333 - Viet D. Dinh — American Legal Scholar + Former Chief Legal and Policy Officer Fox Corporation

No, thank you very much for coming here and welcome. Thank you. It's really an honor for me to be here. You know, I come from a certain generation of Vietnamese American. I was born here, and I think that there is a big difference in perhaps the way we view the world, perhaps the way we view politics and everything. So I would love to have a conversation, and hopefully it gets very open about certain ideas that you have.

Well, I was young. I was 10 years old. And now having children who have passed that age, I do think that I was in the formative process. I'm the youngest of seven children, so my older brothers and sisters are a little bit more formed than I was. But certainly it was a formative experience for me. My father was in a re-education camp after 1975. He was in the city council in the southern city of Bao Loc, and so he was put in a re-education camp. My mother and my oldest sister organized his escape from the camp the same day that our family escaped from the country. Because we were using our house as the debarcadere, it took all of us and took us on the boat trip. It was a long boat trip, 12 days at sea. We had a small boat, probably about 15 meters or so, with 75 people on it, so it was standing room only. It was quite a harrowing experience, especially since we ran out of fuel and the engine broke. We were hungry and thirsty, like so many other boat people, until we got help from a Taiwanese fishing boat who gave us directions and a compass and fuel to get to Malaysia. So it was quite a harrowing experience, and it really reified for me not only the lengths through which my family and my mom had gone to find freedom and opportunity, but how incredible that so many people have undertaken the same journey to seek freedom and as the price of opportunity. Not just Vietnamese, but refugees all over the world. So it is a testament to the human spirit to live free and without oppression.

No, we were just trying to survive. We landed in Portland, Oregon on Thanksgiving weekend, and it was cold. I remember that. We had to get coats, we had to get acclimated, we had to start thinking about learning English. We were sponsored by my aunt and uncle who arrived about two years before, so they were trying to find their way as they were trying to help us find our way. So literally just trying to survive, just trying to get acclimated. After the weekend of reuniting with family, we started working literally on Sunday night, Monday morning, to go clean restaurants. My mom had to start taking driving lessons so she could drive us to work. There was not really a time for existential reflection. We were just literally trying to survive, because my father was still in Vietnam living as a fugitive, my sister was helping him, and we needed to find a way to get money back to them as quickly as possible so they could survive and join us.

Yeah, because we were cleaning restaurants in Portland, Oregon, and during the summer we picked strawberries and other berries, which was the mainstay of how we and other refugees were making money during the summer. Then Mount St. Helens erupted in 1980, two years later, and it really took away our ability to make a living. So we moved down to Orange County because my other cousins lived down here and they said there is a thriving sewing and garment industry here, so we were able to go and be job workers in the garment district.

Right, yeah, that was in Orange County. My memory of junior high and high school up until about my junior year was just working every single day after school. My mom would take us to the sewing shop and we would work there until late at night, and then we would do it again during the weekends.

Oh yes, very young. We were 12 years old at the time. I was 12, my older brothers and sisters were there. But it was a way to survive. We were very grateful for the opportunity to survive, to send money back to my father and my sister to help them escape. In 1983, my father finally made it out after 23 escape attempts. I remember the day when we came home and my mom was shaking, crying, because she was holding a letter and she couldn't describe it. I looked at it, it was from my dad and the return address was in the Philippines, so we knew exactly what that was. We all cried, we all celebrated, and then we put away the emotions and went to work, because life goes on.

The story is a little more complicated than that. In freshman year of high school, I had to give a very brief speech in English class on how to do a certain thing. This was a way for the English teacher to acclimate us to public speaking. I was so deadly shy. One, English is my second language. Two, I'm just a naturally shy person growing up. Three, it was the first experience I had of having to do anything in public. I literally could not deliver the speech, could not finish it, and I just ran out of the classroom in shame and all kinds of emotions. I remember facing up to the challenge and asking myself, 'Is this the way I'm going to live my life, being debilitated by fear?' I said no, and the best way to cure that is to meet the fear head on. So I approached a teacher who was also an English teacher and very active in the local speaking and debating community. He was a speech coach at a prior high school. I asked him if there was a way he could help me cure the fear and maybe if I was good enough to enter competitive speaking and debate. He said that's the only way to conquer your own demons. He organized a little speech and debate team for about five or ten of us, and it was great. We went all around the state, all around the county, we went to nationals for debate and public speaking. I remember one tournament, probably my junior year of high school, when the coach told me that one of the judges wanted to make sure I got his score sheet and comments. At the end of the day, the coach gave me the comment sheet. The judge was a local lawyer, I think he may have been a local judge, and he said, 'If you put your mind to it, I think you'll become one of the great attorneys in this country.' Obviously not true, obviously a bombastic projection to encourage a young kid. But for a kid who is insecure, shy, encountering a different world, not knowing the language that well, having learned it only a couple years before, it was a really good shot in the arm.

One of the great gifts that this country has given me are the mentors that I have been able to pick up along the way. It starts with Mr. Reed, my speech coach, but it started even earlier with my seventh grade homeroom teacher, who was the first and best influence in my early life. When I went to junior high school, they all gave me the encouragement, the courage, and the confidence to try new things, to challenge my demons, and to have aspirations that go beyond what my vision would have enabled me to do at that time. The ability to have role models and mentors who encouraged me along the way is truly one of the greatest gifts that this country and this community has given me.

I know what I look for. People say hyper smart, hyper motivated. I think those are all table stakes. At the level of professional schools and major law schools, you have to have demonstrated the ability to be intelligent and motivated, otherwise you wouldn't have been able to get in. So what I look for in addition is the kind of hunger that truly is a deep motivator. It has to come from within. External motivations are great, but they're fleeting. It doesn't matter where you come from or what you look like. Having God-given abilities and knowing what to do with it is a very important part of success. I don't pick mentors and protégés; most of it is just happenstance. People ask for my advice, and if I am able to give it, I will give it very freely, because a lot of people have been generous to me. There have been other stories. I remember when I decided to apply to Ivy League schools, my high school guidance counselor just wouldn't write me the recommendations. He said, 'Nobody from this school has ever gone to an Ivy League school in its 100-year history. What makes you think you are going to be the first one?' I said that's fair, but I have other people who encourage me to reach for the stars. So I went to talk to the principal and said the guidance counselor has not written my letter. Officially it comes from you, the principal's letter, so will you write it? She did and gave me the recommendation. I was fortunate enough to be admitted. We didn't have money for me to go visit, so I just flipped a coin between Harvard and Yale and came up Harvard. The rest is the history of my life. I remember those feelings, both positive and negative, of detractors as well as mentors, and I just try to be the good guy rather than the other guy.

I was very fortunate in the beginning of my second year to have landed a clerkship with probably the best judge in the country, period. He unfortunately passed away two years ago, Larry Silberman of the D.C. Circuit. He was a great mentor and great judge. Because he provides such great guidance, a lot of Supreme Court justices look to him for their clerks, because they know that he hires great people and really mentors them during that one year of clerkship. The clerkship is more graduate school for law, especially for litigators. That led in my third year to an interview with Justice O'Connor, who also gave me a clerkship. Justice O'Connor, who just passed away a couple of months ago, is the other great mentor in my life. Not only did she give me the skills of being a lawyer, she was also, besides my parents and my wife, my biggest champion. She truly believed in me and in all her clerks. She was a great advisor and mentor in that regard. Judge Silberman is to this day my closest counselor. None of us who clerked for Judge Silberman would ever make a major life decision, be it romantic, professional, or personal, without consulting the judge. I'm fortunate enough to have become friends with his son and his family, so now I get his advice through his family. We all need those types of support systems and people who believe in us and guide us through life.

They call it problem-solving skills, but it's more than that. It's not just the skills, it's the passion. It's the desire to put your training and your skills to work in service of the profession and the community. We do that in private practice through advocating for and practicing what I call the system of democratic capitalism, the greatest system of organizing the economy and the government that we have ever seen or I believe will see in human history. Every day is a journey, every day is a contribution to the fundamental system that not only makes us free but gives us the opportunity to achieve extraordinary things as Americans. Recognizing the value of that work, of a lawyer's work in providing the foundation for democratic capitalism, is an essential part of how you contribute and how you achieve. You can think of lawyers' work, especially for young lawyers, as drudgery. You're just writing briefs, looking at documents, deposing people. But it is the total result that really motivates you. I remember a fable that my great uncle, a Catholic priest, told me when I was very young. It was about a young man who comes upon a construction site and asks the first construction worker what he is doing. He says, 'What does it look like? I'm digging a ditch.' He goes to a second construction worker and asks, and he says, 'What does it look like? I'm laying bricks.' Somehow accurate but not entirely fulfilling. So he went to the third construction worker and said, 'Excuse me, sir, what is it that you are doing?' The guy looked up and said, 'Isn't it obvious? I'm building a cathedral.' The vision that redounds to the third person's benefit and to the detriment of the first two is the ability to appreciate that what you do is not drudgery but actually in service of some greater good. For lawyers, it is providing the foundation for the system of democratic capitalism that underlies this entire country and our great economy.

When I came out of my clerkship, I spent a year working for the Senate Banking Committee, and then I went straight into academia. You attend the job talk, you go around giving papers to faculty. I had a couple of draft papers that I gave to various faculties around the country who were looking for young professors. I got an offer at Georgetown, which was my hometown. I loved my colleagues there, so almost immediately I felt very welcomed in the Georgetown Law Center community. I was a very young law professor, I think in my mid-20s, and I loved it. It was an opportunity to think deeply about the law. There's a luxury of interacting with people and being the good guy and helping them start their careers. That was a great motivator for me. It was also very entrepreneurial, if you can think of academia as entrepreneurial, because we research whatever we want, we publish as best as we can, we develop a core group of students to motivate and inspire. Each of us succeed or fail on our own merits. There's no bureaucracy, nobody tells me what to research or how to write. There's a great entrepreneurialism which I found very innovating. I just kept doing what I did. I wrote some Supreme Court briefs on the side, practiced a little bit for consulting clients, but mainly put my head down to get tenure. After I got tenure, the 2000 election happened. I was very interested in that moment in history. I actually wrote an amicus brief for Bush v. Gore at the Supreme Court, along with other colleagues and some of my best friends from law school. It was an amazing time. Justice Breyer has talked about this: it was the most contested election in American history at that time. What happened? You didn't see tanks in the street, you didn't see bloodshed. You saw a peaceful transition of power, a very gracious speech by Vice President Gore, and a peaceful transition of power that is the greatest testament to democracy and the American spirit. It was totally inspiring to me. In the very short time that the president and his cabinet had to put together a government, because this was late December, early January before we had a resolution, and transition happens on January 18th, you've got to get your act together to form a government. I got a call from then Attorney General designate John Ashcroft asking me to come in for an interview. He asked me if I was interested in this position or that position, and I said no, I'm really interested in this small little office called the Office of Legal Policy, or the Office of Policy Development. He said, 'Well, that's the smallest function that we have. Why is that your request?' I said, 'I'm an academic. I have three folders with me all the time, mentally and physically. One is the near-finished draft folder that I'm preparing for publication. One is the half-baked ideas folder. And then there's this little folder called the crazy ideas file. It's part of my job and part of the way I think about life: let's think about what are some crazy ideas that I can turn into half-baked ideas and then hopefully make them into fully formed thoughts of publishable quality.' John Ashcroft jumped out of his chair, walked across the office, and said, 'Viet, that's exactly what I'm looking for, because the art of leadership is a redefinition of the possible. I want you to come here and help me redefine the possible.' That was very inspiring. When the Attorney General is asking you to think through and help redefine the possible, that's catnip to an academic or a young and ambitious lawyer. That in itself is an act of mentorship, giving me the mission, recognizing my desire to serve, but also the mission to do what I could to help him with his leadership. All of that became readily apparent and extraordinarily valuable after 9/11, because literally the bombing of the World Trade Center threw out the rule book. It was the most devastating anti-terrorism attack on American soil. It was a shock to all of us. We had to rethink how lethal the enemy is, how different the methods are, and how we craft a response that is adequate to the task while reaffirming and solidifying the foundation of democratic capitalism, rather than chipping away or threatening that foundation, because that's what the terrorists were trying to do. We didn't want to help them in their job in our response.

It was a department-wide effort and then at a later stage an administration-wide effort. But I do remember being very clear, and the Attorney General being very clear with me, as the president was clear to the Attorney General: 'Get me the tools that are necessary to do this job.' One of the first and most fundamental questions that the Attorney General asked me was the scoping question. He said point blank, 'This is not Christmas in September. Do not throw in the kitchen sink. Give me the package of the most necessary powers and authorities, and only that. You have to ask the right questions so that we achieve the objective.' We approached the hundreds, if not thousands, of ideas and proposals that came into our little working group with very straightforward questions that policymakers ask all the time. One: is this necessary in order to fight the war on terror? Two: give me an example of where the limits of the law or policy have been reached so that we can test the necessity of the issue. Three: are there unintended consequences with this policy? In many ways, the third question is the foundation of all the questions: is this consistent with our American Constitution and values? If there are ways to mitigate the unintended consequences, let's do it. If those are too overwhelming or threaten our constitutional order, then let's scrap it. What resulted was a package of only 50 proposals that went to Congress. I'm glad to say it was passed unanimously by the House and nearly unanimously by the Senate in record time. From beginning to end, it was a six-week process, but it was a very focused process because there was no other game in town. Everybody was focused on this piece of legislation. Rarely, if ever, do you have that kind of monomaniacal focus of both houses and the executive branch on a piece of legislation. So even though temporarily it was a short period, functionally it was very concentrated and I think a very democratic process.

There are a lot of things that people mistake the Patriot Act for. The Patriot Act was the piece of legislation that was passed by Congress and signed by the president, but it became a brand that expands to include the Total Information Awareness, enemy detention, and all the other activities that were going on in the name of the war on terror. The first recognition is that the Patriot Act was a very limited piece of legislation: 50 provisions that essentially updated the law to the technology and helped us prosecute the war on terror, transforming the Department of Justice from a reactive prosecutorial agency into a proactive detection and prevention agency so that we could stop the next terrorist attack. I'm glad to say that no court has ultimately invalidated any provision that was passed as part of the USA Patriot Act as being unconstitutional, because we did our work very carefully and Congress did its work very carefully. But that said, we asked the exact same question in the period after 9/11: are there dangers here? We were essentially driving at night without taillights to follow. You're driving there and you know what you're trying to do, but you only have the reach of your headlights. There are no taillights in the distance that you can follow.

This unprecedented in American history, and so Congress put in for special provisions for a handful of provisions a sunset device that it would sunset unless reauthorized within three years, and successively comes up every three years. Every single reauthorization has been passed by Congress, and so they ask these questions every single three years, and then after several cycles they put in a permanent reauthorization. And so we put in the democratic process, the checks and balances, so that subsequent legislators can re-ask the same questions that we were grappling with. And again, I think those provisions have stood up to the test of time because, as I said, this was not law enforcement Christmas in September. So yeah, we did ask those questions, and Congress asked the questions, but consistently have reauthorized those provisions. So up to today, all of those provisions, nothing has been pulled back or taken out. There have been tweaks, there have been amendments, there have been refinements and all that stuff. That's the democratic process, and I think that's American government at its best.

Yeah, then I think that I go back to the definitional issue. The Patriot Act has become a brand in politics in American society that's well beyond the provisions that Congress has authorized, passed unanimously, and reauthorized unanimously over the decades. There's no better check than a bipartisan effort to pass and repass these kinds of legislation. So what you are describing, which I do not doubt and indeed has observed, is not the Patriot Act as the Patriot Act, but the Patriot Act as the specter of post-9/11 responses, some of which have been invalidated as unconstitutional and overreach, and most of which have been retired because we're not in the space of immediate danger anymore. But it's also a brand, not just 9/11 responses, but really it's like in 1984, it's just the specter, a shortcut for a sentiment and a fear which I think is genuine but unfounded with respect to the Patriot Act itself. But as freedom-loving Americans, it's always good to be mindful of governmental overreach into our core liberties. You don't need George Orwell to remind us of infection; throughout history we've seen governmental overreach whenever there were opportunities or perceived threats in our society. Frankly, we as freedom-loving Americans should always be a little bit wary. We all should be at our core libertarians, because that's what made this country great and that's what the Constitution at its core protects. So unfounded or not, I think it's a good question to have and a good fear to keep in the back of our minds.

I think January 6, 2021 was in my mind the nadir of the American spirit. It is the absolute lowest point in our constitutional democracy in many ways. It is more offensive to my constitutional belief in democratic capitalism than even a foreign terrorist attack, because this is domestic, this is from our own people, defeating our biggest symbol of American government. I'm not saying this in order to ascribe blame or to enter the political debate, but just the mere fact of seeing our Capitol being overrun, our police officers being killed, and our public officials vilified for doing their constitutional duty was very dispiriting for me and I think for a lot of Americans. So we always guard against that. It's the work of a few that hopefully offends the many and also reminds us of how fragile our constitutional democracy is. So again, we should always be a little bit libertarian, a little bit wary of governmental power, and know that this system of democratic capitalism is very fragile and requires a lot of care and feeding.

Yeah, but as I do when I see it normally, I did not, to be perfectly honest, place any significance to it on January 6, because January 6 is just such an overwhelming event that it kind of overrides and overwhelms all other feelings and sentiments on my part.

Well, I returned to my faculty position. Before I left for the Department of Justice, I was tenured and I had a two-year leave of absence in order to serve in government. That two-year came up in May of 2003, and so I returned to the faculty, the home that I loved. And again, as I did before, I started a little consulting firm that through various iterations grew into a very successful, because of the work of my partners and colleagues, a very successful Supreme Court and high-stakes litigation boutique. We only had 20 lawyers, but I think we punched above our weight, and it was a wonderful experience. We ultimately were acquired by a great law firm, Kirkland & Ellis, and we joined a very big international law firm. Throughout this period, I had sat on corporate boards. Rupert Murdoch asked me to consider joining this company; we couldn't make it work because I love academia. So he and the board invited me to join the board of the News Corporation at the time. This was in 2004, when I was about 36. And Rupert is just magnificent. He's a very good leader and a wonderful identifier of talent and a great manager of talent in the sense that he will provide the vision but also encourage the executives to do their work. So I've been on the board of the News Corporation for a number of years, for 15 years, by the time that Rupert sold two-thirds of the company to Disney. And Lachlan Murdoch became Chief Executive Officer of the new Fox Corporation, and Lachlan asked me to come and be part of the new company, not as an independent director but rather as an operational executive. I jumped at the opportunity for several reasons. One, my mom passed away the year before, so I had a real desire to come back to Southern California, be close to my family, close to my father. Two, this was an opportunity to work with people I've known through my entire professional life over several decades, people I knew and trusted and enjoyed spending time with. And three, we were able to, as Lachlan put it, start with a blank sheet of paper in order to identify the work that we will do, the industries that we will work in, but most importantly the people we're going to work with. So it's a very exciting opportunity to join Rupert and Lachlan and my colleagues in helping build the new Fox.

Yeah, let's step back a little bit and talk not just about the media but about society and the polity. I remember one time after I came out of government, this is around 2006 or so, my next-door neighbor at Georgetown is John Podesta, the chief of staff to President Clinton. A wonderful person, great colleague, good thinker. We obviously disagree fundamentally on a number of political issues, but we're good friends. As all thoughtful human beings, we are honest with each other. I remember we were on a panel together at Georgetown, and both of us kind of recognized even then that we're entering probably the most populist phase of American politics that we in our lifetime had never seen. I would argue that has accelerated to the present day, that overrides and overshadows even the last most populist wave, which is the Jacksonian era in the mid-1800s. So there is this devolution of dialogue into what I call base politics, largely because of a number of societal, political, international, and economic pressures that really drive the polity into different camps. I think part of it is how closely divided we are. Remember, Bush v. Gore was essentially a 50-50 time. Many of our elections are unpredictable. I think the 2016 election was like that. The whole country is very evenly tied, and when you're that evenly tied, the contest gets a little bit more competitive. It's just like any close game, so people compete more vigorously, which is part of the beauty of democracy. So I think part of that is just innate, but it also gives me hope because at the end of the day, we're very close together. The rhetoric has gotten very hard because the contest has gotten much more competitive, but we're close together numerically, we're at that kind of equipoise in American society. And I think the media in general, not just TV media but also print media and social media, is just a mechanism to amplify the most extreme of those views.

Yeah, I tell you, I'm much more optimistic than that. I think the American spirit is fair, it is even-keeled. So I see the loud and extreme voices as really the current version of the internet trolls of the last decade or so. They want, because the American spirit is even-keeled and sensible and courses toward justice, the extreme voices seeking to be demagogues have to become more extreme and more shrill. I hope that at some point people will recognize the detriment that brings, and our polity will become more civil. That's because I am an internal optimist. I see in it part of the technological disaggregation of viewpoints, so that there are not dominant institutions that control American thought or American life. To me, that is a cause for celebration, because now you have the disaggregation of power, and it allows for individuals to have the capability to affect public debate. It's very messy. Simone de Beauvoir made the observation a century ago that democracy is very messy, and she argued that it was not the best form of government because it's so messy. I happen to go the other way and say democracy is the best form of government especially because it's messy.

Yeah, first of all, CNN is about one-tenth the audience of Fox. So in many ways, it's all of the mainstream media standing up to the center-right Fox News. But it's not any particular institution, it's not any particular company. I think it's just a recognition that now, through technological and editorial advances, we have empowered the people again to speak up, and that comes with messiness. I think the advantage of something like Fox was the recognition that Rupert made and Roger Ailes made that there is a vast Middle America that's being underserved by the coasts, literally geographically and certainly metaphorically, whereby both the news and the entertainment culture was being dictated by coastal elites, and all of Middle America was underserved. That is not only a great political opportunity to speak to the people who make up the majority of our democracy, but also a great economic opportunity. There is a huge market there that has not been fully served. That's why Fox News, despite all the detractors, has been the number one news network and the number one cable network for the last 20 years. So there is a sense that, as I said, it is very liberating even with all the messiness.

As I do with any time, not just news and not just Fox. I don't think in reverse, I think in forward. So it's not just news, not Fox, because it doesn't define who I am. But anywhere in our society, you are open to... Were you ever at the point where you're like, 'I got to step up and speak up about that issue'? That's a freedom and an obligation we all have as human beings, not just as executives, because we are hired and paid very handsomely to do our jobs faithfully. I am a lawyer, and hopefully I am an effective leader, and part of that obligation is to speak your mind.

Now you're talking about succession. I've never watched Succession, but I hear it's pretty good, a piece of fiction. No, we're professionals. Lachlan is a great leader, and Rupert is our great founder and leader. I would say that the fact that we have a family control of a public corporation is a bonus, especially in the media space where long-term vision and editorial direction is important. That's why you see the great media companies are essentially controlled by families. You see the Sulzbergers of the New York Times, you saw the Grahams of the Washington Post, you see the Roberts at Comcast. It requires a long-term vision and consistency. I think Rupert and Lachlan's stewardship of the company and their leadership in the industry is unparalleled.

Yeah, look, Rupert is the greatest founder, one of the greatest founders certainly of the last century. He's a great builder, a great thinker, a curious thinker, and he has the courage of his convictions. That ultimately brings the success not only to him and his family but also to the whole corporate enterprise as well as the societies that he has operated in. We just remember the arc of the end of the 20th century with the fall of communism, the leadership of Reagan and Thatcher, the post-Cold War development of the world. It's incredible how much history has happened in the last 50 years. That kind of dramatic historical change requires clear vision, consistency of leadership, and a dogged determination in believing in what you do and the good that you serve. Rupert really is the embodiment of all of that.

The reason we haven't heard much from me is I'm a lawyer and I like to keep my advice to my clients and the people I serve. When I was an academic or when I was in government, it was my job and my duty to explain what we do or to impart knowledge about the law. But as a lawyer and as an executive, I see my role as keeping my mouth shut and putting my head down and doing the job. But thank you so much for being here with me. I do want to see more of you in our community. I know you're very close to Kieu Chinh, and we don't have very many Vietnamese at your level. Are you going to partake more in the upcoming years within our community, and how could you?

Yeah, absolutely. And forgive me for getting this... No, not at all. I think it's a very important reminder to us all that we all do what we can, and we all do what needs to be done in order to provide inspiration and leadership for the next generation. For all the people who reached out and gave me a helping hand, I feel the same obligation to do the same. But it's not just duty or obligation, it is as inspiring for the mentors as it is for the mentees. I think those in public service think of service as a gift and as a wonderful opportunity for personal fulfillment. So I agree with you, and we shouldn't do it just out of obligation or duty, but we should do it out of joy.

I wouldn't put it that way, because I think the Vietnamese community is thriving and has wonderful leaders and contributors. I would put it from a more personal perspective. I identify as Vietnamese, I always think of myself as Vietnamese. So my participation in and contributions to that community is really part of who I am. It's not an obligation because it comes from the heart, it comes from who I am, rather who I need to be. In that sense, it brings me joy.

Well, my son Alexander is returning to Vietnam this summer for his first time in order to do an internship. Our mutual friend Henry Nguyen is one of the lights of our community. I was very proud to find out that he is the owner of LAFC, which is a great football club. The new enhanced trade status with Vietnam, I think, gives a lot of opportunity for Vietnamese both in Vietnam and here to help America keep her critical supply chain open and also to introduce Vietnam to the wider world.

I think I firmly believe in a system of laws defined as the wise restraints that set men free. The more consistent and the more predictable our rule of law is, the more it allows society to flourish because people can have ordered expectations. They know how contracts are enforced, they know what activities are legal or illegal. So the more certainty, consistency, and predictability our system of laws has in any country, the more it empowers human activity and achievement. That's not just Vietnam, it's not just America, but around the world. As a lawyer, I firmly believe in the rule of law, not just as a way to govern ourselves but in many ways a way to empower human progress.

I want to return to the opening thesis that we started talking about. As a 10-year-old boy, I was led by my mom and my family to go searching for a better life, a freer life, the system of democratic capitalism that this country has given me. I think it is a fragile thing that we should not take for granted. I want to end the second half of my life the way I tried to live the first half of my life, which is to be consistent to those principles and to uphold and advocate for that system of democratic capitalism that has given me and my family so much, and that we need to preserve for eternity.

Thank you very much, I really appreciate it. Thank you, Viet, take care.