It's my pleasure to be here. I'm really looking forward to the conversation.

I left Princeton University, where I had been the Dean of the School of Public and International Affairs for seven years, I left in 2009 to go into the government, the Obama administration, to serve as the Director of Policy Planning, for Secretary Clinton. This was really a dream job for me. Indeed, when I graduated from Princeton in 1980, if you'd asked me what I wanted to do in 20 years, being Director of Policy Planning would have been high on my list and I had to commute from Princeton. My husband and I had two sons who were at that point, 11 and 9, and I would leave the house early on Monday morning and come back late Friday. A number of other people, mostly women I knew in the State Department, did the same thing. I spent 2 years as Director of Policy Planning, and they were really tremendously rewarding years working for Secretary Clinton on issues I cared passionately about, and I expected to stay. I've always wanted to be an in and outer, and that means when your party's in power, ride the train as far as it will go.

But, my elder son was having a rocky adolescence, and he really needed both my husband and me kind of all hands on deck. And I made a choice I never expected to make as a feminist, as an ambitious woman, as a foreign policy expert, which was to go home and to put family first. That triggered a whole set of reflections on who I thought I was and even more importantly, a look around at so many other women who I think many of us thought, "Well, they just weren't ambitious enough, or they didn't want it enough, or they couldn't manage their time well enough", something so that there was something lacking with them that they couldn't stay in the workplace climbing the ladder. Because I was still a full time professor at Princeton. It wasn't like I wasn't working. I wrote about that in The Atlantic in an article called "Why Women Still Can't Have It All". Not meaning they can't, but saying we have got a long way to go before we get to real gender equality. Unexpectedly, certainly to me and I think to many people, that article went viral and really launched another round of what has been a regular conversation about work and family, decade on decade. And this happened to be the catalyst for the conversation in the early teens.

I well remember speaking at SHRM. It's enormous, right? It's all the human resources people. I think it was in Florida. I very much remember that. That was probably in 2014 or 2015, because when I wrote the article in The Atlantic, I was focused almost entirely on changes we needed to make in the workplace and in the arc of careers. I wrote about intervals and why was it that you're expected to climb the career ladder between 25 and 55? Why can't you take time out? Particularly, women live longer. But I was very focused on career.

Then I wrote a book coming out of that article called, "Unfinished Business - Women, Men, Work, Family", which came out in 2015. And in thinking through what really needed to happen, and I say that, I'm a foreign policy expert. I always thought of myself as a feminist. I am a feminist, but I'd never done women's studies. I hadn't immersed myself in the literature. So in reading and thinking, I came out at a very unexpected place. Or at least, if you'd asked me in 2012 whether I'd be writing about care for the next 10 years, I'd have said, "No, that's sort of traditional women's work. And I do the work my father did, not the work my mother did." But by 2015, I realized that that work my mother did, of a homemaker, of a caregiver. She's also an artist, but she didn't fully find herself as an artist until we were considerably older, although my younger brother was still at home. And I realized that work is the foundation on which I stand and my brothers stand. That family and the strength of those connections didn't just happen. They were woven by her time, energy and care.

So I really came to realize that inevitably, the beginnings of the women's movement, as often happens with a group that is somehow not marginalized in various ways. We were all appreciating career and striving for career, which I think is enormously important. But we were discounting the relational side of our lives, and that is what care is about. It's about being connected as a child to your mother, your father, your caregiver. That process of care as you get older, it's not just physical care. It's really about the nurturing of another individual. I always say, "You know, it's a care relationship when you're as excited, when that person succeeds as when you're succeeding, you don't feel competition." And so by 2015, I'd realize we have got to make room for care in all of our jobs for men as well as for women. We have to value it both financially. Even if you're not paid, you should be able to contribute to pension funds to get Social Security, that kind of thing, and socially, so that if you say I'm home caring for my children or my parents or any number of caring professions, we should give you the same prestige as if you say, I'm a banker or a lawyer or a technologist.

Yes. It's as simple as a baby crying whether or not she's picked up or not, right? Whether her basic needs are met through connection to another, whether those ties that you describe in which you do feel so keenly in India, I was just at my first real trip to India and ended at a big Indian wedding, and all of the women of my age were aunties. We were all American aunties. But this sense that older people, the friends of your parents, are family in some way, which is very similar to African American culture, where again, you adopt elders as part of this web of connection that supports you. If you grow up with that, yes, you experience connection to another human being, relationship with another human being as essentially positive. Obviously, there is no family in the world where there is no negative and there's always stress and their relationships are often ruptured, and then they can go back stronger. But I think that's exactly right, that your experience of connection or lack of connection to others or misconnection to others, if you're abused by someone you are directly connected to shapes your entire worldview.

Indeed, I've just published an article with a colleague in The Daedalus, which is the journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. It's an academic journal. We've written about a worldview of care. We've looked at how to define individuals as both connected and separated, as both relational and individual. They're both. But that gives rise to a worldview that is also relational as well as individual. And it's a very different worldview than the assumption that development for a human being is to separate from their family and go out into the world and achieve, which is a very Northern European White Protestant view and quite different in many other cultures in the world.

I love that. I think it's exactly right. Hillary Clinton always used to say, "The world is not either or. It is both". For some reason, Americans in particular, and maybe Anglo-Saxons, have a very adversarial view of the world, our justice system, our debating, we are very much either or. You have this side or that side, and one has to win. Now, obviously judges can confuse them, but it is both. It is that we are part of something larger and we need to be healthy. We know that isolation and loneliness actually kills us. People die much earlier. Again, you can't survive as an infant if you're not connected to others, but neither can you as a person going through your life. Physically, psychologically and neuroscientifically, you need connection to others and also you need to be a separate individual. So that cell that you're describing, must be both a kidney and a piece of the larger body to flourish.

I think of this often as a woman because again, for me, growing up in the 60s and the 70s with a father who encouraged me to have a career, and this was the heyday of what was then called women's liberation. I wanted to escape from being a daughter, a sister, later a mother and wife. Those are all identities that are relational. They're defined in relation to somebody else. I wanted to be able to be a lawyer and then a professor, a diplomat, a writer, very keenly. But once I became those things, I didn't want to give up that relational identity. And so I think when people talked about women having it all, they were saying, "No, we want both". And actually men need both just as much. This idea that men are the breadwinners and they don't need to be needed and they don't need to be connected to others, is crazy. But it is that both and for many of us have a very hard time thinking in both in and terms rather than in either/or terms.

Well, I want to start by saying, before I ever wrote about gender equality, career, care and feminism, I defined myself as a foreign policy expert, writing about networks. So when I look at the world, I see a world of 200 something sovereign states, those multicolored blocks that we see on maps or the globe. I understand that that is the international system and that states make war and peace and that they are very powerful entities. Since the beginning of my career, since the early 1990s, I have seen networks of government officials. So I look at networks of bankers or of justice ministers, but also networks of corporations, of churches, of civil society organizations, of universities, and I've argued that again, you have to see in stereo. You need to see both. So I start with this idea that dual view can be applied pretty much to everything.

As a leader, for instance, I can look at my organization as an org chart, as a hierarchy. Here's the person who is the boss of this person, who's the boss of that person. And that is important because that's power. That is a dimension of power that you should not pretend doesn't exist, because the people who have the power exercised upon them certainly are aware of it. And yet at the same time, and this was a big part of my own journey as a leader, you can see your organization as a flattened series of networks who is connected to whom, who is more central, and who is more on the margins. As a leader, I learned to think about leading from the center as well as from the top. Again, I don't pretend that I'm not the CEO and that I don't make more money and have more power than many people in my organization. But I also think, particularly when we are trying to make change, when we are trying to improve our culture, how do I understand my own role at the center, and how particularly do I reach out to those who are on the edges, who are the least connected so that connections are a form of power.

I think you can do it in your family. Honestly, one of the things I learned as a parent was I did a lot better with my children when I accepted some of their arguments, they would accept more of mine. So if they said, "I want to come in at midnight", I might say, "Why", and they might say, "Well, you know, it's really important that I be at this party, etc." If I listened and compromised, they were much more inclined to accept my view. This doesn't work for everything. But again, this idea that in some parts you can be equals even when in other parts you're not, and that can apply to your community, your organization. I would say to your nation and again, even the world, that we need to think about the world as these networks of individual and group actors if we're going to save the planet, as well as thinking of us as these entities that are enmeshed in power relations as states.

That is such an interesting way of thinking about the world in relation to how we think about families. I've never thought about it quite that way, but I very much identify with your point about different roles in families. I have two brothers. And my younger sibling is ten years younger than I am. He had a very different family experience because my other brother and I, basically left for school when he was eight. He has stayed in our hometown and he is there as my parents are now both over 90. Very similarly, he's the one who gets the call. I'm a 5-hour drive away and my other brother is a 7-hour drive. We can get on a plane, but we travel all the time. And I've often thought, what if your sister, my brother, has a really great career and we've taken great pride in it, but it has been more place based, whereas, I've had a national and international career. What if somebody like that said, I'm the anchor of my family? What if that were a role? Because that is really the role he and his wife are playing. They are the anchors. That doesn't mean those roles don't shift. But we don't think about that as, again, making the contribution, as I said earlier, with my mother's work, that creates the foundation that creates the security and the assurance that people are going to be taking care of when they need to that enables everybody to do their different roles.

I really think that work is hard and indispensable. Again, if we were to think about it, as the anchor of your family, you might value it more. I agree with you very much on the global side. Not only that, people are often happier. You're right. There's a level of material need, no question. You need certain things, obviously food, your basic needs and then education and a job. But once those are met, and indeed in this piece I've just published, we've talked about human needs, this idea that you should be connected to others and you should achieve that. You should be separate and connected at the same time. That would give us a view of happiness and well-being that is not measured by GDP. And we know that. Bhutan has a happiness index, and a number of countries score well above the United States, even though the US has the biggest GDP and many of them are small nations where it is easier to be closely connected than if you're as big as the United States. But I do think that this sense that you have a place that others will care for you, that you will care for others is a source of well-being, that once you've attained a basic standard of material well-being, money just won't buy it. It won't buy love. It won't buy happiness. It will certainly make you happier if you're starting from very little. But you'll get to a point where we need something else.

The other thing I would add, and you've thought a lot about this, its connection to others and its connection to something spiritual. It could be the divine, could be nature. As we think about caring for our planet and feeling that we are part of that natural order, that's another set of connections without which we can't flourish.

Yeah. It was not so important growing up. My mother's Belgian and came from an anti-clerical, freethinking tradition. In Europe, often the Catholic Church or any religion was often regarded as a constraint on being able to think freely. That was the tradition my Belgian grandparents came from. My father had been in the Presbyterian Church and his grandmother in the Episcopalian church. But that was none of those really took for me. By 2007, when I published "The Idea That is America", I talked about seven values that made up that idea. The first four are well known liberty, democracy, equality and justice. People might order those differently, but I don't think anybody would doubt that those are four values that Americans claim to hold the country together, or at least used to. Then I talked about tolerance, humility and faith. Faith, I thought very hard about this. I don't necessarily believe in a specific religion, but I believe in the power of faith and the need for faith in the sense of connection to something larger that can be something that motivates you in terms of making the world a better place and the faith that it can be made a better place. But that can also be something that is more personally spiritual. I would say from there, at some point also, my path has been through beauty, and my mother is an artist and I cannot draw or paint. I can take beautiful pictures and I sort of see with her eyes, but she gave me the gift of seeing beauty in a leaf, in a puddle, in a reflection, in an industrial landscape. There are very few places where if I zoom my mental lens out or zoom it in so that I'm looking at something very small, I cannot find beauty. That sense of beauty connects me to the world in a very important way.

Then more recently, during the pandemic, I became a passionate birdwatcher. And when I'm out birding, again, I feel connected to nature, to beauty. Birds are infinitely fascinating, even the ones that we see all the time. I think people who have a deep faith, whether it's the monastic existence or people who worship together in a more conventional religion. And again, in India, I was fascinated with all the different gods. But I think that we need to acknowledge the place of that connection to something bigger. When we think about human needs and human flourishing, and it is not something that can ever be fulfilled, I think just by individual achievement. Because by definition, you are merging yourself in something bigger. That is what fulfills some deep hunger in all human beings.

Yeah, very much so. And it's a connection to her also. I mean, I'm conscious that I'm seeing the world through her eyes. At her 90th birthday party, everyone basically gave the same toast, all of her eight grandchildren and her children. We all sort of said, "You have taught us to see the world differently and with a sense of wonder. It's also the way a child experiences the world, often. If you take a walk with a toddler, you may not get more than three sidewalk squares, but everything can be a source of wonder.

This is a hard question, and I'll separate off what you said at the end, because I do think all higher education as much as possible, and certainly high school education does need to include moral education. Of course, many times that runs aground on separation of church and state in the United States. Although it's also true that many parents choose to send their children to private schools because they want a specific moral education, whether it's Catholic, Jewish or Protestant. But this idea that teaching students to not to lie, cheat or steal, in my high school and my college, we had an honor code and you had to sign your tests and your word meant I have not cheated on this exam, and this idea that you are being formed as an adult who has values and honor as a way of thinking about those to me, I think is very important. It's tied in with civics. But just this idea of moral education, I think we have moved away from for many reasons. But you can have a humanist moral education just as much as you can have a religious one. So I'll put that as part of my answer.

The question of higher education in the United States is really difficult because in part, people like you and me, most of the people who write about higher education come out of a very small handful of very well endowed, elite institutions. I mean, they are the very top, the top 20 or 25 universities in the country. They are all wealthy enough to nurture a traditional vision of liberal arts education, unlike in Europe and many other parts of the world. You have four years to study all sorts of things, rather than choosing at 18 to follow a pre-professional track as you do in Europe. I don't know about the Indian system, but I know that this is true in many places. That notion of cultivating what Montesquieu called, the back room of your mind, for the rest of your life you will know a little about music and enough about many different things that you can continue to educate yourself, which is just a wonderful vision of what education should be, and it opens your mind and enriches you in so many ways, and then you choose your profession.

If all Americans who went to college of some kind, or university of some kind could have that experience, I think we could defend American higher education wholeheartedly. We would really question the attacks as being only politically motivated. And yet, through the work that New America has done, my organization, it's a think and action tank. We do a tremendous amount of work on education, and a lot of what we do is on institutions of higher education that do not provide an education that will, in fact, enable someone to go on and get a job. And often students who borrow a huge amount don't graduate. So then they are essentially left with a lot of debt and no degree. And even students who get a degree, cannot get a job that enables them to earn enough to pay back their debt and to rise.

When we look at places like Princeton, Columbia, Michigan or Berkeley, so public and private schools, those are true ladders of social mobility. Many of them are wealthy enough to provide grants. They are jewels in the world of higher education. But there are many other institutions, particularly in the middle ranks. We do a lot of work with community colleges, and those are often quite wonderful, but they really need overhaul and reform. I see both. I do think there's an attack on higher education right now that is more politically motivated, because often higher education is more to the left. Wall Street is more to the right. I could attack business on political grounds and say, "Look, all you bankers, you tend to be on the right. Banking is bad". Well that's ridiculous, right? It's certainly true that people who devote their lives to learning and reading overall tend to be more on the left. These are gross generalizations. Those attacks are unwarranted. But attacks on our American students and students from anywhere getting what they pay for, both in terms of education that opens their mind and that prepares them for a better life, we've got a lot of reform to make.

That's very interesting and I think it is possible. Indeed, Princeton just had alumni day, and Justice Elena Kagan was there. She won the highest award, the Woodrow Wilson Award, for the undergraduate who has contributed the most in the nation's service. And Princeton's motto always was in the nation's service. That came from Woodrow Wilson himself, when he was president of Princeton, not when he was president of the United States in 1876. And then, later it became in the nation's service and the service of all nations. So now in the service of humanity. But that ethos, it's repeated from the minute you march into the chapel for a non-denominational service, but one that is, as far as I'm concerned, deeply spiritual, you are immersed in that culture.

Now, many graduates of Princeton go on to lots of private sector careers where they are not necessarily working for the public. So I don't want to claim this is something everyone does, but it is a sense that this is the purpose of the university. It is sort of another extreme New America has partnered with Arizona State University, which is run by Michael Crow, who used to be an assistant provost at Columbia. He has transformed the idea of a public university to what he calls a public value university. The most important thing he's done, in my view, is to say we are going to be measured by whom we include, not whom we exclude. All the universities following the top universities brag about how few people they take because that shows how selective they are. Michael's view is, particularly for a public institution, private institutions aren't subject to this, but if you are paid for by taxpayer dollars, your job is to educate the people of your state as much as you can. Arizona State has something like 200,000 students. It's a vast number, and it has a very clear code of values. And if you're there, whether you're there virtually or physically, you are again, imbued with this sense of this is what this university stands for. I think we should understand institutions of higher learning as having a distinctive character. And part of the leadership of those universities, the board, the faculty, the administration is to agree on what is distinctive about that institution and how they want to imbue students, and that can be open mindedness, that can be critical thinking. It doesn't matter, but I think that is important, and it is certainly what West Point does. I've seen this at West Point. That very exercise of coming together and saying, this is what we stand for and then reinforcing it, I do think it should be part of the mission of any institution of learning and particularly of higher learning.

I've taught for ASU as well. I've been taught at the Thunderbird School. New America has a partnership where we offer a virtual master's in global security, and that's been a real innovation where we can bring together some of the top people that we attract in Washington with ASU students and ASU faculty. It started because our education program proposed an idea of a university innovation alliance. ASU was routinely rated the most innovative university in the country. But there are a number of others, and they are generally public universities. Georgia Tech and Ohio State are really innovating. We had proposed this and Michael actually then created it. He talks about ASU as the new American university and we are New America. So when I took over New America in 2013, I invited him onto our board, and we have been partnered in a way, again, that we think reflects our hope of a renewal of American higher education. We actually work on birth through the workforce. So it's all the way up from care, at the very first moments of a child's life, all the way to apprenticeships and the workforce. Along the way, we have just been repeatedly struck by the innovation and the ability to take risks and to, again, be deeply inclusive.

His idea is that you can be a university that reflects the population of your state in large numbers and be a top research university. Now to be fair, when he took over ASU, which was created in 1959 and it was a teacher's college, nobody could change Princeton or Columbia or Harvard like that. It's just not possible because the faculty and the institution, it's just such a deep old institution. But he, having come, as I said, from Columbia, he found an institution that really could be remade, reinvented. He is an extraordinary leader. We have been along for the ride and I've felt that I'm a product of Ivy League institutions, and I revere them in many ways. But if I'm focused on the future of higher education in the United States as a whole, ASU is more of a model than any of the institutions that have educated me.

Yes. It is a concept that has been deeply important in my personal life and in the way we think about what New America is about. I'll start there and then go on my personal journey.

New America is really focused on the country we are becoming, the country that will be half European American and half people from all over the rest of the world. It's sort of 30% Hispanic American and 13 or 14% African American and Asian Americans. It's such a dramatic change. The question is, how do you both stand on the foundation of the country we are now next year in 2026, it will be the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, of the founding of the country, and at the same time recognize the things that need to change and make the really big changes in our political system and our educational system, and how we center family as well as individuals and technology and our place in the world? How do we make those big changes so that New America can flourish? We describe our mission as renewing the promise of America in an age of rapid technological and social change. And there again, the idea of renewing is you look back to the promise that is in our founding documents that was never achieved fully and indeed was clearly betrayed by slavery and our treatment of indigenous people at that founding.

I grew up in Charlottesville, Virginia. Thomas Jefferson is treated like a local who's going to walk down the street at any moment. When I was growing up, he was revered with no criticism whatsoever. Today, you go to Monticello and you see Thomas Jefferson, the great statesman, the thinker, the architect, the renaissance person and the slaveholder and his relationship with Sally Hemings, who was an enslaved woman, and then his own children. It's a very complicated picture. And that's the way I think we have to look at our country as a whole, but it includes, again, there is promise. There has been progress, and we have a long way to go. And renewal means you look backwards at the re, and then you look forward with the new and you try to bring those together.

As we look toward 2026, we have the framework of pride in a lot of what our country has accomplished, reckoning with a lot of our flaws and aspirations. What are we going to be going forward? That became a personal mantra for me after going through a real leadership crisis in 2017, where, New America was accused of letting an employee go on pressure from a funder, that wasn't true. But as the leader, I did not handle that crisis well, and my institution was in peril. Fortunately, it is stronger than ever now, and I'm still in the job. But that personal crisis led me to go through a process of renewal that was, again, looking backward and forward. Looking backward is a process of what I call radical honesty. What I write about in my book, "Renewal" is running toward the criticism. I do not shrink, do not hide. Face it, invite it, and realize that without doing that, you cannot grow. Which is not exactly a revelation. Most therapy is based on you having to name it to change it. But in this case, it was really going to board members and saying, "You need to tell me what I've been doing wrong and don't sugarcoat it. Don't be rude, but I need to hear honestly where you think I can improve", and at the same time believing I could change. Believing that I could embrace not a completely new me. I don't believe in that. But I could change positively in ways that would mean that I was renewing a form of leadership and a way of being in the world.

So renewal for me, again, is looking backward and forward at the same time. It's facing your flaws and your attributes and understanding that through that process is tremendous growth and satisfaction. Happiness is not something we have all the time. I don't believe in attaining some kind of perfect happiness. I do believe that constantly learning and growing is the greatest gift that we can have. And renewal is that process. I would say it was for me, but I see it for institutions and indeed for the country itself.

I have, although not uniformly, and in part that is because I haven't been on a national barnstorming tour with that book, and that means that many of the audiences I talked to were more on the East Coast, more on probably my world. Although I will say the work I've done on gender and after I published my Atlantic article in 2012, I did go across the country and talked to women all across the country and was deeply heartened to feel common experiences as women, even if they had many other things that divided them. I think that on both sides of the political spectrum, the most radical voices, the most militant voices, often drown others out. And it becomes very hard to say for instance, I take pride in my country when I am talking to people of color, white people who say, "How can you say that? Given that Thomas Jefferson was a slaveholder?" And, some would say raped a woman who was under his power and had children with her. And indeed, my own family. I come from people in North Carolina who enslaved others. I come from Belgium on one side, but North Carolina and Virginia on the other. I do think it's both. Because I think simultaneously you can look at the hypocrisy, but I absolutely believe that the words of the Declaration of Independence inspired not only our own great reformers, from Frederick Douglass to Martin Luther King to the women of Seneca Falls. It is hard to find a successful reform movement in the United States that did not seize those words and say, "Okay, what about me?" And globally as well, if you look at Gandhi, if you look at many other anti-imperialist movements, etc., I do take pride in that. I think that pride should not rule out the reckoning just as I think the reckoning should not rule out the pride. But when you are talking to someone who is determined to rub your face in one side or the other, I think many people who agree with you are afraid to speak, and that somehow we have to find a way to enable what I believe as you believe. I believe there is a majority who will find common ground. It's not harmony, but that there is a majority, and in fact I can demonstrate it.

The organization, More in Common, just ran a study where they found that 70% of Americans, and this is just this year, agreed with the statement I am proud to be an American, but I recognize my country's flaws. 70%. So that validates exactly what you and I feel. Democrats who were polled thought that only 40% of Republicans would agree with that, because they thought only 40% of Republicans would recognize my country's flaws, and Republicans thought that only 40% of Democrats would agree with it because they thought they couldn't say, I'm proud to be an American. And yet, the total was 70. That encapsulates the problem, and somehow we have got to empower, uplift, focus on that 70% and not the smaller groups that are just certain that the other side is no good.

I believe very much in that understanding of human progress. It ties back to believing in faith, the power of faith. In other words, even as I understand that progress narrative, which is always what the critical legal studies people accused me of when I was teaching at Harvard Law School, that progress narratives were a liberal construct and clearly naive. I understand that if your people were consistently in the first place, owned and oppressed by people who were marching forward on this progress narrative. I totally understand why you have to call people to account. That's what Frederick Douglass does in his great speech on the 4th of July. That's what Langston Hughes does when he writes poems. And he says, "Land of the free. Not for me". And that's right. To me, part of being liberal and believing in universal values is humility and is constantly having to question, how well am I doing? How well am I doing as a human being, and how well am I doing as a CEO, and how well are we doing as a country, and that it is actually that dynamic that has led to the progress we've made. You can also say, and I believe, that the progress the United States has made and led in the world is destroying the planet, right? In other words, we are now at a point where we have to change what we even define as progress, etc. But, I believe that without the faith that you can make a better world and that you can be a better person and you can have a better life, you don't go anywhere. That is a matter of faith. It's more conviction than prediction or empirical observation. Although on empirical observation, I think unquestionably the vast majority of human beings are better off. But again, we have to now question a lot of those models. This is something we shouldn't assume. It's just going to happen. It happens if we are willing to be humble and to compare ourselves to what we say and to what we think we believe and to be constantly not immersed in self-criticism, but questioning and being honest with ourselves.

No, I won't go further than in the book because the actual details will always probably be a subject of disagreement between me and the people concerned. But what I can say is that New America was, and I was specifically accused of giving in to funder pressure, specifically from Google, and then deciding on the basis of that pressure to spin out a program. That was not true. That was a program that we had supported for a long time that I had raised money for myself. The reasons for wanting to spin it out were much more related to the internal personalities and record, but a good leader would have anticipated that because there was Google and there was an emerging tech clash, which was something that had not happened. But very quickly, the story of David versus Goliath, and New America, sort of in between giving in to funder pressure, which, as a think tank, as a university, as a scholar, will end your career, and rightly you have to be independent. You have to not be doing what funders want you to do, where it violates your values. I did not anticipate those things, or I did, but not well enough. Very quickly, we were on the front page of the New York Times twice, in a very unflattering light. It's still on Wikipedia, and I don't know if we'll ever be able to change it. And I still didn't fully appreciate the seriousness. I was abroad. I should have flown home immediately. I should have been front and center, working with my own leadership and any other help, the board, etc., in figuring out a strategy to defend ourselves. And I didn't do those things.

By the time I realized just how bad it was, we were in peril. I write in "Renewal", I start with, it was the worst day of my professional life because I called all members of the board, one of them told me to run toward the criticism as I described, and I had to go in front of my staff, some 100 plus people in a room and on the phone, which is very hard because you can't see them and you don't know who they are and apologize and explain, as I've explained now, "No, I didn't do this, but I recognize that I have failed as a leader", and that's not fun. It's extremely hard. My stomach still knots even thinking about it, but that was the minimum that I owed the organization at that point.

And then we came through it. But for me, it was a crisis and a comeuppance, a sort of questioning here. I thought I'd been lecturing on leadership, and I thought of myself as a good leader and a strong leader. Again, my career might have ended as a leader. But even more important, New America could really have been hurt as an organization. Our funders could have pulled out, and then you have 100 plus people who are depending. So it then took me a full year to think about what I needed to change, how to go through this process of renewal. Part of it was writing the book, which many people discouraged me from writing. It's a very candid sort of admission of failure, which is not encouraged in leadership. You are risking that everybody will see you as damaged goods. And I knew that and, I still felt particularly for many of the leaders, I knew many women leaders, that this would be worth it, and a gift to them. I think that's been true. But, I lead differently now. I am definitely humbler. I preached humility, I just hadn't practiced it, and I am consistently more reflective on the challenges of leadership.

Yeah. The single most important thing I did was to split my job. I was president and CEO, and most leaders are president and CEO, and they often then have an executive vice president or a COO who is the internal person, and you're the external person. That's true of university presidents. We have a president and a provost. But I took my job and I stayed CEO, and I hired somebody else as president. First, I promoted my executive vice president into the president role. Then when she left, I hired someone else as president. That has been such an improvement. In the first place, I have a partner and I need one. Leadership is hard. It's always hard. But it's hard right now. As you described, you have very divided, very strong minded younger people in particular, big generational divisions. I often feel like this is no different than the 50s and the 60s, when you had hippies and yippies. That was more visible, you could see the differences. Now it's less visible, but it's very much there. But having somebody who is younger than I am, who has a different background than I do, it's basically extended the leadership of the organization in ways that more people, I think, feel that they can talk to one or the other of us, but also that I can hear things from my president that no one else will tell me. And that has been key, because one of the things I realized was I was going along thinking that I was a leader of goodwill and that everybody in my organization understood what I was trying to do and sort of had a connection to me. Well, that wasn't true at all. I found out that many of the staff didn't know me and didn't interpret my actions at all the way I meant them or interpreted them myself.

You have to have channels of communication that are honest and timely. You can always have a study and we did this. Somebody came in and interviewed everybody and then wrote a report. You can always do that. But you need something on an ongoing basis. So splitting my job was very important. I often think of leadership now in sort of accordion terms. Sometimes I am at the top and there's no question I have to make decisions. Generally, Paul, my president and I, make them together, but I still have to be able to lead from the top. But many times I also need to be able to lead in a much more distributed way. So the organization may not be completely flat, but we have all the vice presidents, sometimes all the directors who are part of the council and even decision making. It is this kind of almost push me pull you between the two roles. And it's a hard balance, because if you're only sort of taking advice and trying to reach some kind of consensus, you often just or not lead firmly enough that people feel that they are being led, which many people need. And yet, if you're too far out front, as I was, people don't identify enough with you and don't feel that they've been heard enough to go along, and that's hard. But that's been the biggest change.

As I get older, it gets harder. At some point you just have to say, "Okay, it's time for somebody younger to do this." But for the moment, I think I've found a balance that has been working for the organization and for me.

That's interesting. I hadn't quite thought about it that way, but that's exactly right. You cannot ever predict, and at the end of my life, I will be more known for that article because people all over the world still come up to me and thank me for the article. And I've written, of course, 150 articles, but it doesn't matter. There's only one. I could never have predicted that. I actually resisted it for quite a while. I thought, "Oh my God, I'm a foreign policy person. What is this? This tsunami is overtaking me". And over time, I've come to understand. No, this may not have. I didn't intend it, but it is how my life evolved and I am grateful for it to have had an impact. I mean, what more can we ask for a positive impact. Then you learn to integrate the way the things that have happened, the things you can't predict with the things that you have tried to achieve and bend some, and stand firm some. It's that same kind of balancing as a person and as a leader and as a thinker.

Well, if I look 10 years from now, I hope that I am in a position to keep writing and to write in a way that weaves together fiction and nonfiction together and really devote myself to not to scholarly writing, but to writing in different ways than I write today. And teaching. I hope to travel the world and teach at different places. Again, not as a regular professor.

But my big dream right now is to be able to play a meaningful role in re-knitting the nation. I am thinking very hard about how to do that, how to marshal the assets I have, the networks and the contacts I have. I believe passionately that we have to maintain the rule of law, that without that we cannot survive as a nation. I started my career as a law professor, as a lawyer, as a law professor, I taught lawyers for 12 years about what law meant. I think of it as the glory and paradox of mankind because we create our own rules. Just like a sport, like football. We create the rules and then we agree to abide by them. So in the end, there is no constraint but our own will. And yet, when that is broken, we are back to a world of violence. We are back to Hobbes. And at the same time, as we've discussed, I do believe there's a majority of Americans who can see a positive narrative of the country, but also recognize our flaws and can see one another as good people who differ about how to achieve many common aims. Not all. There are some really big divisions, but nevertheless, they've always been huge divisions. And yet, we have managed to survive as a country and to offer opportunity to hundreds of millions. That's my hope. I don't know how yet to do it, but I am fortunate enough to lead an organization called New America and to have built a lot of capital, and I hope to figure out how to spend it in ways that at the end of my life, I can look back and say, "I helped meet this moment".

That's a beautiful note on which to end, I hope it is true. I've just so enjoyed the conversation. It's given me so many things to think about and reflect on, and that's the essence of a great conversation.

My pleasure.