Human connection over loneliness and division
In this episode of the Imagine A World podcast, Anson Zhou (2024 cohort) interviews Amanda Morrison (2024 cohort), a JD student at Stanford Law School, about the through line connecting her upbringing in Montana, her longtime relationship to dance, her work in documentary filmmaking, and her decision to pursue law. Amanda imagines a world where human connection prevails over loneliness and division. She reflects on how the outdoors and ballet trained her in discipline, endurance, and growth through discomfort, and how those lessons continue to shape the way she moves through new challenges.
Guest
Amanda Morrison, from Helena, Montana, is pursuing a JD at Stanford Law School. She graduated summa cum laude from Princeton University with a bachelor’s degree in public policy and international relations and earned a master’s degree in global affairs from Tsinghua University in Beijing as a Schwarzman Scholar. By combining law and filmmaking, Amanda aspires to challenge overconcentration of power and strengthen democratic systems of accountability.
She co-produced Keep Sweet: Pray and Obey, the Netflix docuseries about the unraveling of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. She subsequently led development of documentary and scripted projects at Oscar-winning production company Little Monster Films. Amanda has published articles about Chinese politics in The Atlantic, Foreign Policy, and The China Project. Her independent documentary about a prominent Chinese feminist activist will premiere in 2025. She was awarded the Myron T. Herrick Prize for the top senior thesis in the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs.
Imagine A World team
Imagine A World's theme music was composed and recorded by Taylor Goss (2021 cohort). The podcast was originally conceived and led by Briana Mullen (2020 cohort), Taylor Goss, and Willie Thompson (2022 cohort), along with Daniel Gajardo (2020 cohort) and Jordan Conger (2020 cohort).
Knight-Hennessy scholars represent a vast array of cultures, perspectives, and experiences. While we as an organization are committed to elevating their voices, the views expressed are those of the scholars, and not necessarily those of KHS.
Full transcript
Note: Transcripts are generated by machine and lightly edited by humans. They may contain errors.
Amanda Morrison:
I think what's invigorating about law is that you have this toolkit as you move through the world. You can be very responsive to what's going on. There are these recurring themes of people pursuing profits and pursuing power and harming people in the process. The law is meant to be this tool to prevent the worst outcomes. I am Amanda Morrison. I'm a member of the Knight-Hennessy Scholars 2024 cohort and a JD student at Stanford Law School. I imagine A World where human connection prevails over loneliness and division.
Ashley Yeh:
Welcome to the Imagine A World Podcast from Knight-Hennessy Scholars. We are here to give you a glimpse into the Knight-Hennessy Scholar community of graduate students, all seven Stanford schools, including business, education, engineering, Humanities, law, medicine, and sustainability. In each episode, we talk with scholars about the world they imagine and what they're doing to bring it to life.
Anson Zhou:
Today we sit down with Amanda Morrison, a 2024 Knight-Hennessy Scholar, and JD student at Stanford Law School. We talk about growing up in Montana, how two decades of dance shaped the way she moves through the world, and how storytelling became a through line in her life, from studying China and feminist activism to documentary filmmaking, to examining power media and international trade through the lens of law. Her journey weaves together, film, ideology, physical endurance and justice, all grounded in a deep belief in the power of lived experience and human stories to challenge systems and connect people. Hi everybody. Welcome back to the Imagine A World Podcast. We have a super exciting episode today. My name is Anson. I'm a member of the 2024 cohort, currently a second year MD-MBA student at the School of Medicine and the Graduate School of Business. And today I'm joined by Amanda, someone who's in my cohort and I remember vividly meeting her at immersion weekend when we were interviewing together. Amanda, do you want to say hi real quick?
Amanda Morrison:
Hi, it's good to be here.
Anson Zhou:
I've been thinking about how cool our conversation was over a year ago now at dinner in the Sheraton over in Palo Alto, and when we're thinking about bringing in more law students on this podcast, I immediately thought of you and interesting mix of things that you've done that eventually brought you to this path.
Amanda Morrison:
Remember that conversation well.
Anson Zhou:
Yeah. Yeah. So I'm excited to dive into it today and like we do with all of our guests on the podcast, we really start with this one canonical question to really set the context for the rest of the conversation. So before we talk about the world you imagine, let's talk about the world that you were born into. Where are you from and what was your journey here, Amanda?
Amanda Morrison:
I grew up in Helena, Montana on the Rocky Mountains. I have an older sister and we grew up going into the mountains with our parents and really learning from being outdoors and being challenged physically and emotionally and mentally from a pretty young age. And I not only appreciated the natural world that was around me, but the opportunities to really challenge myself on a personal level and learn what it meant to dig deep and work through pain and improve your own skills, whether it was skiing or hiking, running. We lived a very active childhood and I'm very grateful for that and those are passions that I continue to engage in now. But I also was a dancer, so as I grew up simultaneously spending a lot of time in the outdoors, that was always a hobbyhorse for my intense ballet instructor who was a phenomenal woman, Campbell Midgley.
And she opened up Queen City Ballet Company in Helena 25 plus years ago and really gave an opportunity for an intense ballet training for students and young kids in Helena. And I think it was an unusual environment to be able to have in a small town in the west and that also I think shaped me as much as the outdoors did. Going to the studio close to every day a week, especially as I got older and also working through a lot of pain and learning what it meant to really be committed to something, improve, challenge yourself against yourself. I think those were two of the most influential aspects of my childhood.
Anson Zhou:
How did you get into ballet in the first place? I think we've talked before, you've done it for a very long time. You have this very intense ballet experience in maybe a less than typical place where I grew up in York, there are a lot of people doing ballet, but maybe not so much where you're from. How did you first get exposed to it?
Amanda Morrison:
I think like a lot of little girls, I started it. My parents enrolled me in classes as a great way to learn how to move and have structure in my childhood, but I think it grew into something much bigger and more intense as I got older. And it was largely because of the caliber of the studio that was available to us. Also, really wanted certain performance opportunities. I loved the aspect of working on the craft day to day and the hard work that could pay off in this very visible way, but then you were working towards opportunities to perform and I loved the aspect of learning choreography, rehearsing, knowing that you were going to be able to be on stage and perform it.
And particularly my dream as a little girl was to be Clara in the Nutcracker and that was something I got to do as an eighth grader and it felt really like peak of the process of ballet training as a kid where after many years I did have that opportunity and got to perform with the live symphony in front of the town of Helena in our Civic center, which is a beautiful old building and that was really just a priceless and unforgettable moment of childhood. And then I went to boarding school actually in the St. Paul's school in New Hampshire and they have a wonderful ballet company as well. And there, I was able to branch out from classical ballet into other forms of dance modern in contemporary styles.
We did Merce Cunningham, Martha Graham, Paul Taylor, and then had other guest choreographers that came. Philip Neal. We had alum who's dancing at the Bathsheba Dance Company come and it really expanded my dance world. I went from being a bunhead exclusively to exploring these new forms and it really opened my mind. And I think as a teenager in high school, having that opportunity to really explore different modes of dance was incredible. And now even though I'm not dancing anymore, aside from maybe an occasional night on the dance floor, I continued to go to dance performances when I was living in New York. That was one of my favorite things to do. There's dance everywhere in the city and so it's a lifelong passion even if I'm no longer training and performing.
Anson Zhou:
I relate to that so much. I had started playing violin myself when I was four, turning five and played for a long time up through high school. And even though I don't play anymore, I think the lessons that you learn from it really drastically change and touch the different pursuits you have in the rest of your life. And I guess to your point, we're obviously really passionate about dance. It was a huge part of your early life, but you didn't study dance when you went to undergrad. You were studying more in the policy and international relations space. So tell me about what drew you into study that and what that experience was like.
Amanda Morrison:
I liked policy because it allowed you to develop a skill set where you could identify problems and then hopefully brainstorm solutions. So it felt both practical but then very transferable where you could employ that framework to a lot of different issue areas. And so when I grew up in a pretty political family, I spent a lot of time on the campaign trail in Montana as a kid with my dad who's a lawyer and held public office, I was always drawn to how public servants and how the government could address issues and tackle social questions. So it was a natural focus area for me. When I got to undergrad, I ended up then leaning more into at Princeton we had what's now the school of Public and International Affairs. It's an interdisciplinary department where you're doing policy but it's also very international.
And I ended up really focusing on US-China relations in part because I think this is true for a lot of my experiences and how my trajectory has evolved. It was based on the professors I had and the positive experiences that led me down a certain path. And so I really loved my East Asian foreign policy class, my Chinese domestic politics class. I took Chinese politics with Rory Truex who was a wonderful and engaging professor and became a mentor. And as I was making decisions about what to do, my independent research on what classes to take those positive experiences built on one another. And so I ended up becoming a China policy focused student at SPIA, the school. It felt like it just brought together a lot of ways of thinking of the big picture dreaming and envisioning a better world like we're doing here, but also then the skills, the elements of econ and stats and business that are required to effectuate those ideas. So I think it was a nice mix.
Anson Zhou:
And that eventually brought you to China for a year, working through more of those in the real deal, in the real place.
Amanda Morrison:
Yes. I was fortunate enough to travel to China a few times while in undergrad on various programs and grants from Princeton, including a language immersion Princeton and Beijing, or you sign a language pledge, don't speak English for eight weeks. That was quite the entry point into living in China, but there's really no better way than being in full discomfort. Going back to my first comments about these early experiences where I think when you out of discomfort comes growth, and that was another moment where I often felt really uncomfortable and wanted to express myself in English, but you sign the pledge, you can't. I learned a lot, not only about the language, but studying the Chinese language also deepened my interest in the country of study.
So in addition to what I was saying about the people who really inspired me to pursue US-China relations and China studies, I was fascinated with what I was learning through the class about the food, about the history, about the political structure. I wanted to learn more based on the language experiences. And then I went back for independent research in undergrad as well and was studying the Chinese feminist movement and how the state reigned in successful activism and co-op elements of social movements for strength and stability of the state and then squashes silences and erases elements that are not aligned with state goals. And that project really grew out of more personal relationships. I interned for Jerry Cohen at the US Asia Law Institute as a college student and he recently passed away, but he was a giant in the China field, was the first lawyer to live and work in China in the early '80s.
Right after the reform and opening period of '79, he introduced me to a lot of organizers in the civil society realm including feminist activists, women's rights activists. So when I was in China in college, I was following their stories and that became my senior thesis and then a documentary film project that I started in college continued while I was living in Beijing post-grad during the Schwarzman Scholars program where I was in a master's program but also working on this film. And I have continued to go back over the past several years to work on that project as well as additional policy work. So it's been a continued presence in my life both at a place I love to go, I love to study and where I have active work.
Anson Zhou:
I haven't been back to China in 15 years, but I can renew my visa or some things I can go back to because I hear about all these cool experiences you're having. At Stanford they have the, I think collaboration with PKU and Peking University as well where a lot of my classmates have gone. But I think maybe that's something to put on my bucket list before I graduate.
Amanda Morrison:
Where were your travels?
Anson Zhou:
I think I want to go to Beijing and I used to live in the south of Shanghai for two years when I was a kid, but I hadn't been back since, so it's been a hot minute.
Amanda Morrison:
Wow. Yeah, a lot of changes in-
Anson Zhou:
I'm sure.
Amanda Morrison:
Even between when I first went in 2016 to last year, every few years there's both physical change but also just change in your conversations and the feeling that you get from people, both my friends who live there. But also I think one of the things I love about Beijing is you can just talk to your cab driver or people at the street cart or entry to a park and people are very, especially with foreigners who speak Chinese, really excited to talk. And so you can learn quite a bit about just the feeling in the air about things. And obviously you don't want to glean too much from that. It's like walk up to an American and ask them how things are going. You're going to get very different answers.
Anson Zhou:
What's an example of a change that you've experienced between times you've visited China?
Amanda Morrison:
So on the street cart front, one of the bittersweet or maybe just sad changes was the loss of a lot of the street sellers in an effort to clean up the city. There used to be jianbing everywhere or sellers crafts just right on the street. You really don't see that anymore. And the Pearl market used to be filled with sellers inside of a building that started to get more and more contained or organized and in the name of organization and accessibility to tourists. But then it lost a lot of the appeal and the liveliness. And now the most recent time I went back to Pearl Market for instance, it's just dead. And I think some of that was the over corporatization of it, but I think then also you have now the post-COVID slump and people are not out spending money in the way that they were and just are not out bustling.
That feels very different. But on the conversational front, there was a mix. I've talked to some cab drivers who the most recent time I went are all driving BYDs now. Basically in a matter of a year the entire cab fleet was turned over and replaced. It replaced combustion engines with electric vehicles and these cab drivers are like, "This is awesome. I got this new car and it's cheap and it's easy to charge." And you are really excited about that kind of government led initiative. And then you have other people who, I had a woman come up to me in a park and whisper that she's not able to speak her mind and that's not really a new feature in China. There's always been controlled media environment, but it feels like there's more fear about being open given that political environment continues to tighten and tighten and tighten.
Anson Zhou:
Thank you for sharing that. I think for myself, when I was there as a kid, obviously a lot of these things I wouldn't have noticed. I'm curious not only what is different, obviously nearly two decades later, but what I would've noticed back then for just now. So I think very cool insight. This is probably a good segue to talk about, I think one of the most striking things I remember about you when we had our conversation is how in-depth you were before coming to law school. It seems like towards the end of undergrad as well with film and that being medium for storytelling, something we love here at Knight-Hennessy. You mentioned one of your early projects involved in film was with China, with policy, with feminism, but you've since branched into a ton of other topics as well. And I think post Schwarzman, you were working full-time on documentary filmmaking. So please tell me how working in China became this launching pad into the world of film and how did that bring you to law? You've traversed a lot of different paths to get to Stanford.
Amanda Morrison:
It's definitely been a mix of chapters and overlapping periods. I made the leap into documentary film formally right after COVID, and I do think there was an element of sitting at home during the pandemic, finishing my master's degree through Schwarzman and feeling a little more emboldened to do something risky. Because we were in a global pandemic and it felt like I didn't have much to lose by doing something a bit against the grain. And I had always loved film. I grew up watching movies and I loved Steven Spielberg and as I grew up, Kathryn Bigelow was becoming a prominent director and I loved her work and I had always wondered what if I go to Hollywood, what if I... And I did intern for some producers in LA during college, and so I had a little bit of experience, but I was always unsure if I was going to go down a more traditional path aligned with what I had studied formally in college or if I was going to make the leap into film.
And it luckily coincided with the streaming boom, which happened a bit more when we were in college or the 2017, '18 '19 period and then into, in COVID everyone was home watching, so there was even more demand for streaming. And so it was this unique time period where documentary suddenly went from being a very niche. I mean I hate to even call it niche because there were lots of wonderful documentaries from the two thousands and early teens, some of my favorites, but it became more commercially viable and more of an industry that you could enter as a young person.
I found a job on a Netflix series. I was a producer on Keep Sweet: Pray and Obey, and during the pandemic, this was fall of 2021, I moved to rural Utah where I was able to socially distance mask up, [inaudible 00:19:49] with two other producers, the director and our crew, and start producing this show documentary series about the FLDS Fundamentalist Mormon Sect and the downfall of the group after evil prophet usurps power from his father and runs the group into the ground. He was a criminal on many fronts, exploited people for labor and then the most egregious crimes were sexual abuse of children. There was underage marriage and then it culminated in a widespread sexual abuse that was documented and that was the source of his life conviction. It's a polygamous sec too, I guess I didn't say that that was the basis of why they are an offshoot of the mainstream church.
There are a handful of these sects that exist to preserve the polygamous lifestyle, but with that there's a more fundamentalist ideology and it was somewhat in the true crime genre, which is very popular on Netflix and all streaming platforms, but we also felt like it was a bit of a Trojan horse where we were in the genre that was very popular to Netflix and the audiences on Netflix, but also we could do something a bit deeper, an investigation into a patriarchal subculture and the ideological control of the group and also the steady decline of a community from harmless fundamentalist religious group to a group that had fallen at the hands of a one man rule. And that was something that I found some similarities with when I had studied authoritarian regimes on more of a global geopolitical context.
And then right here in the Red Rocks of rural Utah, you have a lot of these same features of concentrated power and the abuse that happens when there's no checks on that power. So I felt very lucky because I ended up on that project without a lot of familiarity with the topic, but then learn so much. It was an amazing two years of my life, COVID notwithstanding where I was able to really just run around, gather archive, do research, help the director prep for interviews. We were doing a lot of location scouting the storyboard work, and it was just this deep singular experience and I really appreciated the opportunity to work on one thing for so long and that was different from what I did subsequently, which was working in development of new projects where it was instead of working on one thing very deeply, I was managing 50 different potential ideas at different stages and exploring their potential, often pitching them, gathering resources, gathering team members to start working on projects. And so it was a very different side of the documentary world.
Anson Zhou:
This is when I think you were in Brooklyn in New York generally. I remember we were connecting on that one. I'd love your point on how even from the China work to the work you were doing in Utah, this thread of authoritarianism power, I think you using media and storytelling as a means to share and expose that truth. Maybe we can touch on that a little bit first before we maybe talk more about your other experiences at varying stages of documentary filmmaking. How did that eventually draw you into law? I think that's something I'm interested in because I think there's some parallels there. I think people who are interested in applying to law school would love to hear what are the motivations there and how do you eventually make that leap?
Amanda Morrison:
I found film as a way to be able to understand the layers beneath abuse of power and how the power develops over time. And that was very much part of the story with Keep Sweet was you had all of these people who were complicit in the rise of Warren Jeffs and his abuse. And I think in any power structure you have often a single man rule. It could be a single person rule, but it's almost always a man in this world, man in this world, and the people around him who are enablers and that sounds very familiar in our current political environment is the same in the Chinese context and in this fundamentalist Mormon context. And there are differences in the way that those relationships operate, but there was that common thread of power is concentrated over time and with the help of a lot of other people who either turn a blind eye or are deliberately a part of removing the checks on that power as well as channels for people who are harmed by that power to get recourse.
And to the connection on the law, I think that really is the law at its best to me is this idea that when someone has a harm at the hands of people in power, and that could be in the private sector or the public sector, but it's often harms created by someone with more power against someone with less power. And in our American legal system at its best, that person has a place to go to confront the person who harmed them, whether intentionally or not, and have their day in court and tell their story. Then the lawyer's job is to take that story and then understand where it fits into the law and what legal tools exist to bring them redress on an individual level and bring justice on a more societal level. And so I was very motivated to come to law school to build on my more creative storytelling side with concrete skills to be able to enact that change on an individual level, on a legal level.
And I think we are seeing that now in our political environment where as the government abuses its power in the most flagrant ways, we have lawyers as well as people armed with cameras documenting things, using whatever they have, the skills they have, the technology they have to expose the abuse of power and stop it. And I think it's even though the rule of law is under attack in a way it hasn't been in our lifetime and often there's debates about how unprecedented this is, but despite the hacks on the judiciary and on the rule of law, writ large, law is a bulwark against the abuse. And with the National Guard deployment for lawyers have been able to bring cases challenging the federalization of the National Guard and get favorable judgments.
And that has led to the withdrawal of the guard. That's what happened in Illinois after the Trump first Illinois case and the Supreme Court ruled that it was an unlawful use of the National Guard not justified by the statute that allows the president to federalize the National Guard and Trump subsequently removed the National Guard and obviously we're still seeing all kinds of violence in other places, but I do think on a case by case basis, the law is a powerful tool to stop abuse and stop behavior that is blatantly unlawful. And on the individual level, I think it's very empowering to know when someone is harmed that there may be a legal remedy available.
Anson Zhou:
It all comes back to storytelling. The law allows you to use storytelling as a tool too.
Amanda Morrison:
The chief justice of the Supreme Court, John Roberts has described every lawsuit as a story. I was like, I feel validated because sometimes in law school you have to forget about the story side of things and focus on the rules and the logic and how to build the case from the nuts and bolts, but then the way that you actually move it forward, whether it's in front of a jury or a judge, is focusing on the story and the most compelling part of the case from a human side of things. And I think remembering that the legal system is a system of people, and you could say the same about medicine or really anything. It's like we make these big structural observations, but then sometimes the easiest way to understand something is just that it's people at the end of the day making the mistakes and making the decisions to do something about it. I think that that is a good reminder
Anson Zhou:
In medicine when we're taking patient's history, obviously we have to get the facts straight and use that to build a case towards diagnosis and a treatment plan. But at the end of the day when you actually present it to your attending or whoever's supervising you weave it into a story. I think it's this and this is why I think all of it comes together. To your point, you're presenting to a human, not a robot.
Amanda Morrison:
And I think it's why storytelling is part of the first year curriculum at Knight-Hennessy because whatever you're doing, being able to craft a story is both empowering to you and very powerful to other people and to achieving your goals.
Anson Zhou:
I don't want to miss out on what we were talking about before with your experience doing a ton of different stories. So how did that impact you as a storyteller, as a budding storyteller from one experience diving deep for multiple years into one story and becoming an expert that immersing yourself there versus what's going to be the next big story? How do I start to kick that off? How do I determine which one has the most potential? What are the different skill sets that you're able to build across those two?
Amanda Morrison:
I'm happy I was able to do both because they really do take different caps that you have to put on. While I was at Little Monster Films, which is the production company of Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin, I was focused on our core principles as a company. So we did have a guiding spirit at the company.
Anson Zhou:
I see you have the Yeti from Little Monster.
Amanda Morrison:
Yes. Repping little Monster. I still feel great affinity for the team there. And what's fun is that because I was working at such an early stage of projects there, they're continuing to come out. We actually just had a film that we co-produced Premiere at Sundance about the Great Salt Lake, and that was something I was working on back in 2022. And so it's been fun to see the premieres and get to feel that connection to film as I'm now on the other side of the country doing something very different, but seeing those come to fruition. Our main themes at Little Monster or capturing the triumph of the human spirit and how humans could overcome the odds to achieve the impossible. Chai and Jimmy's most well-known film is free Solo. It won the Oscar when I was in college and actually led to Chai visiting Princeton to screen free Solo and that's how I met her.
So another moment of fortuitous encounter that shaped my path and career, I got to grab drinks with her. It was the highlight of my senior spring. She was very open. We just talked about film and then she said, "Just keep me posted on what you do after college." And so sure enough, that was a promise that she kept and I reached out and I got that job through that serendipitous encounter. But we were really focused on those stories of people pushing the limits of human potential and accomplishing unbelievable things. And that was naturally present in a lot of these outdoor feats. So we did a project, this isn't out yet, but it's been announced five years in the making. Jim Morrison, a professional ski mountaineer, summited Everest on the north, climbing the north face and skied down the north face, which had never been done before. And he went with Jimmy Chin who filmed. That was very squarely in the bucket of our bread and butter, amazing physical feats in the big mountains in the natural world.
But then we took that ethos and explored other worlds and so we looked at survival stories and just had a film that premiered last summer on National Geographic. It was called Lost in the Jungle. The film is about four siblings who survived 40 days in the Amazon jungle after a plane crash where their mom died and they were indigenous kids who lived in the jungle mysteriously for those 40 days off of the land and off of their knowledge of living in the Amazon and the Colombian navy military and indigenous search guard united despite very fraught relations to save the kids. That was an example of this same spirit that we see an amazing climber accomplish something from everyday people overcoming these great odds. So we did other survival stories, shipwrecks, the natural world without the same human feet. So like the Great Salt Lake project, projects about environmentalists. It was fun because it was this kind of tagline, right, or this theme and this feeling, but then you could find it in so many different worlds and even eras.
We had some historical pieces from ping pong diplomacy when the US team went to China and had this serendipitous time there. So it was overwhelming because you were balancing so much at once, but it also felt extremely invigorating because it had all this potential. I remember Chai also would say you'd want to bring the story from the head to the heart, and that was a big part of how I reframed what I was looking for. And then the story that I would develop was not just, oh, this issue is interesting. And I think as someone coming from a policy background and then now in law, it's very much in the head, but you need to peel that away and be like, what is this really about? What does this make you feel? What are we learning from this? Her style was always like, okay, I don't really care about the factual circumstances. What I care about is why? Why are we telling this story? And so that really drove me as well.
Anson Zhou:
I can see the way you're painting a picture for me now, a story of all these seemingly disparate things, very different experiences you had really have a through line through them. And to that end, I'm curious before you jump into some of the last couple of questions, what are you interested in law school now? What does the future look like for you?
Amanda Morrison:
As far as law school interests go, education is very generalized. So you get your core doctrinals, your contracts and torts and property and constitutional law. And I'm really focused right now on just having a very solid basis to be able to effectuate change based on the world that I enter as a lawyer and I live in throughout my life. I gravitate towards issues around grade and security. I think there's really interesting things happening there with our US-China relationship and the trade-offs between protectionism of our domestic industry for security purposes as well as export controls on our sensitive technologies with the benefits of free markets. And that's very policy driven, but there's also a very strong legal underpinning of a trade as we are living through right now. I worked at the US Court of International Trade last summer when the IEEPA, the tariff case was moving through the court and then on appeal, and we should actually be hearing from the Supreme Court any day now about their decision on the constitutionality of the unilateral tariffs.
So that's been one area of interest and focus. And then related to trade on a bigger, sure, more clamor side of trade. I'm interested in antitrust and tech regulations and how this gets back to power structures. A lot of our forces that are most powerful in our society right now are big tech companies and other big corporate players that get bigger and bigger through mergers and through preferential tax policy and really very much live the consequences of very concentrated and deregulated tech world. So I really have my eye on how's that going to evolve, especially in the AI world as things are becoming more automated and more controlled by fewer and fewer players, how can the law be a watchdog on those dynamics and be a tool to prevent the worst of the harms? And right now there's active litigation against the social media giants for their harms to teenagers and it's under a product liability theory of addiction.
It's very similar to big tobacco. I think what's invigorating about the law is that you have this toolkit as you move through the world. You can be very responsive to what's going on. 15 years ago, no one expected that the social media companies would be on track. I mean maybe some people did who had that prescience or foresight, but I compare it to big tobacco because there are these recurring themes of people pursuing profits and pursuing power and harming people in the process. And it might take a new form, but the law is meant to be this tool to prevent the worst outcomes. The law is often about preventing the worst world. I was thinking about this in terms of Imagine A World I often am like I frame the world that I want to see in the negative of what world I don't want to see.
And even the way I've thought about this with a world that's not divided, that's not lonely, the law often is fending off bad outcomes. But then I think in so doing, you are able to then bring in a more positive vision of, okay, if you have the tools to prevent exploitation and abuse, then what can grow in that world that you've created. And I think that's where I hope that we can spend less time on our devices and optimizing everything to the tee just because we have the technology that allows us to do that and move towards a world that is really grounded in our connections with one another and natural world.
Anson Zhou:
Seems like you have your work cut out for you.
Amanda Morrison:
Yeah, it is a podcast about dreaming.
Anson Zhou:
Exactly, exactly. Thank you so much for sharing all that. I've learned a lot about you. It's been really insightful. I'd love to jump into some rapid fire questions and we'll wrap up with some tips for people who are interested in applying in Knight-Hennessy in Stanford generally. One of the questions we always ask our guests is about the improbable facts. For people who haven't listened to podcasts before, the improbable fact is an infamous part of the Knight-Hennessy Scholars application where we have, you list a couple unlikely but true facts about yourselves. So Amanda, do you have one that you want to share with with the audience?
Amanda Morrison:
This is less improbable now that we've had a conversation about my past, but after my senior year of high school, I was in my first and only ever professional theater production of Chicago. I got to play the Ukrainian ballerina. I spoke Ukrainian on stage, obviously had just memorized the lines, didn't even really know what they meant and she commits suicide in the show. But I got to jump off of piano and it was like a hanging very morbid but surreal that I was like, how am I in? I'm not going into... I'm not a singer. I could fake it for all that jazz. I think they put my mic on low, but I could dance, and so I got to have this pretty incredible performing experience.
Anson Zhou:
Awesome. Very multi-talented person. This is my favorite question. For those of you who have been in Denning House before, which is the home of the Knight-Hennessy Scholars program, we have a pretty extensive snack collection that sometimes rotates. There's some that stay pretty consistent, but what's your favorite one that you always come by for?
Amanda Morrison:
All right, I have to do two because they occupy different parts of the food area and different parts of my day. Definitely the overnight oats key top of the fridge and then the unreal chocolate.
Anson Zhou:
The mint ones.
Amanda Morrison:
The blue package, it's like a chocolate covered, it's an almond, healthier almond joy essentially, but it's like a dark chocolate covered coconut bar.
Anson Zhou:
Why have I never seen that?
Amanda Morrison:
They had them every day last year and then they disappear this year and it was a huge tragedy and in the past few days they've been back.
Anson Zhou:
Oh, really?
Amanda Morrison:
Yes.
Anson Zhou:
Okay, so what you're saying is I have to go take a look when I go upstairs.
Amanda Morrison:
I have one here.
Anson Zhou:
Oh, okay.
Amanda Morrison:
I always have one in my bag.
Anson Zhou:
I love it. I love it. I think my favorite overnight oats are definitely awesome. They also had the yogurt parfaits, which are right next... I love those too.
Amanda Morrison:
Also delicious.
Anson Zhou:
Blueberry jam in them anymore. They used to have those last year.
Amanda Morrison:
I also liked the old toppings.
Anson Zhou:
I know.
Amanda Morrison:
The hot topics of Denning House often revolve around-
Anson Zhou:
Have the dynamism of the snack office.
Amanda Morrison:
You got to feed the scholars so we can do our best world-changing work.
Anson Zhou:
Exactly. Exactly. Last question I want to ask while we wrap up is for people who are listening and thinking about graduate school here at Stanford and what the NSCS offer, do you have any advice for them? And if you were doing this again with what you know now, what would you have done differently and what would you have wanted to know before joining?
Amanda Morrison:
I think as far as the application process goes, it's really important to tell your story in a authentic and focused way. As someone who has explored quite a bit, both academically and in extracurricular pursuits, I thought a lot about this, how much I wanted to really cover a lot of ground and be like, here's everything that I've tried and I've done versus focusing in on this is what really matters to me. And I think that that is a personal balance that you want to make in your application. I think that you don't want to just kitchen sink it and list everything.
I think showing that there's a thread to even if you've done different things, how they relate to each other and to your common drive. I don't have insights from inside the actual admissions office, but I think that that's something based on the scholars that I've met and just my experience in the program, something that is important to Knight-Hennessy as a program. And then if there's something I wish I knew about the program as I was applying, I think the breadth of the scholars and the disciplinary design was familiar to me, but that you can tap into that in really creative and independent ways, thinking how you're not going to just socialize with people who do different things because that's obviously really fun getting to hear how people are studying the oceans and studying a new thread of molecular biology or founding an AI startup.
It's so exciting to just be indenting and talk to people. But I think that thinking about how you can use this wonderful community and the support it provides to chip away at a little something of interest to you, and obviously there's formal infrastructure for that through the projects that can be funded. And you can start a podcast, you can start a website that aggregates data or go do a mixed media storytelling project. And so I think that idea of thinking about how is this not just going to be a great community, but how might I do something that's manageable, not start my startup, that I'm going to go pursue post school per se, but do something that allows me to explore and make the most of this very unique environment and period of our lives.
Anson Zhou:
That's what I'm doing with this podcast. I've never done a podcast before, but I think you're right. Knight-Hennessy really gives you the opportunity if you take advantage of it, to just try new things that you never thought you would do. Amanda, thank you so much for coming. This was such an incredible conversation and I'm glad to have learned so much more about you and your motivations and goals and how you got here. I guess it's a good time for us to go upstairs and get some of those blue chocolates then.
Amanda Morrison:
I'm thinking. Or overnight-
Anson Zhou:
Overnight.
Amanda Morrison:
... to start the day. No, thank you, Anson. This was really fun to chat and excited for the rest of the year.
Anson Zhou:
Thanks everybody.
Sydney Hunt:
Thank you for joining us for this episode of Imagine A World where we hear from inspiring members of the KHS community who are making significant contributions in their respective fields, challenging the status quo, and pushing the boundaries of what is possible as they imagine the world they want to see.
Willie Thompson:
This podcast is sponsored by Knight-Hennessy Scholars at Stanford University, a multidisciplinary, multicultural graduate fellowship program providing scholars with financial support to pursue graduate studies at Stanford while helping equip them to be visionary, courageous, and collaborative leaders who address complex challenges facing the world. Follow us on social media at Knight-Hennessy and visit our website at kh.stanford.edu to learn more about the program and our community.
