Taking Share: Lessons From Leaders

Welcome to Taking Share: Lessons From Leaders with Rob Holmes, Chairman, President & CEO of Texas Capital. During each episode, you will hear from leaders, decision-makers and culture shapers across industries. What drives them? What tips the scales when making tough calls? How do they continue to evolve? We're here to understand the thoughts behind their actions and discover how they are taking share. Thank you for listening.

Holmes: Well, our guest today has been at the center of some of the most pivotal moments in recent history. Serving as the 66th U.S. Secretary of State, to now leading the Hoover Institution at Stanford, she offers a rare blend of strategic insight and cultural depth. A classically trained pianist, she has also made her mark in sports and business, serving on the College Football Playoff Selection Committee, becoming one of the first two women admitted to Augusta National Golf Club and now as part owner of the Denver Broncos. Her perspective on leadership, geopolitics and global markets speaks directly to the challenges business leaders face today. Madam Secretary, welcome to our very first episode of Taking Share: Lessons From Leaders. It is an honor to have you on.

Rice: Thank you. It's great to be with you. 

Holmes: Well, thank you so much. I'm going to get right into it. Let's start where we are currently located, the Hoover Institute at Stanford. You became the youngest-ever provost at 38 here at Stanford. This is obviously a very special place for you. It's no secret that you have a high regard for education. You've been vocal about education not only shapes individuals, but the strength of our country and the economy. But it seems that during Covid, parents became more aware of what their children were learning at school. It didn't matter their political beliefs, orientation. They became disenfranchised with education. And then on the second hand, higher education. Now with the current administration challenging Harvard and Columbia and others for things that they're doing, do you think that academia has become disconnected from the rest of America? 

Rice: Well, let me start by making a kind of very flat statement. Yes. Academia has become, it has become disconnected, and we need to reconnect and it's not just tertiary education, higher education. And the kind of paradox is that American higher education is the gold standard throughout the world. When I was Secretary, I can't tell you how many very high-ranking leaders or business people from around the world would come and say, "I'd like my kid to go to Stanford." So we are that. But we have drifted, perhaps from our central mission. And our central mission is to do research, that is to seek knowledge and then to transmit it to the best young minds, and to do that in a way that doesn't tell them what to think. It tells them how to think, and too many universities became bastions of political orthodoxy. I think that broke a sense of trust between the people of America and higher education. But we're getting back. I was just at a forum that we're having here at the Hoover Institution with civic educators, people who are trying to reintroduce our students and our young people to civics, to citizenship, to what it means to be American. Very important that they understand that. And so, yes, we have work to do, but these places are also remarkable when you think about the research enterprise. And it's not just Stanford and Harvard, it's Purdue and it's Texas, it's Texas A&M, where I'm proud that the George H.W. Bush School is very active. These are great engines of innovation and research, so we can get back on track, but it is in part our responsibility to do that. 

Holmes: Does it help or hurt that the current administration has taken such an aggressive stance? 

Rice: Well, it's not exactly how I would have gone about it, but I do understand that something needed to be done. I'm hoping now that we can settle into a way of thinking about protecting the independence of universities, because there are First Amendment issues and freedom of association issues. But I do think there's been a kind of shot across the bow now, and universities are responding. They're responding with civic education, with viewpoint diversity, which is important. One thing that we have here at Stanford, because of the Hoover Institution, is we have people who would be more on the center-right side of some of these issues. So our students have access to a variety of viewpoints. And, I think we will see that more in other places. But the place that I really hope we'll get back to is recognizing the importance of universities, research universities for biomedical research, for engineering. We're in an all-out race with China on the frontier technologies and 80 years ago, we decided as a country that universities would be the innovation ecosystem for the country. We don't have a plan B, and if you ask about the tremendous innovations that have come out of this places just at Stanford, heart transplantation, just at Stanford, the discovery of the double helix, the discovery of the fact of stem cells. Google came out of here, and every research university has those stories. So we need to get back to federally funded support for scientific research.

Holmes: OK. Moving to an adjacent topic as it will affect the students here today, and that's AI. You have called AI "the most important technological arms race in human history." At Texas Capital, we've had a profound investment in technology and its role in our transformation. My real question is with AI's rapid advance reshaping the labor market, how do you see the path from apprenticeship to leadership as AI takes away opportunity for apprenticeship opportunities?

Rice: Well, every technology has changed the landscape of what we study, how we study it, what skills are needed and how we employ. Every major technology from the Industrial Revolution, moving people from agricultural elements to industry, to what we are now experiencing. So I heard a great quote the other day. They said, "You're not going to lose your job to AI, but you're going to lose your job to somebody who uses AI." The important thing is that we teach our students, and look, they're ready. We have a course here called CS Computer Science 106. Something like 85% of Stanford students take it even though it's not a requirement. So they want to do this. What I have to convince my students of with AI is that it's a tool, that it's something that augments your skills. But don't let it be a substitute for your learning. So if I ask you to write an essay and you use ChatGPT to write the essay, do you really know what you are learning? Well, no you don't. And so there has to be a kind of normative shift here. Use it as a tool, but don't try to have it substitute for real knowledge. The other element of AI, though, that's really important, is that it's going to have profound effects on biomedical research. It's going to have profound effects on national security. And that's why I say that this race is so important. I want a democracy to win that race. And right now, there's only two players, really, China and the United States, Great Britain a little bit through Oxford. Just imagine this. If something goes wrong with this transformational technology called AI, and something will, we will have congressional hearings. We will have investigative reporting. You'll probably be doing stories about it on your podcast. What will China do? They'll treat it the same way that they treated Covid. They'll lie about it. They'll hide it. And so I don't want any surprises out of China on AI, which means we as a country are going to have to run hard and run fast. We're going to have to get the right skills into the economy and into government to deal with it. And part of the reason that we've started the Stanford Emerging Technology Review, which I co-chair with the Dean of Engineering, is to demystify some of these frontier technologies: AI, synthetic biology, robotics, for policymakers so that they create a policy environment that doesn't get in the way of innovation.

Holmes: Are you concerned? I heard one client who is very advanced in their use of AI and really rely on it in every aspect of their business already; they're an early adopter. And in a very positive way, he calls AI a predator because it's just so powerful. Are you worried about it? The government? And I'm not big on regulation or overregulation, but are you afraid that we're going to get behind in terms of protecting transparency and other things?

Rice: We may well, but I am seeing, partly because I live here in Silicon Valley, I'm seeing among the most important companies a recognition of the power of this technology and a desire to be responsible in its use. Not all sense of responsibility comes from the government. Some of that comes from an internal sense by CEOs and boards of directors that, you know, these are really transformational. We have to be responsible in how we use it. And so I will trust the fact that we also have a kind of distributed innovation. A lot of companies out there competing, and we have places like universities, which don't have a commercial set of incentives. I always say about universities, the great thing about being a professor, and it's true, you get up in the morning, you think, you know, I think I'd like to think about that. Why does that do that? As long as we keep people doing that, I think we have people who have the right motives, not just the profit motive. And, look, I'm a dyed-in-the-wool capitalist. You won't find any more capitalist person than I am, but we do need not just a profit motive with these really important technologies; we also need, kind of. I'll call it pure research.

Holmes: Great, well, thank you. OK, I'm going to move on to the headlines. I knew you knew I'd get there. So President Trump recently met with Vladimir Putin in Alaska. Five European leaders and NATO secretary met with Presidents Putin and Zelensky in Washington. You've known Putin since his days as a mayor. And you're widely regarded as one of the foremost scholars on Russia and the former Soviet Union. Let's, if we can, it's a broad, complex question I want to get to. So I want to kind of frame it, if you don't mind. We were involved in 2008 with Georgia, then 2014 with Crimea, and then four years ago, I believe, with Ukraine. What are the lessons that U.S. leaders have learned by the repeated actions of Putin? What could have we have done better? And does 17 years of hindsight make you change your view on how to approach Putin? 

Rice: Well, I did know him pretty well; in fact, he kind of liked me because I was a Russianist and he thought I understood Russia. But the fact is, he is a great Russian imperialist. This is not about reconstructing the Soviet Union. This is about reconstructing the Russian Empire. And he said to me once, "You know, Condi, Russia's only been great and has been ruled by great men like Peter the Great and Alexander the Second." Now, he didn't say Lenin and Stalin. He called out the name of the czars. That should tell you something about where he stands. And you can't have an independent Ukraine and a Russian Empire, because Ukraine, from his point of view, is simply part of the Russian Empire. He once told us Ukraine is a made up country. So knowing that, of course, at some point his ambitions would lead him to try to extinguish an independent Ukraine. But "why now" might be the question. And there's where the question of whether or not he took signals from Georgia, from Crimea, that there wouldn't be a response. I think Georgia is a little bit different. He just had a tremendous dislike for Misha Saakashvili, the president of Georgia. Just "how dare he," was always what he said. Ukraine is a bit different. And there, I think maybe the failure to act more decisively when he essentially took Crimea. But I will give the people credit, the West credit. When the invasion began in February 2022, I don't think he expected the response that he got from the West, which was pretty quick. If he expected to split NATO, he strengthened it, Finland and Sweden, I never thought, all the years I studied international politics, if you had told me Finland and Sweden are going to be members of NATO, I would say, oh come on. Really? That's what he accomplished. So now we are in a position, whatever the past, I will say, I think that the messy way that we left Afghanistan probably emboldened him as well. We're now where we are. And President Trump is right. This war needs to stop in however you want to think about that, because, the Ukrainians in particular, the Russians are taking advantage of their mass, but at great cost. I saw a statistic recently they had about 7% of Ukrainian territory when the war began. They now have 19%. That is at a cost of 1 million casualties, 300,000 deaths, at least a trillion and a half dollars that they've spent. And because they're just firing this defense industry, their oil industry is starting to get a little creaky because they're not really investing. The economy's starting to falter. The really very fine central bank head Nabiullina gave a pretty tough-minded speech at the Saint Petersburg Forum recently, sort of saying, things are not going so well. So, Russia also needs to end this, but Ukraine needs it. And they can't keep throwing manpower at it. So hopefully it will come in a way that I think we're starting to see emerge, which is that there will be some territorial compromise of some kind. But if Ukraine gets security guarantee that is real from the Europeans and by extension, the United States, if Ukraine can rebuild its economy on the western part of the country, which is really where the high tech, and if Ukraine can continue to hold Russia at risk, like what they did to the strategic bombing force of the Russians, taking out 25% of it, way out in the middle of nowhere in Siberia, then I think the Ukraine can then prosper and become an independent, sovereign and secure state. Sometimes in international politics, you have to freeze things where they are. Remember, we did that with the division of Germany for 45 years, and then I got to be the young Soviet specialist when we got to unify Germany completely and totally on Western terms. I wasn't even born when Germany was divided. And yet there it was. And so sometimes you have to wait, and I hope that we can get to a place where Ukraine can securely build its future.

Holmes: So some have criticized President Trump for meeting with Putin and others have called it a diplomatic breakthrough. What would you advise the president do? Would you have had advised him to talk to him? 

Rice: Well, every president is different in this regard. And I'm one who believes that the president's role in diplomacy has to fit the president. So President George H.W. Bush was not great at big speeches. He just wasn't. I remember I loved him. He was one of them. He was consequential. But I remember we went to Hamtramck, Michigan, for him to give the big speech about Poland as Poland was breaking out of the Soviet Bloc. And he said, "and I want to say to the Polish people," and I thought, "Did I forget to capitalize the P?" But he was brilliant at one-on-one diplomacy. He was brilliant at the humility that it took to step back and not, as he said, "dance on the wall" when the wall fell in November 1989. That was his strength. George W. Bush was somebody who could rally the country, as he did after 9/11, and who was kind of tough as nails in a way that was needed as Al-Qaeda was on the rise. President Trump is different. He likes the one-on-one diplomacy. But I'll say this, he's shown that he can handle it. I saw him walk out on Kim Jong Un of North Korea. I don't think he gave away anything with Putin. And he managed the Zelensky one well, so has it fit the president? Probably not the way I would do it, but, he's the president, and the diplomacy has to fit him. 

Holmes: You mentioned our exit from Afghanistan, and we talked about these other events, such as Crimea, etc... Actions have consequences. What's China thinking by our actions today with Russia? Ukraine? 

Rice: Well, there's no doubt that China, Xi Jinping, I think, have made a kind of bad bet. I can imagine that conversation at the Beijing Olympics when Putin said to Xi Jinping, "You know, I have to do this thing in Ukraine; it'll take five, six days. You know, you've got the Taiwan issue, you understand?" And, and Xi Jinping just says, "Yeah, just don't do it during the Olympics." And then two, almost three years later, here we still are. And Xi Jinping has hitched his wagon to a weakening Russia. Now, in some ways, I think he will take advantage of that discounted Russian oil. Russian becomes a minor partner, which, by the way, isn't something Vladimir Putin is going to love. But he has to be thinking kind of a little bit, what have I gotten myself into, fearing all the time that there might be secondary sanctions against China for what they're doing. So he needs this war to end too; the Chinese don't like disorder. And this is a very disorderly set of circumstances. I think after Afghanistan, I think we know, that after Afghanistan, Xi Jinping came to the conclusion that the West was in retreat, that we were weakened. I'd have to say that what happened with Iran and, the way that that was handled with President Trump might have him rethinking, and it might also have him rethinking how hard it has been for Russia to subdue Ukraine and make him wonder about the capabilities of his own forces. So I think we're in a somewhat better situation now than we were, immediately after Afghanistan. But credibility is not divisible. I would prefer that we don't do any more Afghanistans, where we show that we have no staying power. 

Holmes: So you mentioned Iran. That had to be a very, very challenging decision to make. Do you support that decision?

Rice: Oh, I support the Iran decision completely. We were dealing with the question. We weren't quite at the point that we could have done it. You know, would the United States; if the Israelis decided to try to take out nascent Iranian capability, and remember, this is almost 20 years ago, would the United States, because we had certain technologies that they didn't, would we engage? We never actually had to face that decision. But facing that decision, the Trump administration did the right thing. The Israelis had sort of set the table, if you will, that what they did to take down Hezbollah in Lebanon, this fierce, fighting force, George Tenet, who was CIA director when I was secretary, our national security advisor told us once that Hezbollah was the A team of terrorism and, poof, because of the way that they handled it. What they've done to the Iranian proxies in Iraq, who's suddenly been very quiet. You've seen the Russians couldn't save Bashar al-Assad in Syria and neither could the Iranians. And so the kind of Iranian infrastructure of terror has broken down, and that leaves Iran exposed. The Israelis have pretty much shown they can have air superiority anytime they want. The Iranians don't have the air defenses to deal with it. One of the great moments for me was when the Iranian foreign minister went to Russia the day after the attack, or a couple days after the attack, and had a meeting with Putin. And Putin came out and said, well, they didn't ask for military assistance. Really? So Iran is deeply weakened. And the final blow really was to do something about the nuclear forces. And I know for your listeners, there's a lot of back and forth of how much damage was done, suffered inside. A lot of damage was done, enough to set them back for some period of time. And it's not just damage to one element. It's very hard to build a nuclear weapon if you don't have what's called a conversion facility. And that was significantly damaged. So the Iranians are kind of in a bad way. And, we helped with that. I just hope we'll take it to its conclusion and they start again. And, as, Netanyahu said, maybe you have to mow the grass. But, for now, I think that decisive action was extremely important. And it sent a signal to all those who had said, well, is President Trump really an isolationist? What does America First mean he'll never do? Well, that's been laid to rest.

Holmes: Clearly. So you're renowned as one of the best. What's the most underrated tool of diplomacy? 

Rice: The most underrated thing about diplomacy is that diplomacy, without the ability to coerce and persuade, doesn't work. I always said I loved walking into a room as the American Secretary of State because I had the American economy in one hand, on one shoulder, and the American military on the other. But I also had a hand of compassion out through things like the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, through things like, all the way back to John Kennedy, the Peace Corps. America's been an unusual, great power. We were at one point, the primary provider of food aid to the Taliban under, to the Afghanistan, under the Taliban, to North Korea. Why? Because no American president would use food as a weapon. And so there's a sense of both power and principle with the United States that is pretty unique in human history. And so, I always thought that bringing those three elements together was really the power of American diplomacy. And, so I'm hopeful. We have some work to do to rebuild on the military side. Our defense industrial base is not in very good shape. Our economy obviously is the strongest. You know, we're kind of the prettiest house on a not very good block, internationally, but we've got that and the innovation, that we have, but we also, need to keep an eye on our ability to be compassionate and to show that America is more than power.

Holmes: I don't think most people appreciate your knowledge base in business, how many substantial boards you've been on and your involvement and your leadership in that arena. You mentioned it, the U.S. economy. Tell me a little bit about your concern or view on the debt and our ability to actually address it as a country.

Rice: Well, I'm very concerned about the debt. And if I weren't concerned, listening to the economists here at the Hoover Institution would make me even more concerned, that the truth is that we can't keep spending money we don't have. And it's fallen off the radar screen in Washington for both sides of the political spectrum as people pay some lip service to "we have to get the debt down" and then keep spending. And, of course, the hardest part is that there's not really enough spending to cut and so-called discretionary spending. We really do have to do something about entitlements. And, that's kind of a third rail in politics. So I don't know, some say if we could get to higher percentages of growth, 4 or 5%, which is tough, even 3.5 steadily, maybe we could grow our way out of the debt. But I think that's a tough proposition to believe. So, I think we don't realize that because of the debt and the debt service, we're starting to squeeze out discretionary spending and ultimately will squeeze out different spending.

Holmes: I'd like to discuss crisis leadership. You've been in the situation room when critical decisions have been made regarding some of the most difficult moments in American history, 9/11, the Iraqi war, when you got minutes, not hours to process such an immense amount of information and form an opinion and a view to advise the president and make decisions. How do you go about that?

Rice: Well, crises when it's a shock, a kind of black swan event like 9/11, that's a different kind of crisis decision-making than when you're planning what you're going to try to do in Iraq with the weapons of mass destruction and what you're taking in the intelligence; they're very two different animals. 9/11 was such a shock. And, we did not have an apparatus for the internal security of the United States because we had not been attacked on our territory since the War of 1812. And so, from our point of view, you know, we didn't even have, what are called combat air patrols that were American. They were flown by NATO members like Canada to protect the United States once that attack had taken place.

Holmes: I don't think most people appreciate that.

Rice: We didn't have a command for the United States of America, the military was outward facing. Everything we thought about was security as an external matter. And then all of a sudden, it comes from within. My point is that you will have to make up things kind of as you go along. We did not have a way for the FBI and the CIA to really combine their knowledge. And that turns out to have really been the hole that kept us from seeing 9/11, the FBI looked inward. The CIA looked outward; for a lot of civil liberties reasons, we didn't let them talk. I'll give you just a very specific example. On September 7 or 8, a man made a phone call from San Diego to Afghanistan. He would become one of the hijackers. Now, if anybody had known he was in the country, it would have set off alarm bells. But he was protected, in a sense, by the fact that we couldn't trace phone calls from inside the United States outside, for civil liberties reasons. So we had to close those gaps, and we had to do it really fast. The first couple of weeks, it was so frightening because the threat matrix was suddenly this big, and we would just have the FBI director and the CIA director in the Oval Office every morning sharing intelligence. It was brute force sharing. And so, that's different because you're kind of making it up. Later on as we got systems in place, and by the way, we captured some of Al-Qaeda's top Seal generals, you began to feel you've got a handle on it. But every day in that kind of crisis, you're just getting up and trying to prevent the next attack. When you're planning more directly, then you try to get as much information as you can, but even then, you can be sometimes blind on Iraq, very opaque place; we didn't really understand Saddam Hussein, nobody really did. And so we had certain assumptions that just turned out not to be right. So in crisis decision-making, the most important is you have to realize you're never going to have perfect information, and still you have to act. And that, I think, is the hardest thing for anybody who's involved in the decision-making, is the degree to which you just never going to know for certain that you've got the right information.

Holmes: Well, thank you for your actions during those periods. Do those moments with that much gravity, tell us about the personal toll like everybody talks about. And Secretary, National Security Advisor, like what about Condi Rice? Like how does it affect you personally?

Rice: It's very tough. I think the first days after September 11 that, you know, that was a Tuesday and that Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, you were almost in a little bit of a fog, you know, you have to act. But how could this have happened? I remember, I'm a very religious person, and I remember going to the National Prayer Service on that Friday, and we were in what felt like a funeral cortege with the president driving toward National Cathedral. And there was a man standing on the side, and he had a sign and it said, "God Bless America. We will not be terrorized." And I remember that as a source of strength all of a sudden, that the American people felt that way. And then we went into the service and the combined Armed Forces choirs did the Battle Hymn of the Republic. Now, in our politically correct world, over the years, we've changed the wording from "As he died to make men holy, let us live to make men free." But the original language is "As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free." And they sang that line. And I remember feeling again a sense of strength. And then we went up to Camp David, and John Ashcroft, the attorney general, plays great gospel piano. I play Brahmns. So John was playing, and we were singing "His Eye Is on the Sparrow" and the strength of being in a community of believers at that moment: President Bush, John Ashcroft, others, was not just reassuring, it was grounding. And after that, you're going to feel that you can do what you need to do. But, you know, we were working 18-, 19-hour days. Every night you went to bed thinking there would be an attack the next day. And I'll say one final thing about it. Even today, I have enormous remorse that we somehow didn't see it coming because 3,000 people died that day on our watch. And the most important thing becomes, don't ever let it happen again. And there were those who said that the Bush administration overreacted. I remember a former president on the other side said they acted out of fear. I thought, you bet we did. Because that next day, every day after September 11, was September 12. What is going to pop out now? And we had threat reporting about smallpox scares and about radiological scares and the like. And so those were very, very tough days. And I'm just grateful that I had my faith, that I had people like the president and our team that really kind of pulled together. And fortunately, I had great family, who would come up from time to time. But, yeah, those were tough days.

Holmes: Well, we have a shared faith, so thanks for sharing that. I was in 9/11 that day watching both buildings go down and drove home the next day and experienced a lot of what you mentioned with people just on the side of the road with posters and sheets from overpasses. I mean, all the way from New York to Texas. And I remember as horrible as that was, and we all had so many people affected by it, the country really felt like it was one. It was unified.

Rice: It was unified. And President Bush made two really fundamental decisions. One was we would we would avenge this, but we weren't just going to avenge it. We were going to make sure that we did it in a way that they couldn't do it again, which is why the Afghanistan attack took a little time to plan and so forth. The other thing was he wanted the American people to feel normal. I remember the day after the attack, we're sitting in the Roosevelt Room, and all of a sudden, where we would have had a National Security Council meeting with just, you know, the vice president, the secretary of state. And now we had the FBI, and we had the transportation secretary and we had the people who did border control. And, he said, how fast can I get up and running again? Because if Americans don't feel normal, the terrorists are winning. And I remember that as just a quintessentially important moment of leadership. The other great moment of leadership was we all went to Yankee Stadium, then, in early October for that first World Series game. And, you know, he's standing out there, standing on Kevlar and, you know, the one, and I think Derek Jeter had said something like, "Don't bounce it." And, but I thought to myself, the American people need their president to throw a strike. And he did.

Holmes: So many more questions to ask you on that, but I also want to have more topics. I'm going to leave that. Thank you for sharing that. Your leadership role in revitalizing America's core institutions. You've made that a priority and a focus at the Hoover Institute. You're focusing on finance, education, business, government, families and even social media. Where are you in that and where do you see the greatest need for renewal?

Rice: Well, we have a remarkable set of institutions bequeathed to us by the founding fathers, and that have developed over time. And yet we know that Americans are losing confidence in them. And so our first job is to understand why is it that some of the institutions have overreached and are doing things that they're not capable of doing, so people lose faith because they don't seem to be very efficient. If you look at our elections, you know, on both sides, you hear, well, there's suppression. No, there's fraud. Actually, our elections are just kind of messy. And so trying to help understand how we can get better at it. So we're both doing the research and trying to make proposals for why, how this might get better. Because no people have been as fortunate as Americans to have the set of institutions that we do. We're going to have our 250th anniversary of our birthday, 1776, pretty soon. The funny thing about it is 1776, the years after, it didn't work out so well. We had that Articles of Confederation thing that did was turned out to be very good. But eventually, with the Constitution, the Founding Fathers created something that's really unusual and unique. I have a friend, German friend, who said to me once, he said, "You know, the problem with you Americans is you think just because you have rights, you have to exercise them." I said, "Yeah, that would be us." It was called by de Tocqueville the spirit of constitutionalism, that we believe the Constitution is our personal protector. If you violated my rights, I will take you to the Supreme Court. Brown v. Board of Education. It's always some person's name in that. And so I just think we need to revitalize our understanding of our history. Our kids don't learn history the way you and I learned it. They learn it is bottom-up grievance history. We need to remind them of political history and diplomatic history. And yes, the United States of America was a slave-owning state when we first were born. But, to allow that to sully our understanding of how we've evolved and to not appreciate, therefore, who we've become. I think it's really quite sad. And so, from our point of view, it's history. It's an analysis of what has gone wrong. It's data about what has gone wrong, and then prescriptions for how to fix some of our lack of confidence in these very important institutions.

Holmes: It sounds like through all your experiences and education and knowledge and research, that you're still very hopeful.

Rice: I'm incredibly optimistic. I'm kind of an optimistic person, but how can you not be? The United States of America is, where else would you want to be fortunate enough to grow up? So, you know, I was born in Birmingham, Alabama, until I was eight. My family couldn't go to a movie theater or to a restaurant because of Jim Crow laws. And then not that long after there I was, standing there as Secretary of State of the United States of America, taking an oath of to a Constitution that had once counted my ancestors of 3/5 of a man. And oh, by the way, sworn in by a Jewish woman, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who was my neighbor at The Watergate. And you think, what other country has this story? Of course I'm optimistic. And I'm optimistic also because I get to teach in a university. These kids are remarkable. They're the most public-minded generation I've ever taught. They want to do things bigger than themselves. Now they are a little bit in a hurry. So I have to say no, just because you've googled it, you haven't researched it. Right. I also have to say no, your first job is not going to be meaningful. Your first job's your first job. What's meaningful is somebody pays you to do it for the first time. So they're in a hurry. But if we slow them down, if we say you have to know something about the problem you want to solve, they are going to do great things. And so that makes me optimistic, too.

Holmes: Okay, so we're running out of time, but I just want to get to the fun part. Minority owner of Denver Broncos. But you like the Cleveland Browns.

Rice: Well I love the Cleveland Browns from this high. But you know it's all Denver Broncos all the time now. I still watch the Browns and I'm hoping for the best for them. I'd like to see them out of the doldrums. It's such a great football city. But so is Denver. You know, I grew up in Denver. We moved to Denver when I was 12. And so it's really fun to be a Broncos owner.

Holmes: Do you have time to play golf?

Rice: I do play golf. I don't play much during the school year. I'm a weekend golfer, but in the summer, I try to get out to play. I was in Bandon Dunes, which to any golfer, that means something. By the way, don't go to Bandon Dunes unless you want to play golf. It's all you can do is play golf. But, it's a great sport. I started out life as a competitive figure skater in Colorado. When I was about 18, I thought, this is not an adult sport. Let's find something else. Then I did tennis. My dad was a three-sport letterman in college football, basketball, tennis. I got my sports gene from him. I got my music gene from my mother, who never picked up a bat or ball of any kind. So as an only child, you get to get to do both.

Holmes: Well, in conclusion, I have one question that I ask all my guests that's going to be really, really important to listeners. And that is what do you think is the most important single trait for an effective leader to have?

Rice: Integrity is the most important trait.

Holmes: That was a quick answer.

Rice: Yeah. Well, I'm absolutely convinced, the great George Shultz used to say that "Trust is the coin of the realm." If people can't trust you, then you can't really get anything done that's lasting. But it has to show up in other ways. It has to show up that you don't ask people to do things that you yourself wouldn't do. I say often to companies, if I'm on a board of directors or if I'm advising, the thing that breaks down an organization most quickly is gossip. I think trust and remembering that as a leader, people have to be able to trust both your word and your actions.

Holmes: Madam Secretary, thank you so much. What a privilege to be with you today. Thanks for all that you've done for our country.

Rice: Thank you, it was a pleasure to be with you.

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