 Good afternoon very much enjoying the Ford School energy welcome welcome welcome I am Celeste Watkins Hayes the Joan and Sanford Wildein of the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy here at the University of Michigan and I'm delighted to welcome all of you here this afternoon for today's policy talks event. Please join me in giving a warm Ford School welcome to our special guest Secretary of U.S. Commerce Gina Ramondo. Before we bring her out I want to welcome Congresswoman Debbie Dingle I see joining us in the audience today as I said to Debbie you show up thank you so much for your presence here. Also former Deputy Secretary of State Steve Began is here welcome back to the Ford School. Steve taught with us last year as a Towsley policymaker and residence so welcome back welcome back. So it's wonderful to see our Ford School community gathered here students faculty and staff and a big welcome back to our 50 plus alumni in the room back in Ann Arbor for homecoming weekend. Welcome as well to those of you from across the University of Michigan campus and beyond who are tuning in online with special thanks to our media partners at Detroit Public Television and PBS books. Today's conversation will be facilitated by Ford School Professor Betsy Stevenson a widely published labor economist and former chief economist of the U.S. Department of Labor. Professor Stevenson served as a member of the Council of Economic Advisers from 2013 to 2015 where she advised President Obama on social policy labor market and trade issues and she is a member of our faculty here at the Ford School. Our esteemed guest today is the Honorable Gina M. Ramondo the 40th U.S. Secretary of Commerce who was sworn in by Vice President Kamala Harris on March 3rd, 2021. She was formerly the governor of Rhode Island and its first woman governor sworn into office in January 2015 and winning a second term in 2018. She also served as chair of the Democratic Governors Association in 2019. In preparation for today's event we invited our students to engage over the past two weeks submitting questions they'd want to hear addressed on the issues they care most about. We've received dozens of thoughtful questions on a variety of topics that fall under the broad purview of the DOC and Professor Stevenson will weave those questions into the conversation. So with that please join me in welcoming Professor Stevenson and today's very special guest U.S. Secretary of Commerce Gina Ramondo. This is amazing. Thank you for being here. I know everybody's excited to see you. So I wanted to start by saying that I have always thought Secretary of Commerce might be the hardest job because commerce has such a diverse collection of agencies in it such that like one minute you might be talking with Noah about climate change then you got to pivot really quickly to talking about broadband and telecommunications or challenges with export controls under BIS and then you're thinking about how American businesses can control. Is there a golden thread you use to pull all of commerce together? Great question. So first let me say how excited I am to be here. And I guess it's homecoming. Is this homecoming? So go blue. Big time go blue. Would be remiss if I didn't take just a second to acknowledge the folks who are fighting for their rights and benefits at the UAW. You know president has said he's standing with them and I think about it you know for GM UAW American symbols iconic symbols of greatness so we hope that they stay at the table on both sides 24-7 until we get a win-win solution here because we need it and the workers deserve you know what they're looking for which is decent wages. On your question it so when I first got the job at commerce it is very hard to find a through line just for everyone here. I run the office of space commerce so I'm in charge of like air traffic control for space. I run NOAA if you know if you know anything about red snapper right whales rice whales fish habitat salmon I'm your woman. Seriously I have thousands of people who work for me in NOAA. We handle all broadband and spectrum issues wireless spectrum O ran 5G security in the network. We hit I don't know if you guys know what export controls are but you know keeping our most sophisticated semiconductors out of the hands of China we do that. We handle all export promotion. I mean it's 56,000 people doing just about everything. So when I got there I said okay Gina how am I going to lead this organization because the only thing that our leader has to do is set a vision that motivates people to go for it every day and where I landed was US competitiveness. Like really the through line that I decided to draw was everything we're doing should be focused on enhancing America's ability to compete in the world. So providing every American with affordable internet which is something we're doing allows us to compete. You can't compete in the world if if right now one-third of people who live in rural America don't have access to the internet. Think about that. You know depriving China of our most sophisticated technology into their military allows us to compete. Investing in chips and making semiconductors again in America allows America to compete and the thick of the AI work so that's the through line we've decided to draw is US competitiveness and you know I think it's working by the way when I hear people no matter what they're because in NOAA they work on climate you can't compete as a country if you don't deal with the issues of climate so that's that's the through line we've chosen. I really loved that you shared the bit about the right whale because you know I once found a giant whale bone on my beach and I had to get a special permit from commerce that allowed me to keep the bone because it was not an endangered whale that I might have slaughtered. And I promise you some Commerce Secretary did a hearing about that because whenever I go before Congress for a hearing about say semiconductors inevitably the first or second question is about salmon red snapper right whales right swales. That's awesome well you know you let us straight to a question that a lot of people wanted to talk about which is trade. So your through line is American competitiveness we we got a lot of questions about trade and I group them into two bunches. Who should we be trading with is one bunch and then how do we make sure everybody is benefiting from trade. Yeah let's start with the first bucket because everywhere I go people are talking about near shoring friends shoring and diversifying trade. You went to China. What do you think you know who should we be trading with what are your takeaways from your trip from China. I think trade is great as long as everyone plays by the same rules and in the case of China they do not play by the rules and other countries don't play by the rules. So Chinese government massively over subsidizes steel aluminum semiconductors and then dumps that cheap steel into the global market brings prices down for everyone. That's that's that's not fair right puts American workers out of work. We need a vibrant steel industry in the United States. You cannot be a great country if you can't make basic things like steel and aluminum and chips. And so if China were or any country for that matter were to play by the rules then you can have trade which doesn't hurt workers and doesn't disadvantage American businesses. And actually a lot of what I do in commerce we do both. We help companies promote their trade. For example I try to help a lot of small companies to learn how to trade but we're also on the protect side. So we will level what's called a countervailing duty which I realize it's like four o'clock on a Friday before homecoming so you don't want to be hearing about countervailing duties but essentially it's a little tariff. So if we find out China Vietnam etc. is subsidizing something we put a tariff on it to make the level of the playing field for U.S. workers. With respect to franchising and such here's how I think about it. I took this job because the president asked me to work with him to rebuild American manufacturing. That's why I took the job. I come from a manufacturing family. I come from a manufacturing state. You cannot be a great country unless you have enough manufacturing. But that being said we cannot make everything in America. So I think we have to figure out what must we make here like chips and sometimes that requires a subsidy. And then for other things like we do when you talk about friend shoring we have to find places that share our values that play by the rules that treat workers fairly that respect the environment and look those are what we call the friends that we're talking about to to work with them. And so I'm spending a lot more time in the Indo-Pacific actually like Indonesia Malaysia Vietnam today actually before I came here as in the phone with the new Prime Minister of Thailand to say raise your labor standards raise your worker standards have transparency play by the rules and then we can work together on our supply chains. I mean we learned all a big lesson about supply chains if you buy a hundred percent of things from one country that's tough. So it's just as much about creating jobs but also about you know portfolio it's a portfolio it's like the simple thing don't put all your eggs in one basket. We bought when we you know I remember being I used to be the governor of Rhode Island center from Rhode Island. Yay where are you from. Love that. But I remember in the dark days of COVID I personally was on the phone in the middle of the night calling mostly China companies to get ventilators because they were all made in China we couldn't access it and that's a risk we can't afford so that's why we have to go to friends to do some offshoring. I really like that you highlighted the diverse diversification of trade you don't want it all in one place because as an economist that's what I think is really important. But it's interesting when I hear people talk about friends sometimes they're talking about national security but you talked about people doing the right thing. Yeah is there is there a bit of both. Absolutely. You know as you say I was just in China and it was a productive visit. I went saying you know we want to ratchet down the tension and trade where we can by the way trade where we can. But what I was clear about is there's no compromise on national security. So our most sophisticated technology we can't trade with them period. If we find that they are stealing our intellectual property or getting into our telecom networks. Well you got to shut that down. So yes absolutely. So are there things that you think we can do better to make sure that we we compensate losers from trade. Or that we make sure everybody every American is actually benefiting from trade. You know. So again I grew up in Rhode Island as I said when I was a kid growing up in Rhode Island in the 70s the jewelry manufacturing was you know at a peak and everyone including my dad and all of his friends had a jewelry manufacturing job. And then the jobs all went away all went to China. And these guys mostly guys were like kind of stuck. My dad was 56 at the time. And it was really hard for my family. And there was no training for him. He was 56. We were like you know solidly middle class working class. He couldn't retire 56. It was brutal. So if there's going to be dislocation for workers we have to be there for them. Train them. Provide pathways into another kind of job. And we historically we haven't done a good job of that. I mean as a country we have programs to do that. But I think if we honestly assess the effectiveness of those programs they haven't been very effective. Again I saw it as governor in my state. So what we what has tended to happen is people are out of luck out of a job and good luck with that. So yes I think we have to do a much much much better job. By the way I think the same thing as it relates to technology. I was just about to ask you that. I was like I think I have to skip over and now talk about it because what do we do about the people who are losing jobs due to technology. We better be there for them. Look I learned this lesson in also in the pandemic. Governor of Rhode Island in the pandemic. A state of a million people. At one point in time I had a hundred and ten thousand Rhode Islanders collecting unemployment. Think that's crazy. And disproportionately women by the way. Because people who were put out of work were retail hospitality. I put them out of work. I closed all the restaurants. We closed all the retail right. And I spent a lot of time personally talking to women in their like mid 40s or 50s who had spent their whole lives working at say JCPenney Macy's as clerks or maybe at a bank or maybe you know. And those jobs were going away. Not just because of the pandemic. They then went away permanently right. They closed due to the pandemic but then they went away. And you just look at the they happen all be women. These guys are afraid. They want to work. They smart. They deserve to work. But they've only ever known one thing. They don't have a college degree and they need and deserve help. So what we did I used about 50 million dollars of our federal stimulus money and created an applied job training initiative as a when you governor gets you call every CEO and they all take your call. And I said I want to guarantee of hiring a certain number of workers who go through this particular training. If they graduate. And that's what we did. And we had thousands. I can't remember now seven or eight thousand people we were able to put to work former bartenders or retail clerks or bank tellers who became cyber technicians digital backbone jobs inside sales for sales force or Adobe or Microsoft. That's hard work. That is easy to say and hard to do. It requires employer commitment and it requires really purposeful intentional like apprenticeships and job training. But we have to do it at scale because otherwise whether it's AI or digitization or online sales like people are going to be put out of work and you know I am not. I am not. This is not President Biden's view or it's that are my view is I am not in favor of universal basic income. Give people jobs and pay them decent wages and to say we can't figure that out. I think it's a cop out. So you know I'm glad you raise this because you're essentially pointing to some lessons learned from the pandemic. And here in the post pandemic you know one of my favorite things is the tremendous return of people into the labor force. I mean you talked about how women were the ones who lost all the jobs. We now have prime age women participating in the labor force at all time high rates way above anything they were doing prior to the pandemic. One lesson might be state training programs helped work to make those transitions. What else are you hearing when you go out and talk to CEOs. Has flexibility helped bring people back into the labor force. How are they seeing this from the employer side. You know what brought all these people back to work so quickly. And what how do we imitate that going forward. Yeah. Excellent question. I don't know that I have have an answer. So I think flexibility is is a huge piece of the puzzle particularly for women. But I think that yes CEOs will tell you that when I talk to CEOs though they're mostly frustrated that they can't hire fast enough. Maybe that's part of the answer. How we get people back to work faster is having CEOs that can't hire fast enough. You know. Yeah. Like the late you know the labor market better than I do. But we are still at historic lows of unemployment. I think now you can correct me. But there's like 10 and a half million job openings in the United States. And when you talk to CEOs they'll tell you we need to we could grow faster if we could hire faster. But this job skills mismatch I think is quite real. In other words folks that are looking for a job now by and large don't have the skills for the jobs that are open. And that's why I think it's time for a wholesale dramatic change in transformation in the way we educate and train people in America. Much more investments in career and technical education in high school. Much broader use of apprenticeships beyond just the building trades but for technical jobs. And and much better job helping people to continue to be educated in their career. Because I I mean I just that's that's what you hear most from CEOs. You know I have one thing I did is secretary working with the Department of Defense is we set up a cyber security technician apprenticeship program mostly because the DOD couldn't hire enough cyber techs. And very quickly within months after an intentional program we were able to find train and get placed. I think almost 10,000 cyber apprentices not in college for your college degree people. So anyway I think this is something that we got to find the people who need who are underemployed find people who are underemployed and figure out a way to get them to be operating at the top of their skill level. And let's talk a little bit more directly about the chips and science act. And I wanted to ask you know this administration clearly has a desire to reinvigorate American manufacturing. You said President Biden asked you take this job to do that. I think you've already sort of told us why you think that's so important. But I guess I wanted to give you a chance to say why you think that's so important. But then what else do we we do to make what are the other kinds of fields when that we need to be preparing people for and what are the other kinds of policies that like you're working on or that are part of commerce to try to make sure that people are getting the skills they need and employers and workers are able to find each other. Yeah, one thing I would say is with this incredibly tight labor market, employers are finally willing to hire differently. And that has changed. I've seen a big change even in the past few years. So for example, five or six years ago, employers would CEOs would complain that they can't hire enough people. But yet, they would use the same checklist for hiring people, four year college degree, five years of experience, regardless of whether that was actually relevant. Now, they are finally, because they are so in desperate, you know, they're innovating themselves. So the half of the puzzle is, half of the equation is training people differently. The other half is hiring differently, and opening your mind to hiring someone who has competency, but not a traditional resume. And so I'm finally seeing that. And that's very exciting. On the manufacturing side, look with semiconductors and a certain other areas, it's about national security, as much as it is about creating jobs in America. I mentioned the steel industry. If you look at certain products, penicillin, active pharmaceutical ingredients, semiconductors, you know, and others, we are really almost dangerously dependent on like one or two other countries for 90 or 100% of the supply. You would never do that, even your own personal finances, like rely so heavily on one thing, particularly for things so critical, steel and chips and such. Right now, the United States makes 0% of the most sophisticated semiconductors in America. 93% we buy from Taiwan, and the rest from Korea. So again, I believe in manufacturing jobs. But that is a red hot national security risk that we have to address. And that's part of why I'm so focused on it. So what steps can we take or are we taking to address, you know, our comparative lack of elements that are critical on chip production? Well, you know, look, the truth of it is, a lot of this is a pure subsidy. It's about 30 to 40% more expensive to build one of these huge factories in the United States relative to Taiwan, China, Malaysia. So it's some of it is just a subsidy to build them. The other is, we have to massively as a country massively increase the number of chemists, engineers, computer scientists, material scientists, technicians that we produce. So everyone here is too young to remember this. But in the years after President Kennedy said, we're going to put a man on the moon. This country tripled the number of chemists it produced and quadrupled the number of engineers it produced. There have been moments in our history, where the country has mobilized behind a goal and achieved, you know, great things. In that case, the goal was putting somebody on the moon, and then the education system and the research and development followed. In this case, we want to produce more chips in the United States. The education system has to file in behind that behind that vision, to triple and quadruple the number of engineers, scientists and send people that we that we produce, because that is what will enable us to achieve the goal. Otherwise, we'll have empty fabs and no trained people to work in them. I mean, right now, I think there's 100,000 open, unfilled semiconductor technician spots in the country. And those are jobs you could have after college with some excuse me, after high school with some training. Also girls, there's no girls and women in these jobs. Yeah, like, I'm telling you right now, we will not achieve this moonshot, or any moonshot, whatever your passion is, climate, solving climate, etc. Unless we figure out a way to get girls into these jobs, including construction jobs. You know, I love that you went there. So I had to shade pivot a little bit because I think sorry, I would know it now I want to ask, okay, so you guys put childcare into chips, which people thought was a little crazy to me. I'm not a crazy person, but I think people didn't see it coming, right? Yeah, that's how we would get childcare subsidies and supports is by putting it into chips. And I wanted to have you explain a little bit of how that's working and whether you think that's going to be a model for going forward for making sure that we get family friendly workplaces. So you asked me before, how do we get more people into the workforce? How do we get women to stay in the workforce? How do we get women in these high wage jobs? It will not happen without affordable childcare. I don't see it at scale. Most people pay more for childcare than they do for their mortgage. Again, you guys are not at that stage in your life yet. Take it for me. This is true. Oh, here's how you can help them. Most people pay more for childcare than people pay for college tuition. True. College tuition, college loans, a mortgage like it's a lot. So a lot of people say, well, forget it, I'll stay home, right? I mean, if I can't make a minimum of $90,000 a year in my job, well, then I'll just, you know, stay home. So I did what Professor Stevenson is saying is when we put out the application for chips, I said that every company who wants to apply for money has to show us a workforce plan and a childcare plan. And that was met with, it was a bit controversial. Because people would say, this is a national security program. Why are you pushing a social agenda? And here's my answer to that. This has nothing to do with the social agenda. In the process of building all these new factories, we're going to create 110,000 construction worker jobs and about 150,000 jobs inside the semiconductor facilities. Right now, the unemployment rate among people in the building trades of the construction workers is like one to two percent, basically zero. I'm going to find 110,000 of them. And then the same for inside the inside the they're called fabs with their factories. So I said, if unless you CEOs show me a way that you're going to be successful at recruiting and retaining women in these jobs, you're not getting taxpayer money because you it's a it's too risky. You will fail. My job is to protect the taxpayer. You will not be successful with taxpayer money if you can't hire and find the skills you need at the pace you need to be successful. And I don't think you can do that unless you have women and I don't think you do that unless you have childcare. So this is my analysis. How's it working? It's early days, but it's going well. Want to hear something? None of the CEOs complained. Only politicians complained. All the CEOs know this is true. So none of the semiconductor companies have complained. They say to me, you're right. We need help finding workers. Help me train people. Help me attract people. So they haven't been complaining. We're working back and forth. By the way, I didn't say they had to provide free childcare. I didn't say they had to. I just said, show me your plan. Show me your thinking about it. The only people who complained are people on Capitol Hill. That thing had some kind of social policy. That thing had some kind of social policy. But if you're a business person running a business struggling to hire people, they're like you're absolutely right. By the way, I also started something called a million women in construction. Right now there's a million women who work in the construction industry in the United States. I said, let's double it. Let's get another million women. Not scientific. I just said another million. Again, a goal. Set a goal, mobilize behind it. Why did I say that? Because if you look at the percent of people in the building trades, plumbers, pipe fitters, electricians, welders, it's the same percent of women today as it was 25 years ago. It's low, single digits. These are fantastic jobs. Women cluster in women without a college degree, cluster in jobs like certified nursing assistant, home health aid, $15 an hour on average. That's poor. You're working full-time poor. If you go be a plumber, $40, $50 an hour to start with a pension with benefits. So I figure it's a twofer. It helps pull women out of poverty and helps get these fabs built. You know, on the child care, I think it's also worth noting that men also leave construction when their parents do to child care problems because construction such weird hours it can cause a lot of problems for any custodial parent, male or female. Sometimes that helps. It's not social policy. It's just helping people stay in a job. No, you're exactly right. I mean if you have to be on the work site at six in the morning, but you know my view is people say to me oh well we can't have women because we can't have child care at six in the morning. I'm like really? We innovate. This is the United States of America. We have innovated our way around every major problem. I'm pretty sure if we put our mind to it we can figure out a solution. I'm not sure exactly what it is, but figure it out. Well speaking of innovation, you know one of the big things that's hanging over all of us is this big shift in terms of AI and large language models and I know that's something you've been working on and thinking about do we need to regulate differently? How do we? I'm sure none of you have written a term paper using chat GPT. Nervous laughter. Yes we do need to regulate. I mean it's two sides of the coin I guess. On the one hand to think about the opportunities it is pretty exhilarating. We think about how much faster we can find cures for cancer, how much faster we can really on the medical side. It seems so exciting, but right now the risks seem scarier than the upside seem exciting because we don't have any safety guardrails in place and so I think it'll take Congress a while before they legislate which means what do we do right now and I was very proud of the president when he brought in on the CEOs of the biggest large language model companies and said listen we need action today we can't wait a year or two for Congress and they they came together around a certain set of commitments that they were willing to make showing us like water markings so you can know what's an AI generated piece of content versus the real person you know how they safety guardrails around how the models are made how the models are tested being honest and open about biased results what's the data they test on so I do think ultimately this will need to be regulated mostly around safety and and that's a exciting thing so that we can go forward with all the upside but right now the administration and the president's working on an executive order around this just to put forward safety guidelines that industry will follow for them to be truly enforceable with the penalty and teeth you need legislation but I think the president has moved quickly to say it's in everybody's interest to not let this spiral out of control to the downside I do think though this election will be wild yeah for AI for a lot of reasons we're not going to talk about politics but some of the AI generated videos you cannot tell the difference yeah well that that's why I wanted to follow up to say do we need to think about intellectual property differently and authorship and how how people are required to cite authorship differently so one of the other things that the Commerce Secretary does is we run the US patent office patent and trade mark office and Kathy Vidal who runs that is amazing if you're interested in that you should have her come to talk to you yes we have a whole work stream underway to figure out exactly that what what how do you protect what is generated in this new world you know it it so you've got that side but then of course we've also talked about trade and trade was the thing we used to negotiate with other countries that was like our big form a multilateralism multilateral trade agreements do we need to start thinking about cross-border regulation when it comes to AI or a new global governance set of issues outside of tax which is what's happening over Treasury but yes sort of your lane thinking about you know because if I mean this is of the complaint right that these companies make is if you do anything here it's just we're just going to move to another country and it'll flow back over yeah yes yes yes yes and fast so these models are portable you know particularly open AI models can go anywhere and look at AI in the hands of bad actors is gets pretty scary very fast so we yes is the answer we have to and we are we will very quickly get with Europe Japan India and say what our safety guidelines and rules of the road globally global safety guidelines and rules of the road that we can all agree to and at the time to do it is now before every country goes off and does their own legislation that is it that is not coordinated I mean for other pieces of technology it's it's hard to harmonize because the US has already done its thing Europe's done its thing it's like cemented in law data localization and data flows it's harder we have such an opportunity right now no countries haven't legislated yet they haven't legislated yet so it's a very cool opportunity to get with our allies who share our values around democracy privacy human rights anti-discrimination and set these global rules of the road well you know the the other thing is even if we if we don't and somebody else does sometimes our companies end up having to follow those rules it just when you were saying that it made me realize like we're all about to get single chargers for our cell phones thanks to the european regulation on that right you know and once companies have to meet the regulations in Europe then they ask well should we just meet that for other completely right yeah so if we're not part of the conversation and get off behind yeah or you know even worse if countries who don't share our values set the rules of the road that's very bad yeah no so for example another thing that i work on is in the internet there are standards for the internet and there's something called itu international telecommunications union we work really hard to make sure that an american was in charge of that standard setting body russia was had another candidate you know china and russia china and russia line up around certain candidates the united states and other democracies line up around other and that in that one it's do you want a closed internet or an open internet and ai you know what kind of safety guard rails and do you want and i you want to do that with countries that share your values around like i said human rights discrimination etc so you're at the university of michigan and one of the things that you might not know is at least for the economists our pride and joy of this university is our survey research psid i lived my whole college career by that psid i um studied economics back in the day you can relate to this where we used to have to load the data on tapes there are these big tapes and i was a research assistant so you get up at like five in the morning and go load the psid tapes so the data would come off so by the time the professor and you get into the office at like 10 the data came off the tape do you come on back me up you not remember this so anyway i i wrote i i got to a college on the base of the psid i have admired you for a long time but now i run the census bureau so like i've gone from being a data nerd to a huge data nerd that's where i'm going with this but i do tell you my partner justin will get up in the morning look at the data and he's like time to run the tapes and i'm like you've got to stop saying that because there's only like there's only people older than you and they're getting fewer and fewer of us who know what you're talking about you know i tell a story to my kids and they don't they don't even get that like what's tape what do you mean the tapes well that's okay my my kids still think it's confusing that i used to talk on the phone attached to a wall they're like you should just like lean against a wall and talk on a phone yeah those are the now on that the reason i was pointing out the psid and is yes you run census and be a and these are you know our statistical agencies what how how do you see it and how do you think about making sure that americans have reliable data i think it's a huge deal so i run we run the census bureau and be a bureau of economic affairs economic analysis i know you're right you're right um i was trying to help you and i got it wrong we collab we are that we call ourselves the viv viv the nation's data agencies um when i took over as commerce secretary you might recall the census in the last administration had a lot of challenges and the people who work in the census were so beaten down so the first thing i did was i said this is going to be database science base professionally run zero political interference and i don't know if they believe me at first who could blame them but i think we've really i do the the people who work in the census and be a i like top flight statisticians you know economist econometricians and they just want to get to the right answer so the first step my whole point here the first step is just leave them alone and let them do their job the data is what the data is that being said where we are trying to push the agencies to be more for lack of better term customer friendly consumer friendly so is anyone majoring in economics these are all policy students they all have to take economics okay well you take an economics class anyone take an economic class yes they all have to every so like everybody i think what makes a great economist is asking the right questions ask the questions that are the right questions and then you have to collect the right data and analyze the data to answer your questions so what we're trying to do is figure out how do we broaden the questions that we ask to collect data on the smallest of small businesses on how people are working flexibly you know what i mean like modernize the questions we ask so we get more relevant data that the consumers of our data people like you um want and so that's where we're trying to go no political interference but update to collect the data that's relevant like if you're trying to get a picture of today's labor market you have to ask a different set of questions than you asked 30 years ago because people work differently i have to say i was actually really impressed by how quickly the agencies moved to add new questions in the wake of covid i honestly didn't think it was possible for them to move that quickly thank you to adapt so um uh you know i i think it's really important and you know did did issues of data reliability come up at all on your trip to china because i don't think they have the exact same approach that the u.s government has yeah uh i it didn't to be truthful it could have but i had a long list and we didn't get to it but it is an issue because they're like us just today early this morning i had a conversation with the leading business person who leaves for china tomorrow and he said we're nervous about investing because we don't have accurate data which is an accurate picture of what's going on in the economy so you can't really make an investment uncertainty is not good for making decisions correct um well i want to thank you for taking the time to come out and talk with all of us today super fun we're all thrilled that you are here and um i want to thank you for your service to the country and everything you're doing and know how hard the work is and sometimes it's under appreciated very nice to say that i i very much appreciate that i'm so pleased to be here we've been trying to get this on the books for a while and finally be able to make it happen i'm grateful for you and for being hosted i would like to ask each and every one of you students to think about serving the country at some point in your lives you could run for office you could do your local school board neighborhood organization get a job in the federal government state government local government join the military and you don't have to do it forever you may that'd be great if you did but i'm asking you all to think about serving in some way in some capacity at some point in your career because everything we just talked about pandemic national security climate women in the workforce no ai challenges with safe ai none of it was going to get solved unless the best and the brightest who have the skills and the right sense of ethics get into the business of trying to solve these and make the policies and enact the policies that'll make a difference it won't but if you do then we will solve these problems it's easy to get discouraged when you think about the magnitude of what we're dealing with just in this little discussion today daunting but i have been in politics now for 15 years state level and now federal level uh i was state treasurer governor secretary and i am way more optimistic now than when i started yeah facts i was i'm way more optimistic than when i started and i'm in it i'm in the swamp every day so but i'm telling you guys if you serve it'll be better if you don't it won't so just think about it is my ask of you well thank you so much