Tino Cuéllar⁠⁠ was born in Matamoros, Mexico, and crossed the border every morning to attend school in Texas. He graduated from Harvard College in 1993 and went on to serve in the Clinton and Obama administrations, as a justice of the California Supreme Court, and as president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He has been a member of the Harvard Corporation, the university's governing board, since 2019.

David Deming talks with Tino about growing up on the border, becoming his 15-year-old brother's legal guardian at 21, his path through government and the courts, and what Harvard and Stanford could learn from each other. They also discuss AI: Tino co-chaired California's frontier AI working group with Fei-Fei Li, is ⁠a trustee of Anthropic's Long-Term Benefit Trust⁠, and thinks the technology's biggest effect could be on the billions of people without access to legal help.

They close on the governance of Harvard itself: how the Corporation works, who holds it accountable, and whether Harvard is a force for good.

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