Fiona Hill

I'm doing all right.

Thanks, Tim.

Glad to be with you.

Yeah, I certainly ask myself that, you know, many times.

I'm also glad to say that we came out the ether rather than the primordial swamp, which everybody else, you know, kind of sort of accuses all of doing.

I mean, look, I mean, you know, I started off life in a rather unexpected place.

I mean, some of the people listening to this will know, you know, I started off in Northern England, daughter of a coal miner or a nurse while coal miner because all the mines closed down.

My dad became a hospital porter.

My mother, you know, was a midwife in, you know, one of those early batches of midwives trained by the National Health Service that kind of call the midwife from the BBC series.

I feel 300 years old.

I just turned 60.

Oh, looking great for 60.

Well, thank you very much.

When I look back at, you know, the little few pictures of my childhood, it certainly seems like it was in the 19th century, not the 20th, you know, it was like a totally a world away from this.

But the whole point was, you know, thanks to expansion of education in the UK, you know, I get the education my parents never did.

It's actually a great American story, actually, for people of my age in America as well, I guess.

you know, kind of funding to go to school, to university.

I decided to study Russian because it's the peak of the Cold War.

And like many other people of my generation, you know, I was obsessed with the risks of nuclear Armageddon and thought, you know, we'd die in a ditch listening to sirens.

You know, various places were blown up in an exchange between the U.S.