Pod Save the World - Europe, Nukes, and Cybersecurity

Episode Date: June 21, 2017

Tommy talks with former Deputy Secretary of Energy, defense policy and Europe expert Dr. Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall about the future of Europe in the wake of Brexit. Then they discussed nuclear weapons in the US and Pakistan, cybersecurity, the advanced science being done at our National Labs, and how government can recruit more women into national security jobs.

Welcome back to POT Save the World. This is Tommy. Thank you guys for tuning in. My guest today is Dr. Elizabeth Sherwood Randall. Liz has had a bunch of very important jobs in government. Most recently, she was the deputy secretary at the Department of Energy. She was a special assistant to the president and coordinator for defense policy and countering weapons of mass destruction. She's also a Europe expert. And that's actually where we started. We talked about Europe after Brexit and what's next for the EU. Then we talked about her job overseeing our nuclear arsenal. and threats and concerns she might have about nuclear programs and places like Pakistan. We talked about the work she did to try to secure our utility grid from cyber threats, the science going on at our national labs, and the way to get more women in national security jobs. She is brilliant. I think you will really appreciate her perspective. It's such a wide range of issues that she's worked on.

It was almost hard to know where the hell to begin with the questions, but it was a great conversation and it was great this year. I am thrilled today to have my guest in studio in Los Angeles, her hometown, Dr. Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall. Liz, thank you for being here. It's great to be with you, TV. It's great to see you. So the best part about the show for me is that it's like a college reunion with all these brilliant people I worked with. What's funny is you and I worked together when you were on the NSC and then you had this whole other set of fascinating jobs after I left.

but it almost made it hard to know where to even begin because there's so much fun stuff we could cover and just scare the shit out of people. It'll be great. Let's also talk about how much good we can do in the world. We talk about all the good we could do. Okay. I was thinking we might start with Europe

because so much is going on. A few months ago, it felt like the conversation was about Brexit, the rise of these right-wing parties, hand-wringing about the end of the EU. Now you've got this extraordinary victory by Emmanuel Macron, which I hope I said that well. In France, the more liberal labor party,

seems to be resurgent in the UK, and here I am with a bit of whiplash. Was the initial hand-wringing wrong? Is this a momentary reprieve? Like, what do you see in Europe now? Where do you think we're going? First of all, thank you for having me. And congratulations on this great series of podcasts. Thank you. It's wonderful, given what's going on in the broader media to be able to tune into just a little place of sanity every once in a while. A little substance, too. When we're not listening to breaking news. I know, I know. Europe has been our most important partner in our pursuit of our global agenda for decades. And indeed in the early Obama administration, as you know, when we worked together, we made an effort to align

ourselves with our close allies and partners in Europe to pursue everything we were trying to do in the world, from nuclear security to climate change. And we dealt with a number of very challenging regional issues, and the Europeans stood with us, whether in Afghanistan or in the reaction to the Arab Spring, a number of topics, the Iran nuclear deal. What we've seen over the years in the last, now it's almost a decade, is the growing strength of the extremes in their politics as well as ours. And so while we can look at them and see things that are very disturbing, we can also see it in ourselves that our center doesn't appear to be holding in either the United States or Europe. That's obviously of great concern to those of us who

don't really think about some of the most pressing issues of our times as being political. We see them as being about our national interest, the interest of our children and our children's children, and the same for our allies in the liberal democracies in Europe. So some of the developments in Europe have been of significant concern. Of course, the weakness of the European economy was something that President Obama focused a great deal on in the first term after the Eurozone crisis. There's been some strengthening of some of the economies, though a number of issues. remain to be addressed in many European countries. And we see this challenge of whether there can be a center in these countries that holds and enables governments to take the hard decisions

that are necessary to meet the needs of their people and the challenges of the global community. So you mentioned the European economy. When you and I were at the White House, it seems like there was a constant economic existential threat to the EU. There were, at times we were worried about Greece, we were worried about Portugal, we were worried about Spain defaulting on their debt. Now that we have some distance from the financial crisis, do you feel like we have some more safety? How do you feel about the future for the EU in terms of the economic prosperity of the block? Well, if we step back, what we can see is there is a major challenge to the whole European project right now. And that's manifest quite significantly in the choice that the majority of the people of the United Kingdom made to exit the European Union.

And our view has been, the United States view, has been in the face of the question being called about whether the United Kingdom should stay in the EU. A stronger European Union is in the interest of the United Kingdom, and the United Kingdom being in the EU is in the interest of the United States. And so both of those things have actually gone in the opposite direction. The EU is weakened by the British moving to withdraw, and our role in Europe is diminished by virtue of the British not being a presence in the EU. EU. Now, we've just seen this recent election in which a second British prime minister in the Conservative Party decided to hold elections to try to consolidate support and ensure a mandate for the decisions that he or she wanted to make. And in fact, it's gone again in the opposite direction. And so we could see a different evolution. Some have believed that the ultimate outcome

would be a softer Brexit, that is that the United Kingdom would not ultimately leave in the way that Prime Minister May has indicated it would. However, many European leaders have said, because they do not want to establish a precedent, that you can have a European Union a la carte, basically, that you have to take the whole menu, that that's not viable and that either you're in or you're out. So we have much to watch in the coming weeks to see if Prime Minister May even holds on to power. and the deal she would have to do with the party in Northern Ireland, the Democratic Union Party in Northern Ireland, could be very disadvantageous for many reasons to our interests as well. So I would not say I have the highest confidence in the immediate politics that are playing out. On the other hand, if we play a long game, we have so much in common, so much history in Europe, so much of a stake in Europe, we have the largest trade with Europe of any region in the world. And so it's a lot of in our best interest to find a way to help Europe be its best self. I'm glad you brought up Brexit because it was funny, around the Brexit decision, the vote,

it was described as this potentially catastrophic event for the UK and for Europe. I think a lot of observers in the United States are a little confused because it happened and nothing seems to have changed and the world didn't end. Can you give us a sense of the process and the timeline for what happens next and when you actually will start to see the impact of this decision? Well, Tommy, the reason people haven't seen the impact is that it's a long process. It'll be about a two-year negotiating process. And in truth, the British were totally unprepared for this. They had no trade negotiators of their own because Britain hasn't had to negotiate bilateral trade agreements for a very long time. Everything has been done through the EU because certain what are called competencies were delegated to the EU as part of being a member of the EU and trade was one of them. Now, they had capable leaders who were British who were working with the EU. there is some knowledge, but fundamentally they have to rethink their whole approach to trade around the world now and negotiate this agreement and other agreements as an independent entity.

We won't see impacts directly and immediately while those negotiations go on, but we did see directly and immediately impacts on the stock market and on companies that have been making decisions about where they want to put their manufacturing. So, for example, if you know that there's a common European market in any place you manufacture in Europe, you will not face trade barriers. You will face, you will not face tariffs. Then it's advantageous to be in the UK. If you know that the UK is pulling out, why would you manufacture there? It will be less expensive for you to base your business somewhere else. And we saw, while I was at the Department of Energy, a number of companies that were interested in doing

clean energy businesses in the UK, consider moving their operations to other places because they just judged it would benefit their bottom line to be in continental Europe. Right. I was talking to a friend today who's Scottish, who lives in London, who thought, who said in a strange way, the UK might need the United States even more now that they're out of Europe and they're negotiating all these deals bilaterally. Do you think that's right? And do you think that makes leaders in the UK even more nervous, given that Trump is all over the map? Well, we've seen the prime minister of the United Kingdom lean into developing a relationship with Trump, but that has not necessarily been satisfying to her, and we've observed some reactions to some things from her that have suggested

questioning whether that initial judgment was the right way to go. But the fact is that this relationship between the United States and the United Kingdom is a very important one called the special relationship for a reason. However, if the United Kingdom were to increasingly withdraw from the global role that we have looked to it to partner with us on and became less significant a player, it's conceivable that it would be less valuable to us than it has been. So it really does go both ways. And my judgment is that the United Kingdom and the United States need to look ahead together and identify areas of cooperation, which benefit each of our interests nationally, as well as the collective good, and then join forces to pursue them, whether in or out of the European

Union. And of course, the United Kingdom remains in NATO. That's our North Atlantic Treaty organization are most important security alliance. This alliance is a unique capability for the United States and the world. And so long as the British continue to field capable military forces in NATO and nationally, they'll be important partners for us. And to their credit, they have 12, 1,500 people on the ground in Syria and Iraq, I believe, fighting ISIS. They're doing good work. Well, they've done, if you look back at our early days together in the White House and think about President Obama's relationship with a number of British prime ministers, first looked to the United Kingdom for partnership in everything we did in the world. And they were

significant contributors in Afghanistan, remained so in the hardest places with us, down in Helmand province, for example, lost a lot of young troops there alongside us and continue to believe that it's important to be in the world with us. So that's going to be important for us to cultivate and sustain. When you see Donald Trump attacking the mayor of London on Twitter, do you ever go back and reread a year of stories about the Churchill bust and do what I do, which is stand in the mirror and pull your hair and scream. Oh, that's just me? Okay.

No, that's fine. I have never stood in front of a mirror and pulled my hair and screamed. Tommy, there are other ways in which I express my stress. It's just so dumb. I just think of those times. The Churchill bust was a caricature of something. And in fact, you could see as I could see, the value that the president placed in strong allies who stood alongside us.

And our president, President, President Obama chose very specifically how he wanted to express himself in the Oval Office. And I think that's a very important thing to consider. The Oval Office is quite a sacred place. I never stepped into that place from the first time I entered in early 2009 until the last time I entered, which was in the last week of the administration in 2017, without feeling a sense of the solemn responsibility that we had to do the very best we could on behalf of the American people. And he chose to place in that office, buss of Martin Luther King and Abraham Lincoln,

who spoke to him about his responsibility to the American people every day. And so I think we knew he had a bust of Winston Churchill up in the private residence. That also speaks to how important the relationship with our ally, the United Kingdom, has been. Great apples in that Oval Office, too. Delicious apples, although it took a lot of temerity to bite one when you're trying to brief the president. You know, you're sitting there on the sofa. You don't want to mess it up. You don't want to dribble apple juice down your chin.

Coffee table. Only those who were really self-confident ate the apples. A bowl of free apples sitting in front of it. Yeah, exactly. Or really foolish. My last question about Europe. So President Trump had this visit to Europe. It felt less than warm.

He bizarrely refused to reaffirm our commitment to NATO, the Article 5 of NATO, which calls for a collective defense. He seemed to bully and Hector, some of our closest allies for no good reason. People who listen to show are bored of hearing me complain about Article 5. But I guess my question for you is, you have friends in capitals across Europe, in embassies, across Washington. How concerned are they about this administration? Do you think we'll see policy changes towards the United States, or is Europe just going to keep on, keeping on without? us and, you know, we just sort of advocate our role. Fortunately, there has been recently a restatement of our commitment by President Trump,

and that's quite important. Article 5, for those who are not NATO-Nicks, means an attack on one is an attack on all. And in the early days after the end of the Second World Wars, we began to see what was described as the Iron Curtain falling across Europe. The Europeans came to us. A group of European countries came to us and said, will you help defend us? Will you stand with us against what we perceive as this growing Soviet threat to our liberty? And the United States had banned together and we will.

And so what we did was we established NATO in 1949. And that commitment, that ironclad commitment, an attack on one is an attack on all, deterred a Soviet attack on Western Europe throughout the Cold War. So that's a very important achievement. There were many ways in which the Soviets probed. And of course we had a nuclear threat that, existed between the United States and the Soviet Union throughout those Cold War years that was quite dramatic and existential. But fundamentally on the ground, the Soviets never took any

territory during the Cold War after the Iron Curtain had come down across Eastern Europe. They took no more territory. So fast forward, the Cold War ends. We begin a period of evaluation of what the post-Cold War era will look like. And we extended a hand to the Russians. You noted that I had been at the Pentagon in the 1990s. The work we did then was to try to build a partnership with Russia, a partnership between Russia and NATO, a partnership with the other countries that emerged from the breakup of the Soviet Union because 15 countries were born when the Soviet Union collapsed. Three became immediately part of Europe because they had been part of Western Europe previously, the three Baltic states. And then we began to look at the possibility of NATO membership for additional countries in Europe. What we have seen, sadly, across these years now more than two decades, is a regression by the Russians who inherited the mantle of the Soviet Union and the direct expression of a threat to the sovereignty and territorial integrity of countries on their borders.

And so that makes those countries, those Baltic states I mentioned in particular, but also Poland and Hungary and the Czech Republic, extraordinarily nervous about whether there's going to be continuing aggression that will extend into their territory. Russians have used energy as a weapon to try to create basically a stranglehold around some of these countries and get them to turn their policies eastward. So the Europeans who are members of NATO look to the United States. Is your word your word? Because if your word is your word, it's going to deter the Russians from acting. If it appears that you're not going to stand by your word, then we are very fearful of Russian adventurism. And because of what Russia did in Ukraine, because of what Russia has done in other places as well, there is that growing anxiety, which we need to ensure that we match, that we counter. We'd prefer not to have to do it by acting.

We'd prefer that deterrence works, but we also have to be prepared to act. You're listening to Pod Save the World. Stick around. There's more great show coming your way. Switching gears a little bit. One of the things the Department of Energy does is oversee our nuclear arsenal, which is an enormous responsibility. You also coordinated defense policy out of the White House, including countering WMD and all the efforts on arms control.

These were huge agenda items for President Obama. He had a goal of a world without nuclear weapons. Do you think there's any chance we achieve that goal? Was it realistic at the time? It was so hard for us to get people to pay attention to arms control, period. And now that it's not even seemingly on the top 100 list of priorities, so that I wonder if we're just sort of stuck. Well, I'll start by saying I think we actually accomplished a lot.

You did. And so I'll just tick through a few of those things. We can talk about any of them specifically. President Obama set us on a path. So it's important to note this work will never be done. As long as the nuclear genie can't be put back into the bottle and it cannot, there are likely to be nuclear weapons on this planet. So we have to maintain a safe, secure, and effective nuclear deterrent

because we never want anyone to mess with us, to consider attacking the homeland. That said, President Obama made a commitment to reduce our reliance on nuclear weapons, to reduce our arsenal to the lowest number that was safe and could ensure that the deterrent was effective. And also importantly, to take fissile materials off the global playing field so that terrorists couldn't get their hands on those fissile materials. Because what we know is that the designs for nuclear weapons are accessible to people. But that nuclear material, that plutonium or highly enriched uranium, is hard to get. So we had a series of nuclear security summits convened by the president with leaders of more than 50 countries that took place four times during our eight years in office. And through that process, we were able to secure an enormous amount of nuclear material around the world and ensure that that material would not get into the hands of those who might want to do us wrong.

So that's a big and significant achievement. And there's more work to be done. It is my hope that that work will be sustained, because, again, that is certainly nonpartisan. The notion that we don't want others to get access to nuclear material could not be argued about by either side of the aisle. On the issue of the nuclear deterrent itself, of course, we negotiated successfully an arms reduction agreement with the Russians. It was completed and signed in the early years of the administration, I think, in 2010. And so that is being implemented. and indeed, both the Russians and the United States are taking the necessary actions to ensure that the ambition of that treaty is respected.

Now, beyond that, the question is, can we go lower? And I think a realistic appraisal of the developmental programs of those who have significant arsenals, and that's really the Russians and the Chinese, suggests that unless we can involve them in a commitment to stop building new types of new weapons and stop modernizing their existing weapons, we would have to look very hard at whether we go to lower numbers in the United States because we want to ensure, as I said, that nuclear deterrent of ours

is one that would give pause to anyone else as to whether they would mess with us. So, I mean, we hear so much about Iran's nuclear program, North Korea's nuclear program. I mean, Iran, clearly we have the Iran deal in place, which has done a lot to sort of lessen their risk and the threat. North Korea is a threat that's, you know, seemingly gotten worse over the last 10 years. You don't hear a lot about Pakistan's nuclear arsenal

and the risk of tensions between Pakistan and India. I'm wondering where you rank that conflict and that risk in the sort of list of scaries. So, Tommy, you've listed the scaries there. You've got them. And I would say the unpredictability of the North Korean leader is, of course, of enormous concern. And we can talk about what ought to be done to address that threat. because it's a very different kind of threat than the one I was describing, which is the threat from, for example, a rapid development of new capabilities on the part of the Russians, our major pure competitor in this arena. I did lose sleep at night when I was the WMD coordinator at the White House over Pakistan and India. The instability on that continent, the possibility of the misreading of signals or the escalation of tensions without any recognition of what the consequences would be, to go to nuclear war, is such that we have to be engaged in trying to work with each of them

bilaterally and encourage them to work with each other to manage their differences in a way that does not lead to a catastrophe on the subcontinent, because it would not be limited to the subcontinent. We all share this planet. And so I did invest a great deal of time and energy on that front and continue to do so when I was at the Department of Energy as well. So you mentioned North Korea. Do you have thoughts on what we could? or should be doing that isn't happening now? I mean, Dennis Rodman is there today. Is that not enough?

I heard that. That's, that's, we can know. What a. So I think that's probably not my solution number one. Okay. I'll write this down. But there have been a long stream of people who have gone to Pyongyang and sought to find a way forward. Obviously, our preferred course of action in dealing with a challenge on the world stage is diplomacy.

However, in this case, I am not confident that diplomacy can work, and I do believe it is necessary that we be preparing for the possibility that we will have to take decisive military action in the face of what could be an imminent threat to the homeland. We know that the North Korean leader is working to perfect not only a nuclear weapon, which he's tested now five times, but also the delivery systems that could ultimately reach the continental United States or, at least Alaska and Hawaii or Guam. So with that in mind, we need to be working closely as we are with our allies in the region. We have, again, as we do in Europe, extraordinary allies in Asia, the Japanese, the Koreans, the Republic of Korea, other allies as well, the Australians, the New Zealanders, the Philippines, the Thai. So we have this network of alliances, but in particular the two who are most immediately threatened are the Republic of Korea and the Japanese. And there we are in placing capabilities to assist in defense and deterrence. We have large numbers of forces in the region

based in both of those countries. And we need to be prepared through the development of innovative technologies and the gathering of the kind of intelligence that would support the use of those technologies to address an imminent threat. You're geeking out with me on POTSave the World. More on the way. Another issue I know that you worked on and thought about a lot is cybersecurity, particularly the ability of terrorists to attack a utility or a power grid. The Washington Post recently reported that the Russian government has devised a weapon that could take down our power grid and noted that they use this tool in Ukraine to shut down one-fifth of the electric power generated in Kiev. This scares the hell out of me.

How vulnerable do you think we are to these sorts of attacks and, like, how high up on the list of things that I lie in bed on Sunday nights and feel anxious about should the power grid getting taken up be? So, Tommy, this is a great opportunity for a public service announcement. Because there are too many things you're lying in bed worrying about. Good, good. And so I think it's important for especially our younger listeners to know that there are things we can do about these things we're worried about. And that's why public service is so cool. Because if you get to go and work on some of these challenges, what you will recognize is that, yes, they are extremely hard things. But they're really worth working on.

And we can really make a difference to the power of American innovation in meeting those challenges. So on the grid, yes, there are big threats, and those countries that might want to mess with us have understood that the power grid is essentially a soft underbelly. And so we do see that adversaries are interested in assessing how much damage they could do if they were to attack the grid. And because the grid is now increasingly integrated due to the fact that we have such advanced technology and because we're working to incorporate many different sources. of supply in a grid that is responsive to the needs of consumers, we face significant threats, especially from cyber attack. We learn from the threats that we observe in the world, and when the Ukrainian grid was attacked in the winter of 2015, the Department of Energy sent a team to work with the Ukrainian government, our partner, to evaluate what had happened. And then not only

did we help the Ukrainians with addressing that challenge, but we also brought in the leaders of many American utilities with whom I worked closely when I was at the Department of Energy. We acquired clearances for them so that they could be briefed on classified information, and we talked to them about our analysis of the threat and what they could do to make themselves more resilient and secure against those kinds of threats. And so what we have now built is a very close partnership, crossing what is normally a very difficult divide between government and the private sector to work closely to develop and deploy the solutions that will make our grid more secure. And a lot of the work on that is actually

being done in federal government labs that are owned and operated by the Department of Energy or managed by the Department of Energy. And they are doing the kind of innovation that grows out of the nuclear weapons program, for example. So you want to be sure your nuclear weapons are safe from cyber attack? Yes. Yeah. And that innovative work can also be applied to work on the grid, on making the grid more secure. Okay, that's the perfect segue, and we didn't plan this, because the Department of Energy oversees these 17 national labs that are asked to tackle the most important scientific challenges of our time, like combating climate change, discovering the origins of our universe.

Yeah. They've always been a bit of a mystery to me. What kind of stuff are they doing? I mean, like, did you go out and visit these places and get briefed? I mean, half of them are in California, right? Or at least several around us. Yeah, right. Not literally half. What kind of stuff are they doing? Why should people support that work? And are you worried about some of these proposed budget cuts to the Office of Science of the Department of Energy? Okay. So the Department of Energy has 17 labs. They originate in the nuclear weapons program. That is Livermore, Los Alamos, and Sandia, famous labs, the nuclear weapons labs that were involved in saving the world. But they're much more than that. And the important thing for the American people to know is that these

17 labs keep us ahead of the cutting edge of technology and science innovation and position us to lead the world in the 21st century as we have previously. So yes, I did go to all the labs. Now, you know I am not a scientist. I'm what's called a soft scientist because I have a degree in international relations, not in physics. And I went in the first year, I made a commitment to visit every single one of the DOE labs. And I went to all the labs and I was briefed by these extraordinary people who do the most pioneering path-breaking work in a vast array of topics from the nuclear weapons that we have and that we need to maintain and ensure that they are viable in the face of the threats that exist now and in the future, to the most important work being done on clean energy innovation, labs that are looking at cutting-edge technologies to deploy renewables onto the grid, how to make the grid more secure against attack in a lab in Colorado called the National Renewable Energy Lab. We have labs that work on issues. having to do with making sure that when we extract fossil fuels, we can prevent them from damaging the planet, as we are experiencing now from the emissions that exist around the

world, from coal and from oil and other things. So there's a national energy technology lab that's based in two states in West Virginia and in Pennsylvania. It has two facilities. And they're doing really important work on how you might capture carbon and utilize it in a way that makes it economically viable to capture it. And so that's a two-fer. Not only do you save the planet, but you also generate an economic incentive for doing the right thing. So fundamental science, the most esoteric from the perspective of most of us, fundamental science, but that fundamental science undergird so much of this innovation. So if you think of it as an innovation chain from the most original fundamental science to applied science and then to the development and the deployment

of these new technologies as early and quickly as we can get them out to the benefit of the American people. And there I'll say that when I was offered the privilege of serving of the Department of Energy, the President, President Obama, said to me, go over there and lift up all that great work that's being done in your labs and bring it forward to the benefit of the American people. So to the greatest degree possible, make it accessible, ensure that our universities are partnering with the labs, which we do on a grand scale, ensure that our businesses can partner with the labs to bring those technologies to market as quickly as possible. So we generate jobs and opportunity for the American people. So when you were at the White House, you would get an

intel briefing every morning on threats to Europe, terrorists, weapons of mass destruction. You go over the Department of Energy, and I'm sure you got briefings on the amount of carbon in the atmosphere, the threat of climate change. I don't want to keep talking about which was scary, but which felt more urgent. Yeah. So I'll tell you something wonderful that happened to me just before I left the White House. You'll recall that John Podesta was an advisor to President Obama who came in to work on climate issues because we really wanted to ramp up the effort to ensure that we met that global challenge. And I had known Podesta for many, many years, and I went to talk to him before I left the White House. And I said to him, you know,

what's your advice to me as I go over to the Department of Energy? And John said, well, Liz, I know you think you've worked on the most important issues facing the planet all your life because you've worked on preventing the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. But actually, climate change is more important. So you get to go and work in an agency that's doing both. Cool. Go forth and do good. So we were briefed on both at DOE because, as you noted, DOE has responsibility for the nuclear deterrent.

Right. But we were also briefed on issues surrounding environmental issues, energy issues. We heard a great deal about countries that were not doing the right thing with respect to the national interest and the Department of Energy was charged with implementation of a number of initiatives to guide them in the right direction. So the Energy Department is much broader than people think because of its National Security Foundation, and it also has all of this opportunity to bring to bear the expertise of the scientists and technology experts in its labs to assist with meeting these challenges. So specifically, let me make that vivid to people in the Iran nuclear agreement negotiations.

we had to be able to validate options that were being presented at the negotiating table. How many centrifuges could Iran have operating for a given scenario in terms of how long it would take them to break out and generate enough uranium to build a nuclear weapon? Or how could the Iraq reactor that was a plutonium production reactor actually be dismantled in a way that would be verifiable and irreversible? That kind of work was done on behalf of the American people by our labs. The experts in our labs were drawn upon daily to evaluate these options and give us their scientific analysis. Divorced from the politics entirely, it was how can we verify different options based on the science? And that science-based analysis is so important to our ability to make judgments at a policy level. And that's why the president asked Secretary.

train monies ultimately to join the negotiations to complete the agreement to make certain that we could stand on the decisions that we're being made from a science perspective. That's very cool. I feel like I've heard you make a really strong pitch for scientists to go into government. I feel like I've heard a really strong pitch for people to join public service generally. One thing that I wanted to ask you about is when we worked together at the White House, there were some unbelievably impressive senior women in national security and foreign policy. you, Lisa Monaco, Susan Rice, Sam Power, like these people who are just incredible, right? But there were not nearly enough women working in these jobs if you looked across government.

If you looked throughout the State Department, the Senior Foreign Service, they were very much underrepresented in the situation room deliberations, but also throughout the ranks. What obstacles to women face in national security that lead to that imbalance? And what's your pitch to young women who may be listening about why they should come in? And actually, more importantly, how would we benefit from more women in these jobs than the fellas we got right now? Seven questions. I was just saying, we could do a whole podcast on this. So when I came into this field, there were no women in the field at all. And I really wanted to work at the center of international relations, which at the time was the U.S. Soviet standoff.

And people were nuclear strategists if they were at that center. And so I had to learn to do nuclear strategy. How do you do that? Do you like go to the library and a book? You learn from, well, no, I didn't go by a book. But I sought to learn at the feet of those who were big people in the field, all male. And I got internships and I went to work for Joe Biden, first job out of grad school. I went to work for Joe Biden on the Hill.

He was on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, on the European Subcommittee. And I worked on these issues with him and then had many other opportunities to grow my expertise, but along the way, what I'll say is I think that for all of us, we have to be willing to tackle the world's hardest problems. And it wasn't so much about gender to me as about really wanting to work on the things that were the most difficult. They're the things that are most worth working on. And so I would say to young people as I did so frequently as I had the privilege of going out and talking about getting a STEM education and choosing to pursue public service when I was at the Department of Energy, first of all, you need a good education. You need the sound building

blocks. Of course, STEM is crucially important to everything today. And if I were going back to start over, I would do more of it. I think that studying math in particular is unavoidable if you want to be at the table. Having a foundation in science is enormously valuable. And building on that experience of working hard in school, seeking out opportunities for internships and a chance to test your strength in difficult environments is a really important part of growing up in fields that don't look to you as if they are welcoming to you. Now, I'm going to switch gears because what's really important is for employers to reach out. We need the strongest workforce in this country that we can invite to serve in the public domain. It's also true in the private sector, which

desperately needs STEM talent, and there aren't going to be enough workers to fill all the jobs that will be available by 2020. But if you're thinking about that, the public sector. It's not for the money that people come into public service, so it has to be about something else. And it's about making a difference, about tackling problems and doing something larger than yourself. We need to make it welcoming to people of all backgrounds, of all colors, of all genders, of all ethnicities, so that they feel like there's a place for them. Because if we don't do that, we will be weaker as a nation. We know from lots of studies that inclusive work environments are more generative of ideas, and they address risks earlier.

So what we want to do is welcome people and give them opportunities and test them. I am very much in favor of asking people to perform at their highest potential and holding people accountable and then giving them opportunities as they prove themselves. And so what we really need to do is on both ends to have women and underserved communities, minorities and others get the educations they need and be willing to go after these opportunities and then to have the leadership be receptive and create opportunities for them. That's fair. That makes sense. Were there ever times when you were in a meeting or a deliberation or, you know,

sort of leading at all hands of the department where you felt like a decision was made that wasn't the right one and that there was a gender might have played a role in that? I mean, were there sort of asking a weird question here? Interesting question, Tommy, I don't really think that gender is the reason for decisions. I do think my observation is in general. This is a gross generalization, but in general, women are more inclusive leaders. That means that there may have been more views expressed at the table, but fundamentally, I wouldn't ascribe decisions to gender. I mean, I will say, you and I were in the White House early on.

It was a pretty male club early, and the team that had been around the president in the campaign was, group of men who were very comfortable with one another, played basketball together, had been on the road for a long time. And I definitely recall having to earn my place to earn the respect and trust of those people. And you could ascribe it to gender, but you could also ascribe it to just the fact that this group that came into the Wise House had been tested, had been forged in fire on the campaign trail. and that they would have to see the metal of a new person before they admitted that person to that small group. Yeah, I mean, look, it was certainly clubby. There was certainly sort of shared experience and terminology and things that made it feel a lot less inclusive than it probably should have for an environment like that, especially early. Yeah, and some of us spoke out about it, and we had the opportunity to give some ideas to the leadership in the White House about how it. might be an environment that could be created that would be more comfortable. But I will say when I went over to the Department of Energy and was put in a leadership role, so the deputies

in our federal system are generally the statutory chief operating officer of the department. And do all the work. Well, I'll say Secretary Moniz was a phenomenally hard worker and put all of us who were younger than he was to shame with his stamina and his willingness to to deliver on behalf of the American people through hard work. But we had responsibility for our departments. And I went out and saw our people all across the country. And at almost every all hands that I did or small group conversation I did, the question would come up, how do you manage your life? Because there is still a very significant interest in the question, can women have it all? And is it possible to be a,

successful leader in a demanding job and also have a healthy personal life. And I fundamentally believe that we're actually stronger and more effective leaders if we do have a full life. People have many different kinds of personal lives. So it's not that you have to have a sort of 1950s kind of family. But if you have a life with balance, with love, with responsibilities to others outside of your work, you are a much more healthy human being. You have more perspective. You have to come out of your head when you leave work. You have to pay attention. In my case, I had two kids who would text me. I would be standing outside the Oval Office. I'd get a message saying, Mom, where are my soccer cleats? And that's much more important than whatever I've got to do momentarily in briefing the president from the perspective of my son, of course. So it is important to convey to those who are watching and who are asking this question, what is it like to be you that you can be a person who, finds a way to work at the pace and the level at which I did and at the same time have a relatively normal. I mean, everything is relative when you're doing the kind of work we're doing relatively normal personal life.

Relatively normal. That's the name of everyone's biography, I think. Liz, thank you so much for the conversation. You wear so many hats. I didn't know where to begin, but that was a fascinating tour of the region. And thank you for your service and for being here today. Thanks for being such a great colleague. And for putting this show on the road, so to speak, because there are so many people listening around the country who love to listen to what you are sharing with them. Well, thank you. It's really a great service to our nation.

We appreciate it. Thanks. Thanks.