Sec. Rex Tillerson | World Affairs Council of Dallas/Fort Worth

Well, I've often said my entire value system that was developed as a young person—and you develop that in your formative years, you know, from the time you're about 10, 11 years old until you are now a teenager, 17, 18 years old. By then you have kind of decided what your values are, not necessarily in a knowledgeable, proactive way, but it's happening to you. Your DNA is being changed by your experiences and by your mentors, by the people around you. And at that point, you've kind of settled in on, this is the way I'm going to be, this is the way I'm going to interact with people around me, the world around me. And for those of you that are familiar with scouting, you know the two bedrock elements of scouting are the Scout Oath: 'On my honor, I'll do my best to do my duty to God and my country.' There's three pillars in the oath: duty to God and country, duty to others to help other people at all times, and duty to yourself, you know, to maintain yourself in a mental and physical state. And I talk to a lot of young person groups and I tell them, you know, that last one's really important because if you don't take care of yourself, there's no way you're going to help other people or fulfill your duty to God and country. And then the Scout Law, there are 12 points of the Scout Law, and every one of them will guide you for the rest of your life: trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent. You live a life according to those 12 points and good things happen to you. And no matter what kind of a fix you find yourself in, the answer of how you get out of it is right there. Just search those and you'll get out of that just fine. And that's kind of what we teach young people today. That's why I'm so committed to that organization, and we call it a movement more than an organization. So yeah, everything I became as an adult, the values that guided me, all came from my scouting experiences.

Well, I grew up in very modest means in our family. My father was a professional with the Scouts, doesn't pay a lot of money, and so there wasn't an allowance. And so if I wanted spending money, I needed to go out and earn it. And I understood that early on. There wasn't anything about it I wanted to, so I began mowing lawns when I was seven years old. And I could barely push our—we had a really crummy lawnmower. And I remember I went to this lady's house one time and she let her grass get really, really long. And I was out there all day long in the hot sun trying to work my way around her lawn. And when I got done, she wasn't happy with the way the lawn looked because she let it get real long. It looked kind of like—well, you can imagine. And so she wasn't going to pay me. I thought my mother was going to kill her. She said, 'Not only are you going to pay him, you're going to pay him double.' She didn't, but I got the $2 that she promised me. But yeah, I just early on, I always wanted to work. I wanted to be doing something. I wanted to contribute, you know, earn my own way. So yeah, I took just about any kind of job I could find, but that was the first one.

Yeah, I had worked in the steel industry for Armco Steel. They had the largest steel mill west of the Mississippi on the Houston Ship Channel, and I had summered with them. And I thought that I'd probably go work for—they offered me more money, they offered me a signing bonus. But the last summer I was there, one of the projects I was assigned to work on was to do a design and a cost estimate of the flue gas cleanup for the main furnaces. The Clean Air Act, which was later passed in 1977, was being debated in Congress, and they were trying to figure out what's the impact going to be on the mill. And I remember every time I'd go in and review my work with my boss, he just kind of put his hands in his head and shake. He said, 'This is going to put us out of business. We can't afford this.' And so when I was thinking about where I was going to go to work, that was kind of in the back of my head. And I graduated a great time, '75. I had 17 job offers. It was a great time to be an engineer in America. And these two guys at Exxon, they were offering me less money, but they just wouldn't take no for an answer. And I kept telling them, 'I know absolutely nothing about the oil business. I'm a civil engineer. Y'all don't build a lot of roads, you don't build airports.' And they said, 'Don't worry about it, you'll figure it out. Just come to work, you'll figure it out.' And I remember I decided, well, I'll go to work, I'll do a one-year check. The one year, I'm going to assess, look back, and I'm pretty sure if after a year it's not working out, Armco will still hire me. So I went to work. One year later, I never looked back. I fell in love with it, and it was a wonderful 41 and a half year ride.

Many of you will recall, the ExxonMobil merger was consummated in the year 2000. It was announced in 1999, of course. It took a little over a year to get it through all the Trade Commission and everyone to have it approved. And while that was going on, I was actually living in Russia, running Exxon's business in Russia. When it closed, they had done a complete restructuring of the corporation, the entire company, top to bottom of both companies, with the idea being that most mergers fail. And so one of the reasons they fail is there's always somebody who becomes the stepchild, and people are always saying, 'Well, this is how we do it here.' And so what they did is they completely changed the organizational structure, they changed the work processes, and that way nobody could say, 'This is how we do it here,' because there's only one way, and it's the way we do it now. It hadn't been done that way before. So two great outcomes of it were the whole organization, top to bottom, became extremely efficient and extremely multifunctional, knitted together in a way that it had never been knitted together before. A lot of the old silos that every organization deals with, those were gone. And so workflows went across this matrix organization in a way that even the chemicals company was consulting with the exploration company over things that they were thinking about that they thought, well, they might have an idea we hadn't thought about. So it was really quite a step out for them to do that, you know, at that time, to basically just rip everything apart and rebuild it. And it was really through the leadership of Lee Raymond of Exxon and Lou Noto of Mobil, and both of them, I remember, constantly were around the organization saying, 'This is the way it's going to be. We're not going to argue about this. You can get on the train or you can get off the train. But if you want to be a part of this adventure, get on the train now because the train is leaving.' And they really hammered that home with everybody, and everybody became believers. And so at the time that I came in, that had been in place. I worked in what was at that time called the Development Company, was one of the new companies they created when I came back from Russia, and we handled all of the capital projects worldwide. And so prior to the merger, we were spending about $3.5 billion a year on capital projects. After the merger, we were spending about 14 to 15 billion a year. So it was a five-fold increase. It's very hard to spend $15 billion a year and do it smartly, but that was the organization I was running. So after a couple of years of that, then they called me up to Dallas to join the management committee. So by the time I got up there, we'd had about two years under our belt, and then two years later when I became president, we now had four years under our belt, and it was really starting to hum. It was really clicking. And I mean, it was just such an exciting time to be a part of all that. And both people and both organizations really became one, and it was because nobody—it didn't take very long for people to quit asking, 'Are you a Mobil person or were you an Exxon person?' It just didn't matter anymore because none of us were that anymore. We were this new thing.

Well, the first overseas assignments I had were with Exxon. I went up to New Jersey in 1994 to run the international natural gas sales business, which then put me on airplanes. And so I was all over Europe and I was all over Southeast Asia, because that's where our two big gas marketing organizations were. But later, after about a year, the fellow that was running Yemen was frustrated with the situation there and he decided to retire early. So my boss came in, he said, 'I need you to go to Yemen.' He said, 'I don't think you're going to be there very long. We're in a big dispute with the government and I think this thing's headed to international arbitration. And when that happens, we'll turn over the lawyers and you can come back home.' This was a joint venture we had with the Hunt Company in Dallas, and there was a dispute over the natural gas rights. So I began going to Yemen. And for whatever reason—and I reflect a lot back on it—I'm going to have to go back to some of my archival notes, but something along the way happened where I suddenly just developed this great friendship with the chief lawyer, the Yemeni lawyer on the other side. And he had come from South Yemen, the Communist Yemen. So I entered Yemen two years after the unification. If some of you know your history around Yemen, it was divided: North Yemen, South Yemen. South Yemen was Communist, supported by the Soviet Union. North Yemen was quasi-democratic. When the Soviet Union fell and the South lost their support, they reunified, but it was a very unhappy reunification and they fought a civil war two years later. That war lasted about six weeks because the North annihilated the South and they reunified again. That's about the time I entered, was a month after the civil war was over. But for some reason, the chief lawyer for the South Yemeni—and he was educated at Moscow Law School, Moscow University Law School, Taha al-Ahmar, very little, diminutive guy, probably didn't weigh 90 lbs—but I just developed a real liking to him. And that relationship allowed us to put the negotiations back on track, which then went on for two and a half years. It all culminated in the liquefied natural gas agreements that later became a project for Yemen. 982 pages and 17 separate agreements. I remember when they did the signing, they had it broadcast on national television in Yemen. President Saleh came, we signed the documents in his presence. That two and a half years of living in Yemen and dealing with a culture that I had never ever had any experience with before was a huge growth opportunity for me to just understand the power of listening. You know, because a lot of people want to do all the talking. And I learned even in my days of natural gas negotiations in the US that if you'll just listen, you can get so much information that people otherwise would never volunteer to you if you're just willing to listen and ask some questions, and say less. And my wife will tell you my favorite saying is 'less is more.' You know, the less you say, the more you're actually getting. So a lot of those early learnings in that Yemen experience then carried over to Russia. Because when we finished up in Yemen, the corporation called me and they said, 'Hey, we know you've been down there, it's been a rough two and a half years for you and your family. We're ready to move you out of Yemen. How'd you like to go to Moscow?' So our guy that was in Moscow had gotten crossways with the Russians and they kicked him out. So I walked into Russia in a pretty bad situation because they were not happy with Exxon and they weren't happy with our people. And so I wasn't sure if I was going to get kicked out. But again, similar approach, I just made a connection with a couple of key people, the Governor of Sakhalin Island and the Energy Minister in Moscow. And from that, I kind of built out these relationships with so many other people, ultimately culminating with Putin and I having a very close relationship for almost 20 years.

Yeah, well, let me rewind just a little bit to give it some context. So I first met Vladimir Putin in 1998 when he became the Prime Minister. Yeltsin was still president and nobody heard of Putin. He just emerged on the scene. And I met him first in Sakhalin Island when he was on his way to Japan for his first overseas trip as Prime Minister. And I'm going to tell you the story because it's important to understand him. So we have this meeting in the conference room of the Governor's office in Sakhalin. His first time Putin had met with any Western businessman. He had just been named Prime Minister. It was myself and my Shell counterpart, and then our Russian partner, and we were to just brief him on the Sakhalin project, which we were all trying to get underway. And so this meeting went on for about three hours. It was a long meeting. Putin gave a 45-minute nonstop speech from a podium in which he said absolutely nothing. And so at that time, I had a Russian adviser named Anna Konsky. She was about 4 foot 10 and about 4 foot 10 wide. Wonderful woman, Russian Jew who immigrated in 1971 when Khrushchev opened the borders and let Russian Jews leave for about a two-year period. She and her husband fled, went to Houston. She went to the University of Houston, she got a tax accounting degree, and she was teaching tax accounting when we identified her. We were looking for Russian speakers because we didn't have any in Exxon when we went into Russia. That's how I ended up with her. Anyway, I wanted to tell a little bit about her because we leave that meeting with Putin and Anna looks up to me and she has this real kind of craggy smile and she says, 'So, Mr. Tillerson, what did you think?' And I said, 'Anna, you know, it was really weird. When you first meet somebody, you kind of study their body language, you kind of look at their eyes, you kind of try to get some sense of the person. And I said, Anna, it's like he was there but he wasn't really there. I looked in his eyes and it's like there were these shadowy figures back there, but he wasn't there.' And she got this wry smile on her face and she said, 'Now you understand the KGB.' She said, 'A KGB agent is trained to be whatever he needs to be in the circumstance he finds himself. He was unfamiliar with the circumstances he found himself with you. He had never met anybody like you before, so he chose to be nothing. You were going to get no information about him. He was going to get information about you.' So I've mentioned that story, and many of you remember the famous George Bush, 'I looked into his eyes.' I winced when I heard that on the news because I said, well, he was what he needed to be for Bush that day. But that's where the relationship with Putin began, and over the years it blossomed into seeing him many, many times a year in his home in Sochi. He was the most curious leader I ever met. Just question after question after question, wanted to understand everything, and listened and retained. And a hard worker. I mean, a lot of times I would get a call, he wanted to meet me at his house, it was midnight, he's still working. And I'd go to his house at midnight and we'd sit up till two or three o'clock in the morning talking about the energy business because he wanted to understand these things. So at that time, it was a very positive relationship. It looked like he really was taking the country in the right direction. The US was very engaged. Many of you remember the Gore-Chernomyrdin commissions, which were followed later by similar commissions. We established the US-Russia Business Council. Don Evans made many trips over to Russia with me, and the US was really promoting US business in Russia. Let's help the Russians understand how to be a successful capitalist society. And Putin was, he was okay, you know, let's go. Somewhere along the way, obviously, things came off the rails. And there's a lot of debate and there's been a lot written about it, and I have my own view about what happened. But Putin came to a fork in the road, and regrettably, he chose the path they're on now. We had all hoped he'd choose the path of continued engagement in a more open society, in a more open way. But obviously, he's gone a different direction. And it's extremely painful for those of us that had a good relationship with him, and it's extremely disappointing for me, for the Russian people. I loved my Russian employees. They were fantastic, hard workers, smart, dedicated, and I think about them often and what are they doing today, you know, and how's their life today. My wife will—if you ask my wife what's her favorite country in the world, she'll tell you it's Russia. She loves the Russian people too. So it's been really disappointing to see how that's turned out. Where is it going? It's going to go to the stalemate that it has been for some time. I laid out a framework for where I thought the negotiated settlement could be a year and a half ago to some folks in Washington. People didn't want to hear it. But it was—and it's not as much as where Zelensky's been talking about today. At that time, a year and a half ago, you could have gotten out of that situation with giving Putin a lot less. Now, because things have not gone well, it's going to cost you more. And I'm not sure he's as inclined today as I felt he was 18 months ago before he got all the assistance he's gotten from the Koreans and from the Iranians. So, you know, so often, as all of you know, timing is everything. And I think we missed an opportunity to settle that about a year and a half ago. It would have been better for the Ukrainians if we could have settled it right then. Yes, they would have had to give up some things, they could have gotten some things too. But now they're in a worse place. And I'm not as sure that Putin's inclined to want to negotiate today. I think he wants to see this change in administration. Obviously, he's making all the hay he can right now. And then I think he'll see, okay, what does President Trump have in mind when he says, 'I'll have this settled in 48 hours.' We'll see what that means. But it's not a good outcome. It's not going to be a good outcome for the West. It's not going to be a good outcome for Ukraine. It's not going to be a good outcome for Europe. And over the long term, it may not be a good outcome for Russia. You know, we'll just have to see.

Well, I was within three months of mandatory retirement. And my wife will tell you, for about three or four months before that, I was starting to get really hard to live with. And she says it's because I knew retirement was coming and I was anxious over, you know, what am I going to do and what's life going to be like after what I've been doing. It was just so exciting and surrounded by the most extraordinary people in the world in ExxonMobil. I mean, they're just top-notch quality people. I mean, where in the world am I going to go after this? And so when I got the call—and the calls first started coming from Steve Bannon, who I refused to take a call from, and then Jared Kushner called and I refused to take that call. And then my assistant came in, she said, 'Well, Vice President-elect Pence is on the phone.' I said, 'Well, I got to take that call.' And so he's on the phone, he said, 'Hey, a lot of people have said, you know, because of your global experience, that you could be really useful, you know, if you come up...

I was just with the president, a briefing on your view of where the world is today. And I said, well, this was when all that stuff was going on at Trump Tower, you remember the golden lobby and all the fuffle of everybody that walked in there was a candidate for something. And I said, y'all, I'd be happy to do that, but I said you got to get me in the building in a way that nobody sees me coming and going because I said I don't want a bunch of rumors starting. He says, well, we'll get you up the back private residence way. I said, okay. So I went up there and spent about an hour and a half just walking the president around the world, kind of my view of, because I knew most of the global leaders, of what the US was up against. And it wasn't a great situation he walked into. A lot of things were kind of been left in kind of a mess from the prior administration. And about an hour and a half into that, he starts this sales pitch on me and, you know, wants me to be Secretary of State. And I said, I got a job. He said, yeah, but you're going to retire soon, aren't you? And I said, yeah. And so Steve Bannon looked at me, he said, you're surprised? I said, yeah. I said, I'm not looking to do anything. He said, well, would you think about it? And I said, well, I'll think about it. So I left his office and I got in the car and I immediately called my wife and I said, you're not going to believe what happened. And she said, he asked you to be Secretary of State? She said, why did you think you were going up there? And then she started crying and she said, I told you, God's not through with you. And he wasn't. So I went up and it was a tremendous honor to serve and with no regrets. And I tell every audience of young people, you ever get the chance to serve your country, never, don't ever say no. You will never regret the opportunity to serve your country.

That's right, that's right. And meeting with the president as well.

Well, first, you know, get your own understanding of the lay of the land as best you can, and then you've got to prioritize, you know, what do you want to attack first. When we came into the administration, first, Jim Mattis and I and H.R. McMaster set up a process for the National Security Council to deal with priorities and policies, because there really was not a well-functioning national security process under the Obama administration. Most things were just run out of the White House and the State Department didn't have the kind of involvement that we all felt it should have. So we set up a new process by which we would develop policies, foreign policies, take them through the Security Council, have them vetted by all the members, and then when we agreed that that was the policy, take it to the president and review it with him. He'd endorse it. So the first, right after I was confirmed, I mean the next morning I went to see the president for my first meeting with him, and first right out of the box he said, you got to get me a North Korean policy. He said, because this guy is just, you know, he's just playing with everybody. So that was the first foreign policy document that we authored out of the State Department, and then it was followed by a policy on China, and then it was followed by a policy on the war to defeat ISIS. And so we just, you know, you kind of had to work through it. It was a very, very busy time with not a lot of sleep and not a lot of time off. I set up a war room in the office behind mine. The State Department is authorized to have two Deputy Secretaries of State. One is for foreign affairs and the other is called the Deputy Secretary for Management. And I had already decided I didn't need a Deputy Secretary for Management, didn't want one. We have an Under Secretary for Management and I felt like, you know, so I abandoned that office and turned it into a war room that we could convene personnel out of the State Department, people from the foreign desk, and we'd do these huge whiteboard sessions, you know, where we just whiteboard the issue like crazy, cover the room with it, and then we'd bring in folks from other departments. Pentagon people would come over, CIA folks would come in, Mattis would come over, and we'd kind of whiteboard some more. And out of that we would formulate policy. So during the time I was there, we authored 13 foreign policies that the president approved, and we had four more in draft when I left. So that was the mechanism by which we got everyone on the same page, because one of the challenges I saw from my days at Exxon, and I interfaced with a lot of foreign policy issues from Exxon obviously, and I interfaced with the president quite a bit. I had a number of meetings with Obama, meetings with Bush before him, and so I had kind of had an inkling as to how people were coming up with the policies and the decisions, and oftentimes you could see there was a lack of coordination among agencies. You know, it's like they weren't on the same page. And so coming in, Jim and I, Mattis and I, talked a lot about that even before we were confirmed. We had a number of dinners together about, you know, first we got to have the Pentagon and State Department on the same page. Most of the time they're not on the same page. That has been the history of the United States of America, is the State Department and the Pentagon hate each other and they're rarely on the same page. Jim and I made a blood oath to one another we were not ever going to go to the White House until he and I agreed, because there was never going to be a ray of daylight between he and I in front of President Trump, otherwise Trump would end up with bad advice. So that's the way we played it the whole time we were there.

I have less stress for sure. I worry about my cows a lot.

Well, I mean, all of us are constantly evolving human beings. You are never static. If you are, you just think you are, you're just not paying attention. You're really not. I mean, so the old saying, we're all works in progress, and you are going to make mistakes along the way, and hopefully you're paying attention and learn from those. Some of them I made, I don't like to talk about, you know, because they're partly because they're painful, and partly because I've never talked about them to anybody. But I think it is, if I were to describe myself and my leadership, the elements that have made me a successful leader throughout my life is first, my favorite Bible verse, First Peter 5:6, humble yourself before the Lord and He will lift you up in due time. Humble yourself and don't get ahead of Him, He'll lift you up in His time. And too often people are, you know, I got to get it now, I got to do it now. And throughout my entire career, I was never a bulletin board watcher. I never paid a lot of attention to who was getting promoted around me. I just kind of worked hard at the job I had because they never left me there long enough and I always felt like I hadn't mastered this yet and now they're already moving me on to something else. So I just stayed focused on every opportunity being a growth opportunity. So I like to think, you know, and I try to view myself as that humble person before the Lord. And then the second is servant leadership, which I learned in scouting. That's what scouting teaches you, is to be a servant leader, a servant to others. And when I taught a lot, and I still talk to some graduate business schools and talk to people about servant leadership, I'll tell them, you know, you realize that that is in fact who you have become when your greatest satisfaction comes with seeing the accomplishments of those who are working around you and for you and with you. And when you see them reach a goal that they didn't think they could, or, you know, really achieve something, you're just so happy to see that person develop to their potential. And that's, certainly as a CEO, that's your number one priority, is prepare your successor and prepare those around you to take over when you're gone and do a better job than you did. And so that requires a servant leader. You know, I don't need to be in the headlines. I used to laugh and tell folks, you know, I knew anytime when I was serving in the government, anytime I was above the fold and the president was below the fold, I was going to have a terrible day. And I did have a terrible day, because it really made him angry.

Well, you know, he's got, it's interesting to, you know, obviously looking at some of his picks for his cabinet positions, there are some really good quality people in there, and there are some that I know we're all kind of saying, what? What concerns me is I don't know how much he learned from that first term. He's a very difficult person to help. He's not a good listener. He doesn't have a depth of understanding of historical context, and that made foreign policy extremely challenging because he didn't understand why the world's the way it is. In that part of the world, why is the Middle East the way it is? There's a reason, you know, but you got to go back 3,000 years to understand it and everything that happened since. There's a reason Southeast Asia is the way it is, it has a history, and he doesn't know any of that. I mean, he literally just doesn't know it. And so you have to spend, you try to spend a lot of time putting things in a context for him, but as you also probably witnessed, he has an extremely short attention span. And so one of the challenges people are going to have is briefing him. So if I could give him any advice, I'd say, Mr. President, he doesn't read, and there's a reason he doesn't read, and I don't know what it is, and it's a personal thing, and I don't want to share it because I became aware of why he doesn't read. It's a physiological thing. So because he doesn't read, you know, the President's Daily Briefing is the most important document he gets every morning. So the CIA agents can take him through it, they'll do an oral briefing, but he needs to listen to it. You know, because a meeting with President Trump is you talk for 30 seconds and then he interrupts you and changes the subject for the next 20 minutes, and then you try to come back to where you were. So my advice to him would be work on your listening skills as much as you can, because there's information that's really important for you to know and you're not getting it. It's not because people aren't trying to give it to you, you're just not receiving it. And that was the biggest challenge in trying to serve him and help him. I agree with essentially all his policies, I agree with his objectives. I mean, he's got all the right things in mind, but if you can't execute them, it's all for naught.

Yeah, well, you're never going to go wrong investing in oil and natural gas. I know everyone, I know we have these aspirations for the energy transition. The truth of the matter is we've been in energy transition since we were knocking two rocks together to start a fire with twigs. We went through the energy transition where wood was the primary energy source, it was displaced by coal, coal is displaced by oil, oil has become somewhat displaced by natural gas and some renewables. But the truth of the matter is when the aspirants of a non-fossil fuel energy future talk about that, they're completely ignoring the demand side of the equation. Demand is growing all the time, and so they are chasing an ever larger demand for energy that cannot be met by the currently available alternative sources. So I have long told people, you know, you can go 50 years from now, if you look at the energy mix 50 years from now, it's still going to be at least half oil and natural gas. There just isn't anything that can replace it at scale, and that's the element that most people simply can't get their arms around, is the scale of the energy enterprise, the scale of how enormous it is. You simply can't replace that while you're chasing a growing demand. And so I love to tell young people who are thinking about engineering careers and they say, oh, I probably shouldn't be in petroleum engineering. I said, please go, go major in petroleum engineering, please. You're not going to regret it because we're going to need those. I mean, the energy component that's starting to get some attention now, and it should have been all along, is nuclear. And you know, we almost stopped training nuclear engineers. The only nuclear engineers out there are the ones who are in the Navy who are looking after the nuclear subs and the ships. So we've got to train up a whole new cadre of nuclear engineers to help us advance the technologies around intrinsically safe nuclear, which we have the capability to do. So we have other options, but again, it's back to scale. So I would say, don't sell your stock. Especially don't sell your Exxon stock. Dividend goes up every year. Put it under your pillow, sleep well at night, give it to your grandkids, send them to college. It's going to be just fine. Now, you know, oil and natural gas are depletion resources, but as I always would tell the shareholder meetings and tell the analysts in New York, don't ever short technology, because every time you think we've run out of ways to figure out how to get oil and natural gas out of the ground, somebody has a breakthrough somewhere, and all of a sudden, boom, here comes a whole new source of energy, which is wonderful for the American people and wonderful for the world. It's what makes our quality of life possible.

Yes, I had to buy a bunch because they made me sell it all when I went to Washington. So when I got home I had to buy a bunch.

Yeah, well, so some of the changes started just after my presidency, but we were studying them a lot during the time that I was president of the Boy Scouts. The first was allowing gay lesbians into the Boy Scouts, gays at the time, and gay leaders. And you know, that was consistent with what was happening in the country, and it turns out we had a lot of gay members in scouting. Nobody knew who they were because again it was at a time when people didn't identify. So it was through a long discussion internally, and it was another five years I think before we finally took a vote. And it was a tough vote on the organization because, as kind of as you would expect, it was split like the country is split. You know, and it's a vote of all of the voting members of the Scouting Council, which is over 2,200 people vote because they're from all over the country. But it did pass, it passed overwhelmingly, like 66%. And so then it was all just a matter of, okay, how do we want to manage that in a way that does, you know, because rule number one in anything is do no harm. And we lost some members out of that, and I respect their convictions around that issue. A lot of people have very strong religious convictions about it. We're sorry that that's the way they felt about it, but in reflection, now that it's been almost 10 years, it's a non-issue today. It's just a non-issue. The second big change was four years ago. We had had heavy lobbying from our members internally to allow girls to be in Boy Scouts. And we said, well, they have Girl Scouts. They said, yeah, but you know, the Girl Scouts don't do high adventure, they don't do a lot of camping. They do a lot of tremendous community service and that's kind of what they're built around, serving the community, which is admirable, and they have a good value system as well. But you know, as young women have changed with the times, young women want to do all the things young men are doing. And so we had a lot of fathers and mothers lobbying as hard that had boys in Boy Scouts and they had daughters, but their daughters couldn't be in Boy Scouts. And then we had fathers who were Eagle Scouts and they only had daughters, they didn't have sons, and they wanted to live that experience of being the father of a scout. So again, long deliberation, which started again under my presidency, because we called in a number of well-recognized sociologists and psychologists. Again, the question is how's this going to harm our boys, because we did not want to do harm to the boys in the program. And so it was through a lot of careful deliberation that the decision was made to allow girls. And the current model is the girls are separate troops from boys, and that's so that, you know, because girls and boys at that age develop differently. You know, boys mature later, and what we didn't want to do is have the boys, you know, one of the key features of scouting we tell parents is it's a safe place to fail. Young men can do things and fail, and they're not going to be made fun of, and nobody's going to mock them, and they're not going to be made embarrassed. They're going to be lifted up. And I've got lots of stories and examples I share with parents about what that looks like to young men, and that's how their confidence grows and they learn that it's okay to mess up. It's not going to kill you. So we didn't want to interfere with the dynamic of how boys and girls develop at those critical years of 11 to 15 years old. And so I think thus far we've been pretty successful with that, as the best I can tell. And I've visited some all-girl troops. I was out at Philmont Scout Ranch teaching a course summer before last, and I went out on the trail. Philmont's a quarter of a million acre high adventure base in New Mexico with big mountains, and kids go out on these eight-day treks where they hike about 50, 60 miles, carry these 40-pound packs on their back, go over tops of mountains. It's a great way to grow up. And I ran into an all-girl crew, 11 girls, and some of them, I mean, the packs were bigger than they were. And I mean, I never seen so much enthusiasm in my whole life. So as I was talking to them about their scouting experience, all 11 of those girls were in the inaugural class of Eagle Scouts, first girls to earn the Eagle Scout award. So it's working. Yeah, some people still have concerns, and we want to be careful with it, again, make sure we're doing it right. But it's been very popular, and we don't want to take anything away from Girl Scouts. The Girl Scouts sued the Boy Scouts when we allowed girls in because they said we were trying to, you know, shed them. That was not what we're doing. We offer a completely different kind of program. The lawsuit ended up getting tossed.

Yeah, we had, you know, obviously we have G20, G7 meetings, NATO meetings where the secretaries and foreign ministers meet oftentimes ahead of the summits where the heads of state show up. And so again, it's an opportunity to do some relationship building. Our allies are really, really important to us. It's something that President Trump never quite grasped, and again, I think part of that has to do with that absence of depth of historical understanding, you know, of the great wars and how we got through those. But it's important to develop those kind of personal relationships with your counterparts, because the day is going to come, and it came more than once or twice in the time that I was serving, you're going to get waked up by the security people at 2:00 in the morning, and we need you to, you know, this is happening, this has broken out in this part of the world, we've got to respond, we need our allies to respond. You got to get on the telephone and start calling people and convincing them this is what we think we need to do. The first one of those I had to do was, you may remember early on in Trump's presidency, the Syrians had been using chemical weapons and Obama had drawn a red line and said, you know, no more chemical weapons. Well, they just kept using them. So Trump said, first time they use chemical weapons, we're going to respond. And so they did. Syrians were using chemical weapons on a village in that civil war. And so we were actually down at Mar-a-Lago, it was during President Xi's first state visit to Mar-a-Lago early on in the presidency. And so we made the decision, we had a National Security Council meeting and had made the decision we were going to launch cruise missiles against the air base where they had been launching these planes that were dropping the chemical weapons. And so I immediately then got to get on the telephone to let our allies know. We didn't tell anybody until 30 minutes before we were going to launch the missiles, but we wanted them to know ahead of time. So you're on the phone calling every one of them, tell them here's what we're about to do so that they have time to figure out how they want to respond, just politically respond to it. So it helps if you have that relationship, you can make those messages short and to the point and they understand you. If you don't have the relationship, a lot of times you get up in a long conversation. But the same is true even with your adversaries. So I developed very close relationships with Sergey Lavrov at Russia, very close relationships with my counterpart in North Korea, whom I had to talk to through the Swedes. But you develop those relationships so that again, something happens, you got to make a call at 3:00 in the morning and say, hey Sergey, y'all need to stop shelling this location or we're going to have a lot of dead Russians and dead Americans. And they either stop or we end up with a lot of dead. At night, we ended up with a lot of dead Russians because they didn't stop.

Well, I do think, and as I said earlier, I unfortunately think we missed a window of opportunity where it might have been easier. But I still think we're at that point where it is basically fighting at a stalemate. You know, the Russians are taking huge casualties every day. Putin is using the same tactics that Stalin used in World War II, just keep throwing more bodies in there. He doesn't care what the body count is. You know, I'll go get some more bodies. And so it's a very difficult war to fight when that's what your adversary is willing to do basically at all cost. But I think we do need to continue to give the Ukrainians capabilities to hold that line static if at all possible, because the best thing is to keep this as a stalemate to motivate negotiations. I was a little bit surprised that Zelensky was so forthcoming in his comments here in the last day or two about the willingness to not permanently cede, but call a ceasefire and recognize that Russia occupies certain territories in the east and Crimea, and that we'll maintain status quo for now, basically an armistice like we have on the Korean Peninsula, no peace accord, but no more fighting. At some point leaders get old and they die. You know, Putin and I are the same age, I'm actually six months older than he is, but we're all going to die eventually. So one day he'll be gone. And if you look at Russia, one of the interesting aspects of Russia, there's no apparent succession plan going on over there right now. He's not making any plans, there's nobody being groomed, and that may be a very interesting time. Because at least in the Soviet system, while oftentimes we were surprised by who emerged, there was a process within the Communist Party of how they selected the successor. It's not evident to me there's any process in Putin's mind of how that's going to work. But I think if we can continue to allow the Ukrainians to fight this to a stalemate, maybe when the Trump administration comes in they will have a different approach to Putin to get negotiations underway and a ceasefire. And it likely will look something like what Zelensky is talking about. I do not think the question of putting Ukraine in NATO now is on the table. It's just that's in the too-hard-to-do category. Perhaps there are other security guarantees that the West can provide that would give the Ukrainians confidence to live with a static situation for the time being. You know, the fear I have in that is that looks like a win for Vladimir Putin. That looks like a win for him. Does that motivate him? Because I know what's behind your question is there's a lot of very worried people in Poland and in the Baltics as well. You know, so will he take that as a signal that, well, it worked here, let me do something elsewhere? I think not immediately, because this has come at a high cost to Russia. It will take them some time to rebuild to mount something new. You know, so I think that's the best outcome at this point. And whether that happens, it's just hard to say, you know, because right now I don't get the sense that Putin feels like he's in a position he needs to negotiate. But that could change after January the 20th.

Well, it's been a pleasure to be here. Thank you.

I'd love to. Thank you for the invitation.