Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump | Lex Fridman Podcast #335

We've got to have strategic empathy about Putin as well. We've got to understand how the guy thinks and why he thinks like he does. You know, he, he has got his own context and his own frame and his own rationale. And he is rational. He is a rational actor in his own context. We've got to understand that. We've got to understand that he would take offense at something and he would take action over something. It doesn't mean to say that, you know, we are necessarily to blame by taking actions. But we are to blame when we don't understand the consequences of things that we do and act accordingly, or, you know, take preventative action or recognize that something might happen as a result of something.

What is the probability that Russia attacks Ukraine with a tactical nuclear weapon? The following is a conversation with Fiona Hill, a presidential advisor and foreign policy expert specializing in Russia. She has served the Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations, including being a top advisor on Russia to Donald Trump. She has made it to the White House from humble beginnings in the north of England, a story she tells in her book, There Is Nothing For You Here. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description and now, dear friends, here's Fiona Hill. You came from humble beginning in a coal mining town in Northeast England. So what were some formative moments in your young life that made you the woman you are today?

I was born in 1965. And it was the period where the whole coal sector in Britain was in decline already and, you know, 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, you know, 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 gonna go down the mine like everybody else in your family." And then he didn't really have any other qualifications to, you know, basically find another job beyond something in manual labor. So he worked in a steelworks, that didn't work out. A brick works, 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 gonna have to get educated and find a way out of this. And very early on my father had basically said to me, "There's nothing for you here. You're gonna 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-