Welcome to How leaders lead where every week you get to listen in while I interview some of the very best leaders in the world. I break down the key learning so that by the end of the episode, you'll have something simple that you can apply as you develop into a better leader. That's what this podcast is all about. Well, folks, I am beyond honored to have one of our nation's most admired and successful leaders joining me today. That's right. My guest is none other than Dr. Conda Lisa Rice, the former United States Secretary of State and National Security Advisor. These days, she's the Director of the Hoover Institution at Stanford and recently became a part owner of the Denver Broncos. Now look, it's not every day that you get to learn from a leader who's negotiated with Vladimir Putin and performed a piano concert for the late Queen of England. But you know, when I look at Condi's remarkable career, I see a leader who knows how to play to her strengths. She understands her unique skills and contributions, and she steps into any situation with a firm grasp on how she can apply those strengths and get the right outcome. Now, that's something that all great leaders need to understand. So, let's get right to it. Here's my conversation with my good friend and soon to be yours, Dr. Conda Lisa Rice. First off, congratulations on being one of the new owners of the Denver Broncos . You know, as a leader, I always like going into turnaround situations. How about you? Well, yes. Well, I don't think this is exactly a turnaround situation. I think, first of all, it's a great franchise, Denver is a terrific city. You know, I kind of grew up in Denver. We moved to Denver when I was 12 and it has great fan base. Really a talented team. I'm confident that we'll be able to return Denver to winning pretty soon here. That's great. You know, you said there's nothing more American than the two-minute drill in football. Why is that? Well, it's not there's nothing more American than having to be very focused, having to have an outcome, having to do it with a time clock. I've always quarreled with my friends who say, well, you know, baseball is the American game. I actually think football has many more characteristics. With all due respect to baseball, I like it too. A lot more characteristics. And, you know, we're always as a country. There's an urgency for Americans. We believe in having to deliver in a specific period of time. That's why this country has been so successful at entrepreneurship and under pressure. And so I kind of like the under pressure with an outcome needed. That's what I like about the two-minute drill. And that's what I like about it's American character. Yeah. And I also think about the two-minute drill requires tremendous leadership. You think about Tom Brady and all those two-minute drills. He's that over his career. That's right. It's certain to us. You know, I know you were once a competitive figure skater and now you're an avid golfer. What's the most impactful story you have from playing sports that shaped the way you lead? Well, I think sports is an absolutely great, gives you a great set of lessons, life's experiences that help you in almost any circumstance. And the one that I always point to when I was a skater is not to put to find a point on it. I was a quite mediocre skater. But I loved it and I worked really hard at it. And then you go and you go out and maybe the performance doesn't quite live up to what you expected or to your own sense of the time and effort that you've put into it. And you have to get up the next day and you have to keep going and you have to resolve to work harder and you have to resolve to work on whatever the weaknesses were that you had demonstrated in not having that great performance. And I've always thought that leading and life are a little bit like that. That you can't be knocked off your blade, so to speak, by a bad set of circumstances. Maybe something just didn't work out and then you have to go back to the drawing board. How are we going to turn this around? That's what leaders do. And I think sports has been great in teaching me how to do that. And David, I watch a lot of Stanford Athletics, as you know, and these student athletes are great at time management. They're great at knowing that they have to get better at the things in their game that they're not particularly good at doing. And they have great resilience. And I think those are all really important if you're going to be successful in life and especially if you're going to lead others. You know, Connie, that all makes total sense to me. And it's been fun doing research on you because you're an amazing person. You're also an outstanding concert pianist. You played before the late Queen of Lesvah with great musicians like cellists Yo-Yo Ma and even Aretha Franklin. How do you prepare for the big stage, those big moments like that? And can you tell us a fun behind the scenes story from one of those performances? The first thing that I will say about preparing for a piano performance is that as a piano teacher of mine once said, you have to know the piece 190 percent so that when you lose 90 percent from nerves and anxiety, there's 100 percent left. And so the preparation, someone asked me the other day, you know, if you're going to perform a new piece, how long do you work at it? A year. Wow. I really want to know it cold and if something goes wrong, which I was performing with the Omaha Symphony and I was performing the first one, the Schumann A minor piano concerto. And there's a big entry for the piano and about halfway down this entry because you're playing from memory. You don't have a score in front of you. About halfway down, I thought I actually don't know where I am. Now this is all going on contemporaneously. And I remember thinking just get back to A minor, get back to A minor and they 'll know where you are. So all of this is going on while you're playing. You have to know the piece really well to be able to do that because the great Glenn Gould once said, when you're performing, it's not a matter of whether something will go wrong. It's a matter of when. If I'm going to perform, I spend a lot of time. So a couple of quick little stories. One involves the performance with Yo-Yo Ma. He was getting in the National Medal of the Arts and he wanted to play a piece with me. We're performing 2,500 people at 5.30. And at three o'clock, I had a National Security Advisor at the time. I had a National Security Council meeting that I had to chair. And I chaired the meeting. We were over about 4.45 and Steve Hadley, who was my deputy National Security Advisor, looked at me and said, do you realize that you're playing before the President of the United States in about 45 minutes here? And I said, yes, Steve, but first I had to finish this National Security Council meeting. So talk about right-wing love. That's it. The other funny story I'll tell you is I did end up playing for the late Queen Elizabeth, who was a wonderful woman. But the way that it happened was that I was supposed to be just doing a little informal concert with the wife of the then Foreign Secretary David Millivan before dinner. And it was my last trip to London as Secretary. So David called. He said, you know, Louise and I, his wife, were thinking that maybe you and her friends could play in this room in Buckingham Palace where Elgar played. Would you like to do that? I said, sure, that sounds fantastic. Calls a couple of days before I'm supposed to leave. And he says, her majesty would like to attend. And I thought, OK, this is taken on a whole different, but she did come. David, she brought her corgi with her and she and the corgi sat through the whole thing. Oh, that was a great story. Thanks for sharing that. And I understand when you were just 10 years old, you wanted to quit playing the piano and your mother said, no way. Tell us about that and what it taught you. Well, I started playing when I was three years old. My grandmother taught piano lessons and so I stayed at her house while my parents worked and she taught me to play from the age of three. So at about 10, I said to my mother, because my grandmother had stopped teaching. And so my mother was now trying to teach me the piano. That wasn't working very well. And so I said to my mother, I'm tired of the piano. I'm quitting. And my mother said, you're not old enough or good enough to make that decision. And so I kept playing. It was a little bit of a parenting lesson. You know, these days parents say, oh, well, if Johnny doesn't want to do it, that was not the way my parents parented. They were loving and encouraging. But there were certain expectations and continuing to play was one of those expectations. And I'll tell you, David, when I was playing with Yo-Yo Ma, or playing for the late Queen Elizabeth, I was really glad my mother didn't let me quit. Yeah, that's a great leadership lesson. And you know, you also, you grew up in segregated Alabama. How did that impact you as a leader? I always say something that's maybe a little bit ironic or paradoxical, which is that I'm actually glad I grew up in segregated Birmingham. Now I was eight, nine years old when the Civil Rights Act passed and life was different. But in those years before, you couldn't go to a movie theater, you couldn't go to a restaurant. But our parents in my little community, which was a community, I think David, everybody in that community taught school. I think we had one lawyer, one doctor, everybody else taught school. And they would say, you know, you're just going to have to be twice as good to survive in a segregated environment. So we went around trying to be twice as good. I tell my students to this day, if you're trying to be twice as good, you will work twice as hard. You will therefore be twice as confident and twice as prepared. And then they said there are no victims. You may not be able to control your circumstances, but you can control your response to your circumstances. And if you consider yourself a victim, then you have given control of your life to somebody else. Those two lessons I took with me that it was a kind of armor in their way of preparing us for what they thought was likely to be a very hostile world for a long time to come. Now as it turned out, we had the Great Civil Rights legislation, we've made a lot of progress. But still, that if there's a barrier, you go around it, over it or through it, but you don't let it stop you. I learned that in circumstances of segregated Birmingham, and I'm grateful because I took those lessons into life with me. You know, Connie, it's interesting. You've been the first in so many different ways. You know, the first woman to do this, the first African-American to do this, you know, what's it like being the only, only in the room? You know, when you're the first person like yourself in these new big situations. Well, David, the first thing I'd say is that first don't set out to be first. It just turns out that way. I remember talking to my great friend, the late astronaut Sally Ride, and she said, "I don't want to be the first woman in space. I just wanted to be in space." So if you keep thinking yourself as the first, then you put a lot of pressure on yourself. You know that you're the first, but you're mostly there because you wanted to do that and you were prepared to do it. Therefore, when you walk into the room, and I was a young Soviet specialist who worked on the Soviet military, and yeah, I'd walk into the room and people look like, "Are you in the right meeting?" And you said to yourself, "Within a few minutes here, you're going to know that I'm in the right meeting, and I'm not going to let your prejudice be my problem." This was another lesson that my father taught me. We moved to Denver when I was 12, and it was interestingly in Denver that I encountered having gone from completely segregated Birmingham to integrated Denver, that someone didn't want to sit next to me at a school event because I was black. And I told my father this, and he said, "Well, you know, that's just fine as long as they move." Now what was he saying to me? He was saying, "Don't let somebody else's prejudice be your problem." And I think when you're the only, you have to steal yourself for the fact that there might be somebody who is kind of a jerk or a turkey, but you're not going to let them ruin your opportunities. But the other thing I'll say about it, David, is we talk a lot these days about inclusion. And yes, we want in diverse communities, whether you are a corporate CEO or a university official, you want the diversity to be a positive. You want everybody to feel they've got a chance for success. But I often say to people who are different in those circumstances, this can be a two-way street. You don't have to wait for them to make you feel comfortable or included. How about you work to help them with the inclusion? So I was a young academic young professor, and I got a one-year fellowship to work for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. So I worked for the Strategic Nuclear Planning Division. These were the guys who planned the employment of nuclear weapons. I was three things they had never seen, female, black, and civilian. Now I walked in, and the first day they said, "The rookie makes the coffee." Now I could have said, "I'm a professor at Stanford. I don't make coffee. I made the coffee." The truth is I make coffee so strong nobody can drink it, so they didn't ask me again to make the coffee. It lowered the temperature. And then the next week, I won the football pool. Now we had something to talk about on Monday mornings, and pretty soon I was just real comfortable with them, and they were real comfortable with me. So it's a two-way street inclusion. It's a two-way street having an environment in which everybody can be successful. And if you just make yourself an object as the person who's different, you have to make me comfortable. It's going to be kind of a tough ride, and it's going to be stressful for everybody. So I just try in those circumstances to take the stress out of the room for everybody. Hey, you know, because you're listening to this, I can tell you're the kind of person who wants to learn how to lead well. But there's a lot of companies out there who want to take that desire and charge you $500 or $1,000 or heck, even $20,000 to try and show you how to lead. That's just not right. If you want to be a better leader, I believe you deserve to have access to something that will truly help you, and it shouldn't cost a fortune. So I want you to go to howleaderslead.com and start my leadership class. It's really and truly free. And after you take this class, you're going to feel more confident in your role , and you'll be on your way to getting big things done with your team. Go check it out at howleaderslead.com. You know, Connie, what drove your passion for foreign affairs and what was your thought process that made you become an expert on the Soviet Union? Well, I hate to tell you this, and I tell this to my students. You know, it was that failed piano major thing. So you know, I went to college to be a piano performance major. And the end of my sophomore year, I was at the Aspen Music Festival School. It's a great honor to be selected for that summer program. And I met these 12-year-olds who could play from sight everything it took me all year to learn, and I thought I'm going to end up teaching 13-year-olds to murder Be ethoven for a living, or maybe playing piano bars someplace, but I'm not going to Carnegie Hall. And it was a class. I walked into a class in my junior year, spring quarter, taught by a man named Joseph Corbel. He was Madeline Albright's father. And all of a sudden, he opened up the world to me of things diplomatic, things international, the Soviet Union. And I knew what I wanted to do. I knew I was going to be passionate about understanding international politics, and in particular, communism and Eastern European countries. And from there, it was frankly a bit experimentation that got me to where I ended up, because I didn't quite know what I was going to do with the degree in international politics and international economics. But as it unfolded, the big decision for me was that I probably wanted to be an academic as the base of what I would do. I had opportunities to go work for defense, corporations and the like, but Stanford wanted to hire me after being here on a one-year fellowship. I took the Stanford job, and from then on, it was trying to be the best academic expert that I could possibly be. And the other story about that for leaders is I had great mentors. Joseph Corbel was one, but also I met Brent Scowcroft, who came out to give a talk at Stanford. And he had gotten to know my work a little bit. He started taking me to things to conferences and the like. And then when George H.W. Bush asked him to be national security advisor, he called me up and said, "The president needs a Soviet specialist. Do you want to come along?" So for young people, I always say, try to be really good at what you're doing, but also find people who will advocate for you, people who have high expectations for you, maybe even who see things in you that you don't see in yourself. We call them mentors. You know, I know that you're fluent in Russian and you've met with Putin several times. What was that like? And how would you describe his strengths and weaknesses as a leader? Yeah, he was one tough guy and I did spend a lot of time with him. We would chitchat in Russian on the sidelines, but if you're a diplomat, you probably better often negotiate in your own language because as good as my Russian was at that time, it was never going to be as good as my English. And so we negotiated, but I never listened to the translation of him in English because his translators would soften the edges of what he was saying. And by listening to him in the Russian, you could tell how really harsh he could be. He liked to intimidate. He kind of had two modes, intimidate and he would try to outflank you in the way that he negotiated. But we had a pretty good relationship actually in those years. He liked the fact that I was a Russianist, but you could even see then elements of what's gotten us to where we are. He told me once in a conversation, he said, "Khandi, you know us. Russia's only been great when it's been ruled by great men like Peter the Great and Alexander the Second." And I thought, "Okay, that's really quite something. He's going after these Tsars for whom it was the greatest expanse of the Russian Empire." And I realized at that point that this was a true Russian nationalist and that 's what we're seeing in Ukraine. We're seeing somebody who believes that Russia's only going to be great again if the Russian Empire is regrated. You've been through so many historic situations and none ever greater than 9/11 . Can you tell us what you learned about leadership managing that crisis? Well, it is still the most searing event. If you were in a position of authority on September 11th, your determination was to never let it happen again. Because to this day, David, I have remorse for the fact that we didn't somehow see it coming. Look, I think we did everything we knew how to do. We didn't have a system of intelligence warnings that put together what was happening outside the country with what was happening inside the country. We had a wall between what the FBI did, which was inside the country, and what the CIA did, which was outside the country for very good civil liberties reasons. But that meant that cues that the FBI might have been getting and cues that the CIA might have been getting weren't unified. So after it happened, on the day that it happened, you just operate on instinct . I remember, well, the first plane went into the World Trade Center, and frankly , we thought it was some kind of accident. And then when the second plane went into the World Trade Center, we knew that it was a terrorist attack. I was trying to reach the national security principles. Colin Powell was in Peru. Don Rumsfeld, they couldn't reach him. His phone was just ringing, ringing, ringing. We looked behind us on television plane and hit the Pentagon. The Secret Service came in and they said, "You've got to get to a bunker. Things are flying into buildings all over DC." And under those circumstances, they don't kind of escort you. They pick you up. They kind of carry you toward this bunker. And then stopping to call first my family, saying, "I was okay. You have to know the races and race." They would have found a way to DC because those pictures were awful. And then calling the president saying, "You can't come back here." And from that moment on, you're just dealing with the consequences. But once you sort of get your bearings the next day or so, it becomes all about not letting it happen again. And we had to really kind of merge what the FBI was seeing, with what the CIA was seeing by having George Tenant, the director of the CIA, and Bob Mueller, the FBI director, in the Oval Office every morning, sharing information. Later on, we would have better systems through what today is called the National Terrorist Threat Center. But at that time, we literally had to merge it right there in front of the president of the United States. And you suddenly realize the United States of America has not been attacked on its territory since the War of 1812. And so we have none of those systems for internal security. And the good news is, I think, we've built them out. They're not safe, but we are way safer today than we were on September 11th. And if I'm grateful for one thing, it's that there wasn't another attack during our time in office. You then rise to become the Secretary of State, which you're renowned for just the great job that you did in that role. What was the biggest skill that set you up to be so successful in that position ? Well, the first thing is a very close relationship with the president. The Secretary of State is going to be out all over the world trying to represent the United States of America. And if people don't know that you fully and completely represent the president of the United States, you can't get anything done. People knew I was very close to George W. Bush and that I spoke for him. So you didn't have countries trying to go around your back to see if you could get something from the president that couldn't get from the Secretary of State. In fact, the president and I would laugh that I'd do it just the opposite. I would say, well, you know, I might be willing to do this, but you know the president, he probably won't go for this. And so I'll try to take it back to him. So you know, it was kind of frankly, you remember how car dealers would do that ? Well, I'll take it to my manager. Well, I spent a lot of time saying I'd take it to my president. And we worked hard at being on the same job. Before I would leave Washington to go to some negotiation, we'd have dinner. And I would say, here's how far I'm going to go. Are you comfortable with this? And he would say fine. And I'd say, if I'm going to go further, I'll give you a call. And so my negotiation, I could be flexible. I didn't have to keep calling back to Washington. That was one thing that was important. Secondly, I had a great staff. Like any leader, you had better have good managers at that next level because the important thing in leadership is to recognize leadership characteristics in other people. And I had a great set of assistant secretaries who were respected in their various fields, Africa, Latin America. They could go out ahead of me and lay the groundwork, which was very important. But probably the most important skill that you need as a diplomat is to be able to listen well because you need to be able to hear whether there's an interest, the overlap that maybe you didn't know going into the room. And as Americans, we do have a tendency to broadcast. We have a tendency to walk in and say our piece. And by the way, when you go out there, people want the American Secretary of State to set the tone or to set the parameters. And I would often just say, let's hear first from the German Foreign Minister or let's hear first from the Brazilian Foreign Minister so that I could read the room a little bit and then know how to use the considerable power that the United States of America has. Lots of great lessons there. And another thing that you talk about, which I really loved, is the difficulty of making what you describe as unpalatable decisions. Can you give us an example of how you thought through such a tough decision? Well, you often don't have all that much time to make the decision. You know, as an academic, your desire is to be really expert and to go very, very deep. I once knew more about the Soviet General Staff than they knew about themselves . And I know that because I was talking to the former Chief of the General Staff, Marshall O'Kermayov once. And I said, Marshall O'Kermayov, how many people worked with the General Staff? He said, oh, I don't know, 5,000. I thought, yeah, I think that's right. He said, how did you know that? Well, I stood in Moscow and counted the windows in the Ministry of Defense. So that's how much you want to know details if you're an academic. When you're in a leadership position, you're not going to have that kind of expertise. You have to learn how to ask questions, how to ask the second order question. Who to trust, how to really probe. I had a little experience. I was provost of Stanford and therefore budget officer for Stanford. I was not going to, when the physics department wanted their $17 million telescope, I wasn't going to debate the physics with the three Nobel laureates that they sent to convince me. But I still had to make a decision. So you have to get comfortable with how you ask questions, how you mobilize data. And then ultimately you have to make a decision. For me, one of the hardest ones was during the war in Lebanon in 2006, we had a very pro-Western democratic new government in Lebanon. And Hezbollah had attacked across what was called the blue line and killed some Israeli soldiers. And not surprisingly, the Israelis then launched military operations against Lebanon. But of course, Hezbollah wasn't the one being punished. It was this new young Lebanese government. And I had to go and say that we weren't going to try to get a ceasefire. We weren't going to tell the Israelis they had to stop until they had destroyed Hezbollah's nest and Hezbollah's infrastructure in the south of the country. But that was a hard thing to say to Fozing Jorah, who was the western leading prime minister of Lebanon who was watching his country be destroyed. And I felt that that was a real Hobson choice for us. But we had, sometimes you can't stop a war when conditions on the ground favor the adversary. I think, David, that's probably going to be less than we're going to learn with Ukraine these days. People talk about a ceasefire. But until the Ukrainians are in a position where that ceasefire is going to advantage them, these would be the Russians, it's not wise to talk about it, even though the devastating damage that is going on. We'll be back with the rest of my conversation with Condoleezza Rice in just a moment. As an athlete, Condi understands the power of learning from failures. It's something almost every great leader embraces, myself included. Just ask me about Crystal Pepsi. But you know, we can learn from our successes as well. And it's an opportunity a lot of leaders overlook. That's the big idea I learned from another legend, Jack Nicholas, during his episode of How Leaders Lead. I think you have to learn why you lose, you have to learn why you win, you have to learn how to do both. And I think business is exactly the same thing. You know, everybody makes mistakes as they're growing up trying to learn to grow a business. And you should learn from those mistakes. But you also, when you do something well, you learn from that too. Check out my entire conversation with Jack, episode 21, here on How Leaders Lead. Dr. Chiften Gares here a little bit. You know, I understand you've given motivational speeches to football teams. Tell us about your most memorable one and what was the key message? I was the honorary captain for Stanford's Rose Bowl game in 2015 against Iowa. By the way, Christian McCaffrey was the running back for Stanford at that time. So I told Coach Shaw, I said, "So David, I'm not speaking to them right before they go out." I said, "I was an athlete. I didn't want anybody in my ear just before I went out." So I'll speak to them at breakfast. So I gave this motivational speech about trusting the person next to you to do his job, about finishing every play. And afterwards, one of our safeties came up to me and he said, "Professor Rice, thank you. That was so inspirational. I want to go hit somebody." And I thought, "Well, that's not usually the reaction of people to my speeches, but you know, I'm glad I inspire him to go hit somebody." So that was probably my greatest motivational speech. We actually, by the way, went on to destroy Iowa in that game. So somebody hit somebody for sure. You know, Condi, this has been so much fun. And before we wrap this up, I want to have some more fun with you with my lightning round of questions. And are you ready for this? I'm ready. Okay. What's one word others would use to describe you? Determined? What would you say is the one word that best describes you? Commit it. What's the first word or phrase that comes to mind when I say, "George W. Bush "? Resilient. Call him Powell. Collagate. Madeline Albright. Tough. Donald Trump. Irresible. If you could be one person beside yourself for a day, who would it be and why? Jackie Joyner-Cursu. I'd like to be one of the greatest athletes ever for just one day. What's your biggest pet peeve? People who don't listen. Favorite piece to play on the piano? I don't have to have a minor ballad. I know that cold. Favorite football player of all time? Johnny Uninus. Number of hole in ones you've made. Two. Now, if we got in your car and turned on the radio, what would we hear? ESPN Sports Radio. Get up. Greenie. Colin Calvert. What's something about you a few people would know? I love hard rock music. Led Zeppelin's my favorite band. I wouldn't have figured that. What's the greatest gift you've ever received? The parents got gave me. That's the end of the lightning round and I just have a few questions and we'll wrap this up because I know you got more to do this day. But first of all, I got to ask you, what is a day like for Condi Rice today? Well, I'm director of the Hoover Institution now, so I decided to go back into an inbox job, I'm academic administrator again. So it's the things that I actually like to do, budgets and hiring and trying to motivate our really outstanding senior fellows here to take on some of the world's biggest problems. So just yesterday I was at an event that we did on K-12 education reform and school choice. The day before that I was looking to help people develop a better program on state and local government. So I'm a full-time academic administrator these days, but I do have these other things that I have to do like meetings on hiring a Denver Broncos coach and traveling to interview coaches. So my days are pretty full. I love being back at a university. Once in a while, I'll be in a classroom teaching. So there's a lot of variety. I do some consulting for a few companies through a firm that I formed with Bob Gates and Steve Hadley and Anya Manuel that keeps us into the private sector. So I've got a lot of ions in the fire, but I've always been a pretty good jugg ler. And since I'm easily bored, I have to have variety in life. You've been around all the top leaders in the world. And what are the traits you've seen of the best leaders? And what are you looking for in this coach that you're going to hire for the Denver Broncos? Well, the best leaders are first and foremost people who, the people that they 're leading. They trust them. If you violate trust, you never get it back. And you have to be able to look at yourself in the mirror and say, am I asking somebody to do something I myself wouldn't do. George Schulz, great friend who died at 100 years old, used to say trust is the coin of the realm. And I really do believe that. Secondly, as a leader, you have to be able to motivate people, but not just with great motivational speakers. Motivating people means motivating others to take on their leadership task. Seeing leadership characteristics in others. When we talk to great coaches, they talk about the locker room and the leaders who emerge within that locker room. Well, it's the same on any team. It's the same if you're a CEO. It's the same if you're a university leader. It's the same if you're in government. You have to inspire others to lead. And then finally, I think you have to have to help people have a sense of where they're going. People like to know what is expected of them, but not just what is expected of them today. What's expected of them on the pathway to getting where we all want to go. And so I sometimes try to be pretty specific with people about what are we doing today to end up where we want to be at the end of this path. You know, Connie, I've got to ask you the question everybody always asks you, but I'm going to keep asking it because maybe someday you'll do it. Why haven't you run for President of the United States? We need you. Yeah, thank you, David. But I do not have that DNA. I have been around campaigns. I've been around. I don't have the DNA. You know, I would go out campaigning with George W. Bush. And at the end of the day, I just wanted to go back to the hotel. He was still wearing to go. They have something special. I have been great admiration for those who do want to run for office. I'm not one of them. I love policy. I don't love politics. And I like being able to affect where we're going as a country, but I'll leave it to those who have the right DNA to actually run for office. Last question. You're very young and you've got a lot more living to do, but what do you see as your big unfinished business? Oh, well, I'm not that young anymore, David, but I've never really thought about where I'd like to be at the end of this journey. I've always more thought about what the next chapter is. And right now, I'm right in the middle of that chapter, which is being here at the Hoover Institution, helping people to answer some of the hardest policy questions that we have from a basis of really strong academics, really strong data, really strong evidentiary-based research, and using the perch here to be able to influence the next generation. I love being in a university. My students are what makes me optimistic because this generation gets a lot of bad press for a lot of reasons. It is true that they think if they've Googled it, they've researched it. It is true that they're in a hurry to solve all the world's problems when maybe they don't quite have the knowledge to do that. But they are the most public-minded generation that I've taught. If we can slow them down a little bit and make sure that they have the tools, they're going to make a difference going forward. That's the chapter that I'm in right now and loving it. Aside from the fact that I'm looking forward to maybe knocking a couple points off my golf handicap, I think I'm lucky enough to be right in the middle of a great chapter . You know, Condi, I want to end where I started. I want to thank you for your service to our country and what you continue to do . We have a lot of mutual friends and I have a lot of people who you don't know. Whenever I've mentioned your name, the only thing that is linked up to your name is respect and admiration and just the fact that you are one great American. I want to thank you for everything you're doing and have done and thank you for taking this time out because I don't know that there's too many people more busy than you. I really, really appreciate you. Well, thank you very much, David. And I look forward to seeing you at golf sometime soon. Absolutely. Maybe you'll win the big tournament this year. I'll just try to keep it in the fair way. Thanks a lot. Okay, thanks. I alluded to this at the end of the interview, but all week is I've been talking with friends and preparing for this interview. The universal reaction I got from people when I mentioned Conda Lisa Rice is just admiration and respect. It's clear that she has just flat out earned her place as an iconic American leader. We need more leaders like Conda Lisa Rice, which is why I'm delighted you took the time to learn from her today. Honestly, you've probably already got a lot of takeaways in your head after that conversation. I know I do. But one of the things I really want to call out is how Conda has played to her strengths over the years. I love how she handled Putin. She knew to listen to him in Russian and pick up all his nuances, but she negotiated in English where she could communicate the best. As Secretary of State, she clearly understood the strength of her position representing the President of the United States. And she used it to her advantage to get more done at the table. So I got to ask you, what are your unique strengths? Now they may not be speaking fluent Russian or managing an international crisis , but as a leader, you've got to understand what you do well and what situations do you really shine? What comes naturally to you? Where do you have insight that seems obvious to you but surprises other people? Take a look at your strengths this week. Don't consider a problem you're facing and how your unique strengths could help you navigate it better. It's natural to want to improve on our weaknesses. That's important, but we can really multiply our effectiveness when we double down on our strengths. The more you can play to your strengths, the more likely you are to get the outcome you want, and the more effectively you can lead those around you. So do you want to know how leaders lead? What we learned today is the great leaders play to their strengths. Coming up next on How leaders lead is Bill Rhodes, the CEO of AutoZone. No individual builds a business. The individual builds an organization and the organization builds a business. We had to motivate and inspire and engage and get people excited about what we could do together. So be sure to come back again next week to hear our entire conversation. Thanks again for tuning in to another episode of How leaders lead where every Thursday you get to listen in while I interview some of the very best leaders in the world. I make it a point to give you something simple on each episode that you can apply to your business so that you will become the best leader you can be. Thank you. . [ Silence ]