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

“Dovetails beautifully with Vladimir Putin's attempts to be the kind of the Kremlin gremlin in the system. And he's basically taking advantage of that forevermore. And I wanted to basically try to work with others to cut through that. And the thing is then people lost faith in the integrity of election system because people were out there suggesting that the Russians had actually stopped the elections. People written books about that. They said that they hacked the system. They were trying to hack our minds. But again, we were the fertile soul for this. I mean, we know this from Russian history, the role of the Bolsheviks, you know, the whole 1920s and 1930s with Stalin, their fellow travelers and the socialist, you know, international. I mean, the Russians and the Soviets have been at this for years about going to pulling kind of people along and into kind of a broader frame. But it didn't mean that they were influencing directly the politics of...”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kind of all those random forces and those random factors because people couldn't understand what had happened in 2016. There was no hanging chads like 2000 where there was kind of a technical problem that actually ended up with the intervention of the Supreme Court. There was pure and simple the electoral college at work and a candidate that nobody'd expected, including the Republicans in the primaries to end up getting kind of elected or put forward at different 2016 suddenly becoming the president. And they needed a meta explanation. It was much better to say Vladimir Putin had done it and Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin guys were like, oh my God, yeah, fantastic. Champagne cocks popping. This is great. Our chaos agent, they knew they hadn't done it, but they'd love to take credit for it. And so, you know, the very fact that other people couldn't explain these complex dynamics to themselves.”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, they did not elect Donald Trump, Americans elected Donald Trump and the Electoral College was a key part. Vladimir Putin didn't make that up. And basically I also remember at one point the Russian ambassador talking to me about when we were doing the standard here we are lodging our complaint about the interference. He basically said, well, we didn't kind of invent Comey and basically the decision to reopen Hillary Clinton's emails or kind of Anthony Weener and kind of his emails on his computer. And I was like, yeah, he's right. I mean, you know, there were plenty of things in our own system that created chaos and tipped the election, not, you know, kind of what the Russians did, but, you know, it's obviously easier to blame the Russians and blame yourself when things are.”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Basically, Trump understood how to get lots of free airtime, you know, how to get himself at the center of attention. Putin did that through a kind of, I think, a less organic kind of way. A lot of people working around him. I mean, that's the old Bolshevik Ajit prop and, you know, kind of then the whole Soviet propaganda machine. And Putin kind of growing up in that kind of environment and having the kind of the Kremlin press office and all the kind of people around him got kind of a massive machine knew how that worked. I mean, they haven't done what the Chinese did in Russia, like blocking everything and having a big firewall. It was kind of putting out lots of content, getting into the sort of center of attention. Trump's doing the same kind of thing. And the Russians understood that, you know, if you put a bit of things out there and then you call up the New York Times and people are going to run with it. And what they wanted was the perception that they had actually swayed the election. They loved it. This was the huge mistake of the Democrats and everything. I mean, I kept trying to push against this.”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was kind of, I think that Putin and some of the people around him understood because, again, propaganda state, they spend an awful lot of time thinking about how you basically put out your own content and how you get maximum effect through performance. Putin himself is a political performance artist. I mean, Trump understood exactly the same thing. They were actually operating in parallel, not in collusion, but in parallel.”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was kind of wondering if it is possible to do something on this skill that's positive because a lot of people seem to be able to use all of this for a pretty negative effect. You've got to kind of hope that you could do this, use the same networks for positive effects”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Although embassy was probably part of a kind of political shtick there, but he had a point. The United States had never been that vulnerable as it suddenly was in 2016. And in the time that I was in government, Going back to what you asked about the whole impeachment and the whole exercise in Congress, that vulnerability was as stark as it ever could be. Our domestic politics were as much a part of the problem as anything else. They were the kindling to all of the kind of the fires. Putin didn't start any of this, the kind of problems. Domestically, he just took advantage of them. And, you know, basically added a bit of an accelerant here and there.”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And also, there's a long tail to 2016. Putin's perceptions, the kind of things that he thought were going on, the whole way that what they did was actually fairly straightforward. They'd done this before in the Soviet period during the Cold War, classic influence operation. It just had gone beyond the bounds of anything they could have anticipated because of social media and just a confluence of circumstances in the United States as well. We were very fragile and vulnerable. And I remember at one point having a discussion with the Russian ambassador where we were complaining about the Russian intervention. He said, are you telling me that the United States is a banana republic, that it's so vulnerable to these kinds of efforts? And he actually locked genuinely mystified.”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, in the 2016, you know, when the Russians had interfered in the election, basically this was a huge national security crisis. And our politics, we'd gone mad as a result of it. And in fact, we were making the situation worse. And I felt that I could, you know, kind of at the time, maybe I could do something here. I could try to clarify. I could, you know, work with others who I knew in the government from previous stints in the government to push back against this and try to make sure it didn't happen again. And look, and I also didn't have this, you know, mad, you know, kind of crazy ideological view of Russia either. I mean, I knew the place. I knew the people I've been sitting a long time and quite calm about it. I don't take it personally. It's not kind of an extension of self. Something I've spent a long time trying to understand for myself going back to that very beginning of why with the Russians trying to blow us up. There must be an explanation. There was. It was a very complicated and complex explanation. It wasn't as simple as how it sounded.”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, that's why I felt this deep sense of responsibility all the time, which is why I went into the administration in the first place. I mean, I got a lot of flack for it, because I thought, well, look, I've been asked. And there's a real issue here after the Russian interference and the whole influence operation in the 2016 elections. And I knew what was going on. And I should do something. If not me, then okay, someone else will go and do it. But can I live with myself just sitting on the sidelines and criticizing what people are doing? And kind of, you know, worrying about this, or am I actually going to muck in there and, you know, just go and do something? It's like seeing your house on fire and you see that, you know, okay, this is pretty awful and dangerous, but I could go in there and do something.”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That made it about the country rather than about themselves. There were others who did a lot of grandstanding. And that's another problem of our political incentive structures, that the kind of sense of accountability and responsibility tends to be personal. People, whether people decide to do it or not, it's not institutional, if that makes sense. We've had a kind of a breakdown of that kind of that sense. Now, I took an oath of office, and I'm assuming that most of them did too. You know, I had to be swan in, you know, when I took those positions. I took that seriously. But I already took an oath of citizenship. There's, you know, presumably you did too, you know, you kind of studied to become an American citizen. It's not something you take unlikely.”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is a game, and I just thought this isn't a game, and that's why I think that it kind of weakened because, I mean, again, on the outside, it weakened as the whole process weakened us in the eyes of the world, because again, the United States was the gold standard. And I do think, I mean, again, in terms of the larger population, although a lot of people did actually see the system standing up, trying to do something to hold people account, but there still was that element of circus and a big political game and people being careless with the country.”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of a continuation of political games coming out of the 2016 election. But on the Republican side, it was just a game. There was people I knew who were basically, you know, at one point, one of them winked at me. In the middle of this kind of impeachment, it's just like, don't take this personally.”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that in itself was kind of weakened because on both sides there was a lot of partisan politics. I mean, I think that there was a dereliction of duty in many respects. I mean, especially, I have to say on the part of Republican members of Congress who were, you know, kind of, they should have been embracing Congress's prerogatives. You could have kind of basically done this in something of a different way. But the whole thing is because it was this larger atmosphere of polarized, I don't know, even polarized politics. And I was deeply disappointed, I have to say, and many of the members of Congress on the Republican side. There's a lot of grandstanding that I really didn't like on the Democratic side either and not admitting to mistakes and not kind of addressing head on, you know, the fact that they'd kind of been pushing for Trump to be impeached and talking about being an illegitimate president right from the very beginning. And that, you know, as a result of that, a lot of people just saw this as a...”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it weakened in many respects just the way that it was conducted. I mean, there's a new book coming out by a couple of journalists in The Washington Post. I haven't actually seen it yet. But I really did kind of worry that myself that it became a spectacle. And although it actually, I think in many respects was important in terms of an exercise of civic responsibility and gave people big, massive lesson in civics. Everyone's kind of running out and looking up the whole process of impeachment and what that meant, congressional prerogatives. I was as well. I was, you know, like running off myself and trying to learn an enormous amount about it because I was in the middle of a lot of this. That it didn't ultimately show responsibility and accountability.”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't disagree, but what I'm saying is people are basically looking for something here. This is why, I mean, I myself am start to think about much more local, you know, kind of solutions to a lot of these, you know, kind of problems. It's, again, the teamed networked approach.”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This work class, this is kind of my collective. This is therefore, this is where I'm going to have to try to push to make change. So, I mean, this is kind of happening here, and we have to realize that, you know, we've kind of gone in a way full circle back to that, you know, kind of period of the early emergence of sort of mass labor and, you know, the way that that's where the political parties that we know today and the kind of... Together and implement a push for change.”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like what you think about some kind of like big political trade union with you know left wing you know kind of ideas in fact they actually tried to root out later after the Bolshevik revolution in the Soviet Union even when they were still having ties with players like the miners of Don Bass in the 1920s Trotskyites and you know kind of Leninists and you know communists they were more focused on how to improve their own well-being you know what they called the welfare they had some welfare societies where they were kind of trying to think and that's kind of what brewsters in Starbucks want or workers in Amazon they're talking about their own well-being it's not just about pay and work conditions it's about what it means to be part of this larger entity because you're not feeling that same kind of connection to politics you know at the moment because you know you're being told by a representative sorry I don't represent you because you didn't vote for me you know if you're not a democrat you're not a republic and you're not red you know you're not blue you're not mine and so people say well”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Goes back to my own experience growing up in Northern England. The Durham miners that I was part of for generations, you know, first person in my family not in the mines on my dad's side, they created their own association. It wasn't a union per se at the very beginning. Later they became part of the National Minors Union. They lost their autonomy and independence as a result of that. But what they did was they pulled their resources. They set up their own parliament so they could all get together. Literally they built a parliament and it opened in the same time as World War I and where they all got together because they didn't have the vote. They didn't have suffrage at the time because they didn't have any money. So they didn't come pay the tax and they couldn't run for parliament. And this is the kind of the origins of the organised Labour parties later. But they create this association so they could talk about how they could deal with things of their own communities and have a voice in the things that mattered, you know, education, improving their work conditions.”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's not just enough to go out there and protest in the street, but if you want something to happen, that's why you're seeing big corporations playing a bigger role as well.”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is my workplace because that's where my benefits are from. They're not coming from the state. I mean, that's a peculiarity of the United States system. You know, Britain, you've got the National Health Service and you've got all the kind of national wide benefits. You know, you're not tethered to your employer like you are in the United States. But here now, we're asking people are pushing for more representation. They're asking to be represented within their workplace, be it Starbucks where brewsters are, you know, the Starbucks employees are trying to unionize. We have unions among our research assistants at the Bookings Institution where I am, you know, kind of teaching assistants in big universities doing the same kind of thing as well, because they want to have their voice heard. They want to kind of play a larger role and they want to have change. And they're often pushing their companies or the institutions they work for to make that change because they don't see it happening. And the political sphere.”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, our political system needs revitalization. We need to be taking a long, hard look at ourselves here. And I think what people are calling out for, look, there's a vast swathe of the population like me who are unaffiliated. Maybe some lean in one direction over another and unaffiliated doesn't mean you don't have views about things and political opinions. And you may sound quite extreme on some of those, either from a left or right perspective. What people are looking for is kind of an articulation, you know, things in a kind of a clear way that they can get a handle on. And they're also looking for a representation. Somebody's going to be there for you, not part of a kind of rigid team that you're excluded from. You're the ins and the outs. Look what people are looking at now. They're looking at that in the workplace because they're not finding that in politics. You're actually getting workers pushing the people talk about the rise of the workers. People just saying, hang on a sec, the most important space that I'm in right now.”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Political system that you're part of. So I think we've got to recognize that even if you're not partisan, you can be politically engaged. And, you know, sometimes you just have to stand up there and speak out, which is what I did and what others did as well. None of those people who spoke out can initially saw that as a partisan act, even if some of them since then have decided to make political choices they hadn't made before. Because the situation actually forced people into, you know, taking sides. It's very hard to still stay above the fray when you've got someone who's trying to perpetrate a coup.”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“See the reasoning, but other times I'm like, they're right, that was a complete mistake. I need to admit that and we need to figure out a different way of doing things. But the one point I do want to get across is there were a lot of people who were non-partisan that I worked with. I mean, honestly, in most of the jobs that I had up until more recently, I had no idea about people's political affiliation. It's just when you get into this kind of highly charged partisan environment, they kind of force people, you know, to make decisions. And when you have one political party or political fashion that's trying to usurp power, it does make it quite difficult. I mean, that's the situation that we're in right now. And, you know, we're seeing some of the things happening. I've seen and studied in other settings or seen for myself happening. When you have a president who wants to cling on to power, you know, you've got to call that out. Is that a party's an act or is that a kind of, you know, defense of that larger?”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've really benefited from these kind of mentorships of people or older. You can mentor up and well and mentor down. I mean, I would try to get people from different backgrounds and different generations to work together in teams, honestly. I'd like to more team networked kind of approach to things, the kind of things that you get again in science, right? I mean, all these ideas are going to come from all kinds of different perspectives. Age and experience does count for something, but fresh ideas and coming in and looking at a problem from a different perspective and seeing something that somebody else hasn't seen before. I mean, I just, you know, kind of love working in an environment with all kinds of different people. And people who don't agree with you, you need people to take you on and say, absolutely, that's crap. Where did you come up with that from? And I go, hang on. Well, explain to me why you think so. And then, you know, you have this kind of iterative process back and forth. I mean, I would always encourage my colleagues to tell me when they thought it was wrong. I mean, sometimes I didn't agree because I didn't.”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, you should definitely have terminal limits, just like you should in everything, right? I mean, it's just like tenure in university. You kind of, you know, we do. We have natural term limits, but you're kind of basically bottling it up for other people. I mean, what I'm trying to do now, I'm not.”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think you can, I don't think that's advisable, though, by the way, because I mean, I don't think anybody should be there. So, your first advice.”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Every level, anyway, so I would actually just make a bid for a more non partisan approach to a lot of the parts of government. You can still kind of bring in the political and primature. But also you have to explain to people writ large in America as well that this is your government and that actually you could also be part of this, things like the small business administration, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, all these kind of things that actually people interact with, but they don't even know it, the postal service, you know, all of these things. I mean, people actually, when you ask them about different functions of government, they have a lot of support for the National Park Service, you know, for example. It's just when you talk about government in an abstract way, they're like, oh, no, too much bloated, you know, not efficient and effective. But if you kind of bring it down more to the kind of local and federal levels, that's kind of, you know, when people really see it, if people could see kind of themselves reflected in many of the people who've gone into public service, I think though they would.”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sectors and to try to think about this as just as you said there that this is a government that's actually running our country. This is an operating system and you wouldn't operate it like that if you were looking at it in any kind of rational way. It shouldn't be so ideologically or partisan tainted.”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know some of the most successful governments are much smaller. And it's not that I say that the government is necessarily too big, but it's just thinking about each unit in a different way. We shouldn't be having so many political appointments. We should kind of find more professional appointments, non-parties unappointments. Because every single administration that we've had over the last, let's say, span of presidencies, they have jobs that are unfulfilled because they can't get their candidates through Congress and the Senate. because of all the political games that are being played. I know loads of people have just been held up because it's just on the whim of some member of Congress, even though the actual position that they want is really technical and doesn't really care about what political preference they particularly have. So I think we have to try to look at the whole system of governments in the way that we would over other professional”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But we make it really difficult because of the political process. And also because we have so many political appointments, we ought to have less, to be honest. I mean, if we look at other governments around the world that are smaller, it's much easier for them to hire people in.”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The last few years have really done a lot of damage. We need to revitalize our government system to get better results. We need to bring more people. And even if it's for a period of time, not just through expensive contracts for the big consulting companies and other entities that do government work out there, but getting people in for a period of time, expanding some of these management fellowships and the White House fellows and bringing in scientists from the outside, giving that kind of opportunity for collaboration that we see in other spheres.”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I want to, you know, kind of, or they're kind of looking for power and, you know, sort of influence, we have a hard time getting people like yourself, another younger people kind of coming in to make a career out of public service and also retaining them because, you know, people with incredible skills often get poached away into the private sector. And, you know, one of the people that I work with on the national security side are now at all kinds of high-end political consultancies or they've gone to Silicon Valley and they've gone to this place and that place because after a time as a younger person, they're not rising up particularly quickly because there's a pretty rigid way of looking at the hierarchies and the promotion schemes. And they're also getting lombastered by everybody. People like, oh, you know, public servants, they're not really public servants. There's this whole lack and loss of a kind of a faith in public service.”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's not a lot of mechanisms for bringing people together. There ought to be in things like the National Security Council actually did that quite successfully at times for analysis that I saw. But we don't have, you know, we have it within the National Institutes of Health, but we saw the CDC breakdown on this kind of front. We don't have sufficient of those institutions that bring people together from all kinds of different backgrounds. And one of the other problems that we've had with government, with the federal government over state and local government, is it actually quite small. People think that the federal government's huge because we've got postal service and the military that are part of it. But your actual federal government employers is a very small number. And the senior executive service part of that is the older white guys, you know, who kind of come up all the way over the last, you know, several decades. We have a really hard time bringing in younger people into that kind of government service unless they're political hacks.”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Why don't we get results because we don't draw upon the diversity of opinion and all the ideas of people out there. You do that in science I mean, all my friends and relatives are in science. They've got these incredible collaborations with people across the world. I mean, how did we get to these vaccines for the COVID virus because of this?”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kind of where we've been heading on some of these trajectories. But the other point is when you look back at Bush and Obama as well, there's a very narrow circle of decision making. Bush period, it's the focus on the executive branch with Dick Cheney as the vice president being very fixated on it. In Obama, it's, you know, he and kind of the bright young things around himself is kind of intellectually one might say arrogant in many respects. He was a very smart guy. And he's convinced that he has ruminates over a lot of things, but he's the person who makes a lot of decisions. And basically George W. Bush used to call himself the decider as well, right? I mean, they're all the people who make the decisions. It's not always as consultative as you might think it is. And for Trump, it's like, I'm not listening to anybody at all. It's just me and whatever it is that I've woken up today and I've decided to do. So I think the problem with all of our systems.”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, believe that he himself knew better than anyone else and then tried to divide everybody against each other would have been a different matter. It's a tragedy of a completely and utterly lost set of opportunities because of the flaws in his own nature. Because, I mean, again, there was all kinds of things that he could have done to shake things up. And so many people around him remained completely disappointed. And of course, he divided and pitted people against each other, you know, creating so much factualism in American politics that people have forgotten they're Americans. They think that they're red or blue parts of teams. If you go back over history, that's kind of a recipe for war and internal conflict. You go back to the Byzantine Empire, for example. There's the famous episode of the Nicaraguans in Constantinople, where the whole city gets trashed because the greens, the reds, the blues and these various sporting teams in the hippodrome get whipped up by political forces and they pull the place apart. And that's, you know.”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You could have done that on the latter, shaking things up because I'm all one for questioning and trying to shake things up as well and do things differently. But the question is if you bring the whole system down with nothing, ideas of putting it to place. Like many people, I've studied the Bolshevik Revolution and many others as well. And kind of, what's the pattern here that actually fits into what you're talking about here is a kind of rigidity of thought on the part of revolutionaries in many cases as well. And also narcissism. In fact, I think it takes a pretty strong sense of yourself, you know, kind of an owning yourself to want to be president of the United States. For example, we see that in many of our presidents have been narcissists to different kind of degrees. You think about Lenin, you know, for example, and people can go back and read about Lenin. He formed his views when he was about 18 and he never shook them off. He never evolved. He didn't have any kind of diversity of thought. And when systems go awry, it's when they don't bring in different perspectives. And so, you know, Trump, if you brought in different perspectives and actually listen to them and not just.”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, are they going around basically with protective gear on in case somebody shoots them in the street? That's just absurd.”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They were treating people like dirt. And they were just playing games with people's lives. I mean, we all had death threats. People's whole careers, which were not just careers for their own self-aggrandizement, but for careers of public service trying to give something back were being shattered. And I find, you know, I just thought to myself, I'm not going to let that happen because, you know, I've come from a, well, are they going to send me back to Bishop Auckland in County Durham? Fine. I'm totally fine to go back, you know, because I could do something back there. But I'm not going to let this happen. I've made this choice to come to America. I'm all in. And these guys are just behaving like a bunch of idiots.”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Coup plotters, you know, you name it. Pegotism being questioned as well. And a lot of people I work with in government, like myself, naturalized Americans, a lot of them were immigrants, many were refugees. Many people had fought and was on behalf of the United States and Iraq and Afghanistan being blown up. And they put their lives on the line. They'd put their family lives on the line because they believed in America. And they were just, they were reflections of Americans from all kinds of walks of life is what really made that cliche of America great. It wasn't whatever it was that was being bandied around in these crude, crass political terms. It was just the strength of an incredible set of people who've come together from all kinds of players and decided that they're going to make a go of it and that they're going to try to work towards the whole idea of the preamble of the constitution towards”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not just on Ukraine, but a national security overall. So, I mean, I'd gone through this whole period, even before we got to that point. Of seeing non partisan government officials being attacked from all sides, left and right, but especially the right, and being basically accused of being partisan hacks, you know, deep state.”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a totally crazy locking glass thinking of Alison Wonderland, Alice through the looking glass version of American politics. I mean, I'd seen everything starting to unravel over a kind of a period of time before I'd been asked to be in the administration, but I did not expect it to be that bad. I honestly didn't. I mean, I'd been warned, you know, by people that this was kind of really a very serious turn that the United States had taken. But I really thought that national security would still be uppermost in people's minds. And it was when a lot of the people that I work with. But what I found, you know, if you want to use that term of heartbreaking was the way in which all of these principles that I really bought into and tried to uphold in the United States government and in the things that we were trying to do with me and my colleagues was just being thrown out the window. And that, you know, I would have to step up in defense of them and in defense of my colleagues who were being lambasted and criticized and given death threats for actually standing up and doing their own jobs.”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The United States was the gold standard for some of its institutions. I worked in the National Intelligence Council and I'd seen the way that the United States had tried to address the problems that it had faced in this whole botched analysis of Iraq and this terrible strategic blunder of honestly crime in my view of invading Iraq but the way that people were trying to deal with that in the aftermath. I mean, I went into the National Intelligence Council and the D&I, the Director at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence when they were coming to terms with what had gone wrong in the whole analysis about Iraq in 2003, you know, in the whole wake of people trying to pull together after 9-11 and to learn all of the lessons from all of this. And I saw just really genuine striving and deliberation about what had gone wrong, what lessons could we learn from this. And then suddenly I found myself in this, I couldn't redescribe anything.”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Racial problems doesn't even sum up the problems we have in the United States. I mean, I couldn't get my head around it when I first came. I mean, I'd read about slavery in American history, but I hadn't fully fathomed really the kind of the way it was ripping apart the United States. I mean, I had a read Alex's Tockville and he'd commented on this, and it obviously hadn't kind of changed the way that one would have expect all this time, you know, from the 18th century onwards. So that was kind of one thing that I realized that the civil rights movement and all of these acts of expansion of suffrage and everything else were imperfect at best. And I was born in 65, the same time as the Civil Rights Act, and there's a heck of a long way to go. So I wasn't, let's just say, you know, as starry-eyed about everything as I'd been before, but I really saw an incredible competence and professionalism in, you know, the US government. In the election system and the integrity of it. And I mean, I really saw that.”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think I would describe it in that way. I think what I was deeply disappointed by what I saw happening in the American political space. I didn't expect it. Look, I was a starry immigrant. I came to the United States with all of these expectations of what the place would be. I'd already been disabused of some of the, let's just say rosy perspectives on how the United States. I'd been shocked by the depths of...”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And what I was trying to get across. In that testimony was the national security imperative of basically getting our act together here and separating out what was going on in our domestic politics from what was happening in our national security and foreign policy. I mean, I think we contributed in that whole mess around the impeachment, but the whole parallel policies around Ukraine to the war that we now have. Confron”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And Putin also thought that he could just manipulate the political space in the United States. Actually, he could because what he was doing was ceding all this dissent and fueling already, you know, debates inside of US politics, the kinds of things that we see just coming out now. This kind of idea that Ukraine was a burden, that Ukraine was basically just trying to extract things from the United States. Ukraine had somehow played inside of US politics. Trump was convinced that the Ukrainians had done something against him, that they had intervened in the elections. And that was kind of a combination of people around him trying to find excuses to, you know, kind of what had happened in the election to kind of divert attention away from Russia's interference in 2016. And the Russians themselves poisoning the world against Ukraine. So you had a kind of a confluence of circumstances there.”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Putin like Nikolai Patrashev, the head of the security council equivalent in Russia who we met with frequently, what's Ukraine to it? We don't get it. Why do you even care? So they thought that we weren't serious, that we weren't serious about Ukraine's territorial integrity and its independence, or it is a national security player.”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Look, I think there is a straight line between that whole series of episodes and the current war in Ukraine. Because Vladimir Putin and the people around him in the Kremlin. Concluded that the US did not care one little bit about Ukraine and it was just a game. For Trump, it was a personal game. He was basically trying to get philosophy musilian. The 2020 election And generally, they just thought that we were using Ukraine as some kind of proxy or some kind of instrument within our own domestic politics because that's what it looked like. And I think that as a result of that, Putin took the idea away that he could do whatever he wanted. We were constantly being asked even prior to this by people around.”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source