 All right, so I'm not a millennial. I guess I'm a materialistic, narcissistic boomer, but I didn't realize that till this morning. So I'm not a millennial, but I did leave my position at Princeton to become president of New America in no small part because we're the kind of place that does this kind of event with people like you in this kind of a space, meaning that we are young. And I'm gonna say two or three words about where New America's going, and then I'm gonna talk about research, less scientific research, I have to admit, growing out of my forthcoming book on care and competition, love and work, what real equality looks like between men and women and what that means for your generation and for policies. So I just wanna say a couple of things about the new New America, and you can see the new New America, you can see the logo, you can see the graphics, see the events, although we've been doing fabulous events for a long time. So we're really trying to reinvent what a think tank is, and it's consistent with the theme of today. Think tanks were created at the turn of the last century, bookings was founded in 1916, and the idea was to improve government, to improve policy by providing independent policy research. So in the era of machine politics, simply having somebody like Reid who was and all of the asset-building people doing independent research, trying to figure out what the best policy solution was, really was revolutionary, and there's still a role for it. We still do it, it's important, but there are three things that have changed that I think are much more material to all of your lives. First, the federal government doesn't work, right? The federal government doesn't work and it doesn't represent the American people, and that's a problem, and we're working on it. All of us are working on it, but it doesn't, it's paralyzed by partisanship, and we know it does not represent a majority of the American people, so that's the first thing. The second is technology, right? So I spend a lot of time in Silicon Valley, and as you know, the basic view there is forget government, we'll just develop the technology that will solve all our problems. Now, I do think if we don't take account of technological solutions, we're not serious about solving public problems, but unlike many Californians, I do actually think that just inventing the technology won't get you there, right? Politics are still there, policy's really important, policy can often block the use of technologies, just think about the efforts of various cities to prevent, to create free wireless access everywhere, right? Which would seem to be an obvious thing to do, policy blocks it, so policy's still very important, but you have to marry policy and technology. And the third thing is really the rise of social enterprise, and this is your generation. It's also some Gen Xers, but your generation, again, many of you are thinking, all right, we're gonna get that out there, we're gonna solve problems on our own, we're not gonna wait for changing government, changing legislation, we want to have direct impact. So a new think tank, or shall I say, an institution dedicated to solving public problems needs to still do policy research, but it has to marry policy and technology, it has to stimulate broad public conversation, and it has to be directly connected to communities. So you can think of it as marrying a traditional think tank, a technology laboratory, and a social enterprise. And that's what the new and new America's trying to do, here in Washington, in New York, and who knows, we hope in cities across the country. So with that start, let me talk to you about what I think about where we need to go with the workplace and with family, and this is based on two years of research and probably over 300 speeches, mostly to groups of women, but probably 20% men, and everything from investment bankers to community college faculty to diplomats to people in retail sales, you name it, I probably talk to them. And so I have a book coming out, and it will not have it all on the title, it will not even have women in the title, it may have women in the subtitle. But it'll have men there too, and here's why. I think there are three huge changes that many of you are already living. So the first actually goes out of what we're doing, Brandi said, you're definitely not gonna have a straight career ladder. You're not going to have one job, or two jobs, or even three jobs. You're much more likely to have five or six or seven jobs, and you already know that, right? When I was the Dean of the Woodrow Wilson School, and that was even as early as I started in 2002, most of my students were planning their careers in five to six year chunks. Now they knew they weren't gonna be necessarily likely to get the perfect job, but they were thinking about spending time in an NGO, spending time in government, maybe spending time at the private sector, taking different jobs to develop a portfolio of skills and experience that would allow them to be resilient and to take advantage of opportunities as they come. And if you think about jobs that way, and again, I'm well aware that obviously it's not a question of planning, but it is a question of preparing yourself for different opportunities. There are a couple ways to think about that. One, and everybody who's from New America is gonna lull their eyes when I say this because I keep pushing it. You should read The Alliance by Reid Hoffman. You really should. It's basically about the old model of your business was your family. It was lifelong employment. We took care of you. You gave your life's work to that company. That's gone. We all know that's gone. That's been gone for well over a decade. He says the new model is the contract model. We don't give you much and you don't give us much. Everybody's kind of looking. We can fire you at any moment and you can leave at any moment for something better. He proposes The Alliance. And there are a number of things about that for an organization. Mostly it means investing in people's careers as much as paying them, that you're really thinking about what kind of experience can you give them in return for what they can give you. But the second point is the idea of tours of duty. That you should think about your job within an organization and then across multiple organizations as different tours of duty. Now that's from the military. The idea in the military when you have a tour of duty is you're getting a set of skills. You're getting a set of experiences and you're getting a set of knowledge in that particular area. And what he says is you should be thinking in one organization, so you work for a while as a policy analyst. Maybe then, I'm thinking about New America, maybe then actually what you wanna do is you wanna learn more about fundraising or you wanna learn more about events. Maybe you then think within the same organization where can you move, how can you move, and that should be laterally, not just up. But then thinking more generally, all right, what's the next phase? If what I wanna end up doing is being somebody who is committed to surveying, alleviating poverty, building assets if we're thinking about here or in my own world, I know that I'm interested in foreign policy but there are many different ways to do that. So I wanna put that out first and I talk about thinking about your career in terms of interval training. And this is also gonna come back to the care issue. So we have a ladder, we have a winding path, Cheryl Sandberg talks about a jungle gym. All of these are ways of saying there's not just one way to the top. I don't even think we should be thinking about one bottom and one top. I think you should be thinking about intervals. Just for those of you who are athletes, you know that interval training is how you get into your very best shape. You work really intensively and you slow down a little and work really intensively again and you slow down a little. For those of you who wanna have families or for those of you who will be caring for your parents because you can choose to have children but you can't choose to have parents, you can choose whether or not to take care of them but we're going to assume that the statistics hold and you are going to be taking responsibility for those you love and for those who've raised you at some point, there's no way you can work flat out all the time. There's no way, that's what I wrote about. I'm not saying that some people can't do it, some people with enough money and enough good fortune and perfect kids, no problem. I have not discovered that and what I discovered in my life was that it was perfectly possible to be a high-powered professional and a mother as long as I had complete control over my own time which I did as both an academic and as a dean. I then found though when my kids were teenagers, even that, you just don't know what's gonna hit you, right? And we see this actually in lower income families all the time, the caregiving responsibilities are often exactly what knock people out of a particular career path. So thinking about holding different jobs, holding jobs that are very intense but also planning to make time for care and that sort of brings me to, so we then need to rethink our workplaces and think about policies that facilitate that. The single biggest change has probably already been made which is the ability to get healthcare on your own, right? Because we've got still a long way to go but at least if you were thinking, okay, I've gotta take time out, I've gotta take a different job, I'm gonna make more time so that I have more time with those I love or maybe simply a passion that you pursue. For those of you where it's not about family, about something that you care passionately about, at least now you can get health insurance on your own. But thinking much more broadly about what are relations between employers and employees, how we plan careers and how we then make it possible for people and you all are gonna have long lives to have those intervals over a long life. The last thing I'll say is for most of you, if you figure you get kids out of the house somewhere between 50 and 60 if you have kids, you're not gonna retire at 65, right Janet Yellen 67. Hillary Clinton if she runs will be 70 when she, if she wins, when she wins, if she wins we're nonpartisan. So you're gonna wanna think about different phases, you know, pre-kids, post-kids, with kids. All right, the next big area that I see again and this is more from having taught countless millennials and worked with countless millennials. You guys actually wanna have a life. You want me to go after her? Hanna Passon is not here today and I'm really sorry she's not, she's actually ill but she's my assistant, I hired her a year out of college. And when she first started working for me, we would, she's phenomenal. She does an incredible amount of work but at six o'clock she would leave and I'd still be there. And my first reaction was like, what is the matter with this woman? I'm still here and she just left. I would never have left before my boss. Hanna's a really serious rugby player and so she would leave at six o'clock to go play rugby, to go work with her team. And after a couple months, instead of wondering why she wasn't there because she always gets her work done, right? She's always, she responds, she always gets her work done. It's not about time, it's about work. After a couple months I started wondering why I was still sitting there. Like what was the matter with me? Like she was out there exercising which I should have been doing and I was sitting there doing my email. I think the sense that you want to have more in your life than work is both evident and incredibly important. Certainly my generation, the boomers, have made a fetish out of work. I wrote about in my original article about Time Macho, which is God knows we have it in this city, I actually pulled an all-nighter. Well, I pulled an all-nighter and I flew to California and that way I got three extra hours on the plane so I built 28 hours in a day. I mean, come on, you know, it's a cult, it's a fetish, it is doing in our health, it's doing in our families, it is bad for us in terms of creativity and it's bad for us in terms of productivity. Go read Overwhelmed. Bridget Schulte, it's a new America book. We've got all the science. We know that working flat out and burning out will make you less productive and less effective. But we've got to change the way we think about what good work is. We've got to focus on results rather than time or performance rather than presence and that means we also have to be much more flexible about where you work and how you work as long as you get the work done. All right, the last thing I will say and here again, my own research, you're starting to see it more and more in papers, millennial men want to be equal with millennial women at home. They want to be equal parents. That does not mean helping out. And frankly, there's a huge amount of sexism among women on this point. When I talk to older groups of women, I give them the following hypothetical. I say, okay, imagine this, you walk into your job and your boss says, I'm biologically better at this but I think you can probably do it if I micromanage you enough. And when I travel, I will call in every hour to make sure you're doing what you're supposed to be doing, you're laughing. You know exactly what I'm talking about. Most of you are too young. Yes, every woman with children knows what I'm talking about. This is how we handle our husbands when we leave. We think we are biologically better at it. We're pretty sure they're not fully competent but they can do it if you micromanage them enough. This won't wash, right? Men have to be just as free to be caregivers as women are to be breadwinners. Equality doesn't work one way. It won't work to say, okay, everybody has care and competition or love and work. Those are the two drivers of human behavior and have always been. And women are gonna be caregivers and competitors. That's the change that happened in my lifetime. I can now be fully competitive. I can have a full career and I can be a mother and a daughter and a wife and a sister. But men are still gonna be defined only in terms of breadwining. They are only gonna be defined in terms of how well they do in their career. And they can, of course, help out on the home front. But they're not going to be fully equal on the home front and we're not gonna value them as much for caregiving as for breadwining. True equality means allowing men to be primary breadwinners or secondary breadwinners or no breadwinners. And if you really wanna see women at the top, you might've noticed, if you look at the Fortune 500 CEOs, there are, oh god, it's like 5% women, not even. But all those guys have a lead parent at home. Every single one has a lead parent at home. So it seems to reason if you're gonna have get to any holding like parody with women and men, those women who are gonna be CEOs are gonna have a lead parent at home. And about half of the current Fortune 500 CEOs who are at the top have exactly that, a lead parent at home. They don't talk about it. They somehow think that's a little shameful. I think those men are heroes. I think men like my husband who has the guts to stand up and say, yep, my wife has a bigger job than I do, and I am the lead parent and I have a really special relationship with my kids. I think those are men we should be celebrating. So the last thing we have to do, we've talked about how you change the workplace, how you think about intervals of career, how you think about how you work and where you work and focusing on results rather than on the presence and time and hours worked. And the last thing we have to do is to make it not only acceptable but valuable for men and women to spend their lives both as breadwinners, pursuing their dreams professionally and having all the satisfaction that brings us and caregivers, taking care of those we love, thinking about others rather than ourselves, putting others first and having all the incredible satisfaction that that brings. So, it's up to you guys. Millennial's rising, you're gonna take care of this. We'll figure it out for the rest of the day. It's wonderful to be able to have this conference and to be able to focus on these issues and it was my pleasure to talk to you. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you.