Yeah, of course I remember that, yeah.

Because actually, Mrs. Bush was at the Capitol when this happened.

And I said, she's here.

And you went and you had your moment with her.

We're not going to ask any more about that.

But the sense of family, it really, really stuck with me that that was the very first thing that you thought.

I do want to say one thing to General Cain, because something in what you said, our paths crossed in a strange way.

I can't even spell botulism talk.

[laughs]

Here is this Black woman from the South, uh, the segregated South, taking an oath of allegiance to a Constitution that once counted her ancestors as three-fifths of a man, promising to protect and defend it against all enemies, foreign and domestic.

And oh, by the way, sworn in by a Jewish woman Supreme Court justice named Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who was my neighbor.

And of course, he would never have imagined it, and I wouldn't have as a little girl in Birmingham, and, and Ruth, when she was just trying to get her voice heard in law school.

And so the case for America is not that America's perfect.

The case for America is we keep striving.

We keep trying on the basis of our values, on the basis of our resilience, on the basis of our belief in one another to make that more perfect union, and it is never going to be done as our work.

... of the American dream?

[laughs]

... with the, uh, leaders of not very, from their point of view, important countries, but she actually, uh, might have been right.

So, uh, what does that transition depend on? That, that, that transition from the moment of revolution, the moment of throwing off the old, to the moment of, uh, the democratic flourishing and ultimately, uh, democratic consolidation Uh, the first is I think you do have to account for circumstances.

Um, and I'll come back to this in some of the cases that I want to talk about.

But you have to say that, uh, if you are fortunate in your circumstances, uh, it's a lot easier.

And, uh, in fact, the United States was really rather fortunate in its circumstances, having from the time of the arrival of, uh, the settlers, the col- the colonists on this land, uh, they found, um, not a completely open, um, field, but a pretty open field compared to what others would see.

In other words, the institutional landscape was theirs to shape in a way because there was not a, a great deal of competition, uh, from other organized, uh, forces at the time.

What exactly do you mean by that?

How did that influence who you are today?

Well, I have to start with the fact that this was in Birmingham, segregated Birmingham, at the height of the civil rights, uh, movement, '63, but this was a community that was very kind, loving, almost cocoon-like.

I, I lived in a little neighborhood not too far, uh, from my father's church.

He was a Presbyterian minister.

He was a high school guidance counselor.

He was the football coach.

My mother was a teacher.

[laughs]

kind.

Yes, and part of what came with that was a sense of trying to engage the mind, not just the immediate heart.

And I think my father in particular was was that way, somebody who could engage people who were different.

I remember that his friends ranged from people like Stokely Carmichael, you know, the founder of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, you know, a person who was in absolute black power and sometimes talked even about violence.

all the way up to people like Reverend Ralph Abernathy, a name that unfortunately should not have disappeared from history.

He was really the heart and soul of the Birmingham civil rights movement.

He was a local pastor, and he was the person that Martin Luther King actually depended on to organize Birmingham.

And it might be nice for people to hear about that from Condoleezza Rice.

... y- obviously you're not talking about specific companies, but if you could give us an example of a trend.

Well, for, you know, going back for a while, uh, on supply chains, for instance, uh, we had talked to companies about diversifying supply chains because, uh, it was pretty clear that a combination of Chinese policy, which made some elements difficult, and the fact that you were starting to get a backlash in the United States, uh, and we used to always say, "When you think about risk, uh, don't leave it to the risk officer, 'cause it's not gonna be the risk officer who's testifying before Congress.

It's gonna be your CEO.

So bring this into your boardroom.

Uh, do some simulation with it, and think about a contingency planning at this point.

If this goes this way, what would we do?" We encourage companies to have what we call, uh, indicators.

We do this all the time in the national security world.

How are we gonna maintain this technological lead, which you've described as being so critical for us to run fast and run hard, um, if university funding, and specifically research funding, is under threat?

How do you think about that? And I'm sure you were thinking about all of these things even as you were making these kinds of decisions.

Right.

Well, I have thought a lot about it because, uh, I, I often say that th-A lot is not known about us.

People just don't understand a lot about us, but unfortunately, some of the things that they understand, they don't like.

And so, I think we do have to work to address the gulf that's beginning to develop between institutions like ours and the broader public.

And the way that I think we address that is, first of all, we say that the, the notion of elite doesn't mean that we are elite in terms of the students that we serve.

Uh, when we look at our, our student body, and I'm sure you experience this, you'll stand in front of a class and you've got a fourth generation Stanford student, but you've also got, uh, the child of an itinerant worker, because we do have a very high proportion of first gen students, and so we have to let that be known, that we still are a place of upward mobility.

Prioritize, right? That was what I was wondering when I looked at the order.

And if you put restrictions on China from taking this core material being made in Taiwan, I think the US even believes Taiwan is or says Taiwan is part of China, um, and says, "You c-" y- tells China, "You can't use these chips," you don't think that China is gonna go invade Taiwan to get them?

Well, let me unpack that for a moment because I think there's several important points, uh, there.

The first is that you asked how do we win or how do we, uh, deal with the fact that China is r- We run harder and faster.

That's how we do it, and, uh, we get out of our own way.

Um, I'll give you just one example.

Um, was talking to some people in the administration, the Trump administration, who tried to get a preemption on states having their own laws about, uh, AI, their own restrictions on AI.

Can you imagine if you're a young AI company and you've got restrictions in Delaware and Texas and California and they're all different? So we have to be careful that we don't just get in our own way, and we have to continue to innovate and innovate quickly.

So if you think about what's happening across universities, is that the solution?