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

“Because there were oftentimes where that kind of relentless nagging about something or constantly raising it actually did have results where it hadn't previously. So the maximum pressure, if it kind of kept on it in the right way and often when we were coming in behind on pushing on issues related to NATO or other things in this same sphere, it would actually have an effect. It just doesn't get talked about because it gets overshadowed by all of the other kind of stuff around this and the way that he interacted with people and treated people.”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, you don't do it through gratuitous insults and incitement to violence. That's one of the things you just don't get anywhere on that front.”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But the actual message was often spot on in those kinds of issues. I mean, he was actually highlighting these ridiculous discrepancies between what people said and what they actually did”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And Trump kept pushing this idea so why are we spending so much money on NATO and NATO defense and we're all talking about this if you're then basically paying billions to Russia for gas? Isn't this contradictory? And of course it was. But it was the way that he did it. And I actually, one instance had a discussion with a European defense minister who basically said to me, look, he's saying exactly the same things as people said before him, including former defense secretary Gates. It's just the way he says it. Know, so they took offense, and then as a result of that, they wouldn't take action because they took offense at what he said. So it was a kind of then a way of could you find some other means of Massaging this communication to make it effective, which we would always try to focus on. Because it's kind of the delivery.”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The one bit when it doesn't work is when they start name calling or kind of inciting violence against the people that you would disagree with. So that was kind of a problem because often one, you know, when I was in the administration, I had all of Europe in my portfolio as well as Russia. And there were many times when we were dealing with our European colleagues where he was asking some pretty valid questions about, well, why should we do this if you're doing that? For example, the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, the United States has been opposed to Europe's reliance on gas and oil exports from Russia, you know, the Soviet Union since the 70s and 80s.”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or he's even asking the right kinds of questions, which he often did actually. I mean, obviously, put them in a way that most of us wouldn't have done, but there was often kind of questions about why is this happening? Why are we doing this? And, you know, we have to challenge ourselves all the time. So, yeah, actually, why are we doing that? And then you have to really inspect it and say, whether it's actually worth continuing that way or you should be doing something differently. Now he had a more kind of destructive quality to those kinds of questions, you know, about maybe it's the real estate developer in him that's taking a big wrecking ball to all of these kinds of sacred edifices and things like that. But often, if you really paid attention, he was asking a valid set of questions about why do we continue to do things like this. Now, we didn't often have answers about what he was going to do in response, but those questions still had to be asked. And we shouldn't be just rejecting them out of turn.”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Paid dues, and you know, it was easy to kind of see what they stood for. And the same in Europe, you know, when you look at France and in Germany and Western Germany, of course, Italy and elsewhere. Here in the United States, it's kind of pretty amorphous. You know, the fact that you could kind of register randomly, it seems to be a Democrat-Republican, I trumped it. Point is to drum a crop, next thing he's a Republican. And then you kind of usurp a party apparatus. I think you can be politically engaged on the issues, but basically without taking a stance that's defined by some ideology or some sense of kind of partisan affiliation.”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I mean, being very careful about not putting any kind of ideological lens on anything that I'm analysing or looking at or saying about foreign policy, for one thing, but also not taking one stance of one party over another either. To be honest, I've always found American politics somewhat confounding because both the Democratic and the Republican Party are pretty big tents. I mean, they're coalitions. You know, in Europe, it's actually kind of, in some respects, easier to navigate. The parameters of political parties because you have quite clear platforms. There's also a longer history in many respects, obviously. I mean, there's a long history here in the United States of the development of the parties, you know, going back to the laity 18th century. But in the United Kingdom, for example, in the 20th century, the development of the mass parties, you know, it was quite easy to get a handle on. At one point in the UK, for example, the parties were real genuine mass parties with people who were properly members and took part in regular meetings.”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In different directions and straining the overall body politic and the way that national politics gets imposed on local politics in ways that I certainly wasn't when I first came to the US in 1989. I didn't honestly in 1989 when I first came here, I didn't know anybody's political affiliation, I rarely knew their religious affiliation. And, you know, obviously race was a major phenomenon here that was a shock to me when I first came. But many of the kind of the class regional geographic kind of political dimensions that I've seen in other places, I didn't see them at play in the same way then as I do now.”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“An ideological precept for more. And in the Soviet case, of course, it was also a power play in a way that actually can't quite play out in the United States because it was the equivalent of governors in many respects who got together three of them, you know, in the case of the heads of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, who then got rid of basically the central figure of Mikhail Gorbachev. It would be a little difficult to do that. The dynamic is not the same, but it does worry me of having seen all of that close up in the late 1980s and the early 90s. And I spent a lot of time in the Russia, as well as in Ukraine and Caucasus, Central Asia and other places after the collapse of the Soviet Union. But you kind of see the same elite divisions here in the United States pulling.”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I also feel that when I go around, because I've spent a lot of time since I wrote my book last October and this last year going around, I find the same feeling. But when I traveled around the Soviet Union back in the late 1980s, I didn't get any kind of sense that people wanted to see the end of the Soviet Union either. It was an elite project. There's a really great book called Collapse by Vladislav Zubuk, who is a professor at London School of Economics, LSE. And Zubok is pretty much my age and he's from the former Soviet Union, he's Russian. And I mean, he describes it very quite aptly about how it was kind of the elites, you know, that basically decided to pull the Soviet Union apart. And there is a risk of that, you know, here as well, when you get partisan politics and people forgetting that they're Americans and they are all in this together, like a lot of the population thing. But they think that their own narrow parties.”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I'd always thought that that wouldn't be possible in someone like the United States or many other countries as well because there wasn't that ethnic dimension. But in fact, many of the way that people talk about politics has given it that kind of appearance in many respects. Because look, I mean, we know from the Soviet Union and the Soviet period and from where you're from, you know, originally in Ukraine, that language is not the main signify of identity. And that identity can take all kinds of other forms.”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Until, though, that they don't keep together. I mean, I've had colleagues who have described what's happening in the West right now as a kind of soft secession with states, you know, going off in their own direction and the center of politics. Well, these kinds of conceptions that we have now are divisions between red and blue states because of the fracturing of our politics.”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I wonder about that too. And I also wondered about what would have happened if it didn't collapse, and Gorbachev had found a different direction”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As the head of the Russian Federation, then a constituent part of the Soviet Union, together with the presidents of Ukraine and Belarus, all of these being individual parts of the Soviet Union getting together and agreeing and essentially ending it. And Garbachev, you know, so basically I'm there at the peak of this whole kind of period of experimentation and thinking about the future. And within a couple of years, it's all kind of gone and it's on a different track entirely.”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One accident after another. And then there was this real kind of sense, even though the vibrancy and excitement and hope of the Gorbachev period, a real sense of the Soviet Union had lost its way. And of course, it was only a year or so after I left from that exchange program and I already started with my degree program in Soviet studies at Halvard, that the Soviet Union basically unraveled. And it really did unravel. It wasn't like it collapsed. It was basically that there were so many debates that Garbachev had sparked off. 1991, you get”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They're all women's boots and no men's boots at all because there's been an oversupply of boots in that size production. But you could really kind of see here that there was something wrong. And in the north of England, everything was closed down, the shops were shuddered because there was no demand, because everybody lost their jobs. There was massive employment. When I went off to university in 1984, 90% youth unemployment in the UK, meaning that when kids left school, they didn't have something else to go on to unless they got to university or vocational training or an apprenticeship. And most people were still looking, you know, kind of months out of leaving school. And so shops were closing because people didn't have any money. 50% male unemployment in some of the towns as the steelworks closed down and the wagon works for the railways, for example, in my area. But in Moscow, people, in theory, did have money, but there was just, there was nothing to buy. Also, the place was falling apart, literally. I saw massive sinkholes open up in the street, balconies fall off buildings.”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Carrying around for years in my teenage years just disappeared because it's just ordinary people in ordinary place not doing great. This is the period of what they call deficit. So the period of deficits, but there was no food in the shops. There was very little in terms of commodities because the supply and demand parts of the economic equation were out of whack because this was total central planning. You'd go into a shop that was supposed to sell boots and there'd be just one pile of boots all in the same size in the same color. I actually looked out because once I was in this Hungarian boot shop that was right next to where my hall of residence was and I was looking for new pair of boots and every single pair of boots in the shop of my size.”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is the cultural capital of a vast empire at this point? I'd never lived in a major city before. It's the first big city I lived in. I'd never been to the opera. The first time I got an opera, it's at the Bolshoy. I'd never seen a ballet. I mean, I was not exactly steeped in high classical culture when you're kind of growing up in a mining region. There's a very limited opportunities for this kind of thing. I'd been in a youth orchestra and a youth choir. My parents signed me up for absolutely everything they possibly could education-wise, but it wasn't exactly any exposure to this. So, you know, I was kind of a standard by the sort of wealth of the cultural experience that one could have in Moscow. But the main thing was I was really struck by how the Soviet Union was on its last legs. Because this was Moscow. I got this image about what it would look like. I was quite, to be honest, terrified at first about what I would see there, even the big nuclear superpower. And as soon as I got there, it was just this like as if a huge weight that I'd been.”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“not just in Moscow, which is where I was studying its transit institute, but to the Caucasus, to Central Asia, went all the way to Habarovsk in the Russian Far East, all the way around Moscow. And there was at this point, it was also the Kreshen Yerus, which has become very important now. So the anniversary, the thousandth anniversary of the Christianization of Russia, which of course has become a massive obsession of Vladimir Putin's, but 988, because I was there 87 to 88. And at this point, the Russian Orthodox Church is undergoing a revival from being repressed during the Soviet period. You suddenly have the church stepping out as a non-governmental organization and engaging in discussions with people about the future of religion. So that was something that I wasn't expecting to witness. Also, I mean, being in Moscow, this”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That was absolutely fascinating in that period because it's the period that just around the time of the peak of Perestroika and Mikhail Gorbachev's role as president, well, it wasn't quite president at that point. It's all Secretary General of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union trying to transform the whole place. So I arrived there in September of 1987, just as Gorbachev and Reagan sign the INF Treaty just within kind of weeks of them about to sign that, which really ends that whole period that had shaped my entire teenage years of the end of the Euromissile crisis by finally having agreement on, you know, basically the reduction and constraints on intermediate nuclear forces. And also at this point, Gorbachev is opening the Soviet Union up. So we got all kinds of opportunities to travel in ways that we wouldn't have done before.”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do. Yeah Yeah, it would be a big mystery for everybody. And you have an advantage on me because it's your native language as well.”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Had to step in. And of course, the Soviet Union is one great big giant nationalized economy when I get there. And it's just the people's attitudes and outlooks are the same. People didn't work for themselves. They always worked for somebody else. And it had quite a distortion on the way that people looked at the world.”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ulster, Belfast, and that whole region, and I kind of clung on because it was again that melting pot, it was kind of intertwined with the larger industrial economy and had a very different identity. And so that, you know, for me, growing up in such a specific place with such a special in many respects heritage gave me a different perspective on things. When I first went to the Soviet Union in 1987 to study there, I actually went to a translators institute, what was then called the Modest Therese, which is now the Institute of Foreign Languages. I was immediately struck by how similar everything was to the north of England because it was just like one big working class culture that had sort of broken out onto the national stage. Everything in Northern England was nationalized. We had British steel, British coal, British rail, British shipbuilding, because after World War II, the private sector had been devastated.”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Rural farming communities, just like it was the same in the northeast of England. And people in the case of the northeast of England came from Wales, they came from further in the south of England, the Midlands, they came from Scotland, they came from Ireland. I have all of that heritage in my own personal background. And you've got a different identity. And it's when somebody else tries to impose an identity on you from the outside that things go awry. And I think that that's kind of what we've really seen in the case of Don Bass. It's a place that's a part in many respects historically and in terms of its evolution and development over time.”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right in the place itself. Yeah, I mean, there are places in the United States, in Appalachia, in West Virginia, and in Pennsylvania, like the Lehigh Valley, that have the same sense of place. And the northeast of England was the cradle of the Industrial Revolution. It was the industrial version of Silicon Valley, which has its own, I would say, contours and frames. And when you come to those industrial areas, your previous identities get submerged in that larger framework. I've always looked at the world through that lens of being someone from the working class, the blue-collar communities from a very specific place with lots of historical and economic connotations. And it's also a melting pot, which is the problems that the Donbass has experienced over the last 30 years. People came from all over the place to work there. Of course, there was a population that one might say is indigenous, you know, might have gone back centuries there, but they would have been in the small...”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On this money that was deposited with the miners of County Durham with the Durham Miners Association, I got the money to study Russian for the first time before I embarked on my studies at university.”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They'd put money aside for education for minors. There were all kinds of lecture series from the minors and all kinds of other activities supporting soccer teams and artistic circles and writing circles, for example. People like George Orwell, you know, were involved in some of these writers' circles in other parts of Britain and minor communities, for example. And so they told me I could go along and basically apply for a grant to go to study Russian. So I show up and it was the easiest application I've ever come across. They just asked me to, my dad came along with me. They asked me to verify that my dad had been a minor and they looked up his employment record on little cards, you know, kind of a little tray somewhere. And then they asked me how much I needed, you know, to basically pay for the travel and some of the basic expenses for the study. And they wrote me a check. And so thanks to the miners of Donbass.”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Set of connections. And in 1984, The miners strike, the miners of Donbass, along with other miners from famous coal regions like the Ruhr Valley, for example, in Germany, or miners in Poland, sent money and solidarity to the miners of Candy Durham. And there'd been these exchanges, as I said, going back and forth since the 1920s, formal exchanges between miners, you know, the region the miners unions. I heard, again, from the same great-uncle who told me to study Russian that there were actually scholarships of the children of minors, and it could be former miners as well, for their education. And I should go along to the miners' hall players called Red Hills, where the miners of County Durham had actually pulled all of their resources and built up their own parliament and their own, you know, kind of players that they could talk among themselves to figure out how to enhance the welfare and well-being of their communities.”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And as I studied Russian history, I discovered there was lots of contacts between Bolshevik, Soviet Union in the early period after the Russian Revolution. But even before that, during the imperial period in Russia, between the Northern England and the Russian Empire in the old industrial areas, basically big industrial areas like the northeast of England and places like Don Bass were built up at the same time, often by the same sets of industrialists. And Danetsk in the Donbass region used to be called Huzefka. because it was established by a Welsh industrialist who brought in miners from Wales to help kind of develop the coal mines there and also the steel works and others that were hearing about all the time. And so I got very fascinated in all these linkages and famous writers from the early parts of the Soviet Union like Yiv Guinea Zamyatin worked in the shipyards in Newcastle upon Tyne. And there was just this whole”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think his wife tried, didn't she? But he got quite upset with her. And then I kind of thought to myself, well, how do I study Russian? Because there were very few schools in my region, you know, given the impoverishment of the region where you could study Russian. So I would have to take Russian from scratch And this is where things get really quite interesting. Because there were opportunities to study Russian at universities, but I would need to have, first of all, an intensive Russian language course in the summer. And I didn't have the money for that. And the period is around the miners' strike in the United Kingdom in 1984. Now, the miners of County Durham had very interestingly had exchanges and ties with the miners of Donbass going back to the nineteen twenties.”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was very much in the context of nuclear war at this particular point, but also in historical context, because I knew that the United States and the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union had been wartime allies in World War II, so we're trying to understand all of that. And also, you know, I, like many other people, I read Russian literature in translation. I'd read war and peace. And I'd love the book, actually. I mean, particularly the story parts of it. I wasn't one really at that time when I was a teenager. I thought Tolstoy went on a bit, you know, in terms of his theories of the great man and of history and, you know, kind of social change, though now I appreciate it more. But when I was about 14, I was like, this man needed an editor. Could you have just gone on with the story? What an amazing story, what an incredible, you know, kind of book this is.”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I mean, I read everything I was actually possibly could about nuclear weapons and nuclear war, and started to try to teach myself, you know, Russian a little bit.”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. During World War II The United Kingdom, the United States, and the Soviet Union have all been wartime allies, and my uncle Charlie thought, well, there's something gone wrong here. Maybe you can figure it out. And as you said, go talk to them. So I thought, okay, I'll study Russian. So that's really how this came about. So I thought, well, it's applying education.”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A nuclear flash, you know, we'd have to get down on the floor, not look up with the curtains would help. And we'd be like, this is ridiculous, Dad. And we would all try to see if we could squeeze in the space under the stairs, a cupboard under the stairs like Harry Potter. I was all just totally nuts. Or you had to throw yourself in a ditch if you were outside. And I thought, well, this isn't going to work. And one of my great-uncles who had fought in World War II said, well, look, you're good at languages, Fiona. Why did you go and study Russian? Try to figure it out. Figure out why the Russians are trying to blow us up. You know, during”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“United States might be preparing for a first nuclear strike, and that then set off a whole set of literal chain reactions in the Soviet Union. Eventually it was recognized that all of this was really based on misperceptions. And of course, that later led to negotiations between Gorbachev and Reagan for the intermediate nuclear forces, the INF Treaty. But in 1983, that tension was just acute. And for as a teenager, we were basically being prepped the whole time for the inevitability of nuclear Armageddon. There were TV series, films in the United States, in the UK, threads the day after we had all these public service announcements telling us to seek sanctuary or cover in the inevitability of a nuclear blast. And my house was so small, they said, look for a room without a window. There were no rooms without windows. My dad put on these really thick curtains over the window. Instead of if there was a...”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Basically provoked by the Euro missile crisis, so the stationing of new categories of strategic nuclear weapons and intermediate nuclear weapons in Western Europe and in Eastern Europe during the height of the Cold War. And the Zero Missile Crisis over SS-20 and Pershing missiles went on from 1977, so when I was about 11 or 12, all the way through into the later part of the 1980s. And in 1983, we came extraordinarily close to a nuclear conflict. It was very much another rerun of the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, so 20 years on, same kind of thing. The Soviets misread, although I didn't know this at the time, I know a lot of this, you know, after the fact, but the tension was palpable. But what happened was the Soviets misread the intentions of a series of exercises, Operation Abel Archer that the United States was conducting and actually thought that”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Deindustrialization and the complete collapse of the local government system around me still maintain money for education. And they also paid for exchanges. And we had exchange programs with cities in Germany and France also in Russia, in Kostrama, near Yaroslav, for example, an old textile town, similar, you know, down in its kind of region, but quite historic in the Russian context. In fact, the original birthplace of the Romanov dynasty in Kostroma, just as County Durham was quite a distinguished historic area in the British context. And so it was an idea that I could go on exchanges, I could learn languages, I studied German, I studied French. And then in 1983, there was the Warscare.”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But if you do get an education, it's a privilege and you need to do something with it So then I'm thinking, well, what could I do? Okay, an education, a qualification, it's to do something. Most people around me, I knew, didn't have careers. I mean, my dad didn't really have a career. He had jobs. My mom thought of her nursing as a career, though, and it genuinely was. And she was out there trying to help women survive childbirth. My mother had these horrific stories, you know, basically over the dining room table. I wish she'd stop. She'd leave out her nursing books. And I tell you, if everyone had had my mum as a mother, there'd be no reproduction on the planet. It was just this grim, horrific stories of breached births and fistulas and all kinds of horrors that my sister and I would just go, oh my God, you know, what? Please stop. So I thought, well, you know, I don't necessarily want to go in that direction. But it was the timing that really cinched things for me. I was very lucky that the region that I grew up, County Durham, despite the massive decrease,”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Day, I saw one of the local vets with his hand up the back side of a cow in a field, and he'd got his hand stuck in the cow was kicking him. And I thought, yeah, maybe not actually. No, I don't think I want to be a vet. So I cycled through all of these things about, okay, I could get an education. But the whole sense was you had to apply your education. It wasn't an education for education's sake. It was an education to do something. And when I was about 14 or 15, my local member of parliament came to the school. And it was one of these, you know, pep talks for kids in these, you know, deprived areas. He had been quite prominent in local education. And now he was a member of parliament. He himself had come from a really hard scrubble background and had risen up through education. He'd even gone to Oxford and done philosophy, politics and economics. And he basically told my class, even though it was highly unlikely any of us were really going to get ahead and go to elite institutions. Look, you can get an education. You don't have to be held back by your circumstances.”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, there were a number of things. I mean, I think a lot of kids, you talk to people, and particularly from blue-collar backgrounds, said, what did you want to do? Boys might say I wanted to be a fireman, you know, or you got, you know, a kind of at one point as a little girl. I wanted to be a nurse. I had little nurses uniform like my mother. I didn't really know what that meant. But, you know, I used to go around pretending to be a nurse. I even had a little magazine called Nurse Nancy. And I used to read this. And, you know, kind of, that was one of the formative ideas. We also, it was a rural area, semi-rural area. And, you know, I'd be out in the fields all the time and I'd watch farmers with their animals and I'd see vets coming along and watching people deal with the livestock. And there was a kind of a famous story at the time about a vet called James Harriot. It became here in the United States as well and was a sort of a TV miniseries. He'd written a book and he was the vet for my one of my great aunt's dogs. And people were always talking about him. And I thought, oh, I could be a vet.”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Get educated and find a way out of this. Very early on, my father had basically said to me, there's nothing for you here. You're going to have to, if you want to get ahead. And he didn't have any kind of idea that as a girl I wouldn't. I mean, actually, in many respects, I think I benefited from being a girl rather than a boy. There was no expectation that I would go into industry. There was, you know, some kind of idea that maybe I, you know, if I got qualifications, I could be a nurse. My mother was a midwife. And so she'd at age 16 left school and gone to train as a nurse and then as a midwife. I had other relatives who'd gone to teach in local schools. And so there was an idea that women could get educated. And there was a kind of a range of things that you could do. But the expectation then was go out there, do something with your life, but also a sense that you'd probably have to leave. So all of that was circling around me, particularly in my teenage years.”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That he didn't really have any other qualifications to basically find another job beyond something in manual labour. So I worked in a steelworks. That didn't work out, a brickworks, that closed down. And then he went to work in the local hospital, part of the national health service in the United Kingdom as a porter, an orderly. So basically somebody's just pushing people around. There was no opportunity to retrain. So the big issue in my family was education. You've got to have one. You know, you've got to have some qualifications. The world is changing. It's changing really quickly. And for you to kind of keep up with it, you're going to have to”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was born in 1965, and it was the period where the whole coal sector in Britain was in decline already. And basically, my father, by the time I came along, had lost his job multiple times every coal mine he worked in was closing down. He was looking constantly for other work, and he had no qualifications because at age 14, he'd gone down the mines. His father had gone down the mines at 13, his great-grandfather, you know, around the same kind of age. I mean, you had a lot of people at different points going down coal mines at 12, 13, you know, 14. They didn't get educated beyond that period because the expectation was, hey, you're going to go down the mine like everybody else in your family.”
2022-11-04 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #335 – Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source