But it's very difficult then to bring information to him in that way. He used to have a lot of information bundled for him in the old days by the presidential administration. I mean, I know that because it was a lot more open in the past. And I have a lot of meetings with people in the presidential administration.”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Deeply suspicious of people and of information. Think in a part of the problems that we see with Putin now. I've come from isolation during COVID. I'm really convinced that, you know, like many of us, a lot of Putin's views have hardened and the way that he looks at the world have been Shadowed in very dark ways by the experience of this pandemic”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that's probably true. He's the kind of person who keeps his own counsel. I mean, people talk about Kovalchuk, for example, or, you know, kind of some of the other people who are, you know, friends with him that are going to go back to his time in St. Petersburg. At various points, he seemed to spend a lot of time way back when talking to people who are, you know, people think of kind of more moderating forces like Alexey Kudrin, but it doesn't seem to be interacting with them. There are obviously aspects of his personal life. speak to his daughters does he speak to you know kind of lovers you know kind of in a way people speculate about you know kind of who might he confide in but i would greatly doubt that he would have deep political discussions with them he's a very guarded uh very careful person”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People who trust for some things, but I don't think there's people who trust for everything. I don't think he's the kind of person who tells anyone everything at all. I don't think he's got something that deeply confides in. No, I think he compartmentalizes things. He's often said that the only person he trusts is himself.”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Enablers and a lot of power seekers, and there are a lot of people who think the same as him as well. He is a man of his times, a man of his context.”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Warmer fuzzy version fuzzier version, yeah. I mean, he's kind of like, he was literally a warm personality. I don't know if you watched him during the September 30th annexation. The guy had all kinds of facial twitches and looked so rigid and stiff that he looks like he might implode. I mean, that wasn't how he was earlier in his career. And he had a different view of Peter Striker. We always have to remember that Putin was not in Russia during Perestrika. He was in Dresden, watching the East German state fall apart. and dealing with the Stasi and in a kind of place where you weren't getting a lot of information about what was happening in West Germany or even what was happening back home in Perestroika and he has that kind of group of people around him the Patrash and Botnikovs and others and Sergei Ivanov and others you know from you know the different configurations of his administration who have come out of that same kind of mindset and who kind of you know wanting to sort of put everything back together again so there's a lot of”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Strengthening the state, the executive, the presidency. And so it's everybody who takes part in that. And it's also others who want power, honestly, and they see Putin as their vehicle for power. I think people like Sergei Kirienko, I knew Kirienko back in the 90s. I mean, I got that guy's all in, or like Dmitry Medvedev. you know, who was a warmer, fuzzier version of Putin, certainly had a totally different perspective, wasn't in the KGB.”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Pressure put on Ukraine and all the other former Soviet republics now independent states by people around Mel Lushkov, for example, in Moscow, by other forces in the Russian Duma, not just Vladimir Zyranowski and others, but really serious kind of what we would call him right-wing nationalist forces. But it's pervasive in the system. And it's especially pervasive in the KGB and in the security sector. And that's why Putin comes out of. Remember, Putin also was of the opinion that one of the biggest mistakes the Bolsheviks made was getting rid of the orthodox church as an instrument of the state. And so there's this kind of restorationist wing within the security services and the state apparatus that want to kind of bring back Russian orthodoxy as a state instrument, an instrument of state power. And it would kind of, you know, blocking all the time about.”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's more rooted in the larger context. I mean, individuals matter in that context, but it's kind of like this shared worldview. And if you go back to the early 1990s, immediately after the dissolution of the Soviet Union when Yeltsin, you know, and his counterparts in Ukraine, Belarus pulled it apart, there was an awful lot of people who wanted to maintain the Soviet Union, not just Putin. I mean, you remember after Gorbachev tried to have the new union treaty in 1991 and there was the emergency committee set up, the coup against Gorbachev. It was because they were worried he was going too far and unraveling the union then as well. They were opposed to his reforms. There's always been a kind of a very strong nationalist contingent that become rationalists over time rather than Soviet hardliners who basically want to maintain the empire, the union in some form. And in the very early part of the 1990s, there was a lot of”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In March of 2014, you see all of the foreshadowing of where we are now. It's already of kind of his view of his obsessions, his historical obsessions, his view of himself has been kind of fused with the state, the kind of a modern czar, and his idea that the West is out to get him and it becomes after that almost a kind of like a messianic mission, you know, to turn things in a different direction.”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And would like the chance as well to kind of move on and move up with him in still in place, that's not going to be particularly possible. And that, you know, it's around the time when he starts to make that decision of annexing Crimea. And that's when the whole thing flips, in my view. The annexation of Crimea in 2014 is the beginning of the end of Vladimir Putin being a positive force within Russia. Because if you pay very close attention to his speech on the annexation of Crimea,”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“and start to take things in a very different direction. He starts to clamp down at home because of the rise of opposition and the fact that he knows that his brand is not the same as it was before and his popularity is not the same as it was before because he's already gone over that period in anybody's professional and political life that if you stay around long enough, people get a bit sick of you. We talked about that before. Should you stay, you know, kind of”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Necessity of reconstituting the Russian world, the Russian Empire. He's obviously been very interested in this. He's always said, of course, that the collapse of the Soviet Union was the great catastrophe of the 20th century, but also the collapse of the Russian Empire before it. He starts to be critical about lending the Bolsheviks, and he starts to do all this talking about Ukraine as... The same country, Ukrainians and Russians being one and the same, and this is where the ledger flips because I mean, the initial question you asked me is about has Putin been good for Russia or not? And this is where we get into the focal point of the point where he's not focusing on the prosperity and stability and future of Russia, but he starts to obsess about the past.”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“in all of the NGOs and others that are operating, State Department, embassy funding, the whole attitudes of God is back kind of thing. And so after that, we see Putin going on a very different footing. It's also somewhere in that period 2011, 2012, we start to kind of obsess about Ukraine. And he's always, you know, I think been kind of steeped in that whole view of Russian history. I mean, I heard at that time I was in, I've written about this and many of the things that I've written about Putin, but in that same time frame, I'm going to all these conferences in Russia where Putin is and Peskov, his press secretary, and they talk about him reading Russian history. They think, is this in this kind of period that he formulates this idea of”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“12 and after that, he goes into kind of a much more sort of focused role where he sees the United States as a big, bigger problem. And he also starts to focus on also the domestic environment because his return to the presidency is met by protests and he genuinely seems to believe because again this is very similar to belief here in the United States that Donald Trump couldn't possibly be elected by Americans as somehow was some kind of external interference because the Russians interfered and had an impact. Putin himself thinks at that time it's one of the reasons why he interferes in our elections later that the United States and others had interfered because he knew that people weren't that thrilled about him coming back. They'd kind of like the Medvedev period. And the protests in Moscow and St. Petersburg and other major cities, he starts a believer instigated by the West, by the outside because funding for transparency in elections.”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's also then kind of, I think, a sense of building crisis after the financial crisis and the Great Recession, 2008, 2009, because I think Putin up until then believed in the whole idea of the global financial system and that Russia was prospering and that Russia, part of the G8 and actually could be genuinely one of the major economic and financial powers. And then suddenly he realizes that in the West is incompetent that we totally mismanage the economy of our own, the financial crash in the United States, the kind of blowing up of the housing bubble and that we were feckless and that that had global reverberations. And he's prime minister, of course, in this kind of period. But then I think that that kind of compels him to kind of come back into the presidency and try to kind of take things under control again in 2011, 2010.”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And part of it is the larger international environment where Putin himself has become kind of convinced that the United States is out to get him. And part of it goes back to the decision on the part of the United States to invade Iraq in 2003. There's also the recognition of Kosovo in 2008 and the whole kind of machinations around all kinds of other issues of NATO expansion and elsewhere. Iraq in 2003 and this kind of whole idea after that that the United States is in the business of regime change and perhaps has him and his crosshairs as well.”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People's labor was being paid for, they weren't being taxed, the taxes were coming out of the extractive industries. There was kind of a guess of a sense of much more political pluralism, but it wasn't the kind of the chaos of the Oltson period. And then you see a shift. And it's pretty much when he comes back into power again in 2011-2012. And that's when we see a kind of a different phase emerging.”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And, you know, the first couple of terms again putting Chechnya to one side, which is a little hard because there was quite a lot of atrocities and I have to say that he was pretty involved in all of that because the FSB, which he'd headed previously, was in charge of wrapping up Chechnya and it created kind of a very strange system of fealty, almost a feudal system in the kind of relationship between Putin at the top and Kadyra Finch. And there was quite a lot of distortions, you know, kind of as a result of that in the way that the Russian Federation was run, you know, a lot more of an emphasis on the security services, for example. But there was a lot of pragmatism, opening up the country for business. Basically extending relationships. I would say that by the end of those first couple of terms of Putin, Russians were living their best lives. You know, there was a lot of opportunity for people.”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, if you look to the first couple of terms His presidency, I think, you know, on the overall ledger, he would have actually said that he'd made a lot of achievements from Russia. Now, there was, of course, the pretty black period of the war in Chechnya, but he didn't start that. That was Boris Yeltsin. That was obviously a pretty catastrophic event. But if you look at then other parts of the ledge of what Putin was doing, you know, from the 2000s onwards, he stabilized the Russian economy, brought back confidence in the Russian economy and financial system. He built up a pretty impressive team of technocrats for everything the central bank and the economics and finance ministries who really got the country back into shape again and solvent, paid off all of the debts. And really started to build the country back up again demand.”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, I lost just like the whole thing about him, and then say about Trump while he was exciting, it was interesting, you know, he was kind of like, you know, whipping it up there. So there's this, just this kind of feeling. We always say about, you know, could you have a beer with this person? And people decide they couldn't have one with Pillary Clinton. And, you know, maybe they could go off and have one with Barack Obama and with Donald Trump. They didn't want to have one with Joe Biden, you know, for example. And remember, George W. Bush didn't drink, so he wouldn't have had a beer with him. He'd have gone out and got a soda or something with him. But, you know, there's this. There's that kind of element. Is about the platforms, it's more about the person.”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it wasn't that kind of people wouldn't vote for a woman. I mean, more people voted for her on the popular level, not obviously through the electoral college, in the electoral college vote. So it wasn't just gender or something like that, but it was an awful lot of things for people found Trump attractive because he was sticking up the big middle finger to the establishment. He's an anti-establishment change character. There was a lot of people voted for Barack Obama for the same reason and voted for Trump. We know that phenomenon was 11% of people. So they could vote for some completely, totally different, radically different people because that sense of change and charisma. I mean, I had people who I knew voted for Trump but would have voted for Obama again if he'd run again because they just liked the way that he spoke, they liked the way that, you know, because they said, I mean, this is all my own anecdotal things doing. One of my relatives said, I could listen to Obama all day, every day. I just love the way he sounded. I love the way he looked.”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“kind of the symbol of the state. Look at, you know, in Britain, you had Queen Elizabeth II and everybody seemed to, for the most part, everyone, I guess, but most people respected her as a person, as a personality, as a kind of symbol of the state, even if they actually didn't really like the institution of the monarchy. There was something kind of about that particular personality that you were able to, you know, kind of relate to in that context. But in the United States, we've got all of that rolled into one, the head of state, the symbol of the state, the kind of queen, the king, the kind of idea, the chief executive, the kind of prime ministerial role, and then the commander-in-chief of the military. It's all things, you know, kind of at once, but ultimately for a lot of people, it's just how you feel about that person. Oh, I couldn't cover up for them because of this, or I couldn't vote for them because of that. And in 2016, Hillary Clinton actually did win the election in terms of the popular vote.”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, which is kind of pretty absurd. And again, the presidency is a weird hybrid in the United States. We were talking before about the person who should be running the country, so the chief executive or the prime minister in another setting. But we don't think of it like that. We often think about whether we like the guy or not, or we'd like to hang out with him. One of my younger relatives, and I said, so why did you vote for Trump? He said, well, he was great. It was funny. I went to his rallies. I got, you know, all kind of charged up. And I said, could you see yourself voting for Biden? No, he's too old. And I said, well, you know, he's only just a little bit, you know, kind of older than Trump or same age as your grandma. Do you think your grandma's old? Oh, no, not at all. But it's just this kind of perception he's boring. So people are actually sometimes, you know, basically being, you know, kind of motivated by just a feeling, you know, kind of that kind of sense because that's the sort of nature of the, you know, the presidency. It's this kind of how you feel about yourself as an American or how you feel about the country writ large.”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The presidential election is like Personality contest, a beauty contest. It's like kind of a referendum on one person or another. It's kind of like what we see in Russia, honestly, with, you know, Putin or not Putin or Putin and Putin before. It's all about Putin. And what do you think about Putin? It's not about what a president should be doing. And what their policies are. That's kind of the bizarreness of the US political system. Look, we've just seen this happening in the United Kingdom. You've got this core of a couple of thousand, a couple of hundred thousand rather people in the Conservative Party who've just voted for three leaders in a row. The rest of the country isn't. And they're just looking at whether they like that personality and what they say to them rather than what they necessarily going to do for the country.”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, no, it is. I mean, that's what people do. Look, I think part of that is First of all, I want to say I completely agree with you about understanding where our own people are coming from, and I think it's very important for people to listen to other people and their views. I try to do that all the time, try to learn from that. Everybody's got a perspective and a context. We all live in a certain context. We're all living in history, our own personal histories matter a lot, and also the larger context and environment in which we're living in. And where we live and who we live with. And, you know, the kinds of lives that we lead as well, those are all extraordinary importance. I mean, I know that from myself, everything that I've done in my life has been shaped by where I came from, who I was, my family, and the way that we looked at things. You can't take yourself out of that. I mean, you can do it in some, you know, like a science or something else, but, you know, it's still your own views and maybe some of the ideas that you have in pursuing experiment might have been shipped by your larger context, you know, depending on what it is that you work on. But the other thing is the nature of the political system.”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because he's shaking things up and you know, he's keeping people on their toes and, you know, kind of we need that, you know, idea.”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Some of them, not some of them did as well, but I'm just saying that not all of them did either. Well, we don't know their data. That's the thing. But yeah, I can't say how much it is. I'm just saying anecdotally, I know people who voted for me because he's him from the charisma and others who voted.”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A lot of those people didn't vote for him and his personality and often could because I know a lot of people who voted for him first time and second time and they could disassociate Kind of all of the kind of features of Donald Trump, the drives of the people nuts from what they thought that in actual fact he could achieve in terms of, and it wasn't just this kind of sense about, well, I couldn't possibly vote for a Democrat. Sometimes it's just like, well, look, he shakes things up and we need things to be shoken up.”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sense of derangement, you know, kind of around him. It didn't drive me nuts in that way. I just became, I was just very worried about, you know, the kind of the impact that he was having on many particulars.”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just the nature of the person. I mean, I don't feel particularly emotional about him. I mean, he's kind of a very flawed guy, to be honest. And this may seem bizarre. I felt sorry for him. Because this guy is so vulnerable, so wrapped up in himself that, I mean, he's just exquisitely open to manipulation. And I saw people taking advantage of him all the time. He has zero self-awareness. I mean, I kept thinking to myself, my God, if this guy didn't have this entourage around him, how would he function? I mean, I felt sorry for us as well. I mean, that he ended up being our president because that should not have happened. I mean, in terms of character and in terms of fit for the job. Although I saw this, you know, kind of over a period of time, but I didn't feel kind of. Any, you know.”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It gets back to what I was talking about before we need diversity of views and diversity of thinking, and you can't have other things. It's like being partisan or rooting just for a team. If something's going to cloudy judgment or constrain the way you think about things and become kind of a barrier to moving on out, look, that's what we see in the system around Putin. It's kind of kleptocratic and it's filled with nepotism. All of the kind of like the people who you kind of see out there in prominent positions are the sons or daughters of, including of Putin himself. I mean, that's when a system has degenerated. And that's, you know, kind of, and I suppose in a way, this is a symbol of the degeneration of the system. But again, it's just a diversion from, you know, kind of the bigger issues and bigger implications of things that we're discussing.”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But they shouldn't be sort of told no, sorry, you can't go and study math because, you know, or whatever physics, you know, because of.”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right. No, I have the same worries as well because it kind of clouds. I would encourage my daughter to do something completely different. Not going to the same field. No, look, it's different if you're in science or mathematics or something like this and maybe, you know, kind of you've got a family member, you're kind of building on some of their theories and ideas. If Albert Einstein had a kind of an offspring, it was in mathematics and took his father's thinking further, that would be very different. But if it's kind of you're in business and other things and it's just the nepotism problem that one has there.”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it depends on what they do if they're making money out of it and kind of basically being in business is what I mean, you know, kind of this is an issue. So it's not Hunter Biden on his own. It's kind of basically the kids of the Trump family that, you know, you name it.”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it detracts from what the larger question should be, which is about the family members of senior officials and whether they should be anywhere near any of the issues that they're, you know, there's ethics, there's government ethics and things there, you know, kind of across the board. But there's a bigger story in there, but that becomes a distraction. It's a look over there. The oldest trick in the book kind of idea Politicians are really good at that because it detracts from the larger question because every single member of Congress and government official, their family should be nowhere near anything they're doing.”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, we had John Podesta's pasta recipes for a while that we were kind of all obsessing over. I don't know, people running out and trying them out, you know, something like that.”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The telegraph, all of these newspapers, and how you could tell their different vantage points. And of course, it's complicated to do that now. I mean, in this incredibly extensive media space, I look at what it is that they're saying. And then I try to read around it and then, you know, look at what are the people are saying and why they're saying it and who are they, what's their context. And that was kind of basically what I was taught to look at. And I think everybody should have that.”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Who was, he was actually very active in the Labour Party. And he was kind of really interested in the way that opinion shaped people's political views. And he was Welsh. She was a native Welsh speaker. So, you know, he was always trying to explore English and how, you know, there was kind of the reach of the English culture and, you know, kind of how it was kind of shaping the way that people thought. And he used to read every single newspaper, you know, from all the different spectrums, which was quite easy to do, you know, back in the 70s and 80s because there weren't that many in the UK context. And every Sunday he would get all the different Sunday papers from all the different kind of ideological vantage points. And then when I got to be a teenager, he'd invite me to look at them with him. Because he was my godfather and he was just an incredible guy and he was just super interesting and, you know, kind of culturally an outsider, always kind of looking in. And he basically ran through, you know, what the guardian looked at, the observer, the daily mail, the sun, you know, kind of all of these.”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But what I try to do is just be really critical. I mean, my mom sends me stuff and I'm like, what is this? It's just, you know, your own mother can be as much of an agent of misinformation as a kind of Vladimir Putin. I mean, we're all kind of, we all have to really think about what it is we're reading. There's one thing from my childhood that was really important to me, and I always think every kid in school should have this. My next door neighbor...”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I have all kinds of strange things. It's Fiona Hill's cat, which I kind of like, you know, occasionally have people send things to me.”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Those can be as well. Obviously, they do have an impact, but it's how people process information. It's kind of like the lack of critical thinking. I'm just not on the internet to that extent. I'd go on looking for information. I'm not in social media. I'm in social media, but not by myself. I don't put myself out there. I haven't got a Twitter feed. I've got a blog.”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of countries writ large. There are plenty of interventions. It's just that we were somehow a confluence of events, a perfect storm. We were somehow exquisitely vulnerable because of things that we had done to ourselves. It was what Americans were doing to themselves that was the issue.”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source