 Welcome to you all to the Ford School. I'm so glad that you're here. It's a very special day for me to be able to introduce John Tien. Let me just give you a little bit of introduction. The Honorable John Tien was the eighth deputy secretary of the United States Department of Homeland Security. He retired from that position just recently in 2023. And he's currently a distinguished professor of practice with the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs at Georgia Tech, which I understand is a new position, and is also a senior fellow with the Belfour Center at the Harvard Kennedy School. John serves on several boards, including the Union Pacific Railroad Corporation, the Carter Center, and the Avalon Action Alliance. Prior to joining the Biden administration as the DHS deputy secretary, John worked for 10 years at Citigroup as a managing director in their US consumer bank. John's also a veteran of the United States Army and served for 24 years as an armored officer, deployed to Iraq for three different combat tours, was awarded the Bronze Star with two oak leaf clusters, and retired at the rank of colonel. His army assignments included three tours at the White House with the Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama administrations as an assistant professor of political science at the United States Military Academy at West Point. He holds a Bachelor of Science from West Point, where he was the first Asian-American to serve as first captain, which is the top ranked cadet. He also has a Master of Arts from Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar and was a national security fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School. He and his wife Tracy live in Atlanta and are active supporters of the arts. Please welcome someone I'm privileged to call a dear friend, John Tien. Thank you, Jenna, very much for that kind introduction and good to see so much of Ann Arbor in the University of Michigan and the Dean of the Ford School here as well. After 40 plus years, I have finally made it into a University of Michigan classroom. Now, why would you say that? They're like, of course, you came here to speak. You've come to the Ford School. Well, one thing that Jenna didn't mention, but she knows and her husband Scott knows is that I actually went to Gross Point South High School. I did not graduate, not because I was not academically proficient, it's because my family, my stepfather was working at Detroit Free Press and the Knight Ritter chain moved him out to Long Beach, California. And I said, I don't want to leave. This is, you know, I'm on the track team. I'm on the school editor for the Tower Magazine and all this kind of stuff. I want to stay here and I want to go to the University of Michigan or Michigan State. To be fair, I still think it's probably true. No one in this room will agree with me, I'm sure. But back in the era of Bo Schembecker and Anthony Carter, I'm getting some head nods. That's good. Michigan State and Kirk Gibson, who's still relevant, right, as a Detroit Tiger guy. You know, that's where you went. That's where you applied to, the University of Michigan and Michigan State, not Ohio State, the University of Michigan and Michigan State. Well, in my senior year of high school, I was lifting weights with my father. Now you might say, oh, this is kind of a weird story. A little bit too much information, TMI, you've lifted weights and basically through dad. Well, it's relevant because my father said to me, why were you lifting weights? And he was a football player. Now Division III, so he would never played in the big house, you know, as a Wolverine or anything. But he was still a college athlete, so father, son, bonding often came with working out together. And he said to me, John, you actually used to call me John Jr., please don't ever call me that. He said, you know, John Jr., where do you think about going to college? And I responded almost reflexively. The University of Michigan, Michigan State, or some Southern California schools where my girlfriend's at. And he said, how about West Point? And I said, I immediately said, West Point, why would I do that? It's a military school, uniforms, gray walls. And I know a little bit about geography. It's in New York, which the last time I looked is not Michigan and is nowhere near Los Angeles. And he said to me, because 50 years ago, if we had not been accepted as immigrants from China as we are escaping communist China, you would not be sitting here today. The United States of America accepted us in as we escaped communist China. My grandfather's part of the Nationalist Chinese Party and they would have been either jailed or killed or worse had they stayed in China as communist China took over in the late 1940s. So he said, the United States of America accepted us. And so we have to look for opportunities to serve this country again. What better way to go to college at the United States Military Academy and become an army officer for at least four or five years? And I said, okay, so I'll cut to the chase. I applied, I did not think I would get in. I got in and I will tell you that I went to the United States Military Academy at West Point out of obligation, but I graduated realizing it had been a privilege to have gone there. Went from obligation to privilege. Fast forward to 2021 and President Biden offers me the opportunity and is what says once the nominate you as the deputy secretary of the eighth deputy secretary of Homeland Security. I accepted that nomination as a privilege to serve. And I realized that I now had an obligation to do what's best for America. Now, to do what's best for America. That's the tagline. That's the name of my speech. Anything's done in the US interagency doing what's best for America. Now, where does this tagline come from? This was just something I made up, right? As I came in and I realized as I was, especially in my first 30 days, I kept, it was actually during my confirmation hearings, I kept having these discussions with all sorts of different people. And I realized that the priorities and the decisions and why people were doing things that didn't always necessarily jive with the national interest. It felt sometimes very individualized and sometimes felt very aligned with the political parties to include both the Republican and Democratic political parties. So for me, I kept saying, well, let's just do what's best for America. Well, interestingly, my chief of staff loved it. She goes, that's great. This is your tagline. This is how you should introduce everything. And I said, well, this is honestly my mantra because I live by it. So she was, and she didn't make any money off it. She put it on every, so it was like swag bag city, right? She kept putting in all these different things. And Mary Ellen Callahan is now, she was my chief of staff. She's now the assistant secretary for countering weapons mass destruction. The marketing skills have no connection to countering weapons mass destruction. But she was a terrific chief of staff. And I was glad she did it because it was not only my mantra, but it was the way I tried to honestly rule my own behavior, but also try to challenge others to aspire to. Here's her, this is not for sale. This is, but we'll leave this up here. This is her most popular item. Of course, it's a coffee cup. WB4A, what's best for America? People loved it. It was like the DHS thing. But it was a way to honestly keep reminding folks that this is why we're here. Whether you are a civil servant, whether you're a contractor or you're from political pointee or you're an elected official, because those are the people who I would say either as a question or a statement to, what's best for America? Or do what's best for America? And I said it to all those folks, DHS colleagues, fellow deputy secretaries, Republican and Democratic elected officials. I asked them to do what's best for America. And I think they did largely, but sometimes there were some really obvious times where they didn't. It really felt like their interests were aligned individually or protecting department equities or political parties or electoral results. And I think we see a lot of that. Now I'm not gonna go down a bunch of negative rabbit holes and tell you all the times that people didn't do it. I'm much more of a glass out full, I'm more of, I try to be more, I aspire to be a more positive type of leader. So I thought I would do today. And again, I'm a classroom dean, associate dean, lots of professors here. I thought I would do is go through a bit of a case study approach. But it also kind of charts my life a little bit. You've heard what I've done throughout my life. It won't be I was born in New Haven, Connecticut in 1963. But I thought I would take you through three of the administrations I served in. And a case study where in the interagency, the interagency and the administration, I think chose the course of action, the path to do what's best for America. Even though in those moments, in those years, in those historical narratives, there were tensions to do so otherwise. So what are the three case studies that I'm gonna talk about? One would be 2008 in the Bush two, the president George W. Bush, one in the Obama administration in 2010, and then most recently last year in 2023 in the Biden administration. So let's start with the first case study in the Bush administration. I had the honor and somewhat interesting perspective to be able to see this particular case study from both on the ground, what you might call tactical, and also at the national strategic level on the ground and tactical. How so? Well, 2006 to 2007, one of the things, and Jenna told you, I had three combat tours in Iraq. I was an Army colonel, but one of my combat tours in Iraq was 2006 to 2007. When I was the task force, 237 Armored Battalion Commander in charge of 1107, actually 1112 American soldiers, airmen, Marines, and sailors, and mostly soldiers, most U.S. Army soldiers, and it was both in the Northwest of Iraq and in Western Iraq. One of our missions was to go to Alambar Province in 2008. And this was a really difficult, I'm sorry, into 2006 to 2007. And if you know your history in 2006, 2007, it was probably the low point for the Iraq war. This is the Bush administration at the time. 2006, things are not going well. We're effectively, we are really losing the war. And in Alambar Province, which was Saddam Hussein's former stronghold, where the Sunnis really ruled, it was a really difficult place. We had the highest casualty rate, and I was in control of northern Ramadi. And my parent brigade, first brigade, First Armored Division, led by then Colonel Sean McFarland, he goes on to a great career as a lieutenant general in the United States Army. We had a really worsening and deteriorating security situation. And when you're in a situation like that, where you're losing a couple of soldiers a week and there's a significant wounded inaction and IEDs and improvised explosive devices, you realize that if you are gonna bring more of your soldiers home, you need to change things. And so we decided, Colonel McFarland, my battalion 237 armor, that we really should start working with the Sunnis. Now, again, I know you're not all Iraq war historians, but if I can set the historical narrative here, in 2006, 2007, the Bush administration's chosen party that we were backing was opposite of Saddam Hussein's party. So not the Sunnis, but the Shia, in particular the Maliki government. And so by us saying, hey, look, we need to start talking to Saddam Hussein's former tribal leaders and really his allies. It pretty much shook up the Bush administration and they're like, why would you do that? Just double down, triple down with the Shia government, with the Shia police and the Shia military. We said, because it's not working. All politics is local. That's what Tip O'Neill said. And I will tell you, all security is local. So we said we really need to partner with these Sunni tribes, with the Sunni military age males, with the Sunni police and we did. I give the Bush administration and the Bush Interagency a lot of credit. In 2006 and 2007, they let us do it and it turned into something called the Sunni or Alambar Awakening and it worked. It worked. It really did turn the tide of the war in a good and positive security direction and who got involved, the Department of Defense, Department of State and USA, all at a very much local level. Now you might say, oh, is the case study over there? Deputy Secretary? Nope, because I promised you. It was on the ground and it was also strategic. A year later, I'm coming out of the Harvard Kennedy School where I did a year, basically a graduate fellowship and they assigned me the Army. Sometimes the Army is smart. Hopefully they were smart in this regard and they assigned me to the National Security Council in a particular, the Iraq directorate. And so I show up and they go, oh, great. You're here because there's a set of policies that you're probably, you know, a little something about and we're trying to figure out whether or not we should continue to fund and support it. And I said, what was that? And they said, it's the SUNY Awakening, which we think you know a lot about. And I came in and I said, well, where are we at? What are the options on the table? And this is how the National Security Council work and because you're sort of charged with the interagency and they said it's doubling down, tripling down to have USA fund the SUNY engineers that have the State Department open up diplomatic ties with SUNYs, honestly, Sodom, Usain, former allies literally from the Department of Defense to continue to support and train the SUNY police in the military. And I said, well, you should absolutely do that. But it was already in train. So I give the Bush administration a lot of credit that in 2008, an election year, now President Bush, you know, he's not standing for election. This is the Obama-McKean election, but still no Republican president wants to say, we might have made a mistake. To their credit, the interagency and the administration made that choice, made the pivot, and it really did turn the tide of war. I think the Bush administration and the Bush interagency, Defense, State, USA did what was best for America in 2008. All right, if you're smart and you go to the Ford School, you know that at least one case study is down. Second case study, the Obama administration, 2010. Again, an election year. Now, President Obama ran on, we're gonna up our game in Afghanistan, we're gonna continue to pursue al-Qaeda, we're gonna try and capture Osama bin Laden. Well, this is 2010. If you remember your Afghan war timeline, we don't kill capture Osama bin Laden until May 2011. So we didn't know that was gonna happen. So we're still finding a pretty hard counterinsurgency war in Afghanistan. Well, 2010, the dilemma here, or the tension here for the interagency was we ended up having to balance a really delicate strategic equation, the diplomatic equation between Afghanistan, Pakistan and India. Why? Because in 2010, again, if you remember your history a little bit here, we had, or in the region, they had one of their biggest configurations, one of the biggest flare-ups on the Kashmir border between Pakistan and India. So India comes to us in 2010 to the United States of America and says, hey, you're partners with Pakistan in Afghanistan, kind of not newfound partners, but you really upped your game with Pakistan quite a bit. We need you to put some pressure on Pakistan to help calm things down in Kashmir. Of course, the problem is everything's linked here. We really needed Pakistan to be very much on our side relative to the Afghan war. Why? What is Pakistan the Afghan war? Number one, the Pakistani military would control or had influence over the Pakistani Taliban and influence on the Afghan Taliban, and in particular, in the tribe, in the shared border between not India, Pakistan, but Pakistan, Afghanistan, very long border in the Hindu Kush, and in particular in the Fatah along the federally controlled tribal areas. The other thing we needed Pakistan for was all of the supply lines in the military, we called it the G-Locks, the ground lines of communication. They all came from the southern Pakistani ports up into Afghanistan, so very logistics and also in terms of the military, we really needed Pakistan. So what is the Obama administration to do? India is our strategic partner, world's largest democracy. How are we going to not appease them, but make sure we maintain really good strategic relationships with them? Yet we have this transactional tactical need we need for Pakistan. And so the interagency had to thread the needle, and they did. They threaded the needle quite a bit and they devoted tons of resources to the Afghan, Pakistan, India equation. In fact, historically, you know, be interesting, we've got all these smart local scientists in here. I think one of the largest interagency task force ever assembled and led by the State Department, not by the Department of Defense, was the special representative for Afghanistan, Pakistan. SRAP led by the most senior diplomat at the time that they had available, Richard Holbrook, who was legendary for sure. Now, you know, rest in peace, he died while he was literally in the office of the SRAP. But it was incredible, the amount. And again, I'm not here to judge the outcome of how things went. I'm simply saying that the interagency really stood up and said, this is what we're gonna have to do in order to manage through this. The other thing that I think the interagency did well, relative to balancing that equation between Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India, was they sent some senior diplomats and essentially did shuttle diplomacy to all these different places. And fortunately, I was the NSC senior advisor for one of the most senior diplomats. I don't think he would necessarily, he's still alive, go buy diplomat, he probably just rather be called General Jim Jones. He was the national security advisor, the first one for President Obama. And I went with General Jones on all sorts of different aircraft to Islamabad and Pakistan, to New Delhi and India, to Kabul and Afghanistan. That was a very cold C-130, and to Brussels for NATO and ISAF, because we also needed forces into Afghanistan. How did it turn out? I'm not here to judge the Afghan war or the effort or the relationships with Pakistan and India. It's the choice that the interagency makes at the time to do what was best for America, which is really to make sure we kept the priority on making sure we were shaping, empowering, and enabling and resourcing the Afghan war effort. Because really that was the priority at the time. We threaded the needle, we got casualty calmed down, we increased NATO forces in Afghanistan, and for the time being, had probably one of our better years against the Afghan Taliban. Third case study, final case study, again, if you're counting. This is the Biden administration, and this is last year, it's 2023. Now, I've just used wards for the first two case studies, and that's kind of sad and dreary a little bit. So let me now do one that's a little less serious, and maybe even some fun. And I will tell you, even in the Ford school, the interagency can be fun, okay? Oh good, I got a little bit of laugh, thanks. It wasn't even canned. This was something that you may have participated in. If you Google in late January 2023, these three letters, H-A-B, high altitude balloon. And what I'm talking about, good. I got a laugh from one of my colleagues here in the room, and it's like, oh, I remember this, that's right. This was the Chinese spy balloon. They came very visibly into the U.S. airspace on January 20, 20, 2023. So about a year and three months ago. And so why do I choose this one? I choose it for two reasons. One, because I'm getting some laughter. Two, because it seems to be a little popular. Three, it was really popular in the Area 51 crowd. Right there, we're just like, it's a UFO. It was just, I can go on record here. I'm not divulging any classified information. I will not talk about aliens, I'm not allowed to talk to you about that. But it is, it was not a UFO. I guarantee you it was not a UFO. But the other reason I'm talking to you about this is because it was really unexpected. Like this was, this China didn't plan it, and we didn't anticipate it. It was totally, it was like, what? I remember there was a ton of things going on budget for 2024, all sorts of things in early 2023. Secretary Tony Blinken was supposed to go to China the next week. It was like, whoa, what do we've got here and what are we dealing with? Well, in these cases, if you've ever been in the interagency, during these times, there's, and we all have day jobs. Like we're all doing things, cybersecurity, Coast Guard, things of that nature. And the NSC pulls us together and said, all right, we gotta figure this one out. Now, sometimes in these cases, not this case, because obviously I'm telling a good new story, the interagency goes into what I call the not me defensive crouch. Don't look at me, not me, not me, not me. In this case is the opposite of what happened. The interagency stood up. I was super proud, I was proud. My, you know, to be fair, when I went back to DHS to my components, they didn't go not me, but they're like, I don't know, maybe somebody else's lead. I said, yes, but here's the deal. We absolutely will have equity and responsibilities, authorities and resources. So what do you got? So I'll tell you about the DHS thing in a second. Well, fortunately, I think the Biden administration made the right call. The National Security Council in their role as honest broker, honest, the honest broker said, all right, it's a bit all over the map here. Department of Defense, Northcom, you're the lead. But this had a lot of different components to it. Number one, Department of Defense in Northcom, tracking inferential kinetic action, which is how it ends on February 4th when they shoot it down over the territory of waters in South Carolina. The director of national intelligence for assessing the Chinese high altitude balloons capability for intelligence gathering over what all the places was flying over, which was a good portion of the Eastern United States. The Department of Transportation for how it was potentially really interfering with civil aviation. NASA is this near space. I learned a lot about near space and orbits and low-earth orbits and all those sorts of things. Where was the Chinese high altitude balloon in that regard? In the end, it was much more, it was above normal aviation, below where the satellites go. And I guess this is where high altitude balloons fly. The other thing NASA was doing is, I still remember this, I think it was like the third day, the NASA person came in and the deputy was like, okay, so when this crashes, this is what the two buses are gonna look like. And I'm thinking, oh my God. And in fact, this is where Homeland Security came in. Because if it did crash in a landmass, NASA was like, it's gonna be really bad, right? And if it crashes on a mall in St. Louis or something like that, it's gonna be really bad. And we're not gonna have a lot of time before it crashes. And so we had to get FEMA alerted. So essentially I said, look, FEMA, I'm giving you 24, maybe 48 hours notice of a pretty significant local disaster thing. And we don't know what's in there. What is actually inside? What's the payload like? These are nuclear materials, there weren't, but we didn't know that at the time. The Cyber Infrastructure Security Agency, CISA, they had to get involved, why? Because it's Cyber Security and Infrastructure Security Agency. So one of the things they had to do was assess what infrastructure this spy balloon, we're pretty sure it was spy, well we know it was spy balloon, was flying over, what were they capturing? And I said, there's a lot from Montana to South Carolina to fly over. And there's, if I got, I think there's some former veterans in the thing, there's like you're thinking silos, yep, it's all those sorts of things. So they had to get in, we had to alert them, can you cover these things up? This is, we really didn't have this. We know there's spy satellites, but it's very different from what a slow moving versus a satellite that goes sort of like this. Very different element to it. And then finally, the United States Coast Guard who had the task and purpose and the responsibility to secure the territorial waters off of South Carolina to essentially keep mariners out of the way. Now, sometimes Murphy really messes with you and in this case we got lucky. Even in South Carolina it's cold in January so there weren't that many mariners. So the Coast Guard had to secure, put out the notice to mariners and it went pretty effective. And then that's when, on February 4th with a fast mover in F-16, I watched it live from a secure facility, brought down the Chinese high altitude balloon, the Navy pulled in and that's it. Air Liam bodies were pulled off and all that. I'm teasing, I'm teasing, I'm teasing. It was effectively a spy balloon. So what's the moral of this story? The interagency, this is a tough one. No, everybody had different things. In the State Department, again, I forgot them, sorry, literally Secretary Blinken was supposed to be in China in the next week. And China, this was right hand, left hand, they finally, at first they were like, we don't know what it is, weather balloon, like all sorts of essentially fabrication, misinformation. They finally said, we just screwed up, okay? We, yes, there's a part of our government that does this, they screwed up. Please don't let this impact what was looking like a mini-day taunt. And look, the tensions are still high between the US and China. They were very high back in January and this was an opportunity to send the Secretary of State, your senior diplomat over there to meet with his counterpart and it got delayed by a couple weeks. And to China's credit, they said, we just screwed up, please send Secretary Blinken. So, you know, that story ends well. I've talked, I think, in a very positive way about the interagency. As I look around this room and for the hundreds students or so that I've met with over the course of today in the Ford School and at the Ross School of Business, you know, in your eyes, in your spirits, I see some great future members of the US interagency. And I hope that you'll consider those opportunities to be civil servants, to be contractors, to be political appointees. I met some PMF, Presidential Management Fellow candidates. Right, it is a great program. It is a great way to not only serve the United States of America, to not only serve the United States government, doesn't matter which party, but it is a great opportunity to do what's best for America. The other thing is, as you look around this room and in the rooms that you are taught in, you're gonna see some folks who you will see again. When I went back as Deputy Secretary, which is a long time after I've been through education programs, I had tons of folks who I had served with or I had been in educational programs with. To Harvard, when I was Deputy Secretary, I went in second day, the third senior ranking SES civil servant in FEMA was one of my Harvard Kennedy School classmates in 2007, 2008. I went over the counterweapons mass destruction. One of my classmates was a senior contractor there. My White House fellow classmate, Carlos del Toro, was the secretary, or is the secretary of the Navy. And even if we go back all the way to 1987, and I see some students saying, I didn't even know that year existed, if I go back all the way to 1987, two of my Oxford classmates, my Rhodes Scholar classmates were in Washington, DC. One was Dr. Atul Gawande, the assistant administrator for global health for USAID. And of course, Michael Barr at the Federal Reserve Bank who was your former dean here at the Ford School, and I think just spoke there, so I just missed overlapping with Mike Barr. Relationships matter, substantive understanding of your topic, of your policy area matters, and how you communicate matters. So I will leave you with this one thing, which I know your professors, my main goal is not to entertain or educate all of you students. My main goal is to make the professors happy with me. So I will just say, and the dean and associate dean is, work really hard on developing your skills as communicators. Work really hard on these policy memos that they're teaching you. I've talked to your dean, I've talked to your associate dean, I've talked to a bunch of your professors to include Jabid Ali. They are teaching you the way to write the policy memo. I'm not gonna sit here and tell you how to work right a policy memo, but I will tell you the importance is incredible. There's this great saying, I think it originated with the French mathematician and philosopher Pascal, and then later echoed by a bunch of people to include Mark Twain, who said, I didn't have time to write a shorter letter. I didn't have time to write a shorter letter. That is the moral of the story for a policy memo. Keep it concise, you must make it substantive, you must. And so as you think through, as you take your courses, listen to your professors please on the importance of the policy memo. My best course that I ever took in graduate school was at the Harvard Kennedy School in 2007. And it was to write a policy memo and then present it as if you were presenting at the National Security Council. And my professor was a man named Ash Carter. Ash Carter was the last Department of Defense, Secretary of Defense for the Obama administration, but sadly in October, 2022, he passed away while he was once again teaching at the Harvard Kennedy School. Professor Carter taught me how to write a policy memo, taught me how to brief a policy memo. In my opinion, always did what was best for America. Thank you and go blue. So we thought maybe I'd have a little conversation with John now and then we'll open it up to some questions in a bit. Thank you, John, that was fabulous. So I wanted to start by, I mean, oh my goodness, I've just learned about the path not taken. You didn't become a Wolverine back when Scotty and I did as undergraduates here, but you chose to go to West Point instead. And then not only go to West Point, but to stay, to stay in the military for 24 years. So can you talk a little bit about that decision? Why, why did you stay? You know, what's point is an interesting place, right? I probably shouldn't say, I'll say it because it's probably a little bit funny. It's like a prison with really good books, right? There's not a lot of do, but now I say again, it went as an obligation, I didn't really understand it. I didn't come from a military family, but over four years, you realize it is not a prison. It's a community, right? Because there's like-minded people who are focused on the defense of the nation. The motto of the United States Army is this will defend, this we will defend. The motto of West Point is duty on our country. In fact, it's on my ring. My class motto is our country will strengthen. Right, these feel like bromides, but at West Point, they teach it, they act it. You're taught by United States military officers and whether it's physics, some of your folks who are graduate students, I met one veteran at the Ross School who's doing an MBA who will go back and teach in engineering at the United States Military Academy. Now I'm not trying to make this totally an app for West Point, but I really like the mission. I like this idea of service nation. My father was right. We had an obligation to serve the country again, and then I was given that opportunity. Now something very interesting happened, and I think had it not, I might not have stayed. I went to Oxford for two years as a Rhodes Scholar. I come out, then in 1989, the Army assigns me to a place called Friedberg, Germany. It's near Nuremberg, Nuremberg Trials. It's in Southern Germany and the beautiful Barbarian Alps. It's very pretty, get really good, warm beer and bratwurst and stuff. And you go there, and our mission was to defend the Cold War, right? I was on one of the last missions on the Czechoslovakian East German border. I got there three months later, I got there August, four months later, the Berlin Wall falls in over 1989. Boy, that felt really good, even though I had very little to do with it. This Cold War that my, the generation before me and the military had fought, but really the United States of America, Reagan, part of everybody else had been fighting this Cold War for so long, and the peace that it did was coming true, and democracy was spreading through the land. So it felt good to be part of that. Then Operation Desert Storm happened, and I'm gonna close this out after Desert Storm. I had a chance to go and lead a scout platoon leader in combat. I got to see what a well-trained, well-resourced unit looks like, semi-well led by me as a scout platoon leader. My wife got to see what it's like to be a family resource group leader. She had all these, she had like 15 scout platoon leader wives and some very angry girlfriends, a lot of them German girlfriends, and she was sort of like their mother head, and she was 24, and you know Tracy, she's a good mother head, but she was only 24 at the time, didn't even have kids of her own. And I came back from that assignment, and I said, wow, I really like the army. I've seen the Berlin Wall Fall, I've seen us be victorious in Desert Storm. I would love to give this shot for another five years. And I asked my wife, I said, what do you think, because it's a five-year obligation on West Point, and she said, I'm way up for it. I love serving the country this way as well. And then one thing turns into another, and you get the, the one time where I would have, I was considering pretty heavily about getting out of the army was 2000. I'd just finished teaching at West Point. I'd been a White House fellow. I'd been exposed to some other networks. I said, this is probably the choice. Then 9-11 happened, and the day I watched, I was at Fort Oren, California. I watched the towers fall. I alerted my Bradley Fighting Vehicle Company to be possibly deployed to Los Angeles International Airport, because we didn't know what was going on. And I turned to my wife and I said, we're going to war against somebody, right? We didn't know. We didn't know it was in the southern bin a lot at the time. We didn't know it was okay to, but I go, we will go to war. And indeed we did. And that really carried me, not my war, hungriness, but the fact that I had an obligation that the army had trained me for effectively 13 years to fight as a combat arms officer in the defense of the nation. Yeah, and you don't leave at that point. You don't leave. Well, I want to fast forward. And just as we're thinking about homeland security and one of the thorniest policies that they're in charge of is overseeing the US-Mexico border and dealing with immigration, both legal and illegal. And it seems like DHS is getting all the blame for the crisis at the border. And then in particular, the secretary, Secretary Mayorkas has been impeached. So thinking about all that you've been sharing about leadership, what do you think it's like inside the DHS headquarters right now? How does having this first cabinet secretary since 1876 to be impeached, how does he carry out his duties? And maybe the hardest question, how do we get there? Yeah. So let me start with the impeachment thing first. Right now, I'm gonna try to be very hard not to be too much partisan here, but there really are no grounds for impeachment. There are no high crimes in misdemeanor here. What there are objectively and frankly are some difficult policy choices that we as the Biden administration have made. There are some very difficult external conditions that no one really controls from a push and pull factors, most notably that the United States economy, and I'm sure I got some economists in here somewhere, recovered at a astronomical rate relative to not just the rest of the world, but to Latin America. In particular, the countries of Venezuela, Cuba, Haiti, Honduras, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Panama and Colombia a little bit, right? And so there was a tremendous push factor because of economic migration. And then there's the pull factor of the fact that we had a recovering post COVID environment. Plus there was no more COVID, right? And so there was this ability to move, no individual fear. So it was a perfect storm of the fact that you've got a very robust economy. You do have a different administration. Your strategic communications matters. The Trump administration just like you are not welcome and we're gonna make life awful and we're gonna separate your children. The Biden administration, I'm proud to be a Biden administration person. I'm proud to not separate families at the border. But you know what happens when you do that? The cartels who make money off of the migrants doesn't matter where they're from to push them up. So we were in a really difficult situation. So I'm really answering your last question first. We're in a difficult push and pull factor. For secretary of my orcus, you know, Ali my orcus, he's probably not gonna watch us, but if he does, he'll say, I'm not talking to you anymore, right? Stop talking about how nice I am and how good a guy I am, how hard a worker I am, but he is. I mean, Ali my orcus, look at this, look at the secretary of my orcus's bio. He is a Cuban refugee. His parents brought him over as they escaped the Fidel Castro regime. He eventually naturalizes. He has so many different, he's a very smart guy, has many choices, goes to law school, gets sort of recruited by all the white shoe law firms and everything. And what does he end up, he does some law firm work, but what does he eventually do, choose? He chooses to become a U.S. attorney and so forth, boy, he did some big RICO cases. He's told me a lot about them. Then he joins, he's the longest serving. He's been a member of the department of Homeland Security as a political appointee for over 11 years. Here's a person who has many, many other choices. And what does he get for it? He gets ostracized through this impeachment. Here's what's so ironic about this impeachment. If you were to pick, and I can say this now, right, if you were to pick one official, one official in the Biden administration who most aligned with the things that the Republicans in the House Republicans wanted to be done on the border, it would be Ali Mayorkas, right? I mean, he stood up processing centers. He surged forces into the border. He took away from other assets in order to step it up there. He created new legal pathways because he's a brilliant lawyer, but he's a brilliant immigration lawyer having been the head of U.S. citizenship and immigration services. He did a legal pathways with Cuba. It's called CHNV, Cuba, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, to give, and he pushed for regional migration centers. If all those things added up and you could do those in the right way, we'd probably take off 30, maybe 40% of the migration. Maybe you take off 70% because it would change the strategic momentum of how the cartels communicate to these migrant families who are desperate, desperate to come in and I totally understand that. Remember, I'm the son of an immigrant. Ali is not only some immigrants, but he's an immigrant himself. So really, no grounds for it. And by the way, while he was getting impeached, this is gonna make a great case study in what I call great citizenship. I wouldn't say, some secretaries, who knows, I'm just picking it as a generic. Some secretaries, where they're going through impeachment when they've been fighting left and right and sending out, well, Secretary Mayork is doing. He was doing negotiations with Senate Republicans coming up with a bipartisan bill to deal with the chaos at the border. That's what he was doing. So what's it like in the headquarters? I know what it's like. I talked to somebody in the headquarters yesterday, but really, I wouldn't predict this anyways. He's coming to work and he's working even harder because as he looks at it and he goes, this is what the Republicans are gonna do. And he doesn't even call Republicans, he said, this is what others forces wanna do. My job is to come in here and do what's best for America and support the mission of the Department of Homeland Security. That is, with honor and integrity, we will safeguard the American people, our homeland, and our values. That's what Allie Mayorkas is doing right now. I guarantee it. It's really inspiring to think about always keeping in mind what's best for America and being mission-driven. And it certainly feels like the border could have consumed all of your time, but you were the Chief Operating Officer for DHS. And so beyond the border issues, what were some of the highlights of your Deputy Secretary and Chief Operating Officer time at DHS? Well, it was interesting, there's COO and then there's the Deputy Policy Job. Those are two full-time jobs on their own. And the Secretary and I definitely divide in and conquer because DHS is consuming. My first day around the Secretary came in, he's a lawyer, I won't ask how many lawyers are in here, I know there's a few, and I'm about to make fun of you, so don't raise your hand. So lawyers have not discovered iPads, they still have legal pads, right? And he came in with a legal pad and I'm thinking, okay, whatever, the Secretary has his way about them. And the couple of staffers who came in with them, they're like, rolled their eyes a little bit like, okay, the Deputy's about to get Allie and we didn't call it that, I just made that up. But it was like, effectively, they were like, whoa, the Secretary's coming on with his legal pad and I saw there's all this writing, he's got very nice script. And I said, sir, what is that? And he goes, stop calling me sir, call me Allie. I was the only person who got to call him Allie, no one would do it. So I would mix sirs and Allies where it makes sense. And so as long as he said, he was the head of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, then he was the Deputy Secretary. So always a little tricky to be hired by somebody who helped your job before you. And anybody in the military knows that's really difficult because they know how to do your job better than you. And he came in and said, these are all the things I didn't get done as the Deputy. So I want you to get done. I said, Allie was probably the reason why you didn't get done. Why aren't they really hard? And he said, yeah, but you're a smart guy and we got to do it. But actually at the top of the list, it was to restore cultural pride and departmental security. The department really got beat up. I'm not being partisan here. I think I'm just being objective. Got really beat up in the Trump administration in norms and traditions just under the bus. And so I said, well, I'm on for that. I'm a culture carrier, I think in a positive way and I'll do my best there. But then there were all these other things. And one was really to transform the department and continue the transformation of what the Post 9-11 Commission 20 years earlier or at that point, 18 years earlier that said, which is you got to break down these silos for data. So, you know, I done a big, that was my last job at Citibank was data transformation and doing straight through processing, golden data, things of that nature and make sure that on the other end, when we fuse the data in the right way that we would have actionable intelligence to go after the bad guys, the terrorists, the ransomware, the cyber non-state actors and state actors and the cartels. So I worked really hard on data transformation at a great CIO and Eric Heisen and a great management undersecretary, Tex Alas, who helped me all through all of that. One, a political pointy and one a long time civil servant, Tex Alas who was a retired Marine two star fixed wing guy. So that was a big part of my job, the budget obviously. One of the other things I did was to fight the cartels on counter drug in particular counter fentanyl. Really, look, I realized that if I look around this room statistically, one in three of you know someone who died of fentanyl or an opioid overdose. It's really sad. I mean, today about 210 Americans die of an opioid overdose or in particular a fentanyl or fentanyl like substance. If ISIS-K, this is the group that is blamed and I think perpetrated the heinous act in Moscow last week. If ISIS-K was shooting down a Boeing 737 of 210 Americans a day, we would be at war with ISIS-K and we would be stepping up in a significant counter ISIS-K effort. Now we already are for other reasons, but that's where you're going to be. And so we, the Biden administration hasn't solved it, the Trump administration didn't solve it, but we pushed back really hard. And one of the things I tried to do along with a great set of staff, especially in INA, Ken Weinstein, the Undersecretary for Intelligence Analysis and some others, was to bring in other parts of the intelligence community who here too for, had it really worked that much on counter fentanyl? In particular, I'm talking about, this will be interesting to anybody who knows anything about the intelligence community, DIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, NGA, the National Geospatial Agency, right? And NSA, I can only say so much about that, but it's the cybercom part of NSA. CIA already had a counter in NCTC and some others. Why? A, it takes a network to defeat a network, so I really wanted to step up and deliver a new network into the equation. I learned about something, what's it called, Scott? Variety? Law of Records, if variety. Again, I just care about getting good grades from the professor's law of records of variety. It's like you want factors on factors, number of factors. Ashby was the smart guy from the UK. I call it, you need a network to defeat a network. And so that's where we went after that. And then the last thing was being the Deputy Service Secretary, I'm just so I can finish the question, was being the Deputy Service Secretary for the United States Coast Guard. The Coast Guard has obvious missions in the literals and securing our maritime environments, including for cyber, but what's the great thing about the Coast Guard from an international perspective is all the island countries, Fiji, the Philippines, Vietnam, they like the Coast Guard white hauls when they pull in to port. They are sometimes concerned when the gray hauls come in. And what am I talking about? White hall is Coast Guard. What is the Coast Guard famous for? Saving lives, dealing with illegal fishing and patrolling territorial waters. What are the US Navy gray hauls famous for? War, right? And so these countries, even New Zealand, who's a great ally, it was my last international trip, said, look, you in the United States have the advantage of half a globe away from China. China is the big brother in this hemisphere. So we want to partner with the United States of America. Let us partner with the Coast Guard versus the Navy, right? Not all the time, but it does provide us, if you want to extend the reach of the United States military, how about considering extending it through the Coast Guard? So I worked really hard with the Coast Guard on that, come up a bunch of different options. And also the Arctic could be an interesting new frontier. We don't want it to be a frontier of war, but it could be hopefully a new, a continued frontier of global cooperation. To include, it used to be with Russia. So I could meander on the Coast Guard. I love the Coast Guard. Semper Paratus, always ready. This, as you've been talking about all of these, you know, kind of threat areas that we're familiar with. And then in the news, we hear a lot about TikTok. How is it that TikTok is a threat to our country? So the TikTok is such an interesting case. I've talked about it a few times today already. There is some classified elements of this, right? So the Senate Select Intel, the House Select Intel, you know, they probably would want to share more to demonstrate why this is a threat. If I were to take out my phone, which I will, because it's a good prop here, and I would ask everybody else to take out their smartphone, I won't ask you, it's an invasion of your privacy. Probably you don't want to show that you're Android versus Apple. I'm teasing, I'm an Apple person. And I said to you, hey, if we go to war, and I'm not saying it's just when we should go to war, that we're gonna go to war with China, but if Ukraine is a possible proxy for Taiwan, if China decides to invade Taiwan, cross the strait, we're gonna end up in this proxy war with China, and I'm not telling you any tales out of school, just this is in a thousand articles, Atlantic Council, Heritage Foundation, it's everything, right? We're gonna end up in this proxy war with China. Now, China becomes Russia, and so if I told you that this country in which we're in a proxy war with is inside your phones knows 90% of the things about you, and they aren't the things that your actual words like, oh, I know people who have got my social security number, I know folks know, maybe we'll get into our financials, but they know the most personal things about you. They know, they can do a profile on you, they probably know your health data as well, right? And they certainly know your social media and your social health data. It will become, and there's 150 million Americans are on TikTok, I am not. I watch the occasional YouTube short if there's a good Atlanta Falcon video or something, or Taylor Swift crushing it. It's really hard to ignore Texas Hold'em, I will tell you that, I mean, it's a great song and it's everywhere on YouTube shorts. But so I get it, I certainly get it, but that's essentially what Mike Gallagher, who's the congressman, the Republican congressman, who just is about to retire, and 352 House representatives have said is, China has way too much influence in a hundred half of the Americans, many your age in here, is gonna have way too much influence on all of you. And they're not a sworn enemy, but they're certainly not a close ally of us. Now are there a lot of different options here? A lot of options have been offered, and I was part of the SIFIUS committee, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States of America, SIFIUS, it's little known, but it's usually made up of commerce, justice, treasury, defense, homeland security and some others. And a lot of SIFIUS offered to bite dance and said divest, right? And then you can do, that will be fine, right, divest. Bite dance has said, we'll create a Oracle cloud platform in Texas and nobody from China will ever go in there, but it's just not enough, right? I think at least in their opinion. So I think at the end of the day, this is going to come down to, and it's a tough choice, Americans for free speech, that's probably where we'll go in the courts, and Americans are gonna say, I'm willing to give up my privacy, I'm willing to be influenced by the largest communist government in the world, I'm willing to be influenced by, and I'm not, I'm trying not to be pedantic here or philosophical, I'm willing to be influenced while we're at war against this country and our proxy war by that country in the most personal way. So I'm not trying to defend it, I'm just trying to explain it. I'm not in the government anymore. Talk to my Gallagher. I have a couple more questions, but I thought maybe we could take one or two from the audience. If you have a question, go ahead and raise your hand, and we have one over here. Cindy, write down here. Hi, is this working? Cool. So throughout your talk, you mentioned a lot of these portable skills or, I don't know, frameworks or epistemologies that sort of permeate a lot of the actions that internal agencies are taking. So some of the ones I picked up on are localizing politics, partnering with local police, threading the needle, considering all variables, even indirect actors. And so I was wondering if there were any other factors or just frameworks that you think carry across a lot of these national security policies or other considerations that you think are generally present in those types of decisions. Well, you fed right into a funny thing that my staff would make fun of me on, I would say what's best for America a lot. It's a great tagline. We could sell millions of these, we're not. The other thing that they came up with was something called a TNO card, which is a bingo card of sayings that I would say, constantly over and over again. And one of the things, I think a framework, right, some of these frameworks, a lot of them do come from the military. I do think they have application here, especially in terms of security, but one of them was really thinking hard about getting to the left of boom, right? There is going to be a boom. And so what are your responsibilities as a national security leader, as a local leader to get to the left of boom? It's easy to say, it's like, of course, of course you would want to plan for that. But this is where I think the importance of building resilience into your organizations through, again, we've got Scott Page here, through having a diverse set of people within there, within your organization. It takes a network, you didn't say it takes a network to defeat a network, but I'm sure you had it on your bingo card, right? How do you build resilience into your organizations? The second is really testing your organizations. One is red teaming. I think it's in action, but it's a framework. And why do you red team? First, you've got to select the appropriate red team. And likely, and this is one of the things that, I think we did well in DHS, I'm not personally responsible for it, but I certainly encouraged it, was to go outside of the Department of Homeland Security. There are great folks who are, there's some great folks within Department of Homeland Security who could red team, but much better to get folks who look more like the red teams that are getting after us. The others is incentivizing like hack DHS, that's very helpful. And then I think one piece that I really liked and I constantly was saying because the cartels were pretty nimble, which was to get inside their OODA loop, right? And so you can look that up, the OODA loop, which was how fighters in, I think it was Vietnam, but there was a Air Force, a US Air Force fighter who said, when they were doing the dog fights, you wanna orient, you wanna observe, you wanna orient, you wanna decide, and then you wanna act, right? And that goes very quickly in a dog fight. Well, that's also true with the cartels because of the way they use their information, they use Telegram, and they use these different networks to get to not only for counter drug, but a legal immigration. So there's just a few for the bingo card. Thank you. Thank you. That's great. Is there another question from the floor? Dean Watkins, hey. Thank you so much for your talk. This has been so interesting. I wanna go back to the Chinese spy balloon because one of the things that you mentioned was that it wasn't intentional, but I would imagine the data weren't necessarily deleted. I would suspect if they were able to have that experience. And I just wonder if you can talk about, you mentioned silos. I assume you mean kind of missile silos. Can you talk about what could have been surveilled just to give a context for why was it such a concern and what was the understanding of what could be recorded by that kind of instrument? Right, so here's, now I'm just gonna report facts that you can read in the New York Times, right? Number one is we shot the Chinese balloon down, right? There are pictures that are not AI influenced on the internet, right? Of the US Navy pulling the spy balloon out. I will sit here as an observer, having watched it in real time. It was a heck of a shot. They only, they fired two, brought them both down. And it was large and it crashed pretty heavily into the sea. So we have everything that, we have the data on the balloon. Ah, but what may we not know, right? It's the case of the known knowns, right here or the known unknown here, right? It's the known unknown, which is how much got downloaded electronically prior to the shoot down, right? And this was the, this was the tension, by the way. We said, it's a great question because I get to say what's best for America again. So thank you. Which was, we were, we got a lot of criticism. So if you go back and look at it and says, why don't you shoot at that? The Republicans were like, I remember the Montana governor said, shoot that thing down over Montana, we'll deal with it. Like, you know, I'm gonna get on my horse, right? I mean, type of deal, you know, in turn. Now that could have, he would have said that until it landed in the middle of Montana state or something, right? So, you know, at the end of the day, it was a federal decision and we said, don't think that's a good idea. But it was a risk, right? To continue to let it flow and the wind literally carried in an airstream that carried it from Montana to South Carolina. And it made sense. Like, we asked him now, there was, it appeared to have some independent control, right? So this is where, I mean, look, it was a spy balloon. So we don't know what got transmitted. What are the kinds of things that it could have taken a picture of? Missile silos, critical infrastructure, right? That it is a very, as I'm told, I'm not an expert here. You need to talk to the head of NGA, Frank Worreth, who's a great guy, maybe three-star Admiral. And Vice Admiral, and I've been in that headquarters super impressive, right? I always said that they're like, what's the next job that you want? And you must be the secretary of Homeland Security. I said, no way, that job's way too hard. I said, the job I want is to be the head of NGA. And they're like, do you have any experience in that? I go, no, but have you ever been to their building? I mean, it is the coolest building in the world. And they've got a great mission and their fusion center is great. And the people all come to work. So there is no hybrid working at NGA. You got to come to work to look at all the classified stuff. Nothing, anything's wrong with hybrid, but you have this in-person community, but you also got to be a three-star Admiral. So I'm not going to get that job. So it's very different, Dean, what you can take a picture of from a satellite and what you can take over a very slow moving balloon. That is really just above, has anybody ever flown in here? You don't need to raise your hands, right? There were only about 20,000 feet above where most of the Boeing aircraft or even 10,000. It was far enough away that we weren't, we didn't think we needed to restrict, the FAA needed to restrict airspace, but it was definitely not in outer space. And it's a very different picture. So some of the critical infrastructure that we're concerned about, and we have told critical infrastructure or railroad terminals, water facilities, electrical grids that, you know, the Chinese probably didn't necessarily have before. Now, to be fair, right? All of this was like, it's, you know, everything sort of a transaction, or not a transaction, but a trade-off was to say, if you really wanted to see it, there is a variance of Google Earth monitoring that the Chinese could do. Why? Because, you know, we have a lot of civil liberties in the United States of America, and we don't stop you from driving near some of these facilities. You don't always know it, so it's putting a little bit of two and two together. There was a trade-off. And, you know, what was best for America was that we weren't gonna shoot it down, you know, over Peachtree City Mall in Atlanta. We accepted that trade-off. So I'm gonna ask one last question. Okay, cool. And it's this. So as long as I've known you, you've been mission-driven and thinking in terms of what's best for America. And so I'm curious about your next step. I can't imagine you leaving this mission behind. But you know, in particular, I'm very interested in this relationship with Georgia Tech. So why academia? What is it that draws you to that? Is this a way to continue your mission? And what is it about academia and why you? Well, you're gonna have to ask Georgia Tech that and you're gonna have to look at America and say, why would I bring John here, right? So, you know, that's up to the court of public opinion and the 150 students that I've interacted with today. Not looking for a compliment, but I am, right? You know, so ask them, you know, how did I do in terms of that? All right, sort of joking aside. It is really hard. I had a great breakfast with 20 veterans at the Ross Business School today. They're all going through their MBA, MBA one, MBA two. They look a lot like me 20 years ago type of deal, although I didn't go get an MBA, but I did have to transition, you know, into the private sector. And one of the questions that I think was a, it was a Navy ship driver asked me, he said, you know, what was it like to transition from the military or even the Obama NSC into the private sector? And I said, you know, it was really difficult, but I eventually figured it out. And I think some of my leadership and my risk management skills came to fore and they kept giving me bigger jobs, kept paying me money. So I was going, I got my parents out from being underwater from the 2008, 2009 economic and the recession and the crisis. So why do I tell you that? One of the hardest things that I had in transitioning was taking off the uniform was feeling like a loss of purpose, right? You have a lot of purpose when your mission, you wear a patch or you wear a ring that says duty on our country or your motto for the Army is this will defend. Zoom, I'm working for Citibank. It's not evil, it's corporate America. It was a way to serve, you know, I really focused on three, two audiences, the customers, they said, okay, how do we make things best for the customers? Any Citibank people in here will be like, you kind of failed, you don't really help us, but I think the double cash back card is really the best card. I'm not promoting at that. The margins for that profit is very low, but it's the sticky behavior and it's all the swipes that you get, right? And I'm just saying, so that was, but it was around customer service. I mean, and it was counter fraud. I mean, that's all getting aside. That's what I was focused on. This is what I'm here for. The other population was at one point about 3,000 people reported into being different indirect lines and direct lines. And out of that 90% of them made less than $45,000, right? So this was a part of America, a good chunk of them were in the Heartlands. We had Mason, Ohio, I know that's the other state, you know, a big population there, Florence, Kentucky. And I tried to be a good servant leader to them. Like even those two purposes to best serve my customers and best serve my 3,000 people who worked somewhere within my organization, it was a little tough. So I started doing a lot of veterans nonprofit work, in particular with this organization called the Mission Continues, whose tagline is reporting for duty in your community. And what it did was gave veterans the opportunity to organize other veterans to go volunteer with Habitat for Humanity or Feed America or clean up a school. And so it was a triple bottom line. The veteran gain from renewed purpose, the school gains the tangible effect. And then any of the civilians who came in to volunteer with the organization got, it was quadruple when you got like Target and GE and corporations to come in, it was a quadruple bottom line. And so now I'm looking for what is that, what is that Mission Continues? I've gone back to doing work in the veterans nonprofit space. When you did the introduction, Jenna, one of them you talked about was Avalon Action Alliance. This is not well known, but it's really what it's trying to do is revolutionize the mental healthcare system for veterans and first responders. And then take that and scale it so that it's helpful that we're doing a huge clinical study so that it's useful for not just veterans and not just first responders. And obviously I care about veterans, obviously I care about first responders, but look, we know how hard it is and how important it is to have good mental healthcare. And one thing that we've learned in the military is that oftentimes it's a Venn diagram of traumatic brain injury, post-traumatic stress and substance abuse leads to really difficult mental health. Any one of those can be difficult. Traumatic brain injury, post-traumatic stress, substance abuse, sometimes one is a cause of the other, but in that, in that overlap target area is a healthcare system need that's not being met right now because we tend to treat these as silos to use the Dean's word here. And so Avalon is backed by some billionaires who are putting a lot of money against it. Bernie Marcus and Arthur Blank are both big Atlanta, Home Depot folks. Got a great board, it's very bipartisan. Mark Esper's on the board, he's the former Secretary of Defense of Trump Administration. I'm on the board, we have Flo Groberg, who's a Medal of Honor recipient, Keith Shattuck and a few private sector folks being led by a great guy, Steve Cannon, who's our board chair and the former CEO of the Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation and Businesses. Why do I say all of that? We're trying to really high power and infuse this so that we can create this new healthcare system that hopes not only veterans and first responders, it really helps America because I'm glad that mental healthcare is coming into a place that is much more accepted in the United States of America and I think not that I'm special, but I think it does take leaders like me or Flo Groberg, a Medal of Honor recipient, to say it's okay to say that you're struggling and that there's a need and that you need some help here. So I'm finding places like that work super hard and the last thing is why academia? I like to hear my own voice, right? I really do, if you haven't figured that out and I like playing, if I could, I'd be Jimmy Kimmel or one of the jimmies or Jimmy Fallon and get the laughter and everything. I mean, it's a positive feedback loop. I love academia. I think this is a way that my generation, you're not quite there, Jenna and Scott, but my generation can give back. Right, you're already great teachers, right? So if you're like, I'm already teaching, what are you talking about? You can aspire to BS, is that what you're saying? Exactly, right? I'm not a PhD, but I do like this idea of Professor of the Practice and Georgia Tech is giving me the opportunity. There's also a lot of research, I'm gonna be with the Strategic Energy Institute with their new school, the Cybersecurity and Prophecy with the SAM Nunn School and with Georgia Tech Research Institute and Georgia Tech's great on research. So it's gonna span across, they're trying to be very multi-sector or multi-discipline and they think, I've already signed the contract so Georgia Tech, it's too late. They think that I'm gonna hit that sweet spot in there and hopefully I can. Wow. Thank you very much for inspiring us all to find our own mission. Thank you. Cool, oh, let my own talk. Well, that's totally enough. All right, thanks a lot. Thank you everyone for being here.