 Thank you so much for coming to the New America Foundation after work. I assume for many of you it's after work. We're just thrilled. We're going to have a great conversation. I'm Liza Mundy. I'm the program director of the Bread, Winning, and Care Giving program here at New America. I'd like to introduce Brigid Schulte, who is author of Overwhelmed, which is just a wonderful book. And I'll talk about how wonderful it is and why. And I would also like to interview two people who are experts in this terrain and who are also in the book and still talking to Brigid because she did a great job of representing them in their work, I think, unless they have anything planned to say. So we have Melvin White, who is the lead counsel for litigation and risk management at ClearSpire, which is a law firm here in DC. And we have Dr. Kathleen Hicks, who is the senior vice president and Henry A. Kissinger, chair and director for the International Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. She is also the former principal deputy undersecretary of defense for policy at the US Department of Defense. So we will have a look forward to a great conversation. And then we will open it up for questions. So it will be fun. And I just wanted to, this is a little bit self-indulgent, but Brigid and I, in fact, to go way back. We go back further, I think, than either of us would like to admit. We both started our careers in journalism at the state's news service, which was an overwhelming job, if there ever was one. One might call it a journalistic sweatshop. And it was an overwhelming place to work. And we got paid little and sometimes nothing on the weeks when the paychecks bounce. So that was, but it was a great bonding experience. And I treasure my friendships, particularly with Brigid. And we've been colleagues at the Washington Post. And Brigid is still at the Washington Post. And I was well here at New America. So I just wanted to start with one brief anecdote. I think one of the things for Brigid, when you write a book like this, is you're inundated by people who rush up to you and say, oh, this is my life. This is just my life. Let me tell you this anecdote from my life. So when I started at the Washington Post about Lothys many years ago, I was hired at the magazine as an editor by someone who said, well, we don't think that you're ready for this job, but we need a woman on the masthead. And so those were the auspicious beginnings. And a couple of years into editing, I wanted to switch to writing. And I started writing a column at about the same time that I had my first child and was getting used to what it was like to be a working parent. And as Brigid can attest, the newsrooms, like many workplaces, were never set up for people with families. It was a culture where you got to work late. You worked late. Phone calls were returned at about five. And then you wrote your piece and you sent it to your editor. And even at the magazine where I was hired and there was no reason for this, we were on that same daily schedule as well. So even though in theoretically it was a weekly magazine, we could have gone home at five, we could have gone before 30, whatever. But we didn't. So I remember not putting my child in childcare because I didn't think I could get to the daycare center by six when it would close. And looking back at me, that was just crazy. And I didn't feel like I could push back against it either. So I was writing a column. And one of the first columns that I wrote was about being a working parent because it was such a new experience. And I wrote about the experience of getting into the workplace and reaching into my work bag and all these bizarre things that were now in my work bag, like the car keys that I had had to replace because my old car keys, I was visiting my mom and putting my daughter in her car seat and I put my car keys on the top of my mom's car and then I got in and they flew off and get them replaced. And then there were like three tea cups at the bottom of my bag. There's actual ceramic tea cups because I would grab my tea to drive to the Metro and then come back and then I would go inside and put it in my bag and then see my daughter and be so excited to see her that I would forget to. So they were accumulating actually and I got to work and they were all these ceramic lugs. And so I wrote this column, just sort of a lighthearted column about the chaos of being a working parent and people thought it was funny and colleagues would talk about the tea cup column but there was a male columnist for a paper who was a media critic and he made this really snarky comment about Liza Mundy writing about the lint in her work bag. Like it was just, like it was a stupid topic and a trivial thing to be writing about. And I remember feeling kind of embarrassed and shamed that I was writing what was apparently about a very trivial, you know, work life chaos was seen at least by some as not really being worthy of discussion in a newspaper. And I think for a long time for writers and particularly for women writers to be writing about what it's like to be a parent or a working parent, there was always this fear that you would be stigmatized, that you would be somehow shamed for what you were writing or that it would seem lesser. And so what is so nice about the New America Foundation is really since it's founding there's been a work family program. I mean, right there with the National Security Program with education, with healthcare, there's been a work family program. I think there's been a recognition that these issues matter, that they are important. And now with Anne-Marie Slaughter coming here as the CEO and president, we've restarted and relaunched and revamped the program. We're calling it bread, winning and caregiving to reflect the fact that it's not just a female issue. It's men and women. Men and women are bread, winning and caregiving. And in the past couple of years to see real heavy weights like Anne-Marie Slaughter and Sheryl Sandberg enter this debate about and I think underscore the importance of the fact that trying to have a meaningful and productive work life and to do well and to contribute to the economy and trying to care for your children and your families and your elderly parents in a way that is fair to them and fair to you and fair to us all as human beings. That it actually is a really important issue. And one of the many wonderful things about Bridget's book, I mean Bridget's book, which I've read cover to cover is such a masterpiece of reporting. To see Bridget take, I guess I was thinking after I heard you talk yesterday about that column and I was trying to articulate this time crunch that has now become so exacerbated by the fact that we do have technology now, we're on all the time, the economy has changed, we're being asked, like those days when we were getting started in journalism, we little did we know that they were the good old days, right? They were the days when you actually had more time to report and you couldn't necessarily have to answer your smartphone at three o'clock in the morning. So there's been these changes, but then you've uncovered this whole body of social science that there are all these time use researchers all over the world that are validating this topic and studying it and recording the impact on our brains, on our families, on our lives of trying to manage these different realms. So to see this great work in these voices now coming at this topic in a way that I feel like I've really never seen happen before is just so exciting and impressive. I mean, to see you marshal this body of research, go out and report in workplaces and people's lives and weave your first person experience is just a wonderful, wonderful achievement and I feel like I'm just proud to know you, so thank you. So I'm sorry, again, that was a lengthy preamble, but very heartfelt. And so I just wanted to start with a question for Bridget. Now I'm just really gonna ask questions. One of the great scenes in your book is when you meet with Pat Buchanan, who practically single-handedly foreclosed the chance of having great, widespread government childcare in the early 1970s, when there was actually a moment when we could have had government sponsored childcare when the president was on board with it and the nation seemed to be on board with it and Pat Buchanan was not and talked the president out of it. So you go and you visit them at home and you ask them why, why did you do that? And he starts talking about his childhood when he could come home from work and come home from school and his mom was a stay-at-home mom and that was great and he could just kind of play as a child and he could just, he doesn't want children in these Soviet childcare and that was a big part of it and big part of it was keeping women at home, but it was also his view that children should just have this unstructured time and they should be in childcare. And I was thinking about reading your chapter on play and reading the case that you make for leisure. You say in a way something along the same lines that we do need that unstructured time in our lives and we do need, children need time to play because children can play as adults, as children can play as adults. So like what's the difference between his argument and your argument, you know? No, that's a great question. And I just want to say first of all, thank you to New America for hosting this event and thank you to Liza, I'm a huge fan and we go- Long-winded inverse. No, it was awesome and you were my editor at City Paper, City Paper after state's new service. So we've gone back long, long ways and your book is amazing. So it is a great question and I have a chapter in there. I call it A Tale of Two Paths and it looks at, I want to say U.S. Family Policy except we don't have any. So sort of it's a look at why, why we don't have U.S. Family Policy, why when you look at these international comparisons, the United States is at the bottom of the barrel on paid leave, on vacation days, on sick days. You know, why do we, you know, the richest and you know, country in the world, why are we here? When we have so many working families, we have a majority of mothers who work full time. Lots of majority of mothers who work in the marketplace. So it's not like, and this is not anything new. It's been like this for a while. So why do we not have these family supports? Why do we not have childcare? In France you have childcare workers who are trained and highly educated and they belong to the same union, the same teachers union as the university professors in the Sorbonne. And here in the United States, our childcare workers are not trained necessarily. It depends on the states. There are really no good regulations or standards. We have none on the federal level except for, you know, people who get vouchers and they're just beginning to revamp those for the first time in decades. You know, why is it that our childcare is so hard to find and so expensive and our childcare workers are paid the same as parking lot attendants and bell hops? And I wanted to understand why, how is it that we got here? And so for that chapter, I profiled Pat Buchanan and also Pat Schroeder. And what struck me about both of them is they were really coming at, they were coming at this issue from two opposite ends of the political spectrum, from the right and from the left. But at their heart, what they both wanted was the same thing. And it's that same thing that you just asked about, Liza. And it was this sense of sacred time for family, the sense of a time out of time for yourself, for your family, for your life, for children to have unstructured time to not be over-scheduled and shadowed every which way, which now we do because people aren't at home. And what I thought was so interesting is that in Pat Buchanan and from the right, he wanted to preserve that sacred time by kind of preserving in Amber this breadwinner homemaker model of having the dad go out to work and the mom stay home. So that somebody could be there, he said at three o'clock in the afternoon for cake and pie. And on the other end of the spectrum, Pat Schroeder had a very different view. She said, I want both mothers and fathers to feel that they can work. I want families to make their own choices based on whatever it is that they can afford, whatever it is they value. And if you both want to be in the workplace or you feel that that is economically what you have to do, how can we structure the workplace in a way that would allow parents, some of the time, part of the time, all of the time, to also have some kind of presence, to be there at three o'clock for cake and pie. They both wanted the same thing. And I think that the fact that our workplaces, I think that was one of the things that struck me the most in a lot of the reporting that I did. I started off on a journey looking for leisure and very quickly saw how you cannot look at leisure time without looking at work. And you can't look at work without looking at our relationships at home, how they're all very interconnected. And that so much of this feeling of overwhelm, so much of this feeling of being stuck really is centered at the workplace. And that our workplace laws and policies haven't changed. We're still working under the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, which set the 40 hour work week, which by the way was discovered by Henry Ford when he wanted to figure out how far you could push a manual laborer without making them so sick. They would make stupid mistakes. It would cost him a lot of money. So we have some very outdated policies and structures. We also have some very outdated attitudes. I think there's another author, Katrina Alcorn, who I think said it best. She said, you know, we expect people to work as if they didn't have families or lives. And we expect people to have families or lives outside of work as if they didn't have jobs. So we have these two extreme pressures coming at us at the same time. And so I think what was so exciting was seeing that there are workplaces that are changing, that are redesigning what it means to work, redefining it, sort of taking that, I think Phyllis Mo and the sociologist had such a beautiful description of it. She called it time cages, you know, the sense that you have to spend a whole lot of time and your nose to the grindstone, first in, last out, never take breaks, eat your lunch at your desk. And the more they are pushing, pushing, pushing, pushing, then you're the best worker. And the crazy thing is there's a lot of social surveys that show we think that that's the best worker. Everybody's convinced that that is the best worker, hard work. And there is also lots of emerging social science that shows that is not the best worker. You know, you get your best ideas in your breaks. Your brain is wired to have inspiration when you take your nose off the grindstone. When you are refreshed, you come into work and you have better ideas. You're more efficient. You do your work better. The other thing that struck me is when I would travel overseas and when I was reporting this book and you'd go to places like, you know, Denmark, I spent some time there for a chapter. And their view is completely different. That they feel if you work overtime and you work these long hours, you're just simply inefficient. There's something wrong with you. Right, so it's stigmatized, working long is stigmatized. It's stigmatized, yeah. So let's ask Melvin why one of the things that Bridget does so wonderfully in her book is visit workplaces where changes are actually taking place. And I think for me, you know, 18 years into the working parenthood journey to see that workplaces are changing is really a wonderful thing to see. So could you talk about Clear Spire and how that workplace is set up and also talk about why in your view this is not simply a woman's issue? Well, I'll start with the first, the second question. We have approximately 30 lawyers and more than, at least half, perhaps more than half are men and men with families and some single men. I am a single man. The concept of Clear Spire was to develop a law firm whereby people were not spending 18, 24 hours a day being lawyers. I love being a lawyer. I've always wanted to be a lawyer. I started my career. My entire legal career has been here in Washington and for all of that, most of that time except for my time at Clear Spire and a two-year stint as a solo, I was in what is called big law, which is the, we all know what that is in Washington, the big law firms downtown that have hundreds of lawyers who spend the vast majority of their day working on legal matters. And I thought it was the greatest thing in the world. I enjoyed it as a young man spending that time and actually enjoyed doing the work of being a lawyer and producing the papers and going to court and all of those things. But at the end of the day, if it were to end, you find yourself oftentimes, frankly, burned out. And you begin to wonder whether it's really necessary to work in that manner. Sometimes it is. Sometimes a client comes to you with an important issue that requires you to stop what you're doing and to focus completely on that issue for however much time it takes to get the result. And because we are a service industry, that is what we do. But after a while, you begin to wonder whether it's necessary to do that even when it's not a client essential. And in the legal profession, what has happened over the past 40, 50 years is that the business of law has arisen and it in some ways overshadows the profession of being a lawyer. And the business of law is making money. And this is America. There's absolutely nothing wrong with making money. But when the focus is solely on that and then we get into the notion of people working 25, 2,500 hours a year, which comes to 60, 70 hour work weeks and weekends. And you're not there. You're there to serve the client, but you're also there to produce numbers. And I think that is where perhaps my beloved profession has gotten off track in terms of tending to people's lives and making sure that people are able to have a full life. Numbers in terms of income, you may have. Well, numbers in terms of income and also numbers in terms of, we judge ourselves by the amount of hours that we work, more or less, not necessarily, obviously you want to do a great job for a client, but the fact, the reality is that you are evaluated in part based on the number of hours that you put on the books, which translates into dollars. And so it's created incentives that are, in my view, not conducive with people being able to live full and whole lives. And at some point along the way, I think the business of law has trumped the profession of being a lawyer. I'm not quite sure when it happened, but I truly believe that has been the case. So after approximately 22 years of doing that, I was frankly burned out. I was looking for a different way to live. I am single, I don't have a family, but I do have an extended family. Exactly, you may not have children, but you have a family. I have an extended family. You have a life. I have a life. Friends, my father passed away seven years ago after a long illness and the ability to just tend to him during that time was stress creating because I was still in that setting at the time. And I needed, he lived in Arkansas, so I needed to be physically in Arkansas, a large part of the time to help. And so coming out of that and coming out of my tenure as president of the bar, I had the honor of serving as president of the District of Columbia bar, which is one of the nation's foremost bar associations. And so coming out of that community service and looking at my family situation and looking at my own life, which was clearly stressed and frankly burned out, I was looking for a new way to continue to do what I love to do, to practice law, but to perhaps do it in a different setting. And so the ClearSpire opportunity arose and ClearSpire is a law firm, a full service law firm. It's a small law firm, so it's not of the ilk of the firms that are hundreds of thousands of lawyers and those firms are great. Don't get me wrong, I had a great experience in those firms. We're smaller, but we are doing much of the same types of work. We're simply not doing it quite as intensely. We have a two company setup so that the lawyers are able to focus on practicing law and the service company handles many of the aspects of law, not law practice, but of the business of law that the lawyers typically had handled in the law firm. So that in and of itself takes a great burden off the lawyers. We're able to focus on handling the legal work, which is what we love to do. Secondly, we don't, we have an office downtown at 18th and Pennsylvania, but our attorneys work most days from their home offices. And the reality is that even in my larger law firm, I found that what I was doing as email arose and so forth, all I would do is I'd drive into my office or Metro Inn, I'd grab some coffee and I'd go into my office and I'd close the door and I'd send emails all day and talk on the phone, even to the person down the hall. So the physical location isn't quite so important as it used to be. And that's one of the great advantages of technology. So when I'm in my home office here, it's much the same as it was when I was in the law firm, except that I'm in my home doing it. And so it's created an opportunity for our lawyers to not structure their days around rushing downtown, but rather it's home-centric. You can start your day at home and if there's a need to be downtown, you come downtown, if there's a need to go to court, you go to court, but you don't show up, we don't keep time. Is my mic cooperating? We don't show up necessarily just to be seen and we don't do all-nighters just so that the people that work on my team, for example, don't need to impress me with the fact that they've done a 24-hour day. We are very quality conscious and we demand the same results that were demanded of the practice at the large law firm. One example of that was a matter I had on Chicago back in the spring, which was an injunction case. And I don't know how many of you are lawyers, hopefully not many, but. And injunction is when a client comes to you with an issue that's so important that you need to rush to court as soon as possible to ask the judge to stop something from happening. So the client, based in Baltimore, came to us and needed us to file an injunction in Chicago. And we needed to do it within three days. And we did it. I sat in my home office the same way I sat in my office downtown and I worked. I did work pretty much around the clock on that with a colleague out in Chicago in my firm and we got the work done. But when the work was done, we didn't feel the need to keep working, so to speak. So what ClearSpire has done successfully is to allow lawyers to structure their lives in a day's in a way that allows us the opportunity to focus on being a whole person. Instead of rushing, the morning rush to the office, I rush to do a yoga class the morning. And then that's my going out. And then I come in and commence my work day at home. And instead of being completely burned out in the evenings or having to stay late just because others are staying late, I'm able to be more engaged in the community. I actually know my neighbors now. My friends see differences and changes in me. I'm more available to my family. And so that's all good and wonderful and it's a great thing. But change is slow, particularly in the legal profession, which lawyers are not known for being necessarily forward thinking when it comes to how we work. We're traditionalist precedent is ruling in the law. So we're glad that we've been able to so far pull together a setting that is helpful to our attorneys. And we hope that we will be able to continue to grow and to give others the opportunity to live more fully. Well, that's great. You seem to clap. And I have a number of questions that I'll put to you later, including why aren't all of our firms like that? Okay. We'll hold that for a second and ask a calf, if I may call you calf, to talk about the Pentagon is not the place where one would expect innovative work family policies to be instituted. But as Bridget shows in her book, in fact, it has been. And I wonder if you could talk about your experience there and the changes there that began to evolve and why they began to evolve. Sure, let me take a minute first to describe the work environment and the people in that environment because I think it's really helpful. When you look at a place like the Defense Department, obviously is massive, the organization that Bridget highlights that I was a part of is the undersecretariat for policy, and it's about 1,000 people. And it's the brains of the operation. Well, I'm not going to say that. I know. Bridget does all of that. I think other parts, depending on believe they may have brains, but I will simply say that it is the part that engages, if you will, the foreign policy establishment. So it engages the National Security Council, the State Department, foreign counterparts, and also develops long-term thinking for the Defense Department itself. So most of the people who populate it, who are civilian, come from an international relations or foreign and defense policy background. And it's this mix of military officers and career civilians and political appointees. And the leadership is political by nature of it being part of government. The leadership is always political. So we have many fewer than half that are women, but a number of women, and growing number. And that number has been growing since the 80s, quite frankly. And so in the period of time, I've actually worked there for a total of 17 years at different points in time. But in the last incarnation that I was there as a political appointee, which was from February of 09 when we really started trying to make these changes under the leadership of Michelle Flournoy. And then I left last July. There were a number of things that we tried to do to make life more sane. So let me add one more comment before I get to that period of time. As I alluded, I was in the organization for a long time, and I was there as a career civil servant originally. And much is described in terms of loving the law. People who work there are not, in fact, motivated by money in any way, shape or form. Sadly, there's not much money in the business. But they're very passionate about what they do. And they have that same love of the work and the ability to make a difference, incredibly motivated workforce that you're talking about, and thus also given to many of the traps of the bottoms and seat culture, the constant availability, the desire to please at higher echelons. And certainly there's the military culture that is a very can-do culture that we live in. But you also have this peculiarity of the political appointees and the career staff and the military, and how those interact. And what's important in terms of balance issues for that is that political appointees come in for a period of time, and they leave. And their tendency is to surge and then leave. And then they go back to places like I work now in a think tank where they can have a much more leisurely existence. And so the time they spend in government as leaders, first, they're not typically as invested in the institutional culture and health of the organization. And second, they're there to accomplish specific objectives, and they will work really hard and then leave. And underneath that, by and large, are these people who've worked there a long time, and they've seen this over and over. So when I was a career staff, I remember one boss whose career said to me one night, night of course, whatever the time was, I don't know. But we were working late on something who knows what it was. And she said to me, these political appointees, they come in and then they go, and they go off to their think tanks or their law firms where they're by that point partners and living in a more relaxed existence. And here we are. We're still here. We're here every year. So just think about that from the employee perspective. You get a new boss who's hard charging, ready to go, runs you ragged, they're out the door to go, relax, and you're still there. And the next boss comes in who's ready to run you ragged. That's the life that these people live essentially day in, day out, and have lived for decades and decades. So changing that culture is more than just changing the mentality of the people who are there all the time. It's about the class of political appointees who come into our government and helping them to think about organizational health as one of their mandates, not just achieving the particular goals, the political goals, if you will, that they're there to achieve, which is important as well. So one of the most important things that Michelle Flournoy did when she came in and throughout her tenure, by far, was leading by example. And so there are some policies I'll talk about, but I think this is incredibly important. First, and most groundbreaking, which I'm not even sure came up in the book, is she took a two-week annual vacation. Doesn't sound that interesting. That never happened. The ramifications of that, people, everyone suddenly realized, do you mean I can go away for two weeks in the summer? And you could just see it happen. You know, suddenly people, they wouldn't say they were doing it, they would just sort of, they'd send in, you have to send in a formal memo at the higher levels and indicate that you'll be out of the Washington National Capital Area. And suddenly it went from sort of two days at a time to a lot more people taking a two-week vacation. Something as simple as that, which was done without any notice, if you will, no big rigmarole around it, but completely changed that culture and I hope will stay in it. I certainly took advantage of that. I never took two-week vacations ever when I worked in the Pentagon before and you better believe as soon as my boss did it, I did it. So just something as simple as that. Certainly the most important thing that we did was institute the alternative work schedule and that was something that had been done in some pieces of the organization at lower levels and what the undersecretary did when she came in was made it a policy for the whole organization. First she test ran it in a couple of offices to prove that it could work because you did have people who had lived a long time under this other culture of constant availability. And you know, sort of the unspoken illegal aspect is you got 60 to 80 hours a week of work out of your employees so why would you actually let them go for less than that when you could not pay them and compensate them at these higher levels and get all the work out of them? So that's a hard culture to overcome because suddenly people are just giving up if you will a whole day of work, extra work if you will, that they were getting from people over and above 40 hours a week. So instituting that was very important to show first of all that you could have a culture where backups were normal, that every staff member could have somebody who backed them up, that no one was irreplaceable and no one was irreplaceable and that people could step in and do the best they could and by the way the whole furlough situation that we encountered last summer was another area in which we didn't wanna have to do it but it was a place where we could demonstrate some of these sorts of effects where we weren't gonna have workers there. Maybe it was the let's just say Egypt desk officer if we're talking last summer or the Syria desk officer wasn't going to be there so you had to create systems within offices that had backups and other things of that sort. So those are, I mean there were a variety of different ways we tried to do things, creating predictability was a huge piece of it. Again, leading by example by the leadership doing things like vacations, doing things like not staying or keeping their people late, these were all sort of small cultural ways to shift the whole organization recognizing that so much of what we did was completely outside our control in terms of world events, the White House, senior leadership and other parts of the government Congress but what you could control, we tried very hard to control. That's fascinating. I gotta clap on that one too. That's so awesome. So as you all both were talking about how much you love your work and I was thinking again about our experience and I think it's fair to say that reporters also love their work and it struck me that a commonality in these professions is you do have really motivated people who love what they're doing who will stay and then it just becomes exponential, right? And so people will stay longer and longer and I'm thinking Bridget, you talk in your book about how Henry Ford realized looking at assembly lines, at manufacturing assembly lines, workers who don't necessarily have that control or maybe not that passion that he realized 40 hours is all that a worker can do before they become inefficient or they start making mistakes and that affects my bottom line. With a knowledge economy type workforce of people who love their job, how do you put those, I know you all have described them, but how do you, what are the other controls you can put to make sure that people who love their work go home, you know? Right, and don't burn out. And don't create this environment where everybody is sort of moving as a group to just keep working. Yeah, just keep going and going. Well, you know, how long can a knowledge worker work without burning out? How long can they stay fresh and creative and engaged? And the answer is we don't really know. We don't really know how long that is. There have been some studies done that it's probably maybe five or six hours and then after that, your brain just kind of like, you're done, you know? Because these are not manual labor jobs. You are not working on a factory assembly line. So it's much more difficult to kind of stay on task and to have the kind of creativity or innovations or thoughts or thinking clearly about policy. It's difficult to demand that for not just eight hours, but 10, 12 hours that we are working. And there's some pretty good evidence that after about five or six hours, you're kind of a button to chair. And what do you do? It's like, oh, I'm really burning. I'm going to answer some emails. You know? And yet you stay because everybody else is staying and because you have, it doesn't mean you love your work any less, but we've created these cultures where we reward those long hours that actually don't necessarily get you the best work. I remember as a reporter, you know, when people would discuss having cams on their kids, you know, to see where their kids, I remember having a conversation with my colleagues when you think about sort of inefficiency during the workplace, we actually said one time, what if our kids could see how we're just sort of fussing around, basically? What if they could see how inefficient we're being at our work? They'd be so horrified. It's so funny. There was an editor at the, well, it's at the Post, I should probably say at a place that she'll remain nameless. There was an editor who told me a story who used to come out at the Washington Post and would brag and say, you know, I can tell who the best reporters are by the ones who are still here late at night. And this editor tells me of looking over and seeing like three or four people playing solitaire. Right, right, right. And it's like because we're putting on a show because we think that's what we're supposed to do, but they're not doing great work and there might be somebody who isn't in the office who's out reporting some great story, which frankly is my view, that's where you've got to be, not in the office. And so sometimes I think we forget what is the mission of our work. We've kind of gotten so caught up in, you know, trying to keep up with the Joneses of overwork and I will, I did work on a, you know, sometimes it does require that intense work. It just does. They're going to be those periods of intensity and pullback, but it's like we never pull back. And I do remember not long ago working on one of those crazy breaking deadline stories where you just had to go all in and there was a deadline and you had to get this big story in by the Sunday paper and I had Saturday duty and I literally had worked around the clock and I was so cranky and I came in on my Saturday duty and I said something like, oh, I was up all night and I was angry about it because now that I've gone through this journey on this book, I value my leisure time and I realize how stupid I get if I work too long and I can't, you know, a couple of reporters are like, well, you think you worked, you know, it's like. So how do you ever tamp that down and keep it from just accelerating like space? Well, I think both Kath and Melon have the keys and Kath, you said it first, leadership. You have to lead from the top because everybody is going to imitate what the top person does because that's how they see you get to the top and the other thing is creating systems and structures from the start that are not just generally what we have that, you know, flexible work throughout, you know, the last couple of decades have all been kind of all about mommies and we have flex track and mommie track and, well, it's okay if they do it and they're sort of seen as a nice to have and a one off and then we, you know, there's a lot of science that shows, social science that shows that, well, then we punish that mother because she's not really being the kind of worker that we think that she should be and, you know, even when that mother and I can attest to that is working those crazy hours because lots of mothers do. So when you create a culture that values this is how we define the work this is when we know, you know, when is it enough, you know, when is it good enough, how do you know when you're done and it's almost like you have to institutionalize that and there are workplaces which is why you guys work in such, you know, it's really exciting that I found that and there are others that really think through that and a lot of times, managers, it's harder to define what your work is and harder to like figure out how to bound it because it's a lot easier to manage by time, you know, check the box, you're here. Yeah. Let me ask you about the changes in the law having to do with these flex, you know, flex tracks and alternative tracks. I remember talking to people in the legal profession just anecdotally at a time when law firms were creating non-partner track or various kinds of ways to work at a big firm where you wouldn't be consumed by your hours but generally seen, I think at one point is that those were being created for mothers that you were going to lose significantly in terms of your pay. You maybe weren't going to make partner so kind of beware of those tracks because there was going to be a cost in terms of your standing at the firm. Is that the case in the law, how have you avoided that at ClearSpire? How have you assured that whatever flexible tracks exist are taken by men and women like? Well, the law in general, I think, has done a good job of adjusting to that and for one reason the majority of lawyers today are women. Yeah. The majority of lawyers coming out of law school are women. When I finished the University of Virginia in 1987 40% of my class was women. Now I think the number is probably higher than 60%. That in and of itself has made a big, huge difference. And you are seeing more and more men who want to have family time who want to spend time with the newborn child. So it's happening slowly but surely. I think that the financial downturn which hit the law profession really hard may have impacted it negatively but I don't see it ever going back to the way it was. I thought you were going to say maybe that the downturn had forced some innovation because there have been really significant changes in the legal field. There have been significant changes but the financial pressures unfortunately have and the focus on profitability profits per partner and the lessening of the amount of legal work have conspired to create a culture where there's a lot more focus now than there had been if it's possible. There's a lot more focus now than there had been on making the money and having your numbers look good but hopefully that's a temporary phenomenon. So at Clear Spire basically men and women are pretty much working the same kinds of schedule. We're all on the same track. The people on my team many of them are mothers who have young children and we just make it work. If we schedule I don't demand that anyone appear when I want them to appear. We coordinate schedules to make sure that everyone's available assuming that we can do that. Sometimes the matter is driving the schedule and we make it work. I don't when one of my colleagues says I can't talk to you at that time about my duty picking the kids and I say fine, we'll call me at X time. So it's in our culture. It's a part of who we are and it's not just for family issues. For me it may be that I want to go running in the park or go to a community meeting. It's just a part of who we are at Clear Spire. But even beyond us I think that as I mentioned the greater legal profession is a large part because they're the larger number of women. Right. I'm Facebook friends with a couple of young lawyers who are at big firms here and they do still seem to be drowning. I'm glad to hear that it's changing but I would think that you would have people hammering on your door. What has to happen in the big firms is that the emphasis on the profits per partner this is mentality that the firms compete against each other with profitability because the American lawyer ranks them by how much they make per partner the profits that the partners make in order to keep that number up you have to do a whole lot of work and there isn't as much work as there used to be so that in of itself is creating a lot of pressure and causing people to to work. Right. And so Kath I have a question sort of how you sustain the sorts of changes that you describe that are taking place at the Pentagon some of whom were some of the changes were a direct result of Michelle Florener's example just setting an example of leadership and the importance of leadership but then there's a problem when that leader is no longer there I would think it would be possible to go back to sort of the way things were and the fact is Michelle Florener is no longer there and you're no longer there and so you know in a culture like that with people who are passionate with crises that are happening all the time how I mean did the changes really work or in fact I mean given the fact that neither of you was there anymore did it I think you're quoted in Bridges book saying well it made it a little easier to work six to 80 hours because you had a little more control over where you were when you were working but you know is it do we still have a long way to go if people are still working 60 or 80 hours yes I think I think it's you know we are probably a very hard case at the Pentagon if you will in terms of the again as I said before the ability to control much of what you need to control to make the workplace truly flexible we don't have that so because it's driven by you can't control what the organization is tasked to do if you will in terms of its relationship to the White House leadership in terms of its relationship to a particular Secretary of Defense all of that there and then oh and then there's world events which don't tend to follow our desired you know my son's high school baseball schedule unfortunately does not often line up with world events so given all of that because I don't want to make it sound it didn't it's all of that is still true within that though there are changes that I think are sustained prior to Michelle coming in there had been movement toward changes that we were able to carry through and part of that is because that career level leadership is so vital to carrying it forward and if they set changes to the way work is done often political pointies again if you will the bright side of many not really caring about the institutional health is if there's a process already underway and it's performing quite nicely and they're getting the quality of work that they expect and the timely responsiveness they don't question it so job shares are an example of something that was underway before we came in in this administration that we continued and and continued to grow the ability for people to compete for internal positions that open up to compete only internally for that so they could shift portfolios is very important for trying to moderate that sign wave a little bit so for instance if you were on a particularly difficult account I'll use Afghanistan very difficult office can't control anything the hours are awful people want to do it to support the troops to support the war effort but two years in an office like that is more than enough that someone can take so the ability to have other offices list their positions and for you to compete for that is a part of how we try to ameliorate it over time so lots of little things like that that I do think will take hold but to Bridget's point leadership is vital so the other piece is trying to take what we learned as political appointees and I mean this in a non-political way if that makes sense and making sure that that class of people in Washington frankly most are in Washington think about leadership in that holistic way that it's not just the policy leadership in one of Michelle's Michelle is in this people leadership policy leadership you have to have both sides of it and I have no doubt that can be a bipartisan agenda and go well beyond this administration so that's something I think even from the outside there are people that you know when they go into the building they come and consult with those of us who have been in the building and that's part of what we can help change over time so it is a leadership issue but at the same time the leaders have to be made aware that this is if you have a leader if you have an editor in the newsroom who just doesn't care then it's very hard I think to change that culture as someone who's forced to work for them and that's one of the things that's tough about most of our workplaces right now if you have a measure of flexibility or if you have some kind of measure of control a lot of it depends almost directly on your supervisor and it's because we don't have an understanding or a value of flexibility or that work can be bounded and intense and high quality because we have this value of work without end we've really left it very atomized and so people have very different experiences and if you do get a measure of flexibility like I did after I had kids you find that you feel so grateful and I will do anything for you and you find yourself overworking in different ways but that's the business case for flexibility so when you ask is there an incentive for bosses and businesses to be flexible and to give leaves and things like that well yes because you're so grateful and loyal that you'll stay there forever well let me just add and you attract people there's no doubt we saw that the more capable leaders in all dimensions to include the way they treated their staff and the way they ran their organization they attracted the best people as I indicated for us we had created an internal marketplace where people could apply for different jobs and it absolutely proved out that people would lock to job listings where it was clear that the leadership even if they couldn't control everything they were working hard to make life rewarding for their employees I can sign on for that as well and perhaps the biggest case I was ever involved in was a three month jury trial in Memphis Tennessee and we had 30-40 lawyers or billions of dollars in the state the leader of our team decreed that no one should work particularly if you were presenting the next day in court he said no you will not work all night you're going to have dinner and you're going to go and have a good night sleep and then he said yeah he said that I don't know if this is true but I believed and I think it works he said for every hour of sleep that you get before midnight it counts as four hours and so I actually I said okay well I'll go to bed at 10 o'clock by midnight that's eight hours but I really did find myself following that schedule and I found myself in the mornings much more productive I got much more done my presentations in court went really well and so to this day I still think very fondly about that particular leader and I'm sorry the schedule was the day before you basically stopped working? if you were going to be the person on the hot seat in court the next day you needed to stop working he was Italian so he believed in having these fabulous dinners which is great right around now we'd all be we'd go to dinner and then after dinner that's it no more work for the evening because he knows that we would be inclined to stand up in court before the jury the next day stay up all night and then stand up before the jury and make a fool of ourselves but I realized though that he was correct that getting a good night's rest made me much stronger in the mornings my work went so much better you know you raised such a great point there's another another workplace that I highlight and what was so interesting is I saw all sorts I called them bright spots in the book of workplaces doing different things and they're all doing different things because it matters what your industry is and what your culture is and what you value and the type of work that you do but it was really cool seeing how different and innovative people could be based on what they needed and there was this one software company that I visited in Ann Arbor, Michigan and the guy who founded it it's called Menlo Innovations he had been this corporate warrior for me and he said this was my success in corporate America more and more prestige, more money higher and higher positions and this was my happiness he was burned out he was miserable, he never saw his children and he finally when he kind of his job evaporated in one of the several dot com bubbles he was so burned out he wanted to start a canoe company like up in the boundary waters like just get me out to start a company based on joy and what joy required then was doing really meaningful high quality work but also recognizing that we're human and that we're not just our work and so they created a culture where they do expect people to come into the office so it's not like they have telework it's a very collaborative kind of environment but they have very bounded hours and when I was there five, six o'clock everybody's gone and you are dinged do you check your email? they do not want you checking your email or your cell phones not over the weekend there was one woman who came there from that high tech industry and she said I started working here like you're expected to work elsewhere I worked 70 hour weeks I was burning myself out and after one week the partners came to me and they said if you cannot figure out how to do your work in 40 hours and go home we will fire you so they're doing very well so it takes there are those possibilities they're doing great work they're just not over working so let me go ahead and open it up to questions now because I think there will be questions I have a few more if there's a lull but let me are you going to call on people? you can go ahead waving waving he was first I'm president of international investor I think I'm older than a lot of people in this room and let me just reflect on the fact that I think there has been a societal shift that's causing some of this I worked on wall street long career my first boss there had a great grandfather clock in his office and when that thing struck at 12 he didn't care if the world was on fire he went to lunch when we had our crisis times in wall street he was one of the cooler heads and made the right decisions so I think there is something to say about not over working and making some time for yourself but I also think that probably few people in this room have ever heard a union whistle when I grew up there was a union whistle that went off at 5 and I got to tell you the people there the society wasn't perfect people who worked hard in those companies went home and they either grabbed their wife or grabbed their children or grabbed a beer but I've been here 20 years in Washington DC and I've never seen happier faces than the faces that I saw in those days actually I grew up in a railroad town and there was a union whistle that you could hear all over the city I'm proud about that okay right there on this side thank you so much for this informative discussion I'm going to bring up the M word millennials and ask if you noticed any generational differences in your book I work for a big corporation and they did something really funny where they instituted scooters to people to go get around the office but you know I work on a small team with a woman who makes comments because I like to take my laptop and work where there's a window so how do you see the workplace changing because of the differing attitudes of young people I'll talk about that briefly and then I'd love to turn it over to you guys and what you're seeing but I absolutely saw a difference in millennials and I actually think that that's really hopeful you know I know that they want to work their own way and they're entitled they were these spoiled kids blah blah blah but you know they are proving that you can do really good work that work is not someplace you go it's something that you do and I think that that's really powerful and there are also lots of smart young people who are not buying into this kind of overwork culture and the more you get talented people saying I don't want to do that business is going to listen because they want to do it and you know and I talked to plenty of young people it's just like well I got into 11 because I'm training for a half marathon but you know I worked late last night because I had a great inspiration and they kind of like stretch and shrink their own hours but it's like life has more of a value and there's there's surveys that show this and I certainly picked it up in my reporting that they want good work but they also want life in a way that maybe people in my generation would be impressed I served as hiring partner when I was in the large law firm and when the younger I presume millennial age people would come through the questions they would ask would go directly to this notion of will I be required to maintain certain hours would I be able to work remotely, immobily working on the go is very important to the millennial crew and at Clear Aspire we use number inquiries from people in that age group so yes we definitely see that yeah I would agree and I think the most helpful piece of that is that it's both genders that what the millennial generation really has helped with is it's completely generational most of them don't have children yet it is for the marathon or the half marathon that they want the time it's for their passions and it's not tracked into this parenthood specific issue it's about how they want to live their lives so that's very helpful there are a lot of aspects to having millennials particularly in a multi-generational workplace that go beyond that but for this issue I would say it's very helpful right there okay thank you very much is it on? so this is something I as most of us here probably have struggled with for many years finding our balances and juggling it all and I came to the conclusion early on but I'm feeling that now maybe there's some open space to move forward with the concept of actually reducing the number of hours we work not just from 80 or 60 to 40 but even less than 40 and so that we do have time for our bodies, ourselves, our communities, our families and so I'm working on one project evaluating that called short time compensation which they use in Europe a lot so that kind of like the furlough concept rather than laying people off you can reduce, let's say you reduce to 80% time and you get some unemployment insurance to make up the difference but the other project I really want to develop I'm interested in asking you all what you think and how if you've thought about things like this and asking other people if you're interested to be in touch with me afterwards which is hiring people at reduced hours I think there's a leveraged spot right now globally I think we have to really change what our concept of people working has this issue of unemployment and I think there's a place that the economic crisis cannot just make people trying to hold on to our old paradigm but to really shift it and say okay if we all worked a little less and shared the work that there is then we'd have a lot better world for all of us so anyway that's what my vision is and I'm interested in your thoughts on it and everybody else's afterwards Bridget, you talk in your book you look at lower income workers as well and one of the real stresses for those workers is working a number of part-time jobs and feeling overwhelmed and trying to get to each one so what do you think about hiring people at part-time you bring up really two issues and that is the Fair Labor Standards Act that I mentioned before in 1938 that protected hourly workers from overtime but not salaried workers so what we've got now in the 1930s you know if you worked your 40 hours as an hourly worker any time over that you got time and a half it was supposed to be an incentive to keep you from overwork and so what do we have now we have far more salaried workers than we did back in 1938 and by law I think I said in the crudest sense it's death perfectly legally there are no protections for salaried workers so that's certainly something to look at the other thing is part-time work in the United States is terrible in other countries there's parity there's benefits you're still on kind of partnership and promotion tracks in the United States it's terrible there are no benefits generally there have been studies done where they compare people doing the same job at the same level but if you work part-time hours there's a big wage gap so there are a host of things that we can look at from a policy perspective whether it's shorter hours or making those adjustments that would share that work or value people's time do you want to weigh in on that? well I would just say you know I was a part-time worker for a period of time in the Pentagon so it is possible even there again that trend is going on since the 80s were you stigmatized at all? no I wasn't I think you know in any workplace where you're part one of the few or only part-time people you're always very conscious of probably more conscious frankly of how you spend your time there is no inefficiency any longer you don't go to lunch you just work as a matter of fact one of my searing memories of that is I didn't have a parking the parking pass I had for the Pentagon in those periods of time that kind of parking was filled when I would get there because I worked on nine to seven schedule three days a week which is part-time in the Pentagon so so I would illegally park every day in a space that I was not designated for and I would leave late enough that when I walked out into the sunshine of Washington from the Pentagon I could see whether or not I got towed immediately and never once got towed so that was like my memory it was talk about overwhelmed all day it was like drive yourself into the first space you can find run into work work all day come out thank god it wasn't towed live to fight another day so yeah I do think part-time schedules should be a piece of what is offered to make life work for people and then I'll just say the organization I work at now the Center for Strategic and International Studies we actually have a 35 hour work week which doesn't quite 35 hours but it's still full-time you are salaried at 35 hours per week and we charge our time up to 35 hours a week so there are places that do that right there I'm behind you but I'll get to you often times I think the justification for Americans working so hard is that we are number one in the world whatever that means and that in order for us to keep our number one spot we have to work harder and longer than our international counterparts Bridget have you found any research that could either support or refute that I am so glad you asked that because that's what I thought too it's like well maybe that's just the price that we pay for being Americans for our exceptionalism we're number one in the world we're so rich and you know so maybe this really is sort of a sacred cow that you don't want to touch well and I know I don't know if you guys saw this the most recent Cadillac commercial that was running through the Olympics I actually wrote about it it drove me so crazy it's like what Americans were so great why do we only have two week vacations we have so much stuff we're so great we work so hard and the crazy thing is the OECD they do these wonderful studies where they look at say GDP sure the United States we're way up on top but then you cut that GDP per hours worked a measure of productivity well guess what there's several years that we fall behind France with their 30 days of vacation a year and they're leaving early to go have coffee in the cafes so I think to me that is the biggest really strong data point that shows we're spending yes we're number one but we're number one because of so many overwork hours do you like being a writer I do I love being a writer and that's why sometimes it's hard to stop being a writer Wendy that's a great question I'm Wendy Paris I'm a fellow here I'm curious about the idea if the 40 hour work week was set for manual laborers you started talking about no one knows exactly what's appropriate what do you call the mental workers intellectual knowledge knowledge workers I've been working too long I think part of the problem is people want to feel good about themselves right so if we have a bar we can especially in this Calvinist work ethic country if we have a bar we know we can hit it and I know setting my own hours I don't really know what's a good amount and when I can feel that I've done a good job so do you think there is an idea or there should be an idea of a different this is a similar question for knowledge workers or a way to deal with that maybe more American idea of I need to feel good I need to know I've hit the mark of what constitutes a full day I mean that's a huge question how much is enough how much is enough when is it good enough and how do you know how do you measure that and a lot of the workplaces that I visited that's really what they wrestled with and each one came up with different different answers but those are sort of several questions and how do you define your work in a way that isn't just hours I think that we're in the middle of trying to figure that out I think Wendy was looking for a number so just give her a number permission we do we have to give ourselves permission to stop have you all found metrics have you found metrics for it's so difficult in the law because every matter is different and requires a different amount of focus and in many instances you do get a result but in litigation often that result is some months or years down the road so it would be hard to measure someone's productivity based on a result necessarily I can tell you that having spent many a night drafting briefs overnight that period from like 2 a.m. to 6 a.m. I may as well have been sleeping so to answer your question I don't know the answer I don't know I think it's like anything there's no magic go you've got to figure it out although you do talk about the pulse so it's sort of working for 90 minutes and then knocking off and work of course that could go on forever well I did talk to Tony this is America after all but I did I talked to Tony Schwartz who runs the energy project and his whole view is you don't manage time you manage your energy and it's really a fascinating it's really great I'd encourage all of you to go to the website and look at some of his stuff but I called him up to interview him about this very question how much is enough and the first thing he said is oh you're working on a book I bet you're writing your book the same way I wrote my first book I said well what do you mean sitting in your chair changing your desk for 10 hours a day I'm like yeah and he said you know I don't do that anymore you know when you think about how our brain works you know we have everything kind of comes in pulses naturally so he sort of mimicked he set up his work schedule to mimic kind of those natural systems he said I don't work anymore than 30 45 or 90 minute in pulses and you know very intensive very intentional I'll choose kind of like one thing to concentrate on that's what I'll do and then I take a break and change the channel and then I come back and I'll do that for 90 minute cycles a day and where he got that from you remember when Malcolm Gladwell wrote about the 10,000 hours the personal mastery you had to put 10,000 hours in well that's part of what drove this woo! crack the whip and get back to work you gotta put in 10,000 hours to be you know really great at what you're doing but really when you look at the study that was the foundation for that 10,000 hours it was a look at the top violinists and what Tony Schwartz said is yes they put in the 10,000 hours but the people who were the best who performed the highest they also slept the most they took the most breaks they practiced the most intensely and they did it early and they practiced in no more than 90 minute intervals so there is a way to do really high quality intensive work and rest and take and pulse and take breaks Valerie? Bridget congratulations on the success of your book I'm Valerie Young I was an attorney for 11 years and through the births of both of my children now I'm a public policy analyst and I like that a whole lot more I could never wait to leave the office when I was a lawyer and now I can't be able to stop working that I'm focusing on women's economic issues so far the whole discussion has been framed in how to contain work it seems to me that if we are to successfully contain work we have to agree that there is something other than work that is worth doing we seem to be so enthralled to the idea of paid activity and paid activity is the only thing that we regard as valuable but of course if people don't have children or care for sick relatives or dying parents I mean a whole chunk of worthwhile human activity wouldn't happen and if people didn't have children and raise them there wouldn't be an economy anyway so how do we elevate the notion of care and the notion of human activity taking care of each other I noticed that it's like the start of 530 so everyone here is either single or their children is so old that they don't need to go home and do homework and cook dinner with them anymore or people are training for marathons or something but a large part of the crisis engaged in looking after each other well I think our conversation started with that actually how do we bring that up in the equation well you know just briefly I mean look at what Liza is doing here at New America you know and reframing this as a breadwinner and caregiver program you know and it's been work and family but I think changing the conversation one of the things that I found most fascinating about time studies talk about valuing care that's one of the main reasons we use time studies is how do you get a handle on how much time and work goes into those unpaid invisible and unvalued activities kind of the traditional women's work and what's really fascinating is that there are some countries now that are using that as a measure of their GDP that there is now they're trying to put some kind of value on it and using time as a way of doing that I can tell you that I've been able to develop my meditation practice in the past 5-6 years and learn more about the eastern way and in the eastern way speaking generally of course work is considered all that you do Dharma I think is the term and it's the caring for others it's caring for yourself and it's the work that you do for compensation but it's also the work that you do for society and so I think I don't know how we get to that culture but I think that's what you're referring to and I do think of these other things as being on the same par as my actual work and I think that helps me as an individual to be more productive so right there yeah in that blue sweater I need to follow up on the other question here my name is Abraham Avidor formerly from the Foreign Service to cope with the stresses created in a workplace what would you advise for people to become in addition to profitable to become mentally and spiritually rich to become physically tired not only mentally tired by the sedentary lifestyle over here which will help by the way to fall asleep you mentioned that what do people can do to cope with the problems created in the workforce not to take them home to think about it all the time to worry about problems they leave the workplace but they come home and they still take the job with them and although they're not working there they're worrying about it what to do is that occupying the mind in a counterproductive way so any guidance and suggestions how do we work on well you know how do we work behind you would answer that because you had some wonderful you know thoughts about mindfulness and meditation well that is definitely one way to do it to become more mindful and to be able to focus the mind or unfocus the mind really is what meditation is to make the mind a vacuum when I look at this country I don't know I couldn't tell you how to begin to make that happen on a scale that would be large enough to impact it in the way that you're asking but I personally know that that works for me and I think what you're talking about in the book what I talk about is change on two levels those larger societal and structural levels but you know that change is going to be you know change is slow, social change is slow that might be a generation or two so what do I do you know and what businesses do you know when I was in Denmark there was an American working there and one of the things I loved about that is she worked like an American does late and stayed late and you know she would get out and all the stores were closed and she'd have to run to the gas station because that was the only place that was open and buy like little packages of crackers because that was the only thing that was open everyone else was home with their families that was the value and she kept getting these bad performance evaluations and she's like but I worked so hard for you but the third most important thing that they judged her on was her work-life balance and they said you have no work-life balance and that is something that we value as a country and as a company and so the more that we can talk about these things and institutionalize that as a value I think that's really important and then the more that you know it's hard to do on your own to make those kinds of changes that are wired to be socially cooperative so you know when you're sort of trying to fight those you know those battles on your own what you've got to do is be clear about your own priorities but then develop a network of support like-minded people and then you have to kind of create your own society to kind of push against that bulwark or you've got to find places like ClearSpire or work for people like half you have to look for those places right now I'm afraid we're going to have to wrap it up there after seven I'm sorry but to maintain everybody's work-life balance I feel like I shouldn't go on thank you so much thank you guys so much it was so fascinating