 Joe Coughlin to come on up. Thank you, Joe. Good morning. Morning. Oh, come on. Good morning. You had free coffee and food. Good morning. Good morning. All right. So you should know that class participation this morning is going to be 10% of your grades. I am far sighted, so I will call on you rather than waiting for your questions. How's that? So I want to talk a little bit, as Jim was saying, about some of the changes that are out there demographically. But I want to go bigger than that. We can't talk about the future of work without talking, yes, about the pandemic. And I know we all have pandemic fatigue. But more importantly, what is the general background, the general context that work fits into? We've gone from a world where work, in many ways, was posited as the center of your life. And some would caveat it as going, oh no, it's my professional life. But in reality, if you think about it, where you live, how you commute, what you do, everything else has generally been, well, I work here, therefore, I should live there. Everything had been around that. The pandemic crisis served as a propellant, changing things, not necessarily totally different, but accelerating things that were already in the making in society. Now, was it simply the pandemic that allowed us to do this? I would say not. In fact, what I want to give you is a little bit of a look through the lens, perhaps, of social psychology, of how crisis actually gave us a moment to see change as possible, to change everything we assume about the future of work, where we live, what we value, and everything else. You see, the pandemic was more than just about health and disease and unfortunately, death and illness. It was yet another crisis. So I'm gonna go through three steps here. I'm gonna talk to you a bit about crisis and how that changes the psychology of how we think about the world. Then we're gonna talk about, yes, I'm gonna get to what Jim asked me to speak about, work, but I also wanna do a little bit of a look into the future, which is very different, very dangerous, rather, because when you predict the future as a rule, and this is an MIT hard and fast rule, you should only predict the future far enough in the future where you are dead before anyone finds out you are wrong. I'm actually gonna try to predict a little bit closer than that. So just to give you a fairness, a number of my colleagues are here from the Agelab. The Agelab, we are based in CTL. We look at transportation. We are the people who parked the car on the main floor. Parking is very hard in Cambridge. You can take it where you can. We're looking at the future of the home, home as service, not just simply as a place to live, providing care for loved ones, and how do you plan that thing? We currently call retirement, but we are gonna be calling it longevity planning. But let's get to a story. You know, I love stories because when I was a visiting student here across the street in Course 17, I was taught that the story is the most powerful technology in the world. Not the internet, not your genome, not space travel, none of that data science stuff, but it indeed is the story. Because stories you see actually frame in why we do certain things, why we don't do others, what's assumptions, what's possible, what we should find acceptable. And the story of work has profoundly changed. So I was on a plane to Florida about a year ago, and I met a gentleman next to me. He was flying down and I started up a conversation with him. And he said, I asked him, so are you going down for vacation, visiting family? He says, no, I'm meeting my wife and my two daughters. I would say this gentleman was probably in his mid-40s thereabouts, and he had two kids apparently around middle school age. And I said, oh, are they down there for vacation? He says, no, we're going down to our new home. Okay, great. And it was, you know, during the pandemic, it was a little rough. And I said, so did you just find a job down there? He says, no, I don't have a job. You see, for a better part of a year, I was working for a real estate company doing work on pricing of properties, industrial properties. And they had me working from home. And frankly, I was working from home just fine, doing very well. I started to have quality of life. I spread my work over 24 hours, not condensed into, by the way, in all fairness, does anyone remember where the eight-hour workday came from? It was a story made up by Henry Ford in scientific management, Taylorism. So you could keep the factory going 24 hours a day. This week clocked it into eight-hour shifts. But he basically, when he was home, he was able to spread out and be amazingly productive. And then they called him back. And he got back and he went to his assigned work station, AKA a cubicle, and he was there for one week. And he keeps on, and he says, you know something? I fired him. And I was thinking, okay, air, I'm over 50, my hearing's off, who did you fire? I fired my boss. Think about that paradigm for a moment. Basically, he says, look, I don't have a job, I've got two kids, but suddenly quality of life, that quantity of pay for Keith, at least, became more important. So he fired him, and he says, I don't know what we're going to do, but we're going to do something. More importantly, we're going to do something different. What kind of change came into this gentleman's mind and many others that would force that? And one of the things that we find is that crisis, this is the social psychology part, gets us to start questioning the assumptions of things that we take for granted. We take for granted so many things, like the eight hour day, the 65 year old retirement ages, acts of Newtonian physics. What in fact, they're only stories that we tell ourselves and we reinforce them with institutions and words and policies and processes. But crisis, particularly in the last 10 to 25 years, has been coming at us at high velocity. So I did a beam count of the New York Times articles referring to the word crisis. Look at this, we've been in a constant state of crisis. Now for those of us in the room that are old enough, do you remember what word we used to use to get people's attention before crisis? War, we had a war on poverty, a war on cancer, a war on drugs, it was always a war. Now everything's a crisis. And as a result, people are starting to show us, they get either crisis fatigue or very angry or very animated, whatever it might be. But as a result of that constant state, we're in a constant state of stress. So let me ask you, remember the class participation, again, what do you all do when you're really, really stressed or as we like to say here in Boston, we get stressed. You in the cheap seats, anybody got answers? No, some of us do this. I've seen Chris, no, that's okay. No, actually, what's the number one thing we do when we have a problem? All kidding aside, you don't even have to question it. You do this. Whether it's doctor, whether it's finance, whether it's housing, school, we all go to Dr. Google. By the way, just for a small note, if you go to Google long enough and you do a date, it always ends up in cancer. If you have a sprained ankle, it's cancer. Just keep on digging. But so we all go to Google when we're stressed. I wanna show you something what this high velocity of stress has been doing to us over time. Anxiety in related searches, look at this. This is not just about the pandemic. The pandemic may be the current set of crisis, but we've been under crisis for so long that your employees, your coworkers and the like are under constant, shall we say, state of anxiety, whether in terms of looking at searches overall. And yes, we are a neurotic nation, the darker the state, the more concentrated searches. By the way, I don't know what was going on 2004 in South Dakota, but apparently they were really having a great time, let alone in North Dakota now looks pretty darn dark. But if you look in terms of what people are doing, this has revealed behavior on how they're thinking. Now the United States may be neurotic, but I just thought I'd show you the top five neurotic nations. Australia, Ireland, I always thought they were kind of the cheery ones, United Kingdom and Canada after us. The bottom line is that we're starting to see that the pandemic was only one source of issues, but the pandemic served as really an acceleration of how we thought about what was going on around us. So now we're confronted with this thing that's about life and death. What happens when you're confronted with something that really scares the heck out of you? Your brain goes into fight or flight mode, reptilian brain it's called. Essentially it's really saying can I eat it or is it going to eat me? The cortisol starts running, the adrenaline starts running, and as a result we start looking for information. But think about the information we've been getting for decades, not just in the past year, two years, four years, it is often conflicting. It is always compounded and constant. And when we can't find a source of what makes sense, some of us get very angry and others shut down. In fact this model's been around since the early 1900s. We use it in the lab when we're studying driving and the like. You want people, in many cases your employees, stressed just enough to get them engaged. It's like even if you're giving a lecture, if you're sitting there doing a monotone and you're reading your notes like this, pretty soon you're gonna be on one side of the curve where people are falling asleep. But if I change, for instance, those of you in the industry and say I need you to make your numbers this year, I better have those numbers just right to keep you stressed enough to be performing. But if I say I want you to triple your numbers in the same year, I'm gonna push you over the other edge and you're not gonna be able to do anything. So what we're looking at is an entire population, I would suggest, as being stressed more than usual. And by the way, remember your mother used to say, ah, Joe, it's all in your head. Guess what? She wasn't a neuroscientist but she was right. These are two FMRI scans done here on campus. One is your brain on stress being fired up and one is not. But here's the thing that we didn't think about. Over time things change, physically change. We know from driving experiments as well as other experiments in other fields that when you're stressed, we start to narrow our field of vision. Physically, we start to have tunnel vision. But the other thing is we stop seeking new information. We stop saying, hey, can we talk? The answer is no, no, I'm just too stressed. I gotta go right in. Remember, I'm doing fight and flight mode. I gotta keep straight in front of me. How about the folks at Fukushima? Boy, did they have a bad year. Remember that years ago? First they had the earthquake, then they had the tidal wave, then they had the nuclear meltdown. One of the things we learned from that, sadly, however, state, that is stress, over time becomes trait. It literally gets ingrained in our brains. A normal brain scan is one on the left. Your neurons are connecting. You're making innovations, you're communicating. New ideas are popping and the like. Under a constant state of stress, we found in Fukushima that people's brains were literally unwiring. We were, that tunnel vision becomes something that becomes physically hardwired overall. Age does matter. After all, we were in the age lab. Good news is the older your employees, the more likely they are to, shall we say, cope better. Frankly, my colleagues were doing surveys throughout COVID and we found that, generally speaking, older people who were more vulnerable, physically, existentially vulnerable, actually were doing far better than younger people. The millennials in particular were weirded out. They were worried about their kids. They were worried about their parents. But if you were over 60, it's like, okay, fine. I'll muddle through, finally. That's the bad news because they're not paying attention, perhaps. And then younger people, again, they're always looking for the negative information. Tell me what the risk is. Tell me what I need to do. How do I get out? And boys and girls are different. You had to come to MIT to get a biology lesson on this. Yes, men are different than women in terms of stress, more likely than not. But here's the news you're not thinking about. Men get stressed and they want to take action. They've got to do something and they know something. They take action and they do something more often than not wrong. Women are more like we want to communicate. They're going to want to talk to others, look for information. All those folks you saw on Google, most of those were women doing Google searches. And we become more risk-adverse. We don't, you know, we need certainty. So if a company or employer can't do that, I'm not really willing to talk about it very much. Ambiguity, remember, if I don't understand it, it's a negative period. It just protects me from, you know, winning, but it also protects me from losing. So I know you're saying, okay, so what? But I wanted to give you the idea that this constant state of crisis and how it's changed us and how we think about work is not something like a novel political or social dilemma that we're confronting. We're looking at something that has been coming for a long time where the workforce has been under a great deal of stress and adversity overall in their head, even when the economy was going well. And what ends up happening under a constant state of stress, we feel three geeky terms that we use in sociology and psychology. Normlessness, meaninglessness, and powerlessness. Let's distill down what this really means in terms of common sense. By the way, you should know academics are a lot like lawyers. We take very simple common sense terms, make them very complicated and then charge you a lot by the hour just like lawyers. Normlessness, the rules are broken. Meaninglessness, what the heck is going on? I don't get it, it's just driving me crazy. Powerlessness, I can't change it, I'm done. I quit, I'm out of here, I fire my boss. That's what's going on, I would submit to you in the background of our minds. So what I wanna suggest to you is that what you're seeing in the workforce, what you're seeing in the marketplace and life is not novel. How many of you wish the world would get back to normal and do you have a date when that's gonna happen? Raise your hands. Even you guys on Zoom, raise your hand, put your coffee down. Nobody wants to get it back to normal. Okay, that's good, all right, we're done Jim. No, the bottom line is get over it. This is the new normal. The pandemic served as a propellant accelerating trends that were already in process. You saw them out there, you just weren't paying attention, you thought all of that was only for certain groups of people that were doing this or that and whatnot, but the pandemic accelerated many of them out there. One more piece of psychology, you get a kick out of it. How many of you served in the military? Bunch of you served in the military. You know that depending on your service, basic training was anywhere from nine to 13 weeks. That wasn't just to show you how to put on your uniform, fix your bed, weapons training and the like. It was about changing your behavior. It was about making you part of a unit in 10 to 12 weeks. There's another little rule of thumb that says it takes 21 days to develop a habit, 90 days to make it stick. I did a calculations for today's lecture. We've essentially been working under, shall we say, strange rules since we all walked off campus March 13th, 2020, 606 days. Remember what I said about your brains? When state becomes trait. If it only takes 10 to 12 weeks to make a marine, what is it done to the population in 606 days? So one of the things that we were looking at in the lab and doing surveys in the past over a year or so is that we all know what you were doing in March. You were buying toilet paper by the pallet load, were you? And by the way, this sounds like it's really crazy. All of you in supply chain are going, God, these crazy people, they're coming into Costco and they're buying pickup truckloads of toilet paper. I wanna make an argument to you that this was the most rational thing they could be doing. Why? If the rules are broken, you can't make sense and you're feeling powerless, you're going to grab onto the one thing you know you're going to need and make sense within your power. You're gonna buy toilet paper. Guess what else they were buying? Technology became the new toilet paper. We saw people out there buying doorknobs, smart doorknobs and thermostats and tablets and smart speakers, essentially going out there saying, gee, I am far more open now to all that crazy tech that my kids or my adult children had that maybe I want into my life. I would submit to you that technology readiness and adoption may have accelerated as much as five to seven years faster than we thought. Homes became a lot smarter. My colleague, Dr. Chai Wuli, working on home logistics and C3, a home as service, is really looking at how these technologies are making your home, shall we say, invite whole cast of strangers into providing services, whether you're young, middle age or older. How many of us used to quietly make fun of our younger colleagues that basically, okay, you don't own a car, you use a ride-hailing service? Many of us would roll our eyes and go, okay, fine. You're too lazy to make a meal. You have to have it delivered, yeah, all right. And by the way, I did a study with Lowe's a number of years ago. Do you know that 60% of people in the United States under the age of 40 do not know the difference between a flathead screwdriver and a Phillips head screwdriver? Okay, fine, there's an app for that, too. What happened during the pandemic? Essentially, this created a virtual assisted living. Suddenly, people are going, you know, those kids weren't crazy. It's not just about convenience. It made it really possible. All of a sudden, we realized you could actually put together an entire life because there's a whole app for that. So we saw home as service suddenly becoming something, not just for show what we used to say as, ah, you're too lazy to live, to, no, this is for everybody, too, and it's not that terrible way of living. In fact, the vision that the team has been using for C3 home logistics is that it's going to start with a home, if you will. That's the one many of us grew up in, is that if you plugged it in, hopefully it worked, all the way to a level of home that is proactive. It is watching. It is caring for you overall. So that's the background of where we live. Remember, I like to think we start with our state of mind, state of where we live in, but where's work going? And no, it's not just about work from a home. There's a lot more going on, and we all know this picture, sadly. It's a little disturbing, if you will. But it was not just about work from home. It became work from anywhere. It has profoundly been changing real estate as we know it. Small towns, rural towns, entire countries like Spain and Portugal, parts of Southern Italy were advertising their little villages as having wicked good Wi-Fi move here to write code for somebody in California. This has changed the workforce. It's not gonna be easy to get Keith back from Florida after he's moved. Right Aid, you know, number three, pharmaceutical chain company out there, convenience chain out there, is rebuilding its headquarters in Philadelphia with the sole purpose of saying not everybody's gonna be here, and by the way, we don't want you here. But here's the thing. Since the 80s, I'm gonna date myself, there was a whole body of literature out there on work-family balance, because before that, there used to be work, and there was family, or work and home. And then the 80s, we started talking about, well, you know, we need to have work balance and whatnot, and many of you are gonna laugh when you think about this because you take it for granted now. It was not until the 90s that this thing called the Child Care Center was even considered. Do you know the U.S. Department of Transportation across the street from the Marriott had to fight the Secretary of Transportation and the White House to get permission to put into a daycare center in the 1990s? Because this is crazy. The kids don't belong in the work-family, you're nuts. So we started to see this change now of work and family starting to blur to the point where I would submit to you today, the state of work, at least until before the pandemic, was much like the mill town of the 1800s. We were suddenly building homes and whatnot right next to places to work, which is like, well, geez, Joe, that's really convenient. Is it really convenient? Where did you start to lose the dividing line between work, home, life? You know, those signs in Canary Wharf or even here at Charles Park is if you lived here, you'd be at home by now. Good, bad, but like the mill town, essentially mills owned your entire life. Then we hear echoes in the background. We hear people like Elon Musk saying, long hours at work, you think this is an option? It is not. I'm not arguing whether he's right or wrong. I'm just saying that's a theme that is out there. And people, all workers of all types are hearing that echo, maybe not from his mind or lips, but from others. Then we have Jeff Bezos out there work, life, integration. It is actually a circle. It's not a balance. Suddenly your employer invited themselves into your living room, into your small living room, by the way. Workers started to hear that. In China, by the way, they are protesting against the 996 culture. Anyone know what that is? Nine o'clock in the morning. Then nine o'clock at night, six days a week. And even in China, they're pushing back on that. See, this has been going on for a little while in the background. The pandemic helped us, shall we say, move what we were feeling as angst. How about this one? Millennials, particularly younger people under age 40 want to work to live, not live to work. Look at the data. I didn't put the data on there, I'm sorry. These are 2018 data. 68% of millennials' flexibility is often more important than finance. This is not during the pandemic. The pandemic just gave pause to say, okay, I'm done. And longevity and work. You know, one of the precepts of the age lab is that we are living longer. We're just got, we have to start planning for what is considered to be 100 year life. Do you really believe that the education you get between zero and 21 or zero and 25, you go to grad school, whatever it might be, is gonna last you a lifetime? Do you really believe that having one career is going to be it? Or when people ask you, what are you gonna be when you grow up? They should stop asking that. They should start asking how many things will you be when you grow up? But look at this, 55% of millennials are not engaged already, more than any other generation. And the average one has already had more jobs than the average person that is currently in their 50s. Again, please look at the date, 2019. So the pandemic really didn't change much. It just made it faster. Here's three really badly drawn ideas that I put up there. Although one of our colleagues, Sheng Hong, helped me with the graphics because I can't even draw a straight line. Here's three stories for you on your career and your profession. The first one which most employers want you to have, it's a straight line. You were born, you go to school, you get hooked on a mortgage, and you take a career and you do a straight line all the way to retirement. You get a chair, a watch, kick out the door. Thank you, you're done. That's the story that most of us live by. But we've started to see many people that had a little bit of courage to do a little zigzag. Well, I'm gonna do this and I do that. Especially those who have higher education. They tend to be, shall we say, a little bit flexible. But even those in the trades, I'll show you here in a moment, have been able to go between professions and careers and the like. You see the one on the bottom? That's not a health scare. Who goes into a career, stops, comes back, maybe stops again? Anyone know who that person might be? This is the dominant career track of women. This is not novel. Women come into the profession, they get trained and whatnot. Many of them take time out, have kids, take care of kids, come back into the profession. Maybe they drop out of large companies, whatever. Do you know a second group of people starting new businesses in the United States? It's not just that kid that's wearing a hoodie and sneakers, writing code. It's women over age 50. So one of the things we're starting to see is a whole new career story as to what it is as an employee. Where do you fit? How do you recruit people? Were that kid that's the intern with the still paper, resume in a folder? It looks a lot closer to 60 than they do 20 years old. This is where employers are gonna have to change their mindset on who they recruit, how they recruit and how they retain. By the way, I hate clowns, so I don't feel badly about this. There is a national clown shortage. Now I think many of us who live and work in Cambridge will tell you that that's not the case here. We have plenty. But no, the fact of the matter is is that there's a national clown shortage. The average clown now is 58 years old. By the way, the clown association says this is due to higher standards apparently. I'd like to know what those are. But I just want to look at these average ages of many of these employees, employee types. The average American worker today is just under 42 years old. And as we look at these numbers, I want you to think about the fact there is not that nice linear line that we're all led to believe that, okay, old guy, get out of the way. There's a bunch of young people, we want your job, we're coming through, coming through. No, you can't find an aerospace worker to save your life. Raytheon's average worker now, 57 years old. Dave Carell's been working on truck driving issues. Truck driver shortages have been going on since the 1980s and it's only getting worse. Average American farmer today, 61. The average person that takes his job after he dies or gets sick, guess what? 62 years old. Many of these jobs, people don't want. This is Pricewaterhouse Cooper's data. It's not that they won't force themselves to take it because they need income, but look at the professions where we're going to have shortages. By the way, these are 2016 numbers. I intentionally pull the old data to show you that many of the places we are having real shortages, people didn't want to work there in the first place. I started my career in the defense industry. I talked to my friends there, they're going, you know, we don't even know how to build half the stuff anymore and the people who did know how to build it, they've retired or in the electric industry, power industry, many of us would say even if you wanted to go nuclear tomorrow, we can't build a nuclear power plant. We forgot, but I want to show you some current stuff. The number one competitor to that person you want to take care of your mother in senior housing is not a senior housing company. It is not a hospital. The number one competitor we find, I've served on the board of a senior housing company, one of the largest in the country, and guess what? It's McDonald's. And now that McDonald's is raising their pay, what, not to 15, 18, 20, signing bonuses, free college tuition, whatever it is, suddenly you're seeing a drain out of senior housing. So it's not just a shortage of people, you're starting to see, should we say, inner market fighting for the same people of relatively lower skills, but ever so necessary overall. Something has been going on in the trucking industry for decades. When trucking is done, they run to construction. When construction is done, they run to truck it. Guess what? $1.2 trillion just got signed off, much of it going to hardcore infrastructure. I have a real serious question that I wrote in Forbes not too long ago. Good luck with that. There's not gonna be anyone there to build it. Just because you've got the cash does not mean they're going to show up. In fact, one of the biggest things you're gonna be seeing, and we're already starting to see it slowly in Europe and now in the United States, you're gonna be seeing more and more women in trades that you had never thought about before. How about Amazon? What's happening now? I know a lot of us are saying, I want you back on the job, and I'll come back to that in a moment. But what we're starting to see is that small business, medium-sized business, is not going to be able to compete with the big boys. How many of you have seen this commercial from Amazon just three weeks ago put out there? You want student loan forgiveness? You're hired. You want flexible work hours? Gotcha covered. You want a part-time job, but you only can do it at night. Gotcha covered. Suddenly, it's gonna be the biggest companies that are gonna be able to do that, leaving many of the mid-caps all the way to small businesses, shall we say, not doing as well. For those who say, I want you back on site, this is important, this is the way business is done, Jamie Dimon, the first one to be called the master of the universe, declared everyone back on site, and I wanted it to be so. You know what the answer was for many of his employees? And by the way, for CEOs like UBS, good job, more people for me. Because suddenly that flexibility now is gonna be a competitive advantage or a key to retention in the workplace. So when people start leaving, and quite often we have this inner, shall we say warfare going on between the chief financial officer and the head of HR, they generally will look at their business and they'll go, wow, these guys are getting really expensive, look at the package, look at the salary, it's time for them to what? Give them the package, retire. But here's the problem, as they go down that escalator and they retire and they go off to wherever people go when they retire. They're taking with them. At the very high end, those who are client facing, they take their contacts. And when something blows up, they go, hey, where's Mary? Mary retired. We got a problem with this client and she's the only one who can do whatever with that client. Hey, do you know why we did such and such? You know, why was this code written? Why do we organize it this way or whatever? Oh, Tom knew that, well, where's Tom? Tom took the package. You see, a lot of the people who are not replacing those jobs, they're not coming back in, they're the ones that are leaving, know what we did and why. In fact, one of our first research sponsors at the Agelab, major IT company that underwrites everything from Social Security Administration, IT and the like. I remember the chief technology officer telling me years ago, keep in mind, IT company, we don't know what we know. Suddenly everything now is becoming a gig as well. Remember, it's flexibility over finance. It's working caregivers. Whether you've got kids or older people, it's about retirement transitions and the like. So suddenly the idea of whether it's work bar or your kitchen table has become a real thing for many people that are, shall we say, not forward facing in the workplace. I'm gonna steal this from Tom Malone years ago. He's gotten a new book as well, but years ago at MIT seminar, just like the ones that you are sitting at today, said that the future of work, and this was about 1995, was gonna be like a Hollywood production. That you're gonna bring together teams of people, talent, get something done, and then blow it up after they're done. So that collaboration, that culture, the idea of getting a project done, it's already been out there in the ether and moving forward. We are seeing women get into professions that are not their traditional. You know the trucking industry now is redesigning cabs for smaller, older women. So the gears are easier to shift, the wheels easier to grip. And by the way, we're also seeing this with New Holland tractor and John Deere and the like. We have a workforce shortage, not in terms of numbers, but lumpiness of where people are choosing to go. Think about the storyline. Again, getting back to the power story. How many of us ever told our kids, you know? Oh, I'll blame myself. My daughter, Catherine. Catherine, do you wanna go to college or be a plumber? Guess what? I'm sending her to college, $250,000 after tax income. I don't know why I'm doing that. If she became a plumber, she'd make $250 per hour. But the storyline says, oh no, no, success is go to school. But it's not just about those folks out there that we're worried about in terms of automated trucks like Walmart announcing yesterday that they're putting automated trucks out there. No, law firms are already using algorithms to write briefs. Just because you've got seven years of education does not make you free. We're seeing a robot developed here at MIT now doing some of the basic certified nursing assistant work in hospitals and senior housing on this creepy little robot that looks like some sort of tiger. Robare in Japan carrying patients from one place to another. My favorite, however, is Holly. Holly's a bartender. That's how I paid for college. Apparently, he can pour 250 drinks per half hour in Munich, but I hear the jokes are not nearly as good as a real bartender. What we have seen happen, however, is that there's been a reframing. How many of us think about the fact that during the Great Recession and thereafter for the last dozen years, we justified and we certified everything based upon, well, you know, since the Great Recession, fill in the blank. We are now reframing how we look at the world in terms of no, since the pandemic, it's not about the loss of my wealth. That was a great recession. That was scary enough. This one, this is about the loss of my life. This is far more emotional, far more passionate, far more lasting that is going to affect every single story. And just because that's the way it's always been done. No, no, no, you understand, my life, my family's life was at risk, both in terms of quality and existentially, I'm done. I'm changing. We're seeing it change business. Everything we do now for at least the next dozen years or more is gonna have healthcare kind of rippling through it, health, wellness, well-being, quality of life, things we heard out there where shall we say niceties in little seminars that very few people ever went to suddenly now. We're seeing them as being major themes out there where the people like GlaxoSmithKliner saying, this whole consumer taking care of their health and well-being, this is going to stay. This is gonna be far bigger than ever. We're seeing the pharmaceutical industry going, wow, it's not just about providing the molecule. We're gonna provide devices and service. We're gonna see molecule as service because frankly, one, health bigger deal than it's ever been before. Secondly, if you wanna protect your patent rights, just add a service to it and you get to extend that molecule at a certain price point for a long time. How about this Walmart, CVS, even Dollar General last August announced they're all not just providing flu shots in the store. You remember the old minute clinic thing? That's old news. It's been around for a good 20 years. No, now they're providing dental services, mental health services, social care and the like. We're now seeing a permeation of essentially health and well-being being distilled and pushed through every single channel of your employee or your loved one's experience. By the way, the other one, public supermarket. 180,000 employees in the Southeast, public supermarket is actually hiring dieticians not just to give you diet support in the store, but they'll come into your house and find out in my case, way too much cheese, way too much scrapple. By the way, if you don't know what scrapple is you'll probably live a lot longer than I will. Telemedicine, do you know that telemedicine has been around as a concept since the 1897 in the Journal of the Lancet and this thing called the telephone was invented? Some Brit doctor said, you know, I think that we might be able to use this some day if this thing ever catches on to maybe, I don't know, do heart patient diagnostics at a far? Well, apparently he was written off for a good 120 years because even though telemedicine has been around for a long time well-developed, it took the pandemic for it to push into our lives in our homes where suddenly we're saying, gee, there really is no reason for me to read three year old people magazine in the doctor's office. Maybe I can get this, shall we say, taking care of at home and the like. And for those of you in logistics, home logistics in particular, health logistics has been a target for UPS and FedEx for the past five years in a very major way. But due to the pandemic it's gonna be even a bigger target now. Think about all the home diagnostics that have come out there. I'm not talking about Ancestry.com where you find you've got twin sisters at Yonkers. No, I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about everything from cholesterol checks, clean and everyone. Who can forget a commercial that's got a box sitting on your toilet? And it's smiling, by the way, which is just kind of creepy. But the whole idea that health now has definitely come home. We're seeing a lot of companies that look like they're just a passing fad actually start to stick. Whole Foods for years has been telling you not just how to shop, but how to eat. I said a number of years ago, John Mackey at the table at Amazon headquarters and he was kind enough to tell me that he did not want to make a store that was about organic food shopping. He wanted to teach America how they should be eating. And he said, by the way, if it was up to him there would be no dairy in the store whatsoever. I come from upstate New York, a lot of dairy farmers in my heritage. There was a lot of cheese on the table. I looked at him, not being a very good guest, I guess. I said, does that mean I can eat all of that? But the fact of the matter, these companies, whether it's Apple now, suddenly has gotten into health in a big way. Whether it's AFib or motion detection or whatever it might be. Ford wants to give you a check up a day from the vehicle, Stanley Black and Decker, they make tools, they also make home monitoring equipment. Best Buy, $1 billion invested in Best Buy Health. We're starting to see that whole permeation go all the way through. So from an employer standpoint, employees are now asking, by the way, look at the date, this is 2021 data, are now asking, does my employer care about me, mine, body, and soul? Wait a minute, I thought it was about the compensation package, or we had a gym, or okay, fine, we have a smoothie bar, does that make you happy? No, I want more. 68% of senior HR leaders rated employee well-being and mental health at the top of their agenda, 2021. Okay, sorry, I can't read that either. To stem the great resignation, I call it frankly the great reframing, but Soundbytes do stick, and that one did, the resignation, employers need to be, shall we say, bolster mental health offerings. In March of 2020, what we found is that most U.S. companies sent employees home, three out of four prescriptions for anti-anxiety meds were written overall. So remember that I started off talking about crisis, social psychology of crisis, where state has now become mental trait. So the last trend line I want to give you is nested. A lot of us saw this, some of us chuckled, some of us were part of it, but what do I mean by nested? Remember fight or flight? Well, there was some work done many, many years ago by a guy named Ted Gur, a political scientist, it was called Why Men Fight, Why Men Rebel Rather. And one of the things that he observed was that about 90% of us just shut down and go to hell away. The other 10%, we get really pissed. Those are the people. So nested is about the 90%. And we know what happened last March, continue to do so. We bought weight equipment, we bought booze, we went gardening, and by the way, bakers, they ran out of flour in the UK, suddenly everybody wanted to get on TV, not new. Do you know that every, shall we say crisis, since if we look at anything from 9-11 to the stock crash of 87 before that, there was always an upsurge in burpee seed cells production. So the victory garden, shall we say, by the way, it turned from World War II, not exactly new. People started building pools or refurbishing pools, not just like in Florida or Georgia where it makes sense, but insane people in New England, Ontario, Canada, they started saying, this isn't just my home, this is my sanctuary, this is my nest. And here's something that's very quizzical. If Lucchio Quinto and I have been doing research on the future demography and the writings that we've been doing, do you know that, well I'll come back to this in a moment, the size of families have been going down. We'll come back to you guys in a minute. We're not having kids, but look at this. The median size of a multifamily home was 10, 1075 square feet only a few years ago. The new one's being built, 1300. By the way, there's nobody moving in. It's you and your dog, and it's probably a very small dog. Average single family house size has gone up in size. Even though there's no kids, again, it must be about the dog. I like this one because the dog looks bigger than the house. So the fact is the families are smaller, but the dogs apparently are getting bigger. So the whole idea of moving to the burbs and whatnot, the headlines in the globe, in the Washington Post, New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, everyone's moving to the city. Yeah, there were a lot of people moving to the city, but the majority still lived in suburbs and rural areas. In fact, one of the things we saw during the pandemic, the suburbs suddenly are starting to look cool again. Not because they were cool, but a lot of the things you could get in the city, maybe not with the variety, with the intensity and density, were suddenly moving to suburbs. And by the way, 2020 was the fifth year. Remember when the pandemic hit? Fifth year that more millennials were moving out to the burbs and small towns and the like, then they were moving the cities. And I know there's economic reasons for that as well, but the fact of the matter is there's now as many shake shacks out in the suburbs as there are downtown. And COVID really started to unwind. 40-year tradition of where we saw people moving into the city, younger people, but then we started seeing that loss, if you will, of businesses and people moving out to strip malls and the like outside. So yes, I'm a donut fan. We are now re-birthing an idea that was in urban planning research since the 1970s and 80s, but we are now looking at many cities during the pandemic as an empty donut phenomena where people are moving out to smaller towns, old mill towns, suburban towns, if they can afford those, leaving this central business district almost as a hollow core. What's this got to do with work? Where are your employees coming from? How much are they gonna commute? Remember the average American commute today according to the USDA OT is 29 minutes. That's the average. If you live in Boston, 29 minutes is a gift. That's not gonna be a reality. I would submit to you that there's a chance that we're gonna see a rebirth of the industrial park. Many of you are too young to remember that, but the suburban industrial park, not just with the smaller warehousing to fit the larger warehousing, but also the office space would not. Maybe not to be 24-7 because I said they're not coming back maybe full time, but maybe those collaborative culture latent hubs don't necessarily have to be on the 26th floor at 101 Federal Street. And as we are nesting, it's also psychological. It's not a matter of place. When we are under threat, we turn inward. We trust the small, the personal, and the local. So if you look at data in terms of who we trust in government, we trust those that we can generally speaking get our arms around their shirt collars and go, what are you doing? We trust the larger institutions less. In fact, the bigger your brand, except for Amazon, we can get back to that generally speaking, less trust in that. But did you notice that only two weeks ago, Apple announcing something? Apple News. You can now have local Apple News. Is that just simply because you wanna know the weather in Boston or San Antonio or wherever it is? No, people are turning inward. There's an issue there around how we think about globalization and what we think is important. Is it proximate? Is it novel? Does it affect me today? Is what people do when they're under a state of crisis? So frankly, I would suggest to you that nesting behavior is a result of crisis fatigue. I'm enough already. I showed you the New York data from 1999 to times data since 1995. Hyperlocalism, this I can control. Farmers markets are not just about organic food. This is real. I can touch it. It's somebody I can talk to. It's not necessarily digital. Digital engagement is not engagement. It's efficiency. We turn inward. There's a demand for home space, both inside, square footage, and outside in terms of space. And is the future where we're going to be going to be going back out? Perhaps. Last thing, let's talk about the future. This is where I get myself in trouble and make a guess. But in many cases, I won't be here to worry about it. If we talk about anxiety across the generations, everyone was feeling anxiety. But as I said to you, the oldest people, those over 75 and the baby boomers between roughly 50 something and 74, generally they were doing okay. Their adult children, however, were worried about their kids if they had them and their parents and the like. So let's talk about it. What is going to happen to Gen Z? We know from some research in cohort theory that argues that if I know what you experienced between roughly 17 and 22 years old, you know, your fashion, the price of gas, for instance, supply chain issues and the like, this is going to show you say in print on you, how you look at the world, who you trust, what you value, what's going to happen. Now look, I don't like the price of gas, but I'm in my late 50s. I remember gas being this price before, so it's like whatever. I know that a number of people are getting really excited about inflation. I don't like it, but I remember paying 16.7% for a car loan. I've seen it. This generation is seeing it for the first time. In fact, there's been a long set of decades where things were semi-normal. So what's going to happen to this generation that's in their late teens, early 20s, as they're entering the workforce, getting out of college and the like? They're seeing everything can be changed. There is no story. There is no Newtonian law physics that say it has to be this way. Proms were canceled. Graduations were held online. I actually went to church using Facebook on a flat screen TV above my fireplace. 2000 years of tradition, and suddenly I'm standing in front of a church altar in my living room. Coronavirus put off fireplaces. The prevalence of depression and anxiety went right through the roof during COVID. People aren't putting those pills away as the pandemic ebbs. We're finding already in 2019, before COVID, 51% of Americans, 18 to 34, said they had no significant other. I'm not talking about marriage. I'm not talking about studies or partners. Just no significant other. Up from 33% much earlier. And this is where we get to the birth rate. Now look, didn't study biology. I think I took one bio class in college. I probably got a BB minus on that one. But if you don't have a significant other, and by the way, I think that's probably gonna hurt the fertility and birth rate. We now have the lowest birth rate in his recorded history in the United States. He had, and by the way, throughout the industrialized world and many developing countries. This has happened before, depression, famine, and wartime. But what happens right after that? Those of you that are close to my age are part of the problem or part of what happens. You have a baby boom. Guess what? No baby boom. The answer is no. 2047 is estimated by the UN, not known for their optimism, but the UN by 2047 says there will be more people on the planet over 60 than there will be children under the age of 18. That's already the case now with children under the age of five. That's your workforce. That's your market. That's all changing. So here's some questions that just came out last year. I'm sorry, 2019 from Deloitte. Do businesses behave ethically according to this generation? 48% said yes versus 65% in 2017. Notice the trend line. Are business leaders committed to helping to improve society? I think you can read the bullets yourself. What you're seeing is a steady decline. To me, somewhat counterintuitively, the younger the generation, the less trust in major institutions. So how do they think about their employers? What's the social contract to be able to get the next generation of work? So lastly, I would have a few questions for you to think about. Are we making Gen Z into Gen S? That is generation stressed? Will we see a further erosion of social capital both on a social level with our governmental and public institutions as well, a new tenuous relationship more than we've ever seen before with our employers amongst our younger workers? So before you start asking, even though it's early in the morning, is the bar open as I leave you on that note? Let me end on this story. Do you know the greatest generation that many have written about World War II, depressions, all that good stuff, starts at about 1901 to 1927? That's generally the parameters of what the greatest generation is. Let me take you a real quick tour. If you were born in the early 1900s, let's say you're 1901, 1902, be generous with the math. Congratulations, you've just been born into the greatest generation. World War I, get over to Europe. Oh, you're coming home? Fantastic, Spanish flu is still going. Oh, just when you thought things were going well in the net roaring 20s, great depression. Oh, and those children you have, fantastic. You're sending them off to World War II. They ended up being the greatest generation. I'm going to submit to you because I think optimism takes far more courage than pessimism. That the Gen Zers that we are minting today will be the greatest generation because their trial will be through crucible. On that note, Jim, thanks so much for having me. Thanks all of you. You had me a little, Joe, you had me a little worried there because I was thinking there's gotta be some uplifting part of this story here. And indeed you did deliver the mail at the end. So thank you very much, Joe. I appreciate that. What I'd like to do now is let's open it up to some questions. Yeah, Ken, could you mind taking the mic? Let me first take some questions from the audience here. And I'm going to look at the Q&A. I'd rather slide them. I got one text that said I looked better with the mask on. No, I'm sorry. Hey, Joe. Go right ahead. Thanks for the good talk. Oh, yeah, okay. Go ahead, Luke. I was just wondering, you know, it seemed like a couple of years ago. Before you ask a question, remember you work for me? Just, you know, I'm sorry. I remember every day. A few years ago, it seemed like automation, coming from, for instance, the trucking industry was a real threat for jobs. And now it seems like the robots can't come fast enough. Is there something employers can do to sort of bridge the gap to help people, to make the cost benefit equation for possible employees molding, continuing working versus retirement? Is there something they can do to make continuing to work more attractive? Yeah, you know, I think that one of the things that industry can do, not just around trucking in general, but I would really give this to David Correll, our colleague who's been studying this and doing really cool stuff out in the field. So talk to him. But I would say that trucking industry and any other industry should seize the issue around, first off, diversity as a way of being able to identify new streams of workers. Secondly, I think that, you know, if you think about productivity gains in the United States, or frankly in the industrialized world, it started, shall we say, with new sources of power and transportation. Then we had a little bit of scientific management to kind of make you all cogs in the wheel. Then we had automation in a larger sense. You know what the next one I think is gonna be? It's not gonna be, you know, AI's out there. Fine, that's great. I think it's gonna be women. I think that you're gonna see far more women go into the workforce and stay in the workforce. And by the way, older women in particular. So I would say the trucking industry, pushing for diversity, looking for new streams of work, but also contributing as institutions to a new narrative. And this is gonna be hard for all of us in this room because I'm gonna take a guess that either all of us have a college education or paying for a college education are here because you get paid because somebody else paid for a college education. We need to write a new story that all work is good work and well paid rewarding work does not necessarily mean a student loan and a bachelor's degree after your name. And I think that will solve many issues around the future of trucking or anything else. Great. Thank you, Luke. You got another question over there, Ken? Joe, just a quick question on the robotics side of it because it's really interesting that a few years ago, I remember going to an MIT event probably about four years ago, three or four years ago now and the message was the robots are coming and everybody was absolutely terrified. That message doesn't seem to be as strong these days although obviously robotics is still absolutely crucial. But do you think Gen Z will be less intimidated by automation simply because A, because they're used to change and B, because there may be a lot more comfortable with the technology? Look, the robots are coming after us but I think it's gonna be far more that work will have changed if we keep the same model of how we think work is going to be. Yes, many of those professions that were written by the fellows in the UK are going to get axed as we know them today. I think that Gen Z and some of the younger millennials and by the way, this does not mean those of you touching 40. I'm talking about younger millennials are probably far more likely to adapt to a collaborative relationship with AI. I worry when I don't hear about things because when I don't hear about them that means something else is going on. I would suggest because of what we're experiencing during the pandemic, because of the workforce shortage little things like the Walmart, we're fueling more automated trucks is forcing employers, CFOs to get together with their heads of strategy going, we need to accelerate what we thought we were doing on automation. We can't get caught again being short on employees. We even know senior housing industry who has terrible margins, very little capital play with is looking more at automation now than they've ever done before because frankly they don't have people. So I think it's actually going to accelerate AI into our lives. So Joe, I have a couple of questions from the virtual audience. Let me start with one. Someone said, well first they said great presentation. So there you go. That was my wife, I gave her 20 bucks. Oh yeah, I'm always doing that. Notice lately the idea of patriotism of work coming up more and more. Is that a messaging trend that could continue or accelerate to get people into the workforce? How does the Puritan Work Ethic play out today? Calvinist work ethic is essentially time is muddy and all that good Puritan work ethic. Interesting, I don't want to say that it is entirely broken. I would say that it's being questions by people saying that they want quality of life, not just quantity of work. I think that ethos that is being put out there by the Elon Musk's or the old mill town community, people are saying no, there's more to life than just where I work. Work is no longer the center of our life, it's been moved off center. Interesting, so I don't know, we're going to call the future one. What do you think we might call that one? Oh, we might just call it work. There's that, this, and the other. Yeah, okay. And if the pandemic didn't gem up patriotism, not much else will. Okay, you got a, oh, Steve, all right, great. Is finding the right balance between building resiliency in our employees, in our case, our soldiers, and then being sensitive to things such as anxiety and mental health and their comfort at work and the army is struggling to find that balance. I've actually had a young soldier say, don't tell me to tough it out. And I think that, I don't know where I'm going, I think I'm interested in your opinion as to how we find what that right balance is, because we haven't found it yet, and it's something that we've identified as an absolute priority. In fairness, not just the military, but I'd say almost every large organization out there, and Steve even touches on the question Jim throughout there, this is entirely new muscle memory. This is all entirely new process. Look, I can remember my first job as a military contractor, one, a full bird colonel, hearing from one of my colleagues, I'm not happy doing X, and the answer was, I'm not here to make you happy. Well, you get this one. Okay, that was only 30 years ago. We don't turn this overnight. There's still that strong ethic of, no, it's work, it's a way of making a living, not a way of making you happy. You wanna be happy, go find someplace else. What the pandemic has done though, is it said, no, if you're gonna make this much part of my life about work, not just eight hours, eight hours would be fine, but what's happened even before the pandemic, we've allowed work to enter our lives 24-7 by email, by text, and everything else. So now suddenly employers are gonna be demanded, if you will, if you want that part of my, much of my life, yeah, you're gonna have to worry about my mental health, my well-being, and whether I smiled that day. And that's gonna, yeah, that's a new muscle memory. Another question from the audience, virtual audience, and then we'll go to you, Dave. To protect against not, this is from Mr. A. Anonymous. To protect against loss of knowledge when older employees exit a business, you mentioned this in your talk. What steps have you seen companies take to institutionalize and retain their expertise for future generations? So I'll mention two companies, IBM and Tata, both have major multi-billion dollar enterprises on essentially knowledge transfer and knowledge acquisition. For anyone who's been in the workforce longer than maybe a month, you know that the things in your head about what you do are not, at least for now, easily translatable into some database that you can simply hand off to a new worker. But that's one thing that's being done. Another thing that's being done, and Luke, you probably may remember the name better than I, but I think it's your encore where IBM, Procter & Gamble, Eli Lilly and Boeing have put together pools of retirees into a pool to be able to access them for certain expertise and the like. Certain universities now are no longer just calling you emeritus. They're literally giving you an office and a role on campus to be able to be part of that. Again, it's like the question we had about the military. This is all new muscle memory. It used to be, you're 60, you're 65, you're good, you're gone. But now we start to find we need those folks. Okay, let's go to Dave Correll first. David. Thank you. Hey, thank you very, very much for the presentation and for remembering our... You're doing cool stuff, by the way. Thank you, and thank you for mentioning it. I guess, so thinking about what I take from the argument that as a country we're getting older and maybe we're getting more isolated and higher anxiety people, thinking about that at the same time, a lot of us are trying to process what Facebook just threw out to the world of the metaverse and how now we can live our whole lives in these virtual online worlds. Could you comment on, do you think the idea of virtual online life helps the problems that you're talking about, or could exacerbate them? I'm gonna caveat the next thing out of my mouth by saying the truth. I don't know. I'll give you two competing dominant arguments out there. Years ago, a study, and Lisa, you would know this. I think you may remember this. A study from Berkeley came out saying how Facebook was depressing the hell out of all the younger people and isolating them. The younger people that were still on Facebook. Now that Facebook is the social media nursing home that it is of people over 50 going on more than kids, they're finding that it's not exactly doing great shakes for older people as well. So that virtual thing is a problem. I'm gonna, now the other theory that I'm gonna give you, and this goes with those who say, you need to be on site because we have culture here. When you can't have culture online, I don't know whether this example I'm about to give you goes against that, but it does, I think, give you a pause. How many of you are like video gamers? I don't mean like just you play occasionally. I mean serious video gamer. Take a look at that group. There's a whole culture there. There's language, there's processes, there's trend lines and ritual, if you will. Maybe we're just not working or looking hard enough. So I do think there's a lot of social isolation that our kids and all of us are feeling definitely. I'm not entirely sure it is entirely about IT as much as it is how we're relating to society in general. But online there might be something we can do there better. Thank you. So Joe, we have a question from the virtual audience from Kevin. How do you see spirituality affecting Gen Z and their feelings about work, mission and purpose? Spirituality. You know, it's funny, we're finding a dramatic drop in faith-based or religiosity. That's Geek speak, do you go to church, temple, mosque, whatever it might be? We're seeing a dramatic drop. In fact, the Methodist church loses essentially one church per month in terms of numbers and whatnot. As opposed to spirituality, most people identify themselves as spiritual. But I would say that the storyline of talking about that more publicly is not sanctioned. So it may be an impact out there, but in most organizations and in most public domains, there's a few officer training up there. What are the three things officers don't talk about? You're training? Politics. Religion. Sex. My first boss was a full bird. You see that change in Joe? No. I think that there's still, I mean, one of the things to understand the future work and hopefully I did that for you, it is kind of silly to talk only about the future work, future home, future transportation. It's in context. It's integrated. And I think that the current debate, current social debate, kind of precludes your willingness to show that inner self for fear that you're going to be attacked. Interesting. So I'm sorry, another follow up there? A next question. OK. Thank you. I would like to ask you a question along the lines of extrapolating your thoughts to adjacent domain. It seems like we're talking a lot about the changing dynamics of power asymmetry. There is this one guy and there is a company. They used to demand a lot and give very little. And now it's changing. How about the relationships between the companies? Let's say there is a huge company and there are a lot of small suppliers. And it used to be that they can pressure a lot out of their suppliers, squeeze anything they want, and not care a lot about their small suppliers. Do you see this trend changing there, where small suppliers and companies are getting more power over their big brothers? I'd probably look more to Chris for a reasonable answer on that. But I'll talk to you in terms of how I see that as relationships in terms of trust. I think that the whole idea of getting a few suppliers to squeeze both cost efficiency and quality out of them sounded like a fantastic master's thesis and has been applied with great success until it didn't. I think that we're now going to be seeing far more. We're going to need diversity. I think you're going to see a lot more of what we used to see in the military. I haven't touched that world for years. But you wanted multiple suppliers as a matter of national security. So you had redundancy in the system. Having only two or three that you can squeeze based upon cost and efficiency, I think we're finding that that's a very high risk. So I think you may start to see changes in terms of how we do that. But that's more Chris's domain than mine. So we have another question from Javier, who's online. Javier cuts right to the chase. How do you survive as a mid cap in dealing with labor shortage? Is it MCAP? Mid cap, yeah. Thank you for your question, Javier. Yeah, I was going to say. That's called the stump theory. He also added another piece to that. He later on wrote, adapt or die. We've got to meet this guy. Now, they're all good questions. You know, I think in part it adds a new dynamic to the workplace. Remember I showed you the straight line, the zigzag line, and the zigzag broken line? Employers may have to get used to what employees are already starting, which is I'm only going to be here for 18 months. And if you can't provide me with exactly what I need, I'm out of here, which means rethinking how they think about retention, how they think about recruiting, and planning in systems, if you will, that plan for those disruptions, which means, unfortunately, for somebody in MCAP and small business, price of business just went up because of the hassle cost of employee management just went higher. You think there's a role for technology that will help deal with this, at least in some way in shape in the future. Now, if you're talking about mid caps, they may not have the capacity, the financial capacity, to invest in technology. But overall, do you see technology potentially playing a role to deal with any of those issues? Reducing the stress, dealing with this work, life, circle, balance, what have you? You know, it's funny. I mean, I checked the address this morning. This is MIT emphasis on the T. So of course, there's going to be technologies going to help. But the crisis I see in the workplace and the crisis that of how we are looking at the world is not about efficiencies and clicks and relationship as defined by digital tech. It's far more about emotional engagement. And so until we can come up with an app for, I give a damn, being heard by the employee, I'm not entirely confident that technology alone. Making it easier to do your expense report or making it easier to get a 1-800 EAP line because you're feeling stressed, I'm not sure that's going to be the band aid that fixes it. Anybody from the audience have a thought about that? Jim? Yeah, sure. Hi, Joe. Hi. What about HR? I'm kind of thinking a lot about HR departments. And that is an institution. It's a department that's maybe been responsible for protecting institutions. But as we think about all of these different dynamics, what's the role there, potentially? HR has got about the clock is ticking, and I'd say half their time is over already. HR has got a clock and window right now to get budget, to get a channel directly to the CEO. We've gone through about the last 20 or 30 years where we went from HR chief people officer, talent officer. There's been this ongoing redefinition of what we call currently HR. But how many of you are here, and don't raise your hands, how many of you are here in industry and know where HR reports into? Quite often, it may report into the CEO, but their budget is so bad. And you know they've got very little influence on the strategy. But right now, people are the major problem. So if HR, Taylor, can jump out right now and say, I've been telling you that we need to do more for people's well-being. I've been telling you that people are the, shall we say, the real capital of this organization. That they not only get more budget, but they may not go through a band saw that's called the Chief Financial Officers Office when they go for budget. Because right now, HR's got no budget, a little bit of influence because it's nice. But really in major corporations, you will find that they're either two steps down from the C-suite or if they are in the C-suite, they're always at the end of the table and muted. Right now within the next six months, if the HR professionals really start to say we have the answer and we need a bigger voice at the table and a bigger budget, I think you'll see a major difference. All right, with that, we're gonna have to close this session. Joe, thank you very much. Thank you, everybody.