 I'm going to highlight sort of the state of play where we are today, and Leah Foundation, I think, for what things that Jared and Leah will be talking about. But I really want to start out by telling you all just a little story, it's a family story, but it's really about the end of the company man. So my grandfather, and here they are here, my grandfather, among the jewelry he left me when he died, left me tie pins. This is something of an age gone by. We don't wear tie pins that much anymore, but there's a special significance to these tie pins. This one here was given to him on the 25th anniversary at the Cincinnati Gas and Electric Company, the 25 years working at CG&E. This one was given to him on the 40th anniversary, two years before he retired, 40th anniversary working at Cincinnati Gas and Electric Company. This was the employer that he started with when he graduated from college, and it's the employer he stayed with his entire professional career, one single employer. Me on the other hand, my first job out of law school I had for three months. Now that might say more about me than my grandfather or the state of employment in America, but that's not that far fetched compared to many other people's experiences in the working world. And this is just to give you some context. This is the data from 1983 through 2010 covering those people between 45 and 64 who had 25 or more years of tenure at the same employer. It's been declining over time. If I were to back this up 20 years prior you would see the trend lines just, they continue to go down and decrease over time. People are not staying at jobs like they used to. Some of this is a product of the economy. Some of this is a product of our expectations about work and I'll get into that in a minute. But this goes by age cohort. So this shows you job tenure by age cohort, right? The thick purple color here is 10 years or more on the job. Now it's difficult to expect a 16 to 24 year old to have spent more than 10 years on the job but somehow some slight sliver have. I'm guessing those are people who are working at family businesses or something like this. But what you will see is people age 25 to 34. Very small amount of them have spent more than 10 years at the same employer. That number's declining over time and you see probably the people age 65 and older and even 55 to 64, that's pretty much the end of more than half of people working at the same job for over 10 years. The stats over the last 15, 20 years say that the average American worker will have something like between six and nine jobs in their professional career. That's a lot of job hopping and that will only continue to increase as work becomes more flexible and our expectations about work change as we expect more flexibility and openness in the way we approach our work environment. So we've seen an end of the company man but this has also been paired up with the rise of what I would call the one man company. So this is data from the IRS looking at the percentage of 1099 forms being issued over the last 15 years versus the number of W-2s. From the year 2000 to the year 2015, the number of 1099s issued has increased by approximately 22% has gone up drastically. The number of W-2s being issued over that same period has stagnated, slightly declined. It's sort of 4% below what it was in the year 2000. So we're clearly seeing a change in the way that people approach work no longer going to a single employer and staying forever and more often than not people working for themselves. Now this is a product somewhat of our continued reliance on technology to find work. I actually think all three of us here have done a good amount of research on the growing sharing economy. That's just one example but the reliance on independent work predates the sharing economy and people for decades have been moving away from traditional employment opportunities and more toward these, some would call it contingent, I would call it flexible or on demand working relationships. So you do have the circumstances surrounding work are certainly changing and that is something that's clear in the data regardless of how you look at it, the way that we are working in America is changing but it's not so much, I think oftentimes the popular narrative is that this is a product of circumstances, that we are simply responding to what's available to us. Millennials aren't working for an employer because they are not given those opportunities but I think the way that millennials and across the board, the way people prefer to work, the way people think about work and the way we talk about work is changing and I will give you some examples of this. In a recent survey of millennial workers the question was posed to them what factors are most important when looking at an employer? What makes an employer most attractive to you? One in four millennials responded flexible working arrangements, that is they prefer flexibility over a lot of the other things that people typically think of when they think of work. When millennials were asked a question about the future of work, looking forward what do you expect out of work? One in three said that they expected mainly flexible hours. Flexibility is certainly a piece of the puzzle that millennials are trying to work with and it's not just millennials, it spans into the generation before millennials. This is something that people are looking to, especially as telework, telecommuting, the idea of working from home has become an easier option for people as information technology and the internet has made that more readily available. Now this looks at the way we talk about work. This is a Google Ngram, I'm not sure if any of you are familiar with this, but basically what Google can do is it can go through the entire corpus of all of the things that Google can get its hands on, both written material as well as the stuff online that sort of are results that return to you when you search things in Google. And these are just some words that I pulled together with a couple other researchers at Mercatus to get at the way people are talking about work. This may be difficult to see, but I'll go ahead and outline them for you. This is just the term independent contractor. Telework, telecommuting, workplace flexibility and work-life balance. Independent contractor, I think I'll start there. Independent contractor is certainly something that became extremely popular as a term in the late 1990s. I think you can see it just sort of just spike in the late 1990s and it has declined since then. Although, thinking back to the chart I showed you before, the rise in independent contracting has continued. So in one way people are no longer thinking of themselves as an independent contractor. People are just thinking of themselves as working. We've no longer thought of independent contracting as something separate or different or wholly incompatible with the traditional way we've thought about work, but it's just become the way people work. Same with telecommuting. Telecommuting in like the year 2001 hit its peak and it's been declining since then. Just to show off hands, how many of you when you work from home tell people that you are telecommuting or teleworking? Right, no. Maybe a couple of people talk about it, but most people don't use those terms. You just say I'm working. I'm on my computer, in my pajamas, in my living room, and I'm working. You don't say I'm telecommuting. It's become a part of our expectations and we've no longer used those terms because they've just become wholly ingrained in the way we think about work in the modern economy. So that's telework and telecommuting. And then here are two other ones that I wanted to just include. Workplace flexibility and work-life balance. These are two things when you hear people talk about millennials in the workplace. These are two things people stress a lot. As they say millennials are striving for work-life balance. Not in the same way that our parents did or their parents did, but somehow that has become something that millennials are looking for when they're deciding where they work, who they work for, and what type of work they do. And the same is workplace flexibility. Both of these, they almost don't even show up. And I think even at this distance, you all aren't that far away from me, you can barely see them. I mean, they're terms that for the most part have just entered the public discourse and the way that we're talking and thinking and really vocalizing our preferences about work. But as Robin mentioned before, although our expectations and our arrangements have changed, the law that dictates the way that employees, workers and employers interact with each other has not. So this is a rundown of some of the laws that are enforced by the Department of Labor for the most part in other agencies as well, but primarily by the Department of Labor. The Department of Labor enforces somewhere around 180 separate laws that dictate who can work, when they can work, who they can work for, the circumstances under which work can take place, workplace safety, so the environment in which you can work with, pretty much every aspect of someone's working life is touched in some way by our current legislation that exists on the books. But to put it in some context, the average, so this is the foundation, just the ones that I'm laying out here, this sort of lays the foundation for labor law in America and in particular, I'm gonna talk about the Fair Labor Standards Act here in a moment, which is 78 years old, but the average age of this legislation is 64 years old on average. The average American worker is 42. It predates the age of most workers and it certainly has found in many ways to become anachronistic to the way we think, talk and expect to work. So while the law is relatively old, are the way we're, while the law is relatively old, the way that the Department of Labor, for example, continues to apply the law has continued, right? That they've gone ahead and they've found new ways to apply old laws. And very often that's not finding ways to adapt the old regulatory approach to the new model of work, very often that's trying to fit the new model of work into the old regulatory regime. So just two charts I wanna show you here. This is the word count from the federal register, just a product of the Department of Labor and this one shows from 1997 to 2012, we see a 22% increase in the word count. That's the way typically people count regulations as by words or pages. This is the word count. The restriction count over that same period has also grown 12%. Now this is not the product of the agencies applying new law. This is the product of the agencies taking these old laws, those on average 61 year old laws in finding new ways to fit them in to our new working environment. And it's become a problem especially in an environment that has become so reliant and so dependent on our ability to connect with one another in new and different ways, right? The hallmark of the sharing economy has been one of people using smartphones, the internet and the apps and platforms created within them to connect and transact with one another. The way that people think about working, the way people choose to work has also radically changed because of our ability to use information technology to remove the physical presence from the office, right? There are people, my supervisor for example, lives in Angel Fireman, New Mexico, right? Three hours from the nearest airport. For all intents and purposes, I have not seen that much of a difference. We're in just as much contact today as we were before he moved. And that's a product of our ability to use these new technologies to change the nature of work. However, I would say that while the nature of work has changed, our public policies toward them have not. And I think Jared's gonna talk about this in a minute, but that's a big problem. When you think that millennials and not just millennials, but if people across age groups are becoming more reliant on the independent contractor relationship to find work and to supplement work, and our public policies do not know how to adapt and change with them. And it's become clearly apparent that our approach, at least at a federal level, has become out of date. But even I would caution against trying to update it for today's work environment because that will continue to change. Even laws passed today that look at the work environment as it is today, as soon as the ink is dry on the paper, will most likely be out of date as the work environment and our working relationships continue to radically change. And so in conclusion, I want to say in a rapidly changing and technologically driven environment, there is a need for public policies to reflect Moore's law. And for those of you who are unfamiliar with Moore's law, this is essentially a, and it was a prediction that has now become a description of the way technology has evolved over the past 50, 60 years. And it basically says that computing power will continue to double every two years. To give you an example, in 1971, when Intel came out with the first commercial processor, the fastest car in the world was the Ferrari Daytona that hit a max speed of 185 miles an hour. The Twin Towers were the tallest buildings in the world at 1,362 feet. Just earlier this year, Intel released a processor with 400,000 times more computing power than the one they released in 1971, right? Information technology has radically changed. If you think about it in the context of the physical world, if cars got that much faster, cars would currently be going 1 tenth of the speed of light and buildings would be halfway to the moon already. So we have 1930s policy, dictating a world that is vastly different. It's not in a physical space in so far as we can see the growth and development every day, but it certainly is rapidly evolving and changing our workspace, for example. And it is coming into conflict with public policy. So to leave you with two examples, and I think Leah will talk about this in during her time, but I was at a CLE conference recently. I'm a lawyer licensed in Florida. I have to get my CLEs. I was at a CLE conference on labor law. And during the Q&A section, it got into flexibility in the workplace, non-exempt workers, and when are they working and when are they not working? And the attorney who was giving the presentation, it got down to things like checking emails, text messaging, working on the weekends, using things like your Apple Watch during work and outside of work. And he basically recommended to the attorneys that have given the question, the safest and easiest thing to tell clients is turn off emails at night for your employees and prohibit them from working outside of the office, because you cannot control their work hours and you do not know when they may hit overtime, when they may exceed their 40 hours. So this will create huge hitches and huge hiccups in work if this is the way we continue to think and approach a rapidly evolving and changing technology environment. In particular, imagine a world where when you went home at night you were prohibited from checking your work email. Imagine a world where you could not work on weekends. You could not work at night. You could not check your smartphones in your Apple Watches. The types of things that we've come to rely on almost on a per second basis. I mean, I haven't seen anyone pull out their smartphones yet, but I'm actually surprised by that. I mean, you all actually really do this on a regular basis, right? Constantly checking your phones. Every time you're doing that, you are by definition working. And so long as these laws stay so far in the past that they have no idea or at least no ability to adapt and change for the current working environment, we will continue to see the problems we see today and it will only get worse as we move into the future. So thank you very much. I'm really glad Chris gave that overview because it flows right into what I wanted to talk about. And first of all, it's very clear, all the graphs showed you just your own experience. You know that the economy is changing and all of our ideas about work and careers are changing with it. And I like to point out that the rise of the sharing economy, it really embodies what many young people want from work, a workplace driven by technology, convenience and flexibility. But the sharing economy's rise, it obscures a troubling economic trend. The American economy is growing slowly and surprisingly, even with all the great success stories we see startups, entrepreneurship is falling. Even though two thirds of millennials want to start a business at some point in their life, less than 4% of private businesses are even partially owned by someone under the age of 30. This is the lowest proportion on record. And the Brookings Institution reports that business startup rates are much lower now than they were at any point in the second half of the 20th century. And this decline in entrepreneurship, we could go on for hours about why it's troubling, but it's especially problematic when starting your own business is seen as a major part of the American dream for millennials. And one reason that I like to pin this decline on is the government policy, particularly when it comes to labor regulation, ignores the realities of today's economy and stands in the way of millennials' economic opportunities. And the first example I want to focus on, which Chris kind of hinted at, is that the Department of Labor recently issued an administrator's interpretation, which is effective immediately, that tried to clarify the definition of independent contractors. Because this administrator's interpretation was deemed guidance, it didn't have to go before the public for comment. But this is a major problem because for just one example, it could completely upend the sharing economy where workers are usually classified as independent contractors instead of employees. And unlike employees, independent contractors aren't entitled to a lot of employee protection such as minimum wage, overtime pay requirements, unemployment insurance, workers' compensation, collective bargaining, things like that. But this difference in treatment, it's justified because contractors work for themselves and employees, in order to get these additional protections, they have to give up a lot of the flexibility that they could have and the control over their own schedules. But going back to the Labor Department's interpretation, it officially accepts a so-called six-part economic realities test for trying to determine who's an employee and who's an independent contractor. But at the same time as it accepts this six-part test, it deliberately downplays one of the six parts which is a control over workers' hours as a determinant in employment status. And why this could be absolutely catastrophic for the sharing economy is none of these companies control their workers' hours. But moving these workers, if we wanna talk about moving them into an employee-employer relationship from their current but threatened independent contractor status, this would obviously ruin not only the individualized work opportunities that the sharing economy presents, but also the immense consumer benefits that it provides. And just to lay it out, I'm sure all of you know this by using things like Uber and Airbnb every day, but these companies provide a technological platform and support to allow customers to easily transact with service or good providers. And for this reason, a lot of these companies, they've been known as intermediaries. And those who partner with intermediaries, again, are independent contractors, not employees usually. And the flexibility that contractor status offers is vital to the sharing economy's success. People always find these statistics surprising, but about eight in 10 Lyft drivers drive for under 15 hours a week with the company. And over half of Uber drivers use the platform for less than 10 hours a week. They're using this for part-time work or supplemental income. Furthermore, half of Lyft drivers have another job while they're working with the company, and two-thirds of Uber drivers work for another company as well. Independent contractor status, it allows the decision of when and for how long to work to be controlled by workers, not companies. And this opportunity to let's say smooth out earnings, meet rent, pay down student loans, or fund a new business venture, it's something that's critical to maintain, especially for the 70% of Americans who are ages 18 to 24, who experience an average of 30% of change in each month over their income. So again, that's 70% of young Americans are experiencing a 30% or more change in their monthly incomes. They need an opportunity for flexible work to try to smooth this out. But the worker classification question, we can't continue to let executive agencies go on and add more and more to that page count and restrictions count that Chris showed you. Instead, Congress needs to solve this problem. The alternative really, the way I view it, is the crippling of the sharing economy by unaccountable executive agencies that are dead set on classifying the vast majority of new economy workers as employees rather than independent contractors. And unfortunately, because as I said, this most recent change was deemed guidance, we can't just use the Congressional Review Act to counter DOL's overreach. But one thing Congress can do to ensure that agency, so-called guidance, goes through the proper regulatory process, is look at a bill that's already been introduced. It's called the Regulatory Predictability for Business Growth Act, and that's sponsored by Steve Danes. And this is just one example of a type of bill that what you would do is then when things are so-called longstanding interpretive, something that's gonna change the nature of a regulation for over a year, it has to go through the traditional process that a formal regulation would. This is just common sense when regulation is now having such a large effect on the economy that, for example, it could completely destroy Uber. But one thing that I do wanna point out is beyond bringing some much needed transparency to this debate, which is what moving guidance to the traditional regulatory process would do, it's also time to really start a conversation about updating, for example, the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 to reflect the realities faced by today's workforce. And the key points to keep in mind when guiding reform because, as we said, we don't wanna codify today's labor market because it's going to change again. But if we keep in mind things such as freedom, flexibility, and mobility when trying to craft the future of labor regulation, that's something that we'll be able to adapt as the economy changes. I mean, just look at right now, the current standard of an employer-employee relationship is economic dependency. And this means, and I quote, suffered or permitted to work by the employer. This is a completely antiquated view of today's dynamic individualized workforce. It's one out of the 1930s. It's not something that applies to today's work. And one idea that's been gaining a lot of attention is a so-called third way of worker classification, kind of creating something between independent contractors and employees. Probably the most recent thing on this was by Princeton University professor, Alan Kruger. And what it would do would create independent workers is what this third category would be called. The easiest way to think about it is anyone who partners with an intermediary like Uber or Airbnb, they would be an independent worker rather than an independent contractor. And this is something that, you know, it might work, it might be something to look at, but I do wanna point out there were certain parts of employee protections that make absolutely no sense to extend to either independent contractors or if a new category of independent workers is created. So the first one, I'll start off with what would make sense. Many independent contractors who partner with these intermediaries, they're interested in gaining access to some benefits, whether that's, let's say auto insurance, health insurance, or something like disability insurance or moving on to retirement or savings funds. And right now there's available options. We have IRAs, we have affordable care act plans, but some people would like additional ones. And a lot of companies are looking into trying to offer these benefits, but the problem is right now the more of these benefits that they offer, the more they look like employers and might be deemed all their workers would have to be employees. So this is one thing that maybe, you know, it could either be a legal carve-out created for offering these benefits where you don't become an employer or if the third way of classification is looked at, this is something I would say could extend to the new category. But while that makes sense, adding a lot of other unemployment protections simply does not. I mean, wage and hour protections, when people are working their own schedules and can work whenever they want, minimum wage and overtime pay make absolutely no sense or even if we did create a new type of worker. Also, they're using their own materials and they're working on the jobs. Really, they could be working for multiple companies at once. So workers' compensation or unemployment insurance, those are things that don't apply to this new economy either. But because of the option of flexibility, work for these intermediaries, it's important to emphasize that it's transient or done in addition to other work a lot of the time. So again, we don't need the wage or hour protections or the disability insurance or workers' compensation. But one of the main pushes that I've seen gaining some traction is allowing independent contractors or possibly independent workers to collectively bargain. And what they would need to do is amend federal anti-trust law to allow non-employees to collectively bargain. But if we did this, it would really take away many of the benefits of the flexible entrepreneurial work that independent contractors enjoy. See, contractors right now, they're allowed to join a union such as the Freelancers Union, but they cannot collectively bargain. But why should independent contractors or independent workers who don't wanna join a union or be represented by one be forced to pay for and follow the dictates of a collectively bargained agreement? Remember, all of these people work for themselves. There's no reason that just because 51% of a similar class wanted to vote for something, they should have to follow it when they work for themselves. And again, these workers have diverse priorities and worker arrangements. For example, if we're looking at Uber drivers, those who work part-time or for supplemental income have vastly different concerns than those who use the platform for full-time work. Who's interested with the union representative? They were allowed to collectively bargain. These are all questions that show that majority rule could take away one of the main benefits of the new economy. And that's the diverse benefits that flexible work opportunities provide. So again, though the merits of a third way of worker classification are still up for debate, what is clear is that the future of work cannot be left to courts. They're placed in an impossible situation due to the undemocratic actions of an executive agency. So in order to promote an entrepreneurial workforce, Congress can use its power to rein in the Department of Labor to make sure that things like the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 aren't holding back a 21st century workforce. But now to pivot a bit, another example of excessive government regulation standing in the way of millennials' entrepreneurial dreams is occupational licensing. And this is something that's been gaining a lot of attention recently, so I'm sure you're familiar with it, but the easiest way to summarize occupational licensing is just say that workers have to gain government's permission to work. They have to get a government permission slip. And by making it prohibitively expensive or time-consuming to start work, occupational licenses increase costs for all consumers and severely limit chances to build a career. And these government-imposed limits on work, which I should point out, they're controlled by state and local governments, but they extend far beyond professional fields, such as accounting, medicine, or finance. And today, nearly one in three Americans needs government's permission to work. This is a lot. It's been a massive increase. Back in the early 1950s, it was about one in 20 workers. Now it's up to one in three. But the time and financial burdens of getting a license, it really varies depending on which state you're in and what you're trying to do. And it shows that also these licenses are rarely transferable if someone moves. Let's say you have a license in Texas and you wanna move just across the border to Oklahoma. You may have to go through years or months of training just to be able to work in the same job you were in Texas. And this disproportionately affects families that have to move a lot due to a spouse's job. I mean, military families, this is a big problem that they face. And the variation in licensing requirements across states shows that even though policymakers constantly claim that the reason they have these restrictions in places for public safety, that's simply not the case. Here's a few stats for you that show how ridiculous occupational licensing has come. Although 10 states require four or more months to become a licensed manicurist, Alaska demands only three days. And Iowa says nine days. So if it really takes more than four months to be able to manicure nails without severely injuring customers, why do 40 states then have shorter requirements? And only three states and where we are in Washington, D.C., license interior designers. Yet the average time it takes to get government's permission to work as an interior designer is six years. But no one in, let's say, I'm sure you all have family in different states, Texas, California, New York, or any of the other 44 states that don't license interior designers. Do any of you worry for your family members' safety if they hired someone to renovate or decorate their homes? The connection between risk to the public and the barriers to starting work in a profession, it is, there is no rational basis. On the other hand, bus drivers who are licensed in every state, and you could argue, pose some sort of a danger if they were unqualified to the public, can begin working with an average of 90 days experience. And EMTs, an occupation that literally requires people to hold lives in their hands, can start working with an average of 33 days experience. There is no reason that a government-improved interior designer should have to take an average of six years when EMTs can take 33 days. The skill sets and risk associated with the occupations, they simply do not line up with the requirements. And additionally, for any of you lawyers in here, the pass rate for the Louisiana florist exam, which is the only one of its kind in the entire country to become a florist, you need a license, is half as high as the pass rate for the Louisiana bar exam. So it's twice as hard to become a florist in Louisiana as it is to become a lawyer. And moving on to occupations that specifically could really help college students right now, especially with the exploding costs of getting a degree. Tour guides in cities such as Charleston and New Orleans need a government license before they can make money by walking and talking. And these cities, they have plenty of colleges and universities, I'd say they're even known for them. But their students can't go and make a little money on the weekend to help offset the cost of college without getting an expensive government license and permission to walk and talk. And these time consuming and costly barriers to entry, they also raise costs by keeping out competition. Morris Kleiner, who's an economist who studied occupational licensing extensively, finds that it can be up to about 15% for licensed occupations. So we're not only being kept out of jobs, but young people have to pay more. And if you think 15% isn't that much, this is actually a critique I've heard when talking about this before. I mean, try telling someone who's getting a haircut for their first job interview that an extra 15% on their haircut isn't a big deal. I mean, every dollar counts when you're trying to start your career. And the negative effects on young people from excessive occupational licensing, this is one of the reasons why President Obama's 2015 budget called for $15 million to go to states to institute common sense reform to their licensing practices. They wanna make sure that licenses keep the public, not established practitioners and businesses safe. And these further initiatives to curb states' desires to license people out of work, it deserves the support of federal policymakers. Members of Congress, they can use their influence to spur local leaders into action. And again, as this is primarily a state and local issue, the Congress can't directly do anything, but what it can do is provide the resources, guidance, and support for reforms. We've seen this happening as even in the last, I'd say, I started writing about occupational licensing about three years ago. And since then, it's went from a barely, rarely talked about topic to now I see on Google News Alerts, it's coming up every day. People are writing about this all over the country, so congressional leaders can use their influence to drive this issue. But the support could also come in more tangible ways, such as encouraging the Bureau of Labor Statistics to collect more data on occupational licensing. Policymakers and researchers like us, we'd greatly benefit from a follow-up to BLS's April 15th release on licensing and this related licensing to industry, age, and earnings. And it was the first report of its kind. It'd be great to go down to a state breakdown that it works on some of the work that people have had to do with think tanks. But these data confirm that occupational licensing disproportionately harms young workers. Congress can also work with the White House to try to implement the best practices that Obama started when he was doing his call for reforms. And again, just to lay them out, these best practices include prioritizing eliminating licenses that are only licensed or occupations that are only licensed in a few states, also making it easier for people to move across state lines, something that disproportionately harms military families, and also harmonizing licensing requirements that vary drastically from one state to another. If people are operating perfectly fine with an average of three days of licensing in one state, you don't need six months in another one. But again, millennials have been called the startup generation. While this may be true based on their desires to start a business and their new universal respect for entrepreneurs such as Steve Jobs, unfortunately, government labor regulation hinders the ability for millennials to follow through on their entrepreneurial dreams. And this obstructionism is clear in both Department of Labor's treatment of independent contractors and in states' desires to license young people out of work. In order to promote a 21st century workforce, Congress needs to use its power to rein in the Department of Labor and incentivize states to restore common sense practices to their licensing schemes. Thank you. All right, so I'm discussing the new overtime regulations and it fits perfectly into this setup right here, especially in Chris's remarks about, not your grandfather's workplace. So what's going on right now is, so currently the overtime regulations from the Fair Labor Standards Act say that anyone under 23,000, under 23k, their employers have to track their hours such that if they work more than 40 hours a week, they have to be paid over time, so time and a half for each hour worked over 40 hours a week. Currently the Department of Labor is going through trying to update these regulations and they're kind of doing the opposite of what Chris says that should be going on because in their mindset, the update of the overtime regulations means that taking that 23k number and increasing it to a much larger number, what they wanna do is increase that number to 50,440, so that means anyone making under 50,440 will have their employers track their hours and the employers will then have to pay them time and a half or every hour worked over 40 hours a week. In some sense, you can see their point of view. Their point of view is that we wanna make sure that there's fair wages being paid and if people are working over 40 hours a week, we should be able to, employers should pay them time and a half and part of the proposal is that, this is part of the justification in the proposal is to increase people's wages. So just put that in the mindset, that's their justification. Well, there's two main problems with it. First is that, are they gonna meet that objective? So before I get into the millennial on how this impacts startups and the young generation, I wanna talk about whether they would, what evidence there is to meet that endpoint, which is to raise people's wages. It turns out that if you do the research on overtime regulation and the impact it has, is that a lot of employers respond to the overtime regulation by cutting the base salary of their employees. So if this regulation gets passed, which they're in the process of doing it right now, the impact would be that a lot of people's base salaries would be cut and we don't even know if they'll meet their objective of increasing the overtime, of increasing people's pays. The second part of this is that, it just doesn't make any sense in today's 21st century world. So one application and one example of this is the tech startup world. So I do research on tech startups and I interview tech entrepreneurs and a lot of young people working at the, both entrepreneurs and the employees at these companies. And the main thing that you get out of this, the scene is that it is not your grandfather's workplace. I mean, these guys are working not nine to five hours. Some are going in at nine p.m., working until like two a.m. and then going home. There's ping pong tables. So during the work day, you might take a 10 minute break and play ping pong and then you might get back into a lunch meeting with another, with an engineer, or you might step out and meet another co-founder somewhere at another startup. And you're constantly, there's this atmosphere of we're trying to make a difference and we have this idea and they're constantly in the process of working and sometimes they have lunch delivered to their workplace. So it doesn't fit in. This model of you have to work nine to five and you have to work 40 hours a week and after 40 hours a week, your employer has to pay you time and a half. Well, that's not what happens in the 21st century in these young startups. And a lot of people see that. Now the other aspect of this is it's a little bit of what Jared was saying is if we're trying to help young people achieve their dream of owning their own business or being an entrepreneur or having a startup, it's not easy right now to do that. So if you're a startup, you can't get a bank loan. And part of the reason is that banks don't know how to evaluate startup companies. So if you're like, what's your collateral? And they're like, I don't know. I work from the basement of my parents' home and I have this app, right? Like what can they take from you? So it's virtually impossible to get a bank loan if you're trying to start a business, which is different than your typical business. So what they have to do instead is raise money. So fundraise. And in the beginning, they don't have a lot of money. So you're constantly the main role of the CEO at as a young startup is to just raise money, trying to raise money, go talk to investors, trying to pitch their product. This is what we need this money for. So they actually have, they actually have very little cash flow in the beginning of the startup. And what they do in response is pay employees in equity. So they'll have a lower salary. And as a result, they'll get, they get paid more in equity. And part of the reason that they, the other reason they do that is because it ties the workers, you know, the worker, it ties the incentives. So, you know, working hard at the company. So if the company succeeds, the worker will succeed as well. So this is like the early Google employees, right? They were paid in equity. And after Google took off, they're like, you know, millionaires and billionaires now. So in the beginning, and the other thing about a startup is that there's no revenue stream in the big, again, as they're starting up. So they don't have any customers. They don't have a product. They're just trying to build the product, but they need money to build the product. So there's virtually no money in the beginning for them to pay people extra overtime and to pay them in cash, which is why they pay them in equity. So if you talk to any of these entrepreneurs, and I have, and I'll read some quotes from them, this regulation, which, on the one hand, we can see the justification from the Department of Labor's point of view, but from the other hand, it just doesn't make sense for these group of people, right? For tech entrepreneurs, because there's no extra money that they have in the beginning to try to pay every one time and a half. And also it doesn't make sense from their point of view to pay someone based on the hours that they work. They pay in equity, or they pay in the outputs that they produce, not the hours that they work. So just reading from, I just wanna read, I went and interviewed a couple of tech entrepreneurs just to ask from their point of view how would this regulation impact them? So I have one who is an owner of a commercial real estate company, and he says, as a small business owner of a finance startup, I attract employees that believe in the vision and are willing to work overtime to accomplish that mission. Our mission has drastic financial restraint at the juncture and it's exceptionally efficient in its compensation structure to accommodate growth and stability. Our employees know this and still work overtime because they believe in our mission and understand that today we can't compete with the compensation packages of our enormous competitors that have been around for, in some cases, centuries. However, our employees get this. They could have worked for big companies that pay more, but their motivation is not reduced to money. They choose to work for my company because they believed in the mission, the team, and the culture, and are proud to be getting the experience and responsibility our firm can offer. Ultimately, because they know our culture, everyone will be paid more and the company ever be able to afford it, but right now our mission is getting there. So the point being, and then he goes on later to explain about how if this overtime regulation passes, he's gonna have to cut a bunch of his employees out because they can't afford to hire the employees in the beginning because there's not a lot of cash in the beginning for the company. Another entrepreneur says, a young company can't afford a huge salary or great benefits at first, but it can offer equity and the opportunity to be part of something big. Young founders often go months at a time without receiving pay, only earning sweat equity for the time they put in. These companies would be stretched to the seams if this extra time paid for not in cash now, but in the potential for future earnings is limited. And just one more, and this is a summary of another entrepreneur who again, from his point of view, he's trying to start a business young out of college and when you talk to him about these regulations, it's like, it doesn't make sense because it's like I'm trying to start this business, this doesn't apply, this doesn't make sense in what I'm trying to do. And he says, regulatory committees often act as though they cannot imagine a world where a few hundred or thousand dollars can make the difference between success and failure. If you raise our costs even modestly, you will put some of us out of business. And that's true because they have, their margins are so thin in the beginning that if you increase their costs, you are gonna put a lot of them out of business. And the problem is that tech entrepreneurs are the heart of innovation right now and a lot of young millennials and want to be the entrepreneurs or they wanna work for these startups. The other problem of why this regulation doesn't make sense is because we live in an information economy now. Again, not your grandfather's workplace, right? So in a manufacturing economy, you go in, there's no work, you go into a factory, right? You check in, you get out and you're working. And in an information economy, it's harder to define the boundaries of what counts for work. And this is part of what Chris and Jared have been saying is that this email count does work, right? So if you're thinking about it in an information economy, where you have to respond to a client after work hours, like if you have to respond to a client after work hours, does that count as work? So another thing is like, if you're going on a lunch meeting with another startup owner and you're responding, you're having this lunch meeting, are you no longer working, are you working? Yeah, but you're taking lunch. So it's a little bit unclear about what counts is working and what doesn't. And another factor about this is worker flexibility. So Chris mentioned that we're not using the telecommuting anywhere, but I've used that in my paper. So instead of telecommuting, we're gonna say working from home, right? So one thing that's going on right now, and as Chris pointed out, is a lot of people are telecommuting or working from home. And one reason they're able to do that is because their employers don't compensate the employees based on hours worked, but they do it based on product or output that you give to the employer. So if you're working from home and you take two hours off and you decide to take a shower or you're eating cereal or whatever, but you're working from home, they're not tracking your hours while you're at home trying to work, they're tracking output. Hey, did you get this? I need this by six p.m. tonight because we have a client meeting tomorrow and we need to present this at the client meeting. So a lot of the reason that we get worker flexibility and telecommuting or working from home is because we don't have to track, employers don't have to track our hours worked. Like did you put enough, did you put eight hours in? I'm paying you for eight hours. No, they're paying you for output. So in an information economy, we're seeing more and more employers going to pay for the output produced and not for the hours that you work. And it makes sense for them to offer telecommuting, working from home benefits and worker flexibility if they're paying you for output produced and not for the hours that you're putting in. Because if you're working eight hours from home, how do they know that two of those hours you weren't reading a book on neuroscience, right? So the main reason, so the thing I want to emphasize about this is it's not, we're on the hill, it's in DC, it's not a right, left issue, it's like does it make sense or does it not make sense issue? So in this case, over time regulations for an information economy might not make sense. And the Department of Labor should, and they haven't done this, is to analyze how employers and how it impacts all the different industries. Because in their mindset, they're in your grandfather's workplace, right? Their mindset is, okay, you're going in, here's the employer and they're paying you and you have to work eight hours and in those eight hours you're working really hard and now you have to work 48 hours instead of 40 hours a week so you should get paid more for those hours and there's a clear delineation between what is work and what does not work. And an information economy is not that easy. And so in order for us to analyze the impact of this regulation, the Department of Labor has to think about how it impacts the 21st century, not your grandfather's workplace. And what they've missed completely from their reports is thinking about how it might impact things like working from home and whether email counts as work and specifically how it might impact the tech sector. So the tech startup sector is the heart of innovation right now. It's really where you've got Uber transform the ride-sharing industry, right? You have 23 and me transform the medical industry. We work transferring workspace and there's so much more. There's just this thriving heartbeat of innovation coming out of that. And the last thing we wanna do is destroy the heart of innovation by imposing these regulations that make it impossible for them to get off the ground. And with that, I think I'm out of time. Thanks. Let me give you another anecdote. I'm Generation X. I won't give you any more so you can take me any more specifically. But in the 1990s, I was looking here on the Hill, I took my parents who were born in the 1930s to Mount Hurgood for the first time. I grew up on a farm. They grew up on a farm. We were going through the barns near the house. And they're standing there very casually pointing at things and going like, do you remember when Uncle Charlie Goals used that? And when Uncle Rodney used that, or when we used this, when we got started with the road farm. Well, I'm a history major, but I got a history lesson. This is a generation that are now in their 80s that went from George Washington's technology to a man on the moon to Apple Plus. One, one generation. So my dad sits there with my four year old and she's like all over the iPad and he just, he knows what he can get out of it, he just doesn't know how to do it. So if that generation is experiencing that type of innovative change, what is my four year old and nine year old going to be experiencing in their lifetime? So that's why we're coming to the question is a 60 year old statue really supposed to be the tether for the policy decisions we're making today or is it entirely different approach of questions and information that we start with that then tell us how we're supposed to be shaping statue regulation. So your guys' time is valuable. So if anybody has any questions, go first, but I have like three or four. I'll fill in if you don't, but please go ahead and ask the panel anything that you have in your screen. The Sheridan Academy is also known as the 1099, John Agnew, and you went through regulations but you didn't talk about the difficulty of tracking all this tax reporting and how they deal with that and what we can do to make it easier for workers to be compliant with the law. Yeah, so there was a, I think there was a survey done this time last year of 1099 workers and roughly like 75%, so three quarters of them when asked what their greatest frustrations with working in the sharing economy are, said some variation of tracking income and expenses or understanding legal and tax implications of everything that they do. So it's certainly complicated and there are a lot of you, I think the average sharing economy worker lasts three months. I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that that's the first quarter that they actually have to report things and then they realize, my God, what did I get myself into? And then they just leave. So I think to a certain degree, that's certainly a huge issue and we didn't get into it but I think that there are big questions with regard to fundamental tax reform, right? That's a big issue here in terms of treating these individual workers as businesses, right? They have the same business reporting requirements, right? It's the one man company, no longer the company man. They have the same reporting requirements as any other business for the most part in finding a way and I think this is one thing Jared talked about is finding a way to accommodate the fact that these workers really are different and fit them into the system in a way that isn't just gerrymandering what they're doing into the way we're thinking about it but changing the way they think about it. So changing the way that we report income and expenses. A lot of that has to do with are they independent contractors or employees? The other big issue is 1099 workers have to pay both sides of the employment tax. So all of us pay six and a half, seven and a half percent in employment tax. They pay 15.1. That's a huge issue but I mean these things and this is the point of the sharing economy I think it isn't just dislodging the way we think about transportation and hospitality but it's actually begging really important questions about taxes and social security. There isn't an easy answer to that so I can't sit here and say oh if we do X, Y, and Z it'll be fixed but it's certainly a big answer and I think the people who are doing research on this that's the area where most of the value can be created at this point is really untangling those sticky questions. I don't have an answer off the top of my head. Just really quick, when Alan Krueger had his proposal of creating the third way dependent workers he had said move holding, make it so that they have tax withholding. One problem with that I mean it's something that would not destroy the sharing economy by any means compared to some of the other things I talked about but what that would do is really you're working so inconsistently it'd be hard to estimate it and also if you're withholding it like people still have to pay it either side so maybe it's a good thing that they have to see how much going into social security and Medicare because you're losing it in wages otherwise when your employer's paying it but that is a good question it's something Chris I don't have a great answer but I'm looking forward to digging into it. And I think in terms of the way people think about the tax implications of what they do many of us can't get to the point where we're you know we think about marginal wages, marginal tax rates where we say okay I've hit the point where every extra dollar I earn has greater tax implications than the dollars before this so I'm going to stop working here. We can't do that right we're all employed sharing economy workers can right as soon as they feel that that one extra dollar changes their entire tax treatment they can stop and I think you see that in the way that workers come and go in the way that you see people actually organizing their activity in the sharing economy not based on what is best for them oftentimes but what makes it easier easiest for them to deal with the current system and there's certainly big big problems in this space. Just a quick question that in terms of the any of the presidential candidates that are out there does anyone really said you know address these issues or you know the time to address any of these? I actually believe it or not they have talked about the sharing economy a little bit. Bernie Sanders it's really easy he just said he's not a fan of Uber you can quote me on that that was his exact quote. Hillary Clinton it's a little more confusing she admits that you know a lot of the sharing economy companies are really exciting there's a lot of innovation going on but also on the independent contractor employee question that I spent a lot of time on she is in stark disagreement with me on that she thinks that they should be employees and that they need department of labor to take action to crack down on people who are quote unquote misclassifying their workers and I would argue that taking a class from the 1930s and somehow applying to today's economy where you could never imagine that you could hail a you know jitney cabs from your little phone it's not something that so you're calling an operator you didn't even call it an operator to get a jitney so I don't think people are misclassifying and what I worry about is when we're talking about the sharing economy now the push for really it's the push for unionization which needs to make them first be employees that's what's clouding a lot of politicians judgment who otherwise fully understand the great benefits that we've seen in this technological revolution and I would also say that while there's stark disagreement among politicians on this in the way they talk about there's also a lot of agreement on that I mean that you have Elizabeth Warren at the recode conference last year saying almost the exact same thing that ran paul is saying about the sharing economy they sound very similar when they talk about it it's not going away we it's essentially the the the 1099 chart that I showed that all of that predates the the mass growth of of the sharing economy that in many ways this is inefficient response by the market innovators to innovate our way out of the problem of work right is is traditional employment is stagnating uh... people are finding new innovative ways to continue to to work and I think that's one thing that I it seems to be at least across the board in agreement among politicians regardless if they're running for any office or no office at all is that the sharing economy is not going anywhere the future of work is vastly changing uh... and it's it it would be who of us to find answers sooner rather than later because it will only continue to cause problems so we're going to start with myself oh yeah uh... just curious about you know not just millennials that are graduating from college and they're pretty good over time to think about what they have to do how millennials and regulations are impacted people take upward mobility problems pretty good for my poverty lines something like uh... postmates the solidaries for all of you you just need to feed or bicycle and smart products that actually really make money like have the opportunity to hope you bought a bottle of how regulation can be preventing that or impacting that so one thing we found when we did this research and also talked to employers is it's a little bit of an unintended conflict it's a little bit of you know one thing that employers responded one way that they responded was that if there's the overtime regulation so let's say you're out of college and you're making forty-k uh... at a company uh... and if there's this overtime regulation and they have to now pay you over time for every hour worked over forty hours a week uh... one way that employers responded was that they get rid of that junior role it's a marketing associate role and bring in a senior role and the senior role is like the director of marketing or like a marketing coordinator and in that case like what they're doing is like the guy with the last experience going in as the marketing associate is now like out of a job and because and then they push the threshold either above the they push the threshold even above the fifty thousand now uh... or you know they will go above the fifty thousand threshold that senior role now has more responsibilities and now they're the marketing coordinator and the junior role is out of a job so like that's someone you know someone potentially right out of college is making that is trying to get that forty thousand dollar junior role but you're ultimately eliminating these junior roles for these for for people to go in not low-skilled but you know they're not high-skilled yet they're just straight out of college potentially or maybe they didn't go to college but they're trying to get this role to gain experience and you're kind of eliminating that role and that ability for them to get that experience and the other the other thing i want to emphasize that one uh... startup employee mention was that as a young person and this particular employee had dropped out of college and now he works at a startup he says the one thing that i have is a lot of time he's like i'm young, i don't have kids and he's like and part of the reason that i want to work all these long hours at the startup is because i'm gaining experience and skills and it's a really great investment and think about what how the employer would respond if they if you had to pay them overtime right now he's like okay you can't work more than forty hours a week and the guy's like but i want to like it's for my own benefit like i want to get and yeah this college dropout works at a startup and he's like i want to get like i have a lot of time what i'm trying to do is get experience working i'm trying to get more skills but the employer's gonna have to cut his hours if he works over forty hours a week because that's cost on the new on the startup and as we talked about they don't have a lot of money in the beginning i also think so too the sharing economy and income inequality question uh... there was an article yesterday in the Wall Street Journal i think that was basically like the sharing economy is not going to solve income inequality of course like you're not gonna make you're not gonna make a million dollars driving for uber you know i mean the the the the truth of the matter is it's not going to happen but for those people on on the fringes of society it's opening up doors that they otherwise probably wouldn't have had open to them but also on the flip side of it in many ways it's mooting the entire question of income inequality when you think that like a vast majority nine in ten people when asked why they use the sharing economy as consumers right not as workers but as consumers the response is it makes life more affordable more efficient right people do it because it makes life better and it's cheaper it's just uh... an overall cheaper option for them often times do you think for example uh... someone making you know twenty five thousand dollars a year probably can't afford a car but they don't need a car because all they have to do is push a button i'm sure they own a smart phone all they have to do is push a button in a car comes whenever they want it right to these issues if you want someone to come deliver your dry cleaning right that's like something that like wow you must work at all you know white shoe law firm no i've washed you and i push a button and somebody comes up and they pick up my dry clean they drop it off wherever i want it right at home at work i give them an address and they come i give them an address and a time they come and they drop it off when i ask them to the whole idea of you know the technology is making sort of the whole issue of income inequality rather moot when you think that you know you can ride in an uber and it'll be you know an uber black a twenty dollar ride if you wanted to five years ago hire that same black car to drive you around is probably one hundred fifty bucks drastically reduces the cost of getting a black car uh... those types of things i think people are mostly when they talk about income inequality are talking about how much are you making uh... but i think what we really ought to be focusing on the thing that's often missed in the sharing kind of evade is how's it affecting the affordability of the life you want to live and i think that's one thing that's definitely missing the sharing economy it's a huge value add that oftentimes is just clearly i think beyond the conversation where people only focus on the working side of the sharing economy yeah and i would point out with occupational licensing i think that's one of the reasons why this has become a bipartisan agreement point which obviously as you all know is pretty rare today but you can't find a single person on the federal level it's like no yeah yeah this makes perfect sense we should have interior designers go six years before they can work like no actually argues that except for a few local politicians who are completely an established industries so this where i think the federal can play a great role of you know really coming together and saying this is you know we want to stand up for the people's right to work you never hear a policy not a stump speech we want to ruin people's right to work people should not be allowed to pursue the career they want like this is a winning argument and that's why it's starting to go somewhere now and you can see in president obama said it harm young and people with low incomes the most that's clear i agree a hundred my question sort of time the consumer side licensure and your point you just made known actually represent black or have licensure bills right now and and so but there's a lot of research and you mentioned that i think it will raise prices about fifteen percent but what a lot of people say is they think that the quality and safety is somehow improved by a patient licensure and that the fifteen percent increase either like you said isn't that much or is worth the quality increase there's a lot of research that the counters that there's a series of papers from the university to see the shows when you uh... license electrician electricians the incidence of home electrocution that's increases people can't afford to hire electrician so they try to do themselves and they kill themselves uh... incidence of rabies is increased in the licensed veterinarians because people who can't find a veterinarian or their price at a market and their animal sick and can't afford to take it to a vet uh... so my question is you mentioned in the sharing economy that there's this consumer side that everybody is thinking about with occupational licensure why is the not just cost but also safety and quality issue that there is not talked about as frequently i'm glad you brought that up i mean the nineteen seventies study on electrocution was kind of the groundbreaking one that showed that hey when something's you know drastically more expensive idiots i'd like i would probably do to try to tangle with electric problem i'm having but uh... more recent study believe it or not uh... academics are so lucky they get to study the most ridiculous things someone actually study the quality of bouquet prepared by license florist and not license florist even now there's no difference so even the pass rates half as low as the Louisiana bar there was no discernible difference in quality of floral arrangements this goes on and on to more serious ones as well while there are some cases that sure you know uh... some people who go through a lot of training i want someone if i'm getting brain surgery as the best training the high qualifications but people can find that out now people when we talk about licensing on the consulate it's as a policy makers have never heard of yelp google reviews angie's list i mean when was the last time you called a government office to figure out if a restaurant food safety inspection what's got no you go on yelp or you look at google reviews or twitter and is now an especially service providers in the types of industries are most affected by occupational licensing they realize that if they make me mad for example i slept everyone know on twitter how mad i that you know but i something's more powerful than a government review when we're talking about the consumer side of occupational licensing we need to keep in mind that the power dynamic between business and consumers has shifted dramatically towards consumers and that we're just creating a one-size-fits-all system do you pass or do you not pass when today we can have a wide variety where consumers can pick what's right for themselves because they have that power and and just to add to that i think often so the study with electricians i think is fifty forty five years old at this point uh... that predates right uh... most of the information technology you're talking about but also uh... the idea that yelp now is now integrating hospital wait times on the reviews for hospitals so you can actually go on when choosing not that there's an emergency and you're like first let me check yelp to see which one i'll get in quick as but it's an option right if you're like you're like which hospital should i go to but you're not going to go to the state's department of health or cms's website and say what was the average wait time over the last eighteen months there's a huge profit motive for these companies to provide the best cleanest most easily in readily accessible information to you to make these decisions and oftentimes when we talk about occupational licensing is completely lost in the debate people don't go to bar associations to figure out who are the best lawyers right they have all of these other things like like jared was saying and if they're actually a lot of these reputational feedback mechanisms are now far beyond and just outpacing the ability of these government regulators to actually provide the type of information people want in the form they want it when they want it so that's definitely something that certainly been missed in the conversation for a long time because those things didn't exist but they do now there's been some controversy over ubers you rate your drivers but drivers also rate the customers and there is some controversy over whether customers that have bad ratings are not getting serviced so think about it this way it actually creates a better environment for everyone involved when you think that all of us if all of us were to like call an uber right now my guess is the person with the highest rating would get selected first so the the the drivers have an option so we're all actually competing with one another to be the nicest best version of ourselves that we can so it isn't just right so it isn't just like the anonymity of a taxi driver where he yells at you and you yell back at him and then you slam on his hood as you walk away that's completely gone the the the ability to hide in anonymity in today's economy is gone yes so there's certainly things that can be corrected and this is one thing in the in the in the settlement for example for better or for worse the recent settlement two weeks ago or last week from uber one of the things is actually uber drivers will have an opportunity to challenge ratings if they think that they've been rated unfairly or poorly or uh... there are studies now that say there's like systemic biases in the way people select who comes and stays in their airbnb or who they get airbnb's from uh... there uh... those are those are part of that but with that being said those same studies show that like for example an airbnb host who's engaged in systemic racial discrimination in renting out their place their rental replacement rates are drastically lower than someone who's not engaged it's just a huge cost right the economics of discrimination you know it's a huge cost of being discriminatory in in the marketplace and saying i will do business with you but not you for some arbitrary reason uh... and so it creates a huge uh... incentive to not do that right if you're if you're only selecting people that look and think and act like you you're not going to last very long in airbnb because there are other people that are going to take those those renters and you won't get them so some of that stuff because we're in a hyper competitive marketplace we'll actually go by the wayside because there isn't the ability to be anonymous and there isn't the high barriers to entry that allow you to act in a discriminatory way and get away with it now if you're a company that engages in systemic biases you know racial religious whatever it's very easy like in a in the tech sector for somebody else to just jump in and take all those people you don't want to do business with and there goes your sixty four billion dollar valuation overnight right like those types of things that i think in a hyper competitive environment like we see in the sharing economy it's just very difficult to act that way any sort of long period and i just want to add to chris's point uh... that if even if there's racial biasing as compared to what if you look at that taxi what was going on the taxi industry and the taxicabs you've not lived in new york if they're making that argument because that was like the main point and i live in new york some of us say this that was the main issue with the taxicabs that they were racial profiling and not picking up any and even if you told them like i am going to the bronc so like we're not taking you and they would like drive away so then you have to get into like this weird gypsy cab and it was really scary so like one time i got in it took a picture of a license plate and i'm like texting my friend and i'm like i'm in this car anyway the point is and so there is there is a lot of as compared to what even if they're doing it but then chris's point is that well if uber begins to do this then lift will be like hey where the what is an opportunity for a lift to come in and say where the non-racist like where the non-racist uh... ride sharing right and so uber doesn't want to like doesn't want that to be there their brand name right so there is an incentive and there's and even if there is there's a huge profit opportunity for a lift or via or like these other ones to come in and be like oh well where the non-racist ones right so even if they're whereas that was not the case for taxicabs right they were able to do it because there's no competition no one to check them on that on the the thing to do that and one more thing i used to be a five-star uber uh... customer i got dropped out of four point six and uh... i got it is confirmed that what chris said is that there is an algorithm that the highest highest rated customers and the highest rated drivers match as part of the algorithm like there's different things that make you match but one of them is your ratings this is a great it's a wonderful educational opportunity for us to hear what your questions and answer that so thank you very much for participating i think one of the things that we hear today is that job security used to be synonymous with economic opportunity much better generation and that's changing so with that change what defines economic security and opportunity so that's the question i leave today and we'll try to do more programs