The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – There Is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the Twenty-First Century by Fiona Hill

Episode Date: October 12, 2021

There Is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the Twenty-First Century by Fiona Hill "As a memoir this is hard to put down; if you are seeking a better American future you should pick it up.”—Timothy Snyder, New York Times best-selling author of On Tyranny A celebrated foreign policy expert and key impeachment witness reveals how declining opportunity has set America on the grim path of modern Russia—and draws on her personal journey out of poverty, as well as her unique perspectives as an historian and policy maker, to show how we can return hope to our forgotten places. Fiona Hill grew up in a world of terminal decay. The last of the local mines had closed, businesses were shuttering, and despair was etched in the faces around her. Her father urged her to get out of their blighted corner of northern England: “There is nothing for you here, pet,” he said. The coal-miner’s daughter managed to go further than he ever could have dreamed. She studied in Moscow and at Harvard, became an American citizen, and served three U.S. Presidents. But in the heartlands of both Russia and the United States, she saw troubling reflections of her hometown and similar populist impulses. By the time she offered her brave testimony in the first impeachment inquiry of President Trump, Hill knew that the desperation of forgotten people was driving American politics over the brink—and that we were running out of time to save ourselves from Russia’s fate. In this powerful, deeply personal account, she shares what she has learned, and shows why expanding opportunity is the only long-term hope for our democracy.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain now here's your host chris voss hi folks this is voss here from the chris voss show.com the chris voss show.com hey we're coming here with another great podcast who knew we'd do it again and here here we are. To watch the video version, you want to check this out. We've got Dr. Fiona Hill on the show with us. You may remember her

from the 2019 first impeachment hearings of Donald Trump. We're going to be talking about her amazing new book. But in the meantime, you're going to watch the video version of this. Go to youtube.com for just Chris Voss. You need that bell notification button. When you hit that button, there's this feeling of completion that washes over you. It's like anything other than you felt before. Or not, the attorney said. I had to say that. Go to our groups on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok so that you can see all the wonderful things we're doing over there, clips of the show, et cetera, et cetera.

Also, go to goodreads.com, 4Chess, Chris Voss. You can see all the books we're reading and reviewing there as well. So we're excited to announce my new book is coming out. It's called Beacons of Leadership, Inspiring Lessons of Success in Business and Innovation. It's going to be coming out on October 5th, 2021. And I'm really excited for you to get a chance to read this book. It's filled with a multitude of my insightful stories, lessons, my life, and experiences in leadership and character. I give you some of the secrets from my CEO Entrepreneur Toolbox that I use to scale my

business success, innovate, and build a multitude of companies. I've been a CEO for, what is it, like 33, 35 years now. We talk about leadership, the importance of leadership, how to become a great leader, and how anyone can become a great leader as well. So you can pre-order the book right now wherever fine books are sold, but the best thing to do on getting a pre-order deal is to go to beaconsofleadership.com. That's beaconsofleadership.com. On there you can find several packages you can take advantage of in ordering the book.

And for the same price of what you can get it from someplace else like Amazon, you can get all sorts of extra goodies that we've taken and given away. Different collectors, limited edition, custom made numbered book plates that are going to be autographed by me. There's all sorts of other goodies that you can get when you buy the book from beaconsofleadership.com. So be sure to go there, check it out or order the book wherever fine books are sold. Her new book just came out on October 5th, same day mine did, which is pretty awesome. I'm kind of honored actually. There is nothing for you here. Finding Opportunity in the 21st Century by Fiona Hill. She comes to us today, and she is the Robert Bosch Senior Fellow in the Center on the United States and Europe in the Foreign Policy Program at Brookings. She recently served as a Deputy Assistant to the President and Senior Director for European and Russian Affairs on the National

Security Council from 2017 to 2019. From 2006 to 2009, she served as a National Intelligence Officer for Russia and Eurasia at the National Intelligence Council. She's the co-author of Mr. Putin, Operative in the Kremlin. Welcome to the show, Fiona. How are you? I'm doing great, Chris. Thanks. Thanks so much for having me. Thanks for coming. We certainly appreciate you. And it's an honor to have you. I view you and Colonel Vindman as heroes. And I remember watching you guys during the hearings and, of course, being horrified by the testimony you gave and going, oh my gosh, what's going on with my democracy? Give us your plug so people can find you on the testimony you gave and going, oh my gosh, what's going on with my democracy?

Give us your plug so people can find you on the interwebs and learn more. The book itself came right out of those hearings. In fact, it's almost two years exactly this week that I was first called into giving a closed door deposition on Capitol Hill. It was like October 14th or something of 2019. And in those closed-door hearings was the first time I became alerted to the fact that this was going to be quite a ride through the hearings and the testimony on two different fronts. First of all, there was the fictional narrative that was being perpetrated that Ukraine rather than Russia had interfered in the 2016 presidential election, which I knew from all of my previous

positions. I mentioned that I was the National Intelligence Officer for Russia and Eurasia previously, and of all my work was just not true. The Ukrainian government did not launch such a sophisticated influence operation against us. That was just not the case at all. And then I also realized pretty quickly that this was going to be a partisan game show in many respects. There's no other really way to describe it. And I was, whether I liked it or not, was going to be part of what was going to be a big performance by many members of Congress. And that started out with Matt Gates, a congressman from Florida, bursting into the room as I was about to begin the questioning and trying to answer the committee's inquiry.

And just sitting there, engaging in a starring contest with me for the first hour or so. He wanted to disrupt the hearings. He was insisting that he had a right to be there, even though he wasn't on the committee. He was saying this is a Soviet-era show trial. Well, I'd studied Soviet-era show trials. No, I don't think so. It was all very public. People knew I was there. And it basically went downhill. And I came away from that set of depositions. And then fast forward, you know, to a month later to the public hearings, deeply disturbed by what was happening

in our own democracy. And I'd gone into the administration, trying to tackle the Russian influence operation and the after effects and to try to make sure that couldn't happen again. And I'd come out of the whole thing really worried about where we were, where America was. The country that I'd come to become a citizen, I'd arrived in 1989, I'd become a citizen in 2002, I'd tried to serve the country and what the heck was happening here. And that really propelled me after the testimony and the reactions to it and some of the things that I'd said there, some things that I'd heard, I got hundreds of letters from all the way around the United States. I just want to say a shout out to all the people who wrote to me because I did read everything.

I just haven't had a chance to respond to all of them. And in a way, the book was the response. The book is that people are right. There's a real threat to our democracy here. People wanted to hear more of my views that I'd expressed in the testimony. And I decided basically to write this book. There you go. So give us an overarching overview of the book, if you would, to touch on. And is it partially a memoir?

Yes. I think most people's biography can be described in the context of the times in which they live. We're all basically part of history. History is being made around us every single day. And we all know from our own biography, our own personal stories of our families about where we fit in. Every American can point to some of their family who fought in World War II or ancestors who came from this country or that country and settled in the United States or Native Americans who have a long oral history. People who were brought to the Americas as slaves and those histories that they passed down were all part of history. People who were brought to the Americas as slaves and those histories that they passed down were all part of history, were all the product of the families, stories,

and the generations that have gone before us. And in my case, I was born in a rather tumultuous time in the United Kingdom in the 1960s, where the British system was, political system and economic system was going through a massive change. I came to the United States in 1989, right at the end of the Cold War, when the United States itself was going through a whole period of change. And so I decided to use my own biography and the experiences that I'd had, the things I'd learned as a person just sort of starting out in life, because I come from, you know, a coal mining area, my father had been a coal miner, and I ended up, you know, working in the White House, which seems fairly preposterous.

But wanting to explain about how I'd got from there to here and what I'd seen along the way and what my own personal biography told us about the larger political context. And so that's really the way that the book is structured out. It's three books in one.

It's the personal journey, the personal memoir of how a kid from the coal mining areas of County Durham in the North East managed to move through life and become a Russia expert, what I saw along the way in Russia and the United States. It's the story of the rise of populism in the United States from the backdrop of de-industrialization, people losing their livelihood in the US, similar as they had in the UK where I was growing up, but the Rust Belt and the places that have got left behind the people who feel politically left behind, as well as economically left behind in the United States. And how President basically

understood that, and basically built his whole campaign around feeding off and speaking to people's political and economic grievances. And then what happened during the Trump administration in this kind of populist atmosphere. And then the third part of the book is really the kind of public policy aspect, the kind of historical aspect of how we got from here to there in a larger context and what we can really do about it now. So again, three kind of books tied into one using as the through line, my own personal journey through all of this. And the book is really amazing. In your memoir part, especially the beginning, where you talk about the parallels between both what happened in England post-war and the coal

mines and industrial age and et cetera, et cetera. In fact, my mother, when I got the press copy, she called me up and says, I want to read that because she's a coal miner's daughter from West Virginia. My grandfather was a Teamster recruiter, I think, or manager of a local thing. And so she really identified with your story and she was like, I need to read it first. And so I was like, I have to give it a press copy and get the audible from me. It was really interesting that way. And you tell the story about, it's almost really parallel to what went on in America since 1980s and 1970s and 80s and how we were almost just a little bit behind what happened in Europe. Yeah, there's just like a different time scale. The interesting thing is as well, so my dad was born in 1932. At the height of the

depression, he ended up being homeless because his father was nearly always out of work, either because he was a union activist on the one hand or because the mines were in and out because they were privatised at that point. And obviously, sometimes they weren't economically viable and they cut back on miners' recruitment. After World War II, the mines open, or during World War II, rather, they open up for the war effort.

And my granddad and everybody else gets back into work again. And after the war they're nationalized and so my dad gets a job as a coal miner following his dad in 1947 when he's you know 14 years old 1946 1947 when he goes um you know basically down the mines and it's the British coal it's a nationalized industry it's only later when it starts to be privatized again that everything falls apart. In the United States, I mean, it's mostly been private the whole time. But the history is very similar, the rise and fall of coal, depending on demand. Mine is in and out of work, moving around to different coal mines. And when one of my dad's

mines closed in the 1960s, there was all these recruitment, maybe grandfather, who knows, you know, for mines in West Virginia or mines in Pennsylvania and Ohio. And my dad was very interested in going to a mine in the Lehigh Valley in Pennsylvania in Carbon County, which was the exact direct correlate of County Durham in the north of England. Anthracite mining, my dad knew his anthracite, similar kind of conditions in the mines. And he would have gone, but he was also responsible for his elderly parents. My grandfather had retired from the mine. My granddad had had a horrible injury in the mine where the pneumatic drill had pierced his pelvis. It was a windy pick in the north. And so he was not in the greatest of shape. My granny had all kinds of problems from hard life of

poverty and hard labor. And my dad just couldn't leave without them. So he stayed. But the irony is I could have grown up in the Lehigh Valley and as you said the mines would have closed down there too they wouldn't have been in the 60s but they would have been in the 70s in the 1980s and when I came to the US in 1989 and I first went to I had a scholarship to Harvard an amazing thing the area around Harvard Yard in Boston Cambridge East Cambridge Somerv, Somerville, you know, some of these suburbs, they were all manufacturing sites. They were in really hard times when I got there. The meat packing plants, the auto manufacturing plants, the brickworks, all of the things that had closed down.

And so once you walked outside Harvard Yard and you went a bit, you know, further afield, people are in the same situation that I'd seen in my hometown, looking for work and not being in the greatest shape. And as I traveled around the States more and more, I started to see the same thing in every place I was going to. Yeah. I think a lot of people that assume the book is just going to be about your time in the State Department, the White House staff doing the State Department work, should read the book because it's a really beautiful book, but it tells a story of growing up in England, the stress of families. There's a story, I think, in there where the kids had to be given to other parents to raise because some people are out of work and poor.

And the title of your book, I remember seeing it when it first came out, and I was like, that's a strange title. I was expecting like F.U. Mr. Trump or something. But there is nothing for you here. Where does the title of that book come from, if you would? It's what my dad said to me when I was basically finishing up high school in 1984. By this point, pretty much every industry in the town had closed down. And only 10% of kids leaving high school in 1984 had something else to go on to. I was lucky.

I'd got basically a place at university, and my local education authority was going to pay for it for me because my family were very poor and if you had low income the government would pay for you to go to college but only five or six percent of kids in Britain overall at that point even went to a university or a college so this was a kind of a rarity and my dad was basically saying to me look if you're going to get an education you're going to get a job and you're going to find something to do with yourself it's not going to be here there's nothing for you here pet he said you're going to get a job and you're going to find something to do with yourself it's not going to be here there's nothing for you here pet he said you're going to leave and i've i know loads of people from my background in the uk at that time that's what their parents said to them either their mother or their father but it's what people are still saying to their kids in parts of the us as well i know that because i'm married into a very large extended family from the midwest

many of whom are out in w, Iowa, Nebraska, Illinois, right out there where people are saying the same thing to their kids from sort of small town or rural America. If their kids want to go to college or they want to do something else, there's nothing for them there either. And part of the point of the book is that shouldn't be the case. There should be something for everybody in the place where their family are if they want to stay there. They shouldn't feel that they have to move or move across continents as I did for opportunity. And it's that kind of sense of feeling that there's nothing for someone there that is feeding into populist politics. Look, it's political as well, because some people feel in the organized mainstream parties that

there's nothing for them there either, that their viewpoints on life are not captured. I certainly don't feel that either party captures my perspectives on life. I'm not an ideological person. I don't vote based on one issue over another. For me, the world is a lot of a gray, fuzzier place, and it is in these extremes of red and blue or black and white, depending on your perspective. And I think a lot of people today, that could speak to them in many different contexts. And of course, the Trump administration went through people so frequently that there's nothing for you here, you need to leave. There was a sudden, there was a lot of changes of personnel here as well. And everyone's looking

for something at the moment. They're looking for some place to belong. They're looking for something that says there is something for you here. I feel that that thing that, you know, that phrase that my dad said to me, the father wanting the best for his kid, he only had girls, so it was me and my sister. And he was basically telling us we would have to go. And I love my dad, and I think that comes out in the book. And my mom and I didn't want to go off and particularly leave them,

but I also wanted a job. I wanted to be able to help them out later on in their life, just like my parents have been helping their parents. So it wasn't really an option, staying around at home. I love your book. Yeah. You worked hard through your life. In fact, do I understand this correctly? I think I remember this from the hearings. Are you one of the leading authorities on Mr. Putin? I am, yes. I've worked very hard to understand that gentleman. Yeah. I don't know if we've had a couple of people on the show. Anders Asland?

Oh, of course. Yes, Anders Asland, of course. Yes, a very good colleague. Yep. We had him on the show to talk about Mr. Putin and where he keeps his money and everything. What an interesting show. And you've got several books on Mr. Putin people should read as well, I think. Yeah, it's one of those things of Putin.

I'm sure that when Anders Asland was on the show as well, he would talk about the context in which Vladimir Putin emerged. In fact, Anders Asland, originally from Sweden, obviously an American citizen, he was heavily involved in the 1990s on assistance programs to try to help, you know, with the transformation of the Russian economy from a state-dominated economy to kind of private sector market capitalism and undersought firsthand the rise of Putin against a kind of a backdrop of political grievances and economic crisis and a failure to really establish the rule of law in Russia in the 1990s. It became a kind of lawless wild east of capitalism. It certainly became a capitalist country but with none of the rough edges smoothed off and enabling people like Putin and those around him to siphon off an awful

lot of money. The Pandora Papers, which have just been, you know, revealed recently by a group of investigative journalists to show that there's a purported mischief of Putin with a very fancy apartment in a villa in Monaco and all kinds of other people who are hangers-on around the Kremlin who've got, you know, ill-gotten gains all over the place. And even in places like South Dakota, people are stashing them anyway. Maybe not Russians, but other people. Pandora Papers are a bit mind-boggling. But, you know, the whole point is that Putin emerged out of this crazy period after the collapse of the Soviet Union,

in which a lot of people lost their livelihoods. There was nothing for them there either. I saw this at first hand, like Anders Aslan did. And Putin comes in saying he's going to fix it. He's going to make Russia great again. And I basically wrote a book about Putin with a colleague from the Brookings Institution, Clifford Gaddy, who was just a great economist, who had a lot of experience in looking at the Soviet economy and then the Russian economy.

And we tried to figure out what made Putin tick. He was a man of his times, a man of his context, a man who had grown up in Russia of a particular period. He joins the KGB to get ahead. His daughter of opportunity is joining the KGB, not getting a scholarship to Harvard or something like this. He gets a different kind of education along with a university education. He adapts everything he learns to running that country. And so he runs the country in a very specific, very special sort of way. I remember watching the day after Trump's election, and I think I was horribly hung over, and there was a couple of Italian journalists that were on, I think, CNN or MSNBC, I think CNN, and they were being interviewed. And they go, you guys just Silvio Berlusconi'd yourselves.

Every Italian that I know has told me that repeatedly. In fact, just this last weekend when I met up with an Italian colleague I hadn't seen in a long while, they said, are you enjoying kind of your post-Silvio Berlusconi moment? Remember, he came back multiple times in Italy. That's my fear, is that he had that second round. We had Ruth Bengate on who talked about strongmen and right-wing things of approaches of fascism and how they come to power. And just seeing the warnings in your book about how this is the moment that we're at and that we're more danger than

ever, as you've commented before. Do you think he's more, Donald Trump is more like Silvio Biscone or more like Silvio Berlusconi or more like Putin in his design of his seeking for power? In some respects, he's more like Silvio Berlusconi in all personality and his approach as a business person. He's more thin-skinned than Berlusconi. Berlusconi took a lot of raps, but would often just roll with the punches and keep on going. He had nine lives, Berlusconi. But unfortunately, he's more like Putin in some of the approaches to the governance, more of the sort of authoritarian's handbook than just the sort of showman's handbook that Berlusconi was playing from. And there's a big difference between

Italy and the United States that we have to bear in mind. Silvio Berlusconi was the prime minister. He was part of a party that was pretty personalized around him. That's true. Also in a very fluid political system, there's lots of parties. Italy has countless parties and they're forming and reforming all the time. But Italy has a president, a head of state, who is the fail-safe, like the safety valve in that system. And right now, Italy has a very interesting because they have a technocrat as the prime minister, Mario Draghi, who was appointed by

President Mazzarella of Italy to run the country because the whole political democratic system turned out a kind of coalition government that was so unwieldy that they couldn't actually get together among themselves to get a prime ministerial candidate. So the president appointed one, and Mario Draghi is one of the most respected men in Europe, having been the head of the European Central Bank that bailed out the euro during the euro crisis. And everybody in Italy loves him, it's just he wouldn't get elected because he isn't part of the political parties from outside of the political system. We don't have a president in the United States who is a head of from outside of the political system. We don't have a president in the United States who is a head of state separate from the political fray. We have in the United

States a president who's everything. Supposedly the chief executive and prime minister, the commander in chief of the military, the head of state, the kind of person above everything else. There is no failsafe in the United States to stop somebody really from riding roughshod over the political system, especially if the political party that person is ostensibly part of has essentially been hijacked because President Trump was not a Republican. He'd been a Democrat. He'd registered. He basically rose up out of a personality and beauty contest in that campaign to the Republican Party out of 17 other candidates who all self-immolated, leaving him as the last man standing. He was the wildcard candidate.

None of them expected him to be president. He didn't even expect himself to be president, although he wanted to win. And everybody expected Hillary Clinton to be president, so they didn't take him seriously. And the Republican Party allowed itself to be hijacked by a charismatic leader. Berlusconi was always the head of a charismatic, focused, personalized party. Trump has turned the Republican Party into that, and there is no Mattarella standing there to kind of intervene. Yeah. I remember, I think it was the book Rage by one of the Washington Post, who am I thinking of? Mike Cannon, Bob Woodward?

Well, Bob Woodward was, you know, he's written Peril. It's a whole phase. It sounds like the various stages of denial, actually. I mean, it's all book series. But he was, in his conversations he's having with Trump, Trump was saying, you will know me in your second term. And he kept saying that. And that was chilling to me to hear. And I think there was somebody else who, I think it's the new, it was one of the spokesmen, the last spokesman for the Trump administration.

Yeah, Stephanie Grisham's book. Yeah. Yeah. We're not having her on. She made a comment that, yeah, there was a lot of stuff that Trump wanted to do that we're like, we'll save that for the second term. And that was horrifying. Today, I believe Les Parnas' trial starts. Are you going to be testifying in that or being involved in that at all?

No, I haven't been asked to do that. You're probably relieved. Yeah, Les Parnas, the Ukrainian-American associate of Rudy Giuliani. Igor and Les Parnas? Is this a movie? Is this a joke? Is this Harvey and – It's like a Coen Brothers movie, honestly.

I love movies, and I love the Coen Brothers and all kinds of – The Theatre of the Absurd. And I was like, hey, I'm in one of these. Is this like, you know, kind of, what am I in here? Is this blood simple? I was like, what is going on here? And the chilling comments that Donald Trump makes, how does it feel? Because no one really gets to experience this on a large scale basis. How does it feel to hear a president say the words, take her? This, of course, is about Maria Yovanovitch, our most esteemed and deeply admired ambassador to Ukraine. Another immigrant, Lieutenant Colonel Vindman and myself. But both Colonel Vindman and Ambassador Yovanovitch come from the former Soviet and Eastern Bloc.

Their families were refugees. They brought them to the united states as children the classic american story of so many people in the military in our service of our state public servants who have been refugees immigrants who want to give something back to the country and masha yovanovitch as she's you know known ambassador yovanovitch maria yovanovitch she was in the way of clearly lev panas and and his associate Igor Fulman and Rudy Giuliani, who had obviously business interests in Ukraine, not just who were trying to perpetrate this idea that Ukraine had been involved in some ways in the intervention in the 2016 elections.

She was leading as part of U.S. policy in Ukraine, from the embassy anti-corruption programs that the U.S. government was funding there. And she was seen to be in the way of their particular business interests. So what did they do? They basically get to a donor dinner with Trump. I mean, left Parnas is now in trouble for what seems to be inappropriate campaign contributions.

He was there with Trump at the Trump Hotel in Washington, D.C. This is back in 2018. We know this because he taped it. They taped it and put this video online eventually of their conversation with Trump, in which they tell Trump that Maria Yovanovitch, Ambassador Yovanovitch, his ambassador in Ukraine, is out to get him. She's been defaming him. It's just a complete pack of lies.

She's done this and she's done that. And he immediately says, get rid of her. He doesn't want to know whether it's true or not. He just can't stand the idea of someone insulting him. And he takes their word for these guys that maybe he's met them before. Maybe he hasn't. But they're in his circle. They're donors to the Republican Party.

They're introduced to him by other people in his circle. He doesn't know who this ambassador is. He immediately assumes that what they've told him is the truth. And so he says, take her out, get rid of her. And it's there on YouTube for anybody to listen to. And this is completely chilling. And then, of course, he says in public that she's going to go through some things. He says this to the leader of a foreign country, to President Zelensky of Ukraine, the leader of a foreign country disparaging

a fellow American, a loyal US citizen and public servant, and basically says she's going to go through some things. I mean, throwing her under the bus of a foreign power who is trying to enlist to also defame other American citizens, former Vice President Biden and his son Hunter Biden, and get them to call for some investigations into their conduct. You guys are hearing this in the State Department going, oh, my God. This is astounding that an American president, an American president's domestic policy is supposed to stop at the water, and overseas the American president is supposed to defend Americans.

Yeah, and you talk about in the book how you guys are in the State Department and there's a group of you just trying to hold democracy together and be like, we need to be the bulwark against what's going on here. And there's just these crazy insinuations and horrible lies going on. And there's countries that learn that they can get their ambassadors changed out if they just create the right sort of environment. It was crazy. Yeah, I was actually in the National Security Council, just to clarify this, but we had so many people detailed in from the State Department, the Defense Department, other government agencies, and everybody's looking at this thinking, what's going on here? Why are we in this situation?

And it's unprecedented. Crazy. You've said this a lot on different interviews that you've done. And two weeks after January 6th, I had the radio host, Tom Hartman, on the show. At the end of the show, he decides to throw me a winger. And he goes, hey, man, you know what they call January 6th? And I go, no, what? And he goes, practice, rehearsal.

And I about fell out of my chair and realizing what he said. And I was thinking of the beer hall with Hitler, but then you also referenced Lenin. Yeah, and actually General Milley did the same thing and the hearings that he was taking part in in Capitol Hill. He said when he saw this, he thought of 1905 in Russia,

which was the dress rehearsal for the Bolshevik revolution much later on actually in 1917. And people might think, well, there's 12 years in between this. But that uprising, which was suppressed by the Russian imperial government, really did was a dresser. A lot of people learned a lot from this. Both the revolutionaries would be revolutionaries and wanted to overthrow the imperial government, but also lots of other people

watching it, that they realized that Russia was a tinderbox, it was about to explode, and that something would trigger it off. And 1905 was triggered off by a war between Russia and Japan. 1917 was triggered off by a war between Germany and Russia as part of World War I, and all of the stresses and strains. And we have been at war for 20 years, since 9-11, the forever wars. There's a lot of stresses and strains in our politics at the moment. The one thing I didn't really make much of in the book, 9-11 and the after effects and the forever wars, because there were so many books out there looking back at 9-11.

But that could have been an element of part of what I was discussing as well, because we have this socioeconomic crisis, these political grievances rising up against the backdrop of the United States overextended in terms of its blood and treasure, spilling the blood of Americans in forever wars and expending enormous amounts of money in the conduct of these. What was it like for you? And I imagine you spent a lot of time watching the interactions between Putin and Trump when they would meet. What was it like for you to watch the Helsinki thing? That was painful, to say the least. And I've described another end in the book about how I thought about faking a medical emergency to stop it all. But it wouldn't have worked. It would just

made it worse. I would have just been part of the whole spectacle as well. But it was also a complete tragedy and also predictable because, first of all, Trump was completely thin-skinned about any kinds of questions about what had happened in 2016. He didn't want to be shown up in front of Putin. He didn't want to ask Putin any of these questions. Because I mean, part of it was probably about what do you have done if Putin said, well, yes, actually, Mr. President, I did interfere in the elections in 2016 on your behalf, and you wouldn't have won without me. What would Trump have done if Putin had said that to mess with him? But Putin didn't have to say that because everybody else is saying that. And it drove him nuts, the idea that people were suggesting that he didn't win because of his own amazing

campaign as he kept putting it. And the tragedy was also that behind the scenes, they'd had a relatively normal set of interactions. There was a lot of abnormal things that Putin tried to pull a fast one on us by suggesting, you know, that Russia would let their former operatives who'd messed about in the 2016 election be interviewed by the FBI, but only, of course, if they were allowed to interview Americans, which, of course, was something that never was going to happen, but he was playing making mischief there. But they had agreed to have arms control negotiations, more discussions on the nuclear arsenal. They'd agreed to have

the national security councils of both countries meet. They'd agreed to some sensible discussions that we could have taken forward in the relationship. But instead, we got this completely humiliating press conference where President Trump and his eagerness to still be basking in the glow of his one-on-one with Putin through basically the whole U.S. intel community and lots of other people under the bus. And you would likely know more than anyone, being a Putin expert, I think it was Rick Wilson who said Putin is playing something to the effect of Putin is playing 3D chess and Donald Trump is eating the pizza.

Putin does many different things, but he's also a judo expert, a judoka, somebody who is an officiado of judo. And what does judo entail? It really entails somebody using their own weight against them. And Putin was a smaller, more wiry guy. Judo for him was, it was also a great exercise in discipline, self-discipline, self-control, letting the other person trip themselves up and fall under their own weight. And judo takes place over a whole series of tournaments. You don't always win every round, but over the tournament, you're playing a longer game. And it's a head game as

well. You're trying to beat your opponent. And often the smallest guy is the victor, having thrown the big guy kind of off his game. And that's exactly what happened at Helsinki. The really big guy, Trump, over six feet tall, and the rather small guy, Putin, well under six feet. Who won that sparring match? Because Trump was easily thrown off his game and he did not behave like the President of the United States. He basically behaved like a deeply insecure, vulnerable human being who couldn't deal with the idea that he was being questioned in front of... There's a saying I like to say, the one thing man can learn from his history is that man never learns from his history and all these strong men all these autocrats all these fascism people that rise they're always these insecure i don't know what another good word for

is but they're these horribly insecure ununfulfilled or undeveloped men that that that pull this stuff off. And I imagine when Trump saw Putin get to that, I think 2036 is what he can be president to or king of Russia. Yeah. Maybe longer if he changes the constitution again and is still viable enough physically. Yeah. Do you put any stock in that? I think there was a story going around that he might have developed Parkinson's. Do you put any stock in that? There's all kinds of questions about Putin and his health because he is the wild card in the system. He said he's the one and only. We know Russia without Putin. That's what people around him say.

And, of course, then everybody's watching closely. If politically and legally, at least obviously he's fudged on that somewhat. These amendments to the Constitution were put through. In any case, he can stay out that long. Will he physically be able to do it and so everyone's watching closely there's lots of rumors or maybe meant to discredit him in some way maybe these are signs that the vultures are circling around inside of his own system wondering if there's any frailty or trying to suggest there is to see what happens sometimes the rumors might be put by him too to see who comes forward

with aspirations so that he's made himself for the crux of everything and so obviously people are very concerned about his health you know i mean what if he died tomorrow i mean all the sort of scenarios about the future russia you know require putin leaving the scene one way or the other he's become the state itself he's the epitome of it i think it was anders and asland talked about how they hide money and they move it and they put it with – he has his inner circles and stuff. Is he one of the richest men in the world technically if you were to pile that money together? I think he'd actually like us to think so because there's a bit of shock and awe about that. Back in the day of the Romanov monarchy, they wanted everyone to think that they were the richest monarchy in the world and they just weren't.

A lot of it was like surface glitter, everything basically covered in gold, and you get shock and awe when people would come to the Kremlin and have to be wowed by all of the inner sanctum, very much like the imperial city in China as well. All these kind of corridors and just this kind of amazement at the place that you were in. But in actual fact, the Romanovs were sometimes a bit more impecunious. And in Putin's case, as president of Russia, he's in charge of a vast state enterprise where the Kremlin owns planes, luxury yachts, holiday houses, palaces all over the place. And a lot of this has been escrow, has been named for him. As Alexei Navalny, the opposition leader who's now in prison, showed in a fantastic, amazing, well-produced video about Putin's palace down in the Black Sea that was being built for him under all these kind of different shell companies. So just as Anders Aslan has described this kleptocracy where all this money is put in different places under different people's names,

when you add it all up, there's probably fabulous wealth there. But the question is, how much can Putin actually really claim for it all up, there's probably fabulous wealth there. But the question is, how much can Putin actually really claim for himself? Obviously, there's money there under daughters, ex-wife, mistresses, close personal friends. But there's an awful lot at the, at his fingertips,

at the Russian state. If he leaves being the president, he already loses access to all of this incredible luxury that's in and around the Kremlin. Yeah, it would be interesting to see whose success would be or how that whole thing would play out or if it would fall into a revolution or something. You've issued very powerful warnings as to what the future is of our country if Donald

Trump is re-elected. Would you like to comment on that? Yes, I'm deeply worried about it. And again, even questioning that has become a sort of a partisan issue. I was apparently denounced on Fox News saying that I've chosen a side and it's the Democratic Party as a non-partisan person. Obviously, I've struck a nerve somewhere there because as somebody who is a registered independent who's never been a member of any political party, you know, I'm just calling it like I'm a citizen. I became a citizen of the United States by choice. I want to see a future in this country for my daughter and all my extended family members. And our democracy is in big trouble because one faction, let's call it that, in the country has taken control of one of the great parties are actively perverting democracy by building the way forward on a lie. This isn't a lie. President Trump did not win. Former President Trump did not win election in November 2020. Seed, his refusal to repudiate these lies led to a mob storming the Capitol in January 6th to stop the certification of the election and the formal handover of executive power. I mean, an unprecedented

act in our country. We've got Vice President Pence, who kind of fancies himself as a future president, thinks that Trump will somehow let him run to perhaps be the president in 2024, who would have been lynched by that mob who are out to get him for doing his constitutional duty, actually saying also that nothing happened on January 6th. And everyone's turning themselves in circles, turning themselves into pretzels, people would say, to deny that something happened on January 6th because they can't see a path forward to their own power, their own influence without fealty to Trump, who is building everything upon a lie.

And this is how democracy is done. Our democracy is in trouble. Our democracy is in constitutional crisis. We're in full-blown crisis and people are throwing it away. Hundreds of years of efforts to improve on our democracy, civil war, civil rights movement, going through all of the traumas of, you know, Vietnam on top of that, all of the forever wars that people have died for since 9-11. Sorry, what is going on here? And this is not a partisan statement. If they want to say that, it's just proving the very point. Yeah, if you study history, this is how democracies die everywhere around the world. Everywhere around the world it has, too.

There's been the perversion of politics, the usurpation of one party and turning it into a faction. That's what this is. And feel to a charismatic leader, instead of people looking themselves in the eyes and being their own person. 330 million of us in this country, the preamble of the Constitution is we the people. It's not about one guy. Yeah. It's scary to think what he would do. And we know it would be a revenge tour of hell.

It would just be fire and brimstone. It would be dismantling the state because anybody who had counted in pushback, Department of Justice, in the military if he could, he would have them kicked out and try to run the countries he'd want to do the first instance, which is from a close circle in and around the White House. Then there's no federal government and it would be up to really the governors of states and mayors to hold everything. It was chilling to hear, I can't remember, I believe it was General Tilly. He, there was from a recent book, I think it was the Bob Woodward book again. Oh, General Milley, yes. General Milley, yes.

Doing too many things here producing the show. He made those comments at the inauguration of Biden that they landed the plane and saved democracy. And a few people were more. And it's really interesting to me how many people in this country do not, number one, understand history. And number two, don't understand the value of this democracy. In fact, you're seeing a lot of polling with the GOP where people are like, ah, democracy, big deal. We're fine. Let's have a God.

Let's have a president. Let's have a personality cult. Yeah, we've had a breakdown fine. Let's have a God. Let's have a president. Let's have a personality code. Yeah, we've had a breakdown of civic education in the United States. As somebody who's an immigrant, every immigrant who's become a citizen, we had to take a citizenship test. We had to prove, I had to prove as well that I could speak English, that I could, even though in theory it's my native language, I still had to take the test. We had to basically American history and study basic points about the way that our democracy functions. So there are millions of us out there who've had to take a citizenship test and stand up to it in the military as well.

As General Milley also said in that hearing, particularly the officer corps, but anybody who's moving up the ranks, they're really well educated in American history and the Constitution, the separation of powers, because we were trying to keep our military out of politics, but they have to understand how the system works. There are parts of our, basically our body politic, the fabric of our society where people are well educated in these issues. But we've lost the plot, as it were, in our basic education system. You know, that's something that's in the media, the kind of functioning no longer as the third estate, but also being warped by politics. We heard from the Facebook whistleblower, Francis Hogan, that it's not the content.

It's the algorithms of Facebook. It's similar with our politics. Our algorithms are askew because we're pushing people into outrage, into false facts. No facts. So basically false narratives. No facts. A kind of alternative Kellyanne Conway's alternative facts universe. We're getting people to focus more on performance than we are on the actual reality and fabric of life.

We need to figure out how to fix this. And I think it has to start at the bottom. It has to start with people like ourselves mobilizing out for the truth. And sometimes I wonder how much of it is effective, fingers or thumbs being on the scale between pan-globals like Zuckerberg or Peter Thiel, which sits on the board of Facebook. And we've had some different authors on that have done a bio on him as well. You talked in a CNN interview about which is worse, Facebook or Putin for America. And I know we're pressed for time, so I'll let you get to that. Yeah, I think Facebook at this particular point, unless it gets itself regulated and gets its algorithms in order.

Because Vladimir Putin was able to influence public opinion in the United States because of social media platforms. So it's not just Facebook, it's Twitter. It's the ability for bots to take control, Twitter bots and trolls. Every large internet entity is open to exploitation. And they're not well-policed internally. And we've got a rare moment of comedy on Capitol Hill with congressmen and women from both sides of the aisle saying, hey, yes, we see the problem here.

People are understanding how divisive and dangerous all of this, particularly people with kids, for example. But any woman who's been trolled on the internet and been subjected to all kinds of horrible, genderized vitriol. I keep off the internet because I just, I don't want to know what people are saying about me out there. I've had death threats, you name it.

So this is what passes for discourse. And Vladimir Putin and, you know, political operatives, Vladimir Putin himself has said he doesn't want to be on the internet. I don't think the guy has an internet account. He said it's used for porn and basically perversion and for people shouting at each other. He's not wrong.

So the internet was put together for good, actually, to connect people and enable us to network in a positive way, but that's not where we've ended up. And so unless we can get that fixed, it will be open to exploitation by all kinds of actors who mean as ill. There you go. And he's probably just sitting and laughing the whole time. Well, and people are making money out of it as well. That's the thing that Putin said, people use the internet for gambling. Again, he's right, because of the sort of stock markets and

the internet fortunes that have been made, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos, and just this obscene amounts of money that they have generated online. We have people living in the streets all over the place. And then people label it, oh my God, you're talking about socialism. No, this is the kind of fabric of revolution, of reaction. That's 1905 in Russia. And people didn't necessarily want to completely and utterly change the system. In 1905 in Russia, they wanted to get the attention of the Tsar. This was actually basically a protest to get the Tsar's attention to change things, to address people's lot in life. They didn't want to end the monarchy, but by 1917, they did. There you go. It's been insightful to have you on.

Everyone should read the book and get it. Fiona, give us your plugs so people can find you on the interweb. My plugs actually, there you go. I'm just about showing, but I actually am not an internet presence. The way that people can find me, I'm on LinkedIn and I'm on the kind of Brookings website. And obviously my publisher has got websites and things, but I've actually actively taken myself off from most of the internet because I'm so disturbed by the level of discourse. So when we get that fixed, maybe I'll come on. There you go. An amateurish handle or something.

People should read the book. There's some great stuff in here about a Marshall Plan for America and a whole different things we didn't get to. But it was wonderful to have you on. Thank you very much. No, thanks, Chris. It's great to be on with you. Great discussion. Thank you.

Thank you. And thanks to my audience for tuning in. Go to YouTube.com, 4ChessChrisFoss to see the video version of this. You can go to Goodreads.com, 4ChessChrisFoss, see everything we're reading and reviewing. Go see all the groups, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram. They're free for an unlimited time. You want to sign up for them while you can. Thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other and we'll see you guys next time. So we're excited to announce my new book is coming out. It's called Beacons of Leadership, Inspiring Lessons of Success in Business and Innovation.

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