a16z Podcast - Tough Love, Global Diplomacy, and Lessons on Leadership

Episode Date: February 14, 2020

Susan shares how she learned to leverage the characteristics of her personality early in her career as assistant secretary of state [2:05]One of the important conversations Susan had with a mentor that changed the trajectory of her career [4:50]Her parent’s commitment to education, their personal backgrounds, and the legacies they created [8:10]The result of instilling self-belief into children and mastering “psychological jiu jitsu” [10:22]What the early lessons of family diplomacy taught her [14:00]The importance of strategic compartmentalization [16:48]How to approach crisis during high stakes situations [18:29]How to practice compassionate leadership while maintaining effectiveness [20:10]Hacking the concept of “work-life balance” [21:10]The required characteristics of powerful leaders [28:14]The hard things about leadership and the idea of being liked [31:20]The “middle finger story”/the time Susan stood up for herself in an important meeting [33:23]Susan talks about China’s intelligence collection in the US [39:45]A call for unity between the private, public, and academic sectors [42:54]

Hi everyone. Welcome to the A16Z podcast. In today's episode, A16Z general partner Katie Hahn interviews Susan Rice, the former national security advisor and U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. She's the author of a memoir, Tough Love. This is a candid talk in which Ambassador Rice discusses leadership, what it is, how to achieve it, and how to focus under the extreme pressure of global crisis. She also talks about U.S. foreign relations and what role the tech community can play. This conversation took place at our most recent innovation conference, the A-16-Z Summit. It was previously released on YouTube if you'd like to check it out there. Susan, it's so great to see you again here in L.A. And this time I get to share you with this

audience, which I'm really excited about. You've had such an incredible life. And you've been in so many rooms and situations that really very few of us, even in this rarefied room, will ever really get to experience. Aside from being Obama's national security advisor and the U.S. ambassador of the United Nations, you were also the youngest assistant secretary of state in the Clinton administration. And you were Rhodes Scholar. You have your doctorate from Oxford. And, of course, all of these experiences meant that you had a front row seat to some pretty interesting situations. Things like the Snowden leaks, North Korea, negotiations with Iran, the war against ISIS, the Ukraine, and now you're on the board of Netflix, you write for the New York

Times, and you've just published your memoir, Tough Love. So Susan, in Tough Love, you write that when you were in your younger years, when you were 32, people said about you that you were smart and dynamic and decisive, but they also said you were, and I quote, brash, demanding and impatient. And I'm wondering if these traits on balance, do you think, think they were a bug or a feature as you rose to the ranks of the government? Well, first of all, Katie, thank you so much for doing this. And good afternoon, everyone. It's great to be with you. I, thank you. I would say that I had a mix of qualities at age 32 that were on the one hand feature and the other hand bug. On the feature side, you know,

I do think, you know, I had a strong preparation. I was hungry. I was driving, drive a team to a very particular set of outcomes, that was feature. But I was impatient, I was brash, and I think that I learned the hard way that I had to adjust some of those characteristics. They were more on the bug side, and they were not well suited to the environment in which I was in. This was when I was a very young Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs. I'd started the job having worked at the White House previously.

I was 32 years old and not only the youngest person by far among the people who worked with me and under me, but I was also the mother of a three-month-old breastfeeding son. And the combination of all of those things, plus my characteristics in the State Department were, I think, off-putting to some. And I had a wonderful set of advisors and mentors, some of whom who took me to the woodshed and delivered a dose of tough love at a stage when it was very useful to me.

Yeah. And in particular, I know you write about several of those mentors in the book, but is there one that really exemplifies helping you overcome some of those, as you said, those characteristics that you've deemed were a bug? Well, the most impactful experience was in 1998. I'd been in the job about a year, and 1998, none of you will recall, but I'll remind you was the year when not only on the African continent, we had wars break out between Ethiopian Eritrea, huge war in the Congo, wars in West Africa as well, and over the summer

in August, al-Qaeda attacked our embassy. in Kenya and Tanzania and killed 12 Americans and over 200 Kenyans and left thousands wounded and our embassies destroyed. And so it was a really high pressure, high intensity time. And my approach to dealing with all of this was to keep focused on the mission, to, you know, drive through the pain, to just, you know, stay focused and push myself and the team as hard as fast as we can to deal with all these simultaneous challenges. But just before Christmas, a colleague, a man named Howard Wolpey, who was a former member

of Congress from Michigan and was working as a political appointee in the State Department. He took me out to lunch at a really crappy Chinese restaurant near the State Department. And I thought it was just going to be a social occasion. And after a few bites, he came straight out and said, you know, Susan, you're going to fail in this job if you don't change course. You're smart, you're committed, you know your brief, you're hard charging, you've got the support of the Secretary of State and the President, but you are not being sufficiently deferential to sufficiently appreciative of the expertise of the senior people working with

you. And you're not bringing the team along, you're not investing your team in the outcomes, you're You're just driving relentlessly towards an outcome, and you're losing people. And if you don't change course, you're going to fail. And I don't want to see you fail. And so we then had a conversation, which was obviously pretty bracing for me.

But I realized that he was doing this as a huge favor. He was doing this as somebody who cared. He could have basically said, I don't care if you fail. It's not my problem. But he took me under his wing and gave me that advice which enabled me, I think, to be a far more patient, more inclusive, more collaborative leader and manager of teams than I had otherwise been. And that helped me soften some of those qualities that we described as a bug. And so that by the time I completed my tenure

at the end of the Clinton administration, I think I really had learned and grown in ways that were very valuable. And I think I was able to leave behind a record of success, without which I'm not sure I would be, have gone on to do the other things that I ended up doing in the Obama administration. Well, one of the things that struck me in reading the book is you were so fortunate to have a number of mentors

like that, including your own parents. And so I want to take a step back and talk about your origin story, because I'm sure a lot of people in this room are familiar with a lot of your accomplishments. But your parents were also really accomplished in their own right. I mean, your dad descended from slaves in South Carolina, went on to become a member of the Tuskegee Erman.

And then he went on also to become an economics professor at Cornell, eventually serving as governor of the Federal Reserve Bank and in several senior roles at Treasury and the World Bank. Your mom had a very different experience. She was the daughter of immigrants from Jamaica who settled in Maine, which explains your main connection. And she went on to Radcliffe, not only to Radcliffe, but also to become the student body president and then served on the boards of 11 different major public companies. Now, all of those things seem like really impressive accomplishments for any person at any time, but really rare, especially for a woman of color at that time. And so I'm just curious, what lessons did you take from these incredible parents?

you had? Well, I really was blessed with two extraordinary parents who came, as Katie said, from extremely different backgrounds, but they had several things in common. They had a commitment to education. They had a commitment to service. And they had a sense that they had been blessed with the gifts of their parents and grandparents. And it was their responsibility to make the most of those and the expectation for me and my brother was that we do the same. And as you said, their background is very different, but on my father's side, he grew up in really the most raw form of Jim Crow and brutal segregation in South Carolina, born in 1920. And then, as you said, served at Tuskegee with the Tuskegee Airmen.

And his challenge as somebody whose parents and grandparents had both gone to college, his grandfather, my great-grandfather was a slave who ended up getting a college education after fighting in the Civil War on the side of the Union Army and founding a school in New Jersey that educated generations of African-Americans. So there was a tradition in my father's side of having the extraordinary operations. to attend university. But in his experience, he was so freighted with the oppression of bigotry and segregation and so resentful of having to serve in a segregated military in World War II and be expected to prove what to him was absolutely obvious, which was that African Americans

could fly and fight as well as anybody. So he left trying to figure out how to as an African-American man in the 1940s who had already gotten a college education, went on to get his Ph.D. in economics at Berkeley, believe in himself when society is pushing him down. And my mom, from her perspective, a very different set of challenges, but again, the daughter of immigrants who came to this country with nothing, sent all their kids to college and the expectation for her was also to excel and succeed. And what they taught me and my brother was, in essence, that we couldn't let other people define us for us. We had to believe in ourselves and know our worth and not let others discount us. My father had an expression

which was if my being black is going to be a problem. It's going to be a problem for for somebody else, not for me. In other words, what he understood was that bigotry is the function of somebody else's insecurity. And even though there's structural and institutional and legal impediments that he faced every step of the way, he did realize that he got to choose how he thought of himself. And if he let the bigot's definition of him

become his own, then the bigot would succeed and he would fail. He would not believe in his own capacity. And so what he and my mother taught me and my brother John is that we were worthy, we were capable, and we had to believe in ourselves, and we would inevitably encounter racism or sexism or ageism or whatever it might be.

But the way to deal with that is, in essence, a psychological jiu-jitsu, to let that be somebody else's concern, not yours, and to try not to expend your precious mental energy doubting yourself. And that's really hard to do, whether you're a male or a female, a person of color or not. Yeah. Wow. So powerful. I'm wondering also, in addition to the lessons that you were taking from your parents, and you wrote about them, I encourage everyone who hasn't read the book to go read for yourself, because they're really a set of extraordinary things you took from both your mom and your dad and their extended family.

You write a lot about some of the memories you had growing up, the summers in Maine. But I'm also curious in writing your book, if there are themes that you kind of discovered about yourself that helped motivate you to become the kind of successful person that you became. Well, writing the book was a real opportunity, a gift of a chance to reflect and to think back as to all of the things that influenced me, because frankly, I realized in writing this, that essentially from high school until the day I left the Obama administration, I've been going at almost full speed, nonstop.

And what I really realized is that the most formative experiences were the lessons I learned from my parents and the real challenge I had coming through my parents' divorce. You've heard how great my parents were and they really were, but they absolutely had no business being married to each other.

And you wrote about that a lot, and you've talked about it. I read a lot about it because I realized that I can't explain myself without explaining that experience. Can you impact that a little? Because I think that it's just really so interesting as you found yourself in some of these crisis situations later, mostly professionally, but also personally. Explain that a little bit, how you think that your parents' own relations with each other and then their eventual divorce kind of contributed to that. Well, by the time I was about seven,

they were fighting constantly and sometimes violently. And it was really terrifying for me and my brother who was two years younger than me. We'd be in bed at night trying to go to sleep and I'd wake up to them screaming and yelling and I was scared, frankly, that it could spin out of control. And so I would creep downstairs, and spy on them and try to figure out, you know, if this was going to get out of control.

And if I feared it might, I'd intervene, sometimes physically, but more often actually trying to talk them down and therefore listen to what they were arguing about, what were the, who was making what point and, you know, where reason lay at seven or eight. So you're doing diplomacy then, really. I mean, really a precursor to what came later, I guess, professionally. I had no idea, obviously, that any of that would have any relevance. But I did find myself trying to firefight, in essence. And then when I was 10, they actually separated and then went through a very bitter and ugly divorce

and a very public custody battle. And so really until I was 15, this thing dragged out in one shape or another. And I had to make a decision about whether I was going to let it crush me or whether I was going to control what I could control and not try to be weighted down by what I couldn't. I couldn't control them and how they were dealing with each other, but I could control how I performed in school and whether I tried to. to repair my friendships, which had suffered, and whether I was going to be an athlete and a student leader and all this stuff. And what I learned from all of that is that I could take a hit and

keep going. And it gave me a degree of confidence in my own resiliency that turns out, I think, in retrospect, to have been probably the most important, formative revelation that I had early on. And rather than feeling like, you know, this was the worst thing that ever could happen, which of course it wasn't, but it was bad in my experience. I realized, wow, this was really bad, but I can still keep doing what I need to do. And I think that strength was something that I wouldn't know I'd need down the road, but it was incredibly valuable. Well, we've talked before you and I about how you have an ability. I think you'd agree to compartmentalize. Yeah. and that it served you well later professionally in times of crisis.

And by compartmentalize in this context, what I mean is, and as I had to do as National Security Advisor, for example, when there's all this stuff going on, whether it's your parents fighting or, you know, working on the most difficult problems and crises in the world when almost every major decision has life and death implicated, I found that I was able to do the work of the job and be focused and committed to that work without it affecting me in every day, all day, emotionally and being debilitating. I feel, you know, if we're working on a very difficult issue, I felt that weight, I felt that pain, but it didn't become something that I could not.

cope with. It didn't cripple my ability to focus and do the job functionally. And I think, you know, you have to have some measure of that, wherever it comes from, to work on those kinds of issues and not, you know, be crushed, for example, by the weight of the humanitarian crisis in Syria. Well, and you've been in a number of those crisis situations. Obviously, you just mentioned Syria, the humanitarian crisis. And I'm just wondering, you're kind of tied to this room. What best practices or philosophy do you bring to bear, Susan, in moments of real crisis? Well, I think my way of approaching crisis is, first of all, to get super calm. The worse, the situation is the more I kind of just chill out and not freak out. I mean, you wrote

about the embassy bombings. Yeah, the embassy bombings were an example. So, trying to stay calm, trying to gather the information, trying to focus on outcomes that we could control, and not allow the overwhelming nature of the crisis to impede our ability to act rationally and effectively. So in 1998, when the embassies were bombed in Kenya and Tanzania, my focus was on what can we do in the moment to be impactful and effective. We had to get search and rescue teams out in the shortest order

to try to save people who were buried in the rubble. We had to get the FBI and the other investigative elements on the ground to gather the evidence so that we could find the perpetrators. We had to support the families of the victims with information and with comfort We had to do all these things in the moment, and so my emphasis was on what can we practically do immediately without falling apart and despairing.

And how also at the same time, and this is what I learned the hard way, became better at as I got more experience, is recognize that the people you are working with process these crises differently than you may and may need a different kind of support and approach. And so being a compassionate leader that recognizes that you need to provide space for people to work through their pain and cope with it while trying to keep them on the focus to be

effective, that was where I was lacking at age 32, and I hope by, say, 52 I'd gotten a little bit better at. Yeah. Well, you know, look, you've clearly been in some really high pressure situations. And at the time you mentioned the embassy bombings, you know, you had Jake, your son, who was practically a newborn at that point, right? He was a newborn. He was a newborn, right? Well, so clearly you've been in these high pressure situations, but then you add marriage, you add kids, and somehow you're managing a really complicated life, Susan, and you've managed a really complicated life with a great deal of elegance

as an outsider looking in. And I'm wondering just as I think about all you've accomplished and you have two kids, we'll talk about in a minute, and I think Ian is here in the audience, your husband. My wonderful husband. But how are you hacking this? How have you done this? And what practical tips do you have for people in the audience?

Because I'd sure love to hear them, and I'm sure others would. How do you manage this really robust professional career? and yet also a robust personal life. Well, I don't think anybody does it perfectly or to their own satisfaction. What I learned along the way is that there's certain things, again, that you can control, and those are the ones you should focus on.

So I really tried to take care of myself, to sleep as much as I reasonably could, to exercise as much as I reasonably could, and to prioritize time with family and friends because that was rejuvenative time and gave me sort of the strength and the perspective to deal with the things I couldn't control. Those were all critically important. And then I couldn't have done it, frankly, without an extremely supportive and hands-on partner who was very much engaged in his own high pressure.

career as an executive producer at ABC News, but was hugely helpful with the kids, with my parents who were ailing at the time, and in supporting me. So I was blessed with all of those systems of support, but I think the main things that most of us can try to prioritize are taking care of our physical and mental health through basic things like sleeping and exercising, hopefully eating reasonably well, and cherishing that time with

the people you love as what you need to keep giving you fuel. That's great practical advice. I mean, speaking of kids, you have two. We have two. Daughter Maris, who's junior in high school. Yes. And then Jake, who's a senior at Stanford.

Yes. And everyone says this about their kids, Susan. Oh, anyone who has more than one child says, oh, they're so different from each other. But you kind of take things to a new extreme with your kids. They took us to an extreme. They took you to an extreme. I mean, for those who aren't familiar, I mean, your son Jake, here you are, having served in the Clinton administration, in the Obama administration, and your son Jake is the president of, was president of the Stanford College Republicans? Yes. And then you have your daughter, and I wish we had a picture of them, but anyone can grab the book, and there's pictures of them in the book. Maris, you describe us to the left of you and Ian.

Yes. And yet the two of them are very close and also close in age. And how did that happen? And tell us a little bit more about that. Uh. I know you were trying to raise independent thinkers. You know, we wonder sometimes what we fed them. And we really did try to teach them that they should think for themselves

and have the courage of their convictions. And we tried to impress upon them our respect for their independence and individualism. And unfortunately, that's what we got. And we love them both. I mean, they're both wonderful, bright, thoughtful, committed kids. And they're not just different politically. I mean, they're different temperamentally. They could not be more different.

And sometimes you wonder, like, how's that possible? Same household, same parents, same, you know, same diet. I mean, you took Jake with you campaigning. Yeah, he used to be, he campaigned for me, with me, in 2008 for Obama in the snows of New Hampshire. And this was before he had this metamorphosis. Where he's hosting speaking engagements at Stanford. Yes. And he's just, you know, he's gone his own way politically, but not emotionally.

He's still very much my baby and very much an integral part of our family. And so we have some robust debates. And sometimes at the dinner table, food will fly. Mostly between the kids, I'd like to believe, but Ian is here, so I'm not going to state that categorically. That's great. He knows better. But it's all good.

And I've learned a lot from having somebody so close to us who reflects and represents a very different perspective. And one that I think is really important for, me to understand, but for all of us to understand, regardless of whether you're on the right or the left, understanding, or in the middle more like some of us want to be, respecting opinions with which we differ and being willing to engage them, you know, thoughtfully. Yeah. Well, that's, it's so great to see that you were able to raise such independent thinkers. In addition to doing everything else that you and Ian had going on. So hats off for that. Thank you. Thank you. And then also, you know, I was struck by, actually, it's such a coincidence that Shonda Rhymes is going to speak next because Shonda Rhymes was one of the people who read your book first, and she said that reading your book was like a master class in how to be a powerful woman. I think reading your book was like a master class and how to be a powerful person. And many of us think that being a powerful woman equals being a career woman. But, you know, Susan, you told a different story in your book. You talked to you.

not about just being a career woman. In fact, I think half of that book is about how to be a loving wife, a devoted mother, and also caring for your parents, both of them when they were aging. And I know they've now both since past. At the same time,

you're making these incredibly hard decisions and in the public eye met with a great deal of scrutiny. You wrote about a great deal of scrutiny when your mom was watching you, you said obsessively on CNN during the Benghazi story. Not watching me, but watching the news. watching the news, freaking out about me. Right.

And so amidst all that, you know, I want to know, Susan, like, what do you think it takes to be a powerful woman or a powerful person? What are the traits? I would say in the first instance, it requires confidence. It requires believing in your own self-worth. And that's the huge gift I got from my parents. I think it requires integrity and strength.

and compassion, quite frankly. I think being powerful means not being hard. It means being, to the greatest extent possible, somebody who can lead and inspire and motivate others. And one of the things I learned as I grew from that young Brash assistant secretary was that the secret to, having effective teams is that every member of the team feels valued and feels like they

care and that you, that they count, that you care about them and that they count. And so, to me, that's the secret sauce. It's leading in a fashion that values the individuals and the human beings on the team. And the model, quite frankly, that President Obama set and that I, and I think others tried to manifest, was to give all of our colleagues the confidence to know that if and when they had to put their personal lives first because somebody was sick or their kid needed them for something important, that the team would fill in behind them and that we would manage collectively in their absence.

None of us was indispensable. Not when I was national security advisor, never. I had partners and deputies who could fill in, and at the lowest levels, that was the way we tried to run our teams. If you had to go to do what was vitally important to you as a human being, then that was what was most important.

Not least because you weren't going to be effective anyway if you were stressing out about this, but also because it's a way of saying we care about you. and we value you as a human being, and we got your back, and we as a team can fill in behind you. And that, I think, is empowering to one's team and one's people, but it's also, in many ways, a source of one's own strength as a leader. Speaking of being a leader and leadership, you have another, I mean, I'm curious what you think about, then all of the traits you're mentioning make me think, well, I would really like

like to work for that person. I really like them. And one of the favorite quotes that I have of yours is you said, and I quote, people who are so intent on being liked may not have the fortitude to do the right thing or the tough thing. And so what advice would you give to leaders? A lot of leaders, including some in this room, really want to be liked. Well, I think, look, it's always better to be liked than not be liked. Let's be clear. But what I discovered at some stage was, at least for me, if I had to choose, if I couldn't have both, I'd rather be respected than liked. And that was because I realized that sometimes, and this is sort of reflected in the quote

you read, sometimes by being overly concerned about being nice, particularly women who sometimes that manifests as being deferential or asking for permission or affirmation, it's a not effective and it is diminishing of your capacity to perform to your optimal level. And I realized that just by being me, by believing in myself, by being an African-American woman who really wasn't asking for permission or affirmation in the circles in which I ran, some people weren't going to like that. You said that you intimidated a lot of people, most notably. Some men, but that wasn't, I mean, I didn't set out to do that, but I think, and I still don't set out to do that. I'm just trying to be myself, but I'm not going to be somebody I'm not

to make somebody else more comfortable. I love that you've embraced those characteristics of yourself. And that's, you know, that leads you to being not always liked. And if you're so obsessed with being liked, I think it can lead you to be somebody you're not. And as I said, better to be liked. I much prefer that, but not at the expense of being who I am. Well, we're going to get to a – I want to tell a story, which I thought was fake news, and then I asked you about it, and you said it was true. It's not fake news. It's in the book. I know where to go.

I read it, and I thought, oh, this is true. There's a situation where at one time you had to give the middle finger to Ambassador Richard Holbrook in front of a room full of ambassadors and diplomat. Can you tell us about that? So we're rewining the tape again to the trash days. No, but this was not brash. This was, this was, this was implementing a philosophy that my father had beat into me from a very early age, which was don't take crap off of anybody.

If somebody is bullying you or dismissing you or discounting you, don't let them get away with it. away with it. Now, I'd like to think that at 55 I might have found words that would have been more appropriate, but words failed me in that moment, and I ended up realizing that my hands had not failed me. But the back story is that I'm Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs. I'm probably now 33 or 34. Ambassador Holbrook had been nominated to be the U.N. ambassador, but not confirmed. His confirmation had been held up for many months. And one day, I'm up on Capitol Hill meeting with members of Congress. And my secretary calls on, you know, remember those cell phones that were the size of bricks. That was what we were dealing with back in

those days. And she says, Ambassador Holbrook is in your office and he wants to meet with you now. And I said, well, I'm sure you explained. I'm on Capitol Hill meeting with members of Congress. I can't just come back to meet with him now. Why don't you schedule an appointment and we'll figure it out? And she said, he's not leaving. And I said, well, okay, then I'll see him when I get back. But that's going to be a while and make sure you don't take anything while I'm there. So I come back about an hour and a half later and sure enough, he's sitting in my office. You know, very comfortable on my couch. And I sit down and I introduce my son. I because we'd never met.

And I say, what's so urgent that you had to be camped out here in my office? And the first words out of his mouth were, I dislike you already because you beat my record as the youngest regional assistant secretary of state. And our relationship went downhill from there. And I realized, you know, I was dealing with with a very talented, you know, diplomat on the one hand, but a classic bully on the other. So now, a few, maybe a year later, he's UN ambassador, he's established in the job,

and he decides in the month that the United States is chairing the Security Council that he's going to make it the month of Africa. Africa already consumes a large share of the Security Council agenda, and that meant that we had to interact quite a bit. and he decided he was going to have a summit meeting with the African heads of state from Central Africa and he therefore summoned these heads of state and of course he was only an ambassador so he had to have the Secretary of State at least be the person to chair the meeting

and he summoned back the ambassadors who reported to me who were the ambassadors in each of these Central African countries and he calls a meeting on a Sunday afternoon in his office in New York and in the meeting are my maybe six or seven of the ambassadors who report to me, all of whom are 20 to 30 years, my senior, all men, all white, and a handful of my staffers and Holbrook and a few of his team, and there's a robust argument that we're all engaged in about a real important policy issue. And at one stage, after I'd listened to the debate,

I weighed in with my own opinion, which differed from his. And he leans over this table where we're all seated in a very cramped room. He's a big guy with a hulking body. And he looks at me and he says, ah, I too remember when I was a young assistant secretary. And I was like... And that's where words failed you. That's where words failed me. And so I did exhibit my dismay with a gesture, which was displayed long enough for him

to see it, and everybody else to see it and like freak out, some with real relish and others with horror. And he just kept talking, and that meeting continued. It became a bit urban legend, but the end of the story is I realized that I realized that I had better discreetly step out of the meeting and call back to Washington. To your boss, then Madeline Albright, right? Whom I called in, I said, Madam Secretary, I'm calling to report that I've just given the finger to a member of President Clinton's cabinet.

She said, oh, tell me more. So I explained. And at the end, she said words to the effect of, you go, girl. Well, so fast forward from the brash woman that you once were, Susan. And I want to go right into kind of one of the issues that consumed a lot of your time when you were working for President Obama was China. And now it seems like China's taken even more of a center stage. Of course, a lot of people in this audience were talking a lot about tech and China and government

in tech, or maybe not government in tech. And I want to ask if you agree or disagree with a statement that I pulled. Actually, I won't tell you who said this. I want to see if you agree or disagree. That China poses one of the most severe intelligence collection

threats to the United States and to U.S. businesses today. Yes, agree. Very strenuously. And they're doing it not with traditional spycraft anymore, but with putting actually agents in private companies and in graduate programs and universities in the U.S., like, how should industry

leaders in this room think about that and grapple with that? Well, China is not only using human assets, as you just described, plants or moles, but they're also using cyber tools, as we know, to steal intellectual property and exfiltrate data. I think that the most important thing that I would share as a former national security advisor is this threat is deadly serious and it's not getting any better. And China's objective, quite plainly, is to compete and ultimately surpass us economically, geostrategically, technologically. And in fact, they're explicitly stating it as their objective.

And what they are doing to accomplish that is basically using any means at their potential disposal. And what we need to do as a nation, and I think it applies as much to the government as it does to the private sector, is to be witting of this threat and work really hard to prevent it, recognizing that, you know, The most dangerous individuals are often the ones inside, as we in the United States government have learned the hard way many times with Snowden and others. That you really do need to take as seriously as you possibly can the hardening of your cyber security.

That you also need to recognize that, you know, in your effort and work to get a foothold or expand your business in China, that as they ask you to do things that cause you to share information or, you know, provide the kinds of access or information that they seek, they're doing it at our expense geostrategically. And I think, quite honestly, we really need a revolution of patriotism in business as well as in the tech sector, but as well as across the greater American public, to recognize that we are, unfortunately,

in a kind of Cold War-type challenge. It's not to say we have to treat China as an adversary. I actually don't argue that. But we have to recognize that we are in a real competition that requires us to behave as if we're in a competition, not as if everything is, you know, go along to get along. And you coined that term today, didn't you? The Revolution of Patriotism. And I asked if you'd ever said that before, and you thought that the revolution of patriotism

needs to happen in the tech community. It needs to happen, including in the tech community, but not exclusively. And by the reason why we were talking about the tech community, just so people are understanding, given that we are in an era of arguably existential competition, we need to be matching to the extent we can, consistent with our democracy and our values, the strength of the Chinese model. The Chinese, as you all know, are using all elements of their capacity, government, the private sector, academia, in complete unison to advance their capacities, whether in biotech or AI, you name it. We're not. We now have lost that historical triumvirate between the academy, the private sector, and government that enabled us.

to compete against the Soviet Union. And there are all kinds of reasons why that's broken down, but it's the animosity between elements in the tech world towards government and arguably vice versa that is in part preventing our capacity to concert our efforts consistent with our values and free enterprise and all of that stuff, we need to be competitive. We need to find ways to put that triumvirate in some form or fashion

back together, not at the expense of our values, but in service of our strength and our competitiveness and ultimately our way of life. Well, so there are a lot of leaders from the tech community in this room, and I'm just curious, how do you think we can get some of that collaboration going again, practically? Well, I don't have all the... to that, but I do think it could be catalyzed by a sustained exchange that was institutionalized between the private sector and government. And we've got really smart, talented people in government. We've got even more smart talented people in the private sector.

And I think there's, particularly among some of the employee base in the tech sector, a real suspicion of or hostility towards government and a perception that if you're working on something that serves the U.S. government and particularly might advantage us technologically or militarily, that somehow there's something wrong with that. And that's what I mean about a revolution in patriotism. We need to understand that actually, you know, we're on the same team here. Yeah. And by the way, to the extent that many companies are making compromises and accommodations to open the Chinese market and expand their foothold in the Chinese market, doing things that, quite frankly, in my judgment, advantage China in this

competition, but then won't be comfortable cooperating with the U.S. government. I think we've got things kind of upside down. And so a partnership whereby, you know, for three, five years, you know, best in the brightest in both government and industry, you know, basically change places, trade places for a little while, and learn to understand and respect the motives and the perspectives and the skills and the weaknesses of each would be at least a starting point for trying to establish bridges and recognize that we are, we are. just as we are in many other ways, we have more that unites us than divides us.

Well, and I suppose you're bringing, you're on the board of Netflix. What kind of voice are you bringing to that boardroom and what some of the skills and experiences from your own past that you're bringing to bear? Are you having these conversations? Well, I think that the main thing that I bring is a deep knowledge and understanding

about many, many different parts of the world in the international landscape to a company like Netflix that is increasingly growing globally and views its path forward as being very much in the international realm. I have an understanding of crisis management and how government works and how to make teams optimize their capacity

to address crises under pressure. All of those sorts of things. Also an understanding of the security terrain, physical and cyber and otherwise. And a recognition that, you know, some of the things we've just talked about, yeah, which may not be necessarily front of mind far from Washington, are actually some of the things that companies need to be increasingly mindful of. We've covered so much.

We've covered, you know, you've written a book, you serve on boards, you speak. You're about to be an empty nester a year and a half. And I want to just wrap up by asking you, what's next? What lies ahead? We couldn't just end this? Well, tell me what, tell the audience what you told me when I asked you this question before once. I'll, without the profanity?

Yeah, please. No. I don't know. You know, I love my freedom, which I now have, having left government, and I've enjoyed very much the process of writing the book and now going on book tour and I love writing my columns with The New York Times

and I love serving on Netflix board and I'm interested in continuing to participate in board service. But the fundamental question that I have to wrestle with is do I want to throw myself again full-time into any one intensive endeavor, whether that's in the public sector, in the private sector, in the nonprofit world, or do I want to continue to have a combination of things, which some people call a portfolio that allows me to maximize my free. And I love maximizing my freedom, but I do think I might wake up one day and be so grabbed by something that I'm passionate about that I'm willing to jump back in and throw myself entirely into it.

And you told me today, you're not running for Senate in 2020, but you told me that you weren't ruling out for all time. I'm not running for the Senate from Maine in 2020, which is something I thought about for a period of time. And that's mainly because we have this junior in high school who deserves to have her parents present and not being yanked out of one high school into another. But I haven't given up the thought that I might serve again, whether in an elected capacity and I don't know at what level or in an appointed capacity. But I'm also not planning on it and aiming for it. I feel very privileged to be able to say that I got to serve this country under two presidents that I had enormous respect for, and that's the greatest privilege. And if that's the last of my service, I'll feel good about it, and I'll be happy to try

to take my talents elsewhere. Well, Susan, I'm... It's such a privilege to sit down with you. And I want to say thank you for your service to our country on behalf of everyone in the room. And also for joining us here today, it's been so great to get to chat with you and have this conversation. So thank you so much. It's great to be with you.