I've been an athlete all my life. I was a competitive figure skater, and then when I realized skating was not an adult sport I took up tennis and played that quite seriously from the time I was about 18.

The best armor against everything around you is to be well educated, to work hard, to be twice as good as if you had to be, to do languages and culture better.

Education is transformational. It changes lives. That is why people work so hard to become educated and why education has always been the key to the American Dream, the force that erases arbitrary divisions of race and class and culture and unlocks every person's God-given potential.

It is possible to work across the aisle in Washington, but it's hard. And I think it's been made worse by the kind of 24-hour news cycle, the fact that everything is on TV before you can work things out quietly. I think it's the intensity of information that makes it feel more difficult to get things done. But I didn't leave with a bitter taste about the politics. The one thing that I would say is, I do think there is an unfortunate tendency to turn political differences, or policy differences, into critiques of one another's character or motives, and that's unfortunate.

I use the word power broadly. Even more important than military and economic power is the power of ideas, the power of compassion, and the power of hope.

American national security and American economic interests, of course - every president, every secretary of state - that is the primary goal. As you are in this job and in the work, you begin to see, though, that in the long run, both American economic interests and American national security are better served when there are other decent countries in the world who are both your allies and even when your adversaries are acting more decently.

There are some places that have had real quarrels with the United States' policies, but I think the country is very well-respected worldwide.