Fiona Hill

And also the larger context and environment in which we're living in and where we live.

and who we live with.

And, you know, the kinds of lives that we lead as well, those are all extraordinarily important.

I mean, I know that from, you know, myself.

Everything, you know, that I've done in my life has been shaped by where I came from, who I was, my family, and the way that we looked at things.

You can't take yourself out of that.

I mean, you can do it in some, you know, like a science or something else, but, you know, it's still your own views and maybe some of the ideas that you have in pursuing an experiment might have been shaped by your larger context, you know, depending on what it is that you work on.

But the other thing is the nature of the political system.

The presidential election is like a personality contest, a beauty contest.

It's like a kind of a referendum on, you know, one person or another.

It's kind of like what we see in Russia, honestly, with, you know, Putin or not Putin or Putin and Putin before.

You know, it's all about Putin.

And, you know, what do you think about Putin?

It's not about what the president should be doing and, you know, kind of what their policies are.

That's kind of the bizarreness of the U.S.,

political system.

Look, we've just seen this happening in the United Kingdom.

You've got this core of a couple of thousand, a couple of hundred thousand, rather, people in the Conservative Party have just voted for, you know, three leaders in a row, the rest of the country isn't.

And they're just looking at, you know, whether they like that personality and, you know, what they say to them, rather than what they're necessarily going to do for the country.

I mean, which is, you know, kind of pretty absurd.