I'm Linda Quinlan. I'm Keith Ghostland, and welcome to All Things LGBTQ. We are taping on Tuesday, August 9th. All Things LGBTQ is produced at Orca Media in Montpelier, Vermont, which we recognize as being unseeded indigenous land. And now the the an of the hour. Yes, welcome. Who still has a cast and is gimping around. So there you go. So so welcome back. And thank you. Thank you. It's nice to visit and I've got a few international news stories and a little bit of a primer or as the English say a primer on polyamorous relationships. A little primer for you. So the first story I have today, Uganda's suspension of LGBTQ charity and okay, so we're going to start over. Uganda has suspended an LGBTQ charity organization and the leader calls it a clear witch hunt. The country's government says sexual minorities Uganda operated illegally in East Africa. So the Ugandan government suspended them. The National Bureau for Non-governmental Organizations, NGO, part of the Internal Affairs Ministry announced on Friday of last week that it suspended sexual minorities Uganda known as smug for not registering with the authorities. The NGO Bureau has taken the decision to halt operations of smug with immediate effect. It said in a statement.  The executive director of smug Frank Mogisha said the suspension was a clear witch hunt rooted in systemic homophobia that is fueled by anti gay and anti gender movements. The refusal to legalize smug's operations was a clear indicator that the government of Uganda and its agencies are adamant and treat Ugandan gender and sexual minorities as second class citizens. In 2014, the Ugandan court struck down a bill passed by MPs and signed by President Yawaui Musavine that sought to impose life imprisonment for homosexual relations. It's one. Another news article, which comes from July, but it's still relevant in Havana, Cuba's National Assembly approved a sweeping update of its family law, which opens the door to allowing gay marriage greater women's rights and increased protections for children. You may have heard of it already, I'm not sure, but the elderly and other family members are also included in that the new families code will put be put into to a referendum vote on September 25th after being debated in community meetings earlier this year, where organizers said that 62% of participants expressed their support. That is relatively low by Cuban standards, apparently, where recently they passed a new constitution that was approved by 86% of the votes. That's amazing. Policy proposals in previous referendums have seen support of around 95%. So that gives you a sense of where they're at on it. The code promoted love, affection, care, sensitivity, respect for others, and the harmony of our families. Justice Minister Oscar Manuel Silvera said presenting the code for the vote to the National Assembly. Opponents to the rule change include many churches. I'm not going to quote what they have to say because we know what they always have to say. The new code would legalize same-sex marriage and civil unions. It would allow same-sex couples to adopt children and promote equal sharing of domestic responsibilities. It will also allow pre-nuptial agreements in circuit pregnancies or not for profit. One of the interesting pieces of this for me is that parents would have responsibility instead of custody of their children and they'd be required to be respectful of the dignity and physical and mental integrity of children and adolescents, which is interesting. Cuba is already a regional frontrunner in women's rights. Women head up nearly 50% of households. They make up 60% of professionals. They have free access to abortion and can claim up to two years maternity leave. It's too bad we can't travel there. Exactly. A Havana couple who have lived together for many years but were never able to have children said that it's their human right to marry and adopt children. So this is a good thing. You would have to do it through that Newfoundland residence. Yeah, you wouldn't be able to do it from here. I think that's just ridiculous but we won't go there. It is. But I'm trying to give you some positive news. Good, thank you. Positive news. We can, yes, we can kibitz about the rest later. So the third piece I have, Zelensky opens door to same-sex civil partnership in Ukraine. That is really good. Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky has opened the door to this in response to a petition that called for equal marriage to be introduced in the war ravaged nation. In a written reply online Zelensky explained that it would be impossible to legalize same-sex marriages while the country remained at war because it would require change to the constitution. They're not allowed to change laws during the war. That the call is the family code of Ukraine. It defines that the family, sorry. So although the family code of Ukraine defines a family as the primary main unit in society consisting of a man and a woman, he said this work could be adjusted. A family consists of persons who live together or connected by common life, have mutual rights and obligations according to their constitution. One of the things he said that I thought was really great is the constitution of Ukraine cannot be changed during the war, but also we wouldn't be able to be making the strides we are during war without these people in our community who are LGBTQ. That's a paraphrase. I don't have the quote. So those are the three international news pieces I have. What I have lastly is the seven types of polyamorous relationships you should know. So this is kind of a fun seven types. Okay. Okay. And to introduce that let me say that polyamorous relationships are diverse and complex compared to monogamy, right? It's gradually become more normalized in the mainstream over the past few years and we've been seeing a lot more representation in the media. We've people like Megan Fox who's in a polyamorous relationship. Despite all the conversation around it, I think there's a lot of confusion about what the different types are. So let me give you the titles. Hyararchical polyamory, non-hyararchical polyamory, triad, a V as in V, the letter V, kitchen table polyamory, garden party polyamory and solo polyamory. That kind of reminds me of the old term of softball lesbian to define a sort of person from within the feminist community, but they weren't an activist. It was just sort of this social egg, right? Softball lesbian. Yes. So hierarchical, I can't say the word hierarchical polyamory, right? In that kind of relationship, typically there may be a couple. They're considered the primary relationship. They may have secondary partners. They may have a single secondary partner. They may have others, right? But their family takes precedent and then they may go outside of that family for relationships with other people who know you tell them I'm in a relationship but we're open, right? Non-hyararchical polyamory is a little different compared to the hierarchical. Everyone involves free to figure out the relationship dynamics of each other person. Nobody's in charge. While there's no hierarchy in terms of importance or love, the group typically called a polycule, say that three times fast, don't necessarily have to treat everyone equally. It just means there's no third party that makes decisions about your relationship, okay? It's up to you and your partners. A triad is what's most commonly shown in Hollywood, three people, right? Triad is a triad is a triad. Three. Also known as a threple, instead of a couple. Threple, right? It's not to be confused with love triangles, right? Which you always see in Hollywood. Two guys chasing after a woman or a couple who just wants to sort of have a third and do nothing with them. And so it's just three people, they all decide together what their relationship status is. They all know each other. They all interact. They're in a relationship. A V gets its name from the letter V, which has three points. The singular point at the bottom branches off, right, and connects these two points here. So you'll have a couple with a third person most often. But what'll happen is these two points aren't connected to each other, but they're connected to the third. So here's a person, he knows this person and this person, but they don't know, for example. Okay, that's a V. It's similar to a triad. Kitchen table polyamory, I love, less of a structure and more of a dynamic. Kitchen table polyamorous relationships involve a poly cool, who are on good enough terms that they can all sit around a kitchen table and talk, right? They can have coffee. They can chat. They're totally connected and that they know each other. While not everyone in this type of relationship dynamic is involved romantically or sexually, each person is emotionally connected to the other. Garden party polyamory, relationships that are very similar to kitchen table. They both involve a network of people involved with each other in various ways. The key difference here is that you are not close with your, what they call metamores, your other paramores who are part of this group. You're not necessarily close to them all.  The term garden party refers to how everyone is familiar with each other. And then finally, solo polyamory, your single, I'm signal, they're single. We may all be involved romantically or sexually at some point, but we're all individuals. We live alone, maybe we don't cohabitate. Nobody decides our lives. And we're not really in a close intimate, say triad or something. We just, we just, we mix and match. We mix and match. I can see the t-shirts coming out now. Yeah. Mix and match. Mix and match. Remember with the briars Briggs with the site testing that all of us and everyone have their initials across their t-shirts. I can see it. Type A, type B, type C. I can see it now. The bottom line is that polyamorous relationships are not always clear cut. The more people involved, the more unique to dynamics. And ultimately, it just depends on what you decide. Right? All right. Now what if you have two couples? Then you have a quadruple. You have a foursome. That's different. But yeah. So, you know, if you're an open group, yeah, you never know. Right.  Every relationship is different. And it's, it's, there's no right or wrong. Yeah. So those are the stories that I have brought. Okay. For today. Thank you. You're welcome. I have, well first, I have a clip which I will show after this small introduction. K. Graham fights for LGBTQ rights with the new album. She's using this platform to raise awareness of the LGBT community. Graham partnered with GLAAD to announce her new album with a Pride tour. She said that everything that comes out of this project goes to GLAAD. The album is called Long Hot Summer.  She is also starring in a bunch of new releases. One is Collide, which cast the actress in a plot that threatens everyone's life in a restaurant. So here's the clip. Do you really think they could get away with it? I don't know who has a more stocked resume right now than you. But we got to talk firstly, of course, about Collide. This exciting new thriller. I got to ask you, what attracted you to this project and what do we get to see in this film? I'm always attracted to the underdogs. Like you mentioned, I'm traveling all over the world. I'm focusing on an album that's about LGBTQ rights. I was attracted to this film because I wanted to play a character who was seeking revenge and was basically put in a position where she had to fight for her life. Very cool. And it's like you said, I have to tell you, my friend, as a member of the LGBTQ community, you are seriously the definition of an ally. Thank you for everything you're doing. Tell me a little bit what you're doing right now that's raising awareness and literally benefiting the community in real time. Well, I've been partnering with GLAAD. I've been on the council out here in ATL for like 10 years and so the proceeds, everything that comes from this project goes to them.   I like to focus aggressively on putting my energy where it's needed. I saw that as a window to be able to put my projects and my art and my life force into giving to a community that has literally taken care of me was the only community that really accepted me when I was before I had started TVD. Hopefully with my work, it's moving the needle a little bit. I just need a little bit of movement. That's all. What do you hope people will get from the amazing work you get to do? I hope they see themselves in these characters. I hope they see themselves in these songs.  I hope that that's the message that I hope people walk away from is a better understanding of who they are. So that looks interesting. We're armed and we're ready.  Fire is being renewed nearly half a century ago after an arson killed 32 people in a New Orleans bar it has been renewed by order of the city council. Three people were never identified. Ferris Le Bon 50 was a WW2 World War II vet and three others were burnt beyond recognition and are buried in Potter's field. So they're going to try to find out who those people are. Director John Logan is leading a cast in a queer horror film called They Them. They are complex characters in a complex movie. It's a psychological thriller about warfare on LGBTQ youth in conversion therapy. There's someone on this panel who might like horror films. I love horror on YouTube. Oh yeah. I read a review. Lea Jenis a trans cyclist competing in a U.S. cycling event since June is being stripped of a civil medal for not meeting the latest requirements for trans athletes. And it seems that hate groups are registering as churches. FRC is a think tank without a congregation and they are getting all the tax breaks and benefits. 40 members of Congress have written an open letter asking the IRS and Treasury Department to investigate the anti-LGBQ hate group the Family Research Council. Oh boy. Andrew Warren Democrat was suspended in Hillsborough County, Florida. He was accused by DeSantis Republican Governor of Florida of trying to overthrow democracy after he was suspended for refusing to enforce state laws on abortion and gender reaffirming care for trans youths. Former GOP spokesman Tim Miller is spilling tea in his new book, Why We Did It, which is a travel log from the Republican road to hell. It's sharp and funny according to critics and full of self-reflection. The 42-year-old gay author takes readers on a deep dive through the underbelly of Republican campaign politics. And former Rosie O'Donnell intern wins GOP primary for anti-LGBTQ platform. Tudor Nixon just won the primary gubernatorial election in Michigan. She's a Trump-induced candidate and said she will ban schools from kindergarten to third grade in a similar to Don't Ask Don't Tell in Florida. She also said that she would protect young girls by banning trans kids from school sports. And Laura Bobbet suggests that monkey parks has been made up by Democrats to win the midterms. I don't see the connection, but I can't get inside her head. The anti-Drake queen journalist Kerry Lane wins the GOP primary for Arizona governor. Lake endorsed by Trump called drake queens activists that are sexualizing young children. The man who threatened violence at Pride is going to jail. The 72-year-old threatened to bomb parades and shoot people at Stonewall. And Jay Leno subtly rose Bill Maher for trans joke. Maher is known for his homophobic and transphobic jokes. Since when was Jay Leno subtle? Yeah, I know. If you want to know more about it, his little joke is on YouTube. Now we have another one of our favorites, Marjorie Taylor Green. Republican of Georgia claims that Karine Jean-Pierre cannot understand parents because she's a lesbian. Actually, Pierre is the daughter. Green's bizarre notion comes on the heels of Republican here. She comes again. Laura Bobbet, Bobber, Republican of Colorado, said something similar when it came to abortion. So she, anyway, a town votes to defund- You need strength here. I know. The town votes to defund the library after claims it was grooming kids. In James Township, Michigan, voters rejected a ballot measure during the primary election to renew property tax funds to the library. The library will run out of funds soon. Glad you don't live there, huh? So I think I will save the rest for my second segment. Did you do all your stories? I have one more piece. I could do. He's going to do this. No, I was going to say, because you had said, oh, those are all my stories. And I thought if that was everything, you could just never mind. So we'll go back and come through again. Exactly. Well, I wanted to make sure. All right. Okay. So starting off with our trivia, and they did get it. Saturday the 13th is National Left-Hander's Day. And somebody might have had an advantage by being at least left-handed themselves. This famous left-hander was the co-author, along with Liz Nichols of three detective novels, The Total Zone, Breaking Point, Killer Instinct. However, they may be best remembered as being the inspiration for Rita May Brown's 1993 novel, Sudden Death. Who might that have been?  We have a large slate of out LGBTQ plus candidates. Some had opposition in the primary. So on our following shows, I will be recounting who made it through the primary, who is running, where the races are. And don't just look at the top of the ticket. Look at the down ticket items. People running for justice of the peace. These are the people who are officiating at weddings. People going on to select boards, zoning commissions. Those have a lot to do with how a municipality makes decisions and how they move their community forward or how their community is defined. Or hold them back. Well, that's exactly it. So Taffy Art Center in Rutland, they have an exhibit of LGBTQ plus artists. And one of our favorite Wicked Women poets might be included. Yes. Vermont Humanities, they're doing a Words in the Woods series where they go to state parks, poetry reading. On Saturday, October 20th, and you can go onto their site to register for this, is going to be poet Carol Potter, lesbian poet. She has a book that is soon to be released. And I'm looking quickly to find the name of it. What happens next is Anyone's Guest, which was the winner of the 2021 Pacific Coast series in poetry. Nice. And she described herself as, I'm an unmarried lesbian feminist lefty. That's not kind of lefty, but yeah. Fox, Mockered, and East Montpellier. People should be going on and checking their website. It looks as though they're doing drag karaoke the second Thursday of each month. And they have special themed dinners and they have a wine club. So they're doing some great stuff. Outright Vermont, the Friday night groups are starting to meet in person again. Second Friday of each month in Montpellier, Middlebury, Morrisville, and then they're going to continue to do the online group, which has been critical for youth living in rural areas. Momentum. Well, I noticed their meeting in Burlington, but for the last two months, there's been nothing listed for Montpellier. So I'm not sure how we've sort of dropped off the scheduling. Queer Connect in Bennington. And this is a Zoom event, their sapphic story hour, which someone we know may have read their poetry. They are going to be hosting Veronica Gutierrez, author of the forthcoming lesbian detective novel as you look. And they will be reading and then there's a question and answer. And I'm going to make a big push here to check out people's websites, Facebook page for both our organizations, networks, and not just for the sort of special events, the conversation in chat, whatever. It's the other educational webinars that they're offering. I just did one last night sponsored by Out in the Open about LGBTQ plus health insurance. And it's, okay, this is what you need to know. This is what your options are. This is how to apply. This is where to get information. And more importantly, if you encounter difficulties, here are the advocates or advocacy organizations to which you can turn saying, I need some help here. And for our community, the big one is reaching out to Vermont Legal Aid. And they have an LGBTQ plus health initiative within their organization that is specifically looking at, are we being treated equitable within the insurance industry? And sort of building off that the sort of webinars, there is one coming up on August 18th and it's 6pm at night. And it's sponsored by the Department of Children and Families. They're looking for foster parents. And think about our youth and our concern about youth who are turned out of their homes when they disclose sexual orientation, gender identity. Do they have a supportive household to go into so that we then become the desirable foster parents? I was reading in some article I was reading about, it listed all the states that are like really pro-abortion and how many children are still in foster care who will never have a chance to belong to a family. And some of them were like in the tens of thousands. And it's just unbelievable. Before I forget, the health insurance webinar, one of the co-sponsors along with that in the open was Grace Cottage Hospital, Townsend, Vermont on the LGBTQ health care rating grid out of a possible 100, they scored a 95. Nice. Small little Vermont doing phenomenal work. The last thing I'm going to plug is Sage May who continues to do interesting things and really looking at how can I provide a service to our communities. They do a monthly speaker series. And the next one coming up is Gretchen Legler, Woods Queer.  And she's going to recount this was what it was like for she and her partner to go into the woods of Maine and establish a connection with a sustainable life. So they keep doing interesting things. But I'm going to give it back to you because you've got something interesting to tell me. Maybe. I'm going to tell you the title of this article that I really love is called People Think I'm Too Hot to be Asexual, but they're wrong. I'm not saying that about me. I'm not hot. No. But there's this misinterpretation that people have that asexuals are maybe agender, right?  And so Asha Grace has done a story talking about the fact that surprise some of the sexiest taste makers on TikTok and Instagram don't actually have much of a taste for sex. So the idea that people are asexual. So for a growing number of Generation social media influencers identifying as asexual, being hot isn't about attracting the perfect mate. It's about, well, being hot, right? So being hot or being sexy or dressing up well and feeling good about yourself is not always directly connected to seeking sex, right? Sometimes it is. Sometimes it is.  And so the Big Apple Bombshell, who boasts TikTok fan base of more than 82,700 followers, identifies as an asexual or ace, is the term that we use, a person with little to no sexual attraction or interest in physical intimacy. So I thought it was a really interesting article to just make us stop and think about what we think of when we hear someone say, hey, I'm asexual, right, or aromantic, doesn't mean that they're not sexy. And it feeds into some of the conversation that our youth are having, which is I'm not going to take on the label. No, this is a continuum. Yes. There's an ebb and a flow. There may be times when this is the attraction I'm responding to, or, you know, there may not be anything there. And I'm just comfortable sitting at home watching PBS and reading the latest PD James novel. Right. Exactly.  I'm like, no. Right? Because that's not always the drive in people's lives. I have people. And I also have a bit of a kitchen table polyamory relationship with my ex because we are close and people think you must hate an ex or you must want to have sex to be sexy. So it's a really interesting take on the fact that asexuals are not necessarily asexy. All right. There you go. Last but not least, I did have a bit of a thing about bisexuality and that bisexual people are still fighting to sort of not be invisible. So it's still out there. And bisexual men in particular are finding that people will see them, see that they look like a straight male and they're in a relationship and maybe they're straight and they're not. And so there is a really great resource in New England, but not in Vermont, the Biresource Center in Boston, which has a lot of great events and a lot of great ways you can connect. Is it for both women? It's for any women, men, agender, you know, gender nonconforming, any gender. So they've been around a long time through the struggle and they can really give people some resources if they need them. Sounds like a possibility for interview. Oh yeah, we might be able to do that. I have a growing list of possible interview. Yeah, they do great stuff. Maybe I'll think about that one. Yeah. Okay. So how are you going to depress me now? Oh, it's endless depressing stories. I know. I know. Because remember, it was Anne who said that she was going to be the, you know, the uplifting of our team. Oh, good. So I fell in line and didn't have the story. Absolutely. Well, I'll start with a really, you know, another not so good story, but a couple is attacked after they hugged in the street.  This was in Sandy, Utah. They were at the end of the driveway and they were hugging good night. And the car, I guess, circled back and there were five men in the car. They got out and said we don't like seeing gay people on the street. And one of the boys said, well, that's because you're probably repressed. Two against five. Needless to say, he was a little bit beaten up. So very sad story for these young folks.  A mother is accused of blinding her son's boyfriend, but she claims that her family is the victim. Despite being accused of a brutal hate crime, Ina Makenrenko wants people to know that she and her family are the victims here. All she wanted was for her son, Ole, to marry a woman.  That's a very sad story. I almost put that in my international news because to me, when you look at the family, they come from a different culture and they have not to say that that's an excuse, but it felt like a little bit international to me that that happens. Yeah. It's unfortunate. There are various circumstances. And a Texas-based church has been slanted for putting on a unauthorized rendition of Hamilton that critics claim include anti-LGBTQ messaging. The unsanctioned production of the popular play by the Dore McLean Church includes a 15 minute sermon that equates being homosexual to struggling with drugs and alcohol according to the Dallas Morning News. Maybe you struggle with alcohol with drugs with homosexuality. Maybe you struggle with other things in life. Your finances, whatever. God can help you tonight. He wants to forgive you for your sins, said Pastor Roman Guterres. Footage of the play leaked on social media. How to ruin a good play. Senator Lindsey Graham said he wants states to decide the issue of whether two consenting adults can get married. When Dana Bash asked him, if he would support legislation codifying same-sex marriage, Graham claimed it's a state issue during an appearance on CNN State of the Union. Rob Portman, Republican Iowa, is trying to just get enough votes to codify same-sex marriage because Justice Clarence Thomas has suggested it might be in jeopardy. You said two weeks ago that the state-by-state approach is the best way to go. I want to be clear about your position. Are you saying that 2015 Supreme Court decision that made same-sex marriage in the law of the land nationally should be overturned in which you replied again? I think it's a state's rights issue. Did you see the follow-up article with Tammy Baldwin? Tammy Baldwin is saying we have the 10 votes and that when they come back in September, that she thinks is going to pass. But keeping to these are 10 Republicans, she didn't go to disclosing who she thought those would be. I could think of two or three offhand but you know they're going to get really squeezed. I think that's why she was telling. So now we have Marjorie Taylor Greene again. Do you know what she did? Well, I'm going to tell you. I've lost count. She's looking for the Jewish space lasers again. She prayed with a gay conservative activist Brandon Straka as he cried while pretending to be a capital rioter held in a New York jail. Many conservatives have been angry that people got arrested for storming the Capitol on January 6, 2001 in an attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election. The events of that day which included making a makeshift news while chanting for the death of Mike Pence and arms Trump supporters push past police in the Capitol. So they set up this whole thing where they put this fake guy in the jail and she was praying with him and all right anyway. So I'm going to end my segment with a very, very sad death. And it was the death of activist Alana Dyke woman. And she was 72 and did an interview with her in October of last year. So if you would like to see that interview, you can look on YouTube. Also during your interview, Alana said that she was working on a play about the death of her partner. And it seems that she died 15 minutes before her partner's name was Susan Lennon kind. And she died 15 minutes before the stage reading for the first time took place in San Francisco. I know she was the author. She grew up as a lesbian activist, author, editor and teacher. She was the receptionist. She was the recipient of the Lambda Literary Award for lesbian fiction. She also wrote River Finger Women and Beyond the Pail, which I loved that book. And they will be and they will be known by me by my teeth. River Finger Women was selected as 87 in the publishing triangle of 100 and best lesbian novels. She edited Sinister Wisdom and also Supported Bridges, a magazine of Jewish women. We lost an icon and you know, there will be no replacing her. And I recommend any of her writing. I like them all. And I remember, I think River Finger probably came out, I think she wrote it when she was 23 or 25, somewhere in there. And it had a huge influence on me. So thank you, Alana, for all the work you did and you'll be missed. How do you follow that? Yeah. Milton Vermont. That's how you follow that. Well, you know, people woke up to find their community leafleted with antisemitic rhetoric. And in the reporting, and it wasn't a major part of the story, but just sort of this, oh, by the way, apparently several weeks before the antisemitic, people woke up for homophobic and transphobic literature distributed in the same manner throughout the same communities. And the community is saying, what's happening here? Where is this coming from, who is responsible for it? That wasn't the same as the flag burning. But that's where I'm going now, because Milton is just a bit south of Isle of Mont, where you know, several weeks beforehand, there was the public media reporting of somebody had burned a pride and a transgender rights flag that were hanging from a tree. And when you read the story, you found out that this had been going on in this community for a month. And what had been happening is flags were either being stolen, vandalized, and the community, and it was focused on specific houses. So you know, it was the members of our community who were putting out their pride. And the community was trying to rally behind their neighbors. So they kept coming and replacing the flags. And they came up with the idea of hanging them in the trees, thinking, okay, they're beyond reach. So they were set on fire. Now, the follow-up to Isle of Mont is that citizens went to the select board and said, what is happening in our community? And the select board has crafted a formal response condemning the action and sent it out to their community saying, we need your help. We need your involvement. This is not who we are. Help us identify where this is coming from and what we can do to bring change. But sort of following along on that bias, hate-motivated crime, Fern Feather, who was the transgender woman who was murdered in Morrisville earlier this year, there should have been an arraignment follow-up hearing at the end of July in the Hyde Park Court. And when I've gone through, I can't see where anything has happened. So I'm going to do, for our next show, I'm going to do a little further research to see if, because of COVID and because of judges changing, is there something that's happened because they gave an indication that they were going to actively pursue it. This was not going to be something that was going to be drawn out, delayed, whatever, quick action. And the alleged perpetrator is still insisting this was self-defense. So it's not going to be a pretty scenario. Do you know where we can watch, where the best place is to watch the debates tonight? You mean the primary results? Yes. W-C-A-X? P-T-Z-W-C-A-X are doing it on their website. Apparently, you're also going to be doing sporadic reporting. VPR is going to be doing it. And if you go on to the Secretary of State's website, they will have live updates. They will have live updates as everything comes through. And what I'm hoping, well, before our next show, we will have the final candidates list. So we will know who were the winners in each individual race and what was the majority of victory. P-T-Z-W-C-A-X. Another story that I kind of lost track of from Aunt Medicaid several two sessions ago, our health care committee, which was chaired by Bill Lippert, an openly gay man, went through and changed the administrative rules process for agency of human services, health access, etc., because of COVID. Let's decrease, you know, the bureaucratic administrative responsibilities. Let's make this a friendlier system. So it was an administrative change. You didn't know exactly how it was going to play out. Well, Vermont Health Access and the Medicaid Division, and I totally missed this, had a public comment section about a change in pre-authorizations for hysterectomies. You no longer need a pre-authorization if it's deemed medically indicated, except, you were waiting for the except, weren't you? Yeah. Gender affirmation. Gender affirmation. What's the difference? There is no difference. It either is or is not medically indicated. Yeah. So, but the comment period is over, but it is definitely something I'm going to be following up on finding out what's happening. And there were letters submitted from different aspects of our communities saying this is a discriminatory practice, best practice medically indicated is best practice and medically indicated. So let's, yeah, monkey pox. You knew it was going to happen, but I'm not going to make Zach put pictures of it. I was going to say, which Zach will thank me for it. No, we have cases here. We have one. I know we have more cases. Well, no, we have a case, which means that there is the potential for more. Remember, keep in mind our original reporting is not all Vermont physicians are going to recognize this. They're not necessarily going to know the proper means to biopsy and diagnosed. However, being part of a webinar with UVM Medical Center, we have 63 doses of the vaccine available. Now, a priority may be to healthcare providers who are helping to treat people with monkey pox. 63 doses. Nationally, there is close to 9,000 diagnosed cases of monkey pox. Isn't there only one place that makes it? I'm sorry. She, she reads my notes and then, and then, and then she, you know, it's like Charlie McCarthy. Isn't there? I'm sorry. I got so excited. Well, no, I mean, no, that's exact. That's no, Linda and I were exactly trying to go to the same place. Every week, there is an increasing percentage of the increasing cases. The last week, there was a 67% increase in less than a week. We have potentially 1.5 to 3 million people who would benefit by a vaccine. We have 650,000 doses. And the one laboratory in Denmark, they are producing the vaccine worldwide because, oh my, it was a racist, homophobic, non-response, nobody else's manufacturer. And we only have 175,000 additional doses due in the fall. And looking at, you know, we may only have one diagnosed case in our backyard here, New York has over 1,300. Maine has to, New Hampshire has 15, Quebec has almost 400. Now, Massachusetts, which you would think would be, you would think would be sort of in the higher range. They have only 174. And remember, no, remember when we reported initially, P-town, they knew it was coming. They reached out, they did clinics saying, if you are coming, here is the risk. This is what we can offer it. So I'm theorizing that that's what accounts for their lower than expected numbers. Is there any way like the government, like they did with COVID?  We have. Have they? They've made it a health care. Other people, other labs doing the. They don't have the patent. There's only one patent for it? Well, previously, there, and there was a great story on NPR about monkeypox. Previously, monkeypox was mostly transmitted to children through access to wild animals. Right. And five years ago, an epidemiologist from Africa, I can't remember which continent, which country. Sub-Saharan Africa. We reported on it on our last show. Right. And nobody listened to him. Bingo. So unfortunately, ramping this up is going to take a lot. And there's also been some concern that right now people are in emergency health mode fatigue. Bingo. Coupled with. Okay. But remember with the COVID vaccines, one of the things that NIH, we needed to do was to release the patent restrictions. I mean, because any company that's developing a medic, but somebody is going to have to develop the resources and the expertise and have all of the necessary ingredients in hand. This is very similar to a smallpox vaccine, but there's a little tweaking. There's a little difference. University of New Hampshire, they like doing polls. They like doing a lot of polls. One of the polls that they did recently that didn't get a whole lot of attention yet was about, you know, 2024 presidential, you know, how was Biden doing for numbers wise? And is there another Democrat that has equal to or stronger support and support? And oh my, there was someone who is equal to and could easily move ahead of Bernie Joe Biden. What's the basis of our show? Queer people. So it might be. Bingo. I knew she could get it. She got that quick. But it's a longer conversation. I'm not going to talk about that right now. A little bit in our remaining time. There's been lots of stories about the selection and campaign spending and who is giving money for what, which there's a very specific conversation about the role of PACs. And what is totally misleading is a PAC is not a PAC is not a PAC. The same as nonprofits. There's 501c3, 501c4s. They have different responsibilities, limitations and oversight. But the average voter is not going to. Well, no, that's what I'm saying. Right. That's a lot of nuance. Actually, it's not that much nuance. It's the Secretary of State's responsibility is to track any activity that is outside of any individual campaign. And are you following the rules? And the recent case relative to Becca and the victory fund, the victory fund knows exactly what they're doing. They have done all of the reporting that has been required. They have made all of the necessary disclosures. There has been nothing that is covert or outside of the prescribed protocols for what they could or could not do, which is a well-known established fact. So that saying, oh my, look at how they are not playing by the rules. Not true. And also, and this is where voters really get confused. There's a difference between the Citizens United and the victory fund. The victory fund is trying to raise money to support LGBTQ plus underrepresented traditionally disenfranchised candidates, which actually leads to a larger conversation about how we go about elections and the funding that's made available. I'm one of those people who believe it should all be public funding. It should be a shorter campaign season. I mean, and from our interview with Brenda Siegel, she is a single mom. She is working class. Her comments were, you don't know what it took for me to be able to do this. Our political system is rigged against low income disenfranchised underrepresented. We make it impossible for those individuals to be candidate, a viable candidate for office and truly to have a voice in changing our political infrastructure. Absolutely. And she can't even debate him. Well, let's see what happens after the primary because pre-primary what the incumbent governor had said is, I'm not going to amount to campaign by just carrying on my role as governor that will be my campaign. And then after the primary, he might consider, which is fine for them, but somebody who is trying to run against them, it doesn't give the opportunity to show the differences. Which works in the advantage of the incumbent. Exactly. So our trivia question, she's grinning because she was right there. National left-hander's day. And from your, you know, being disclosed as a left-hander may be, you know, more of a liability than being disclosed as LGBTQ plus. And you voted her now. No, she outed herself. I did. I just kept raising my hand when he said left-handed. See, I'm one of those people that I've never outed. I wait for someone to make and then it's like, so this famous left-hander was a co-author, three detective novels. And I was deliberately misleading because the answer may in fact be Martina Navratilova, who was the subject of sudden death, who had lovers. Oh, yeah. No, that's no. Yeah. That was the reason for the book. You're like, hey, hello. Yeah. No, Rita May wrote the book after they separated and people saw it as, you know, revenge, revenge fiction. Trash. Yeah. So, but Martina, 18 major singles titles, 31 major women's doubles titles and 10 major mixed doubles title. And she was the top seeded for what, 12 consecutive years or something. My entire childhood. Yes. Right. Which was just last week. Just last week. So that, that's it. So remember always to resist.


The law of supply states that if the price of a product increases, the quantity supplied will increase too. And if the price of the product decreases, the quantity supplied will decrease as well, setter is parable. Now, as we did with demand, we will tabulate some data and use it to create a graph to explain this law of supply. Remember, these are just tools to help us understand how supply works. Okay, let's start with our table. Assuming you're the owner of the funky chicken, how many fried chicken pieces are you willing to supply if the price of one piece of fried chicken is say seven round? Any figure will do to start with. So let's start with say 14 pieces. And at six round, well the law says that if the price drops so will the quantity supplied, so 12 pieces. At five round, 10 pieces and so on, using round figures until our table is complete. This clearly confirms that a positive relationship exists between the price and the quantity supplied. In other words, the higher the price, the higher the quantity supplied and the lower the price, the lower the quantity supplied. You'll see later that this relationship is governed by the law of diminishing returns. Now, let's present this data in the form of a graph. We're going to create our first supply curve. As we did with our first demand curve, we'll start by plotting the axes and indicate the origin. Then we'll assign the price of the good P to the vertical axis and the quantity supplied Qs to the horizontal axis. Then the intervals. In this seven equally spaced ones on each axis, followed by the corresponding values from the table. That's one round, two round, three, four, five, six and seven. And two pieces, four pieces, six, eight, ten, twelve and fourteen. Now, we plot the different price quantity supplied combinations. At seven round, fourteen pieces are supplied. At six round, twelve pieces and so on. When we draw a line joining the points and label S, S, we have our first supply curve, indicating the quantities of a good or service that the funky chicken plans to sell at each possible price. A movement from point A to B shows that as the price of the fried chicken increases from four round to six round, the quantity supplied increases two from eight to twelve and an upward movement along the curve takes place. Likewise, if the price drops, a movement down the curve takes place. But how does the supply curve differ from the demand curve for fried chicken pieces? Well, the demand curve shows that a higher price leads to a lower quantity demanded. But with the supply curve, a higher price leads to a higher quantity supplied. So that is the law of supply, which states that the higher the price, the higher the quantity supplied. And the lower the price, the lower the quantity supplied.


This is a terrific panel and it's a great conversation. Liza Mundy, who is the moderator, who is the only person sitting here right now, has been a fellow at New America for the last couple of years. She became director of our bread winning and caregiving program in the fall and has really been great guns since she took over the role. Ann Marie and I have been with her all over the Eastern Seaboard, rallying lots of interest in this subject. She's the author of The Richer Sex, among many other books, and she'll be a terrific moderator. Everyone else can come up now. Bridget Shilty, the... Oh, the weather's getting better. We're doing it differently for this last panel. Dislodge your mic, Bridget, while you're dancing. It's really, these are the perils. Sometimes there's less productivity. We'll stop being silly. Bridget Shilty, as everyone I hope here knows, and everyone has bought the book already, is the author of Overwhelmed Work, Love, and Play when No One Has the Time, which I made the mistake of saying wasn't a book but a movement and then landed with that quote in the New York Times on her advertisement a couple of weeks ago. But it really has been an upswell of interest and enthusiasm for this, the idea that it might be possible to actually enjoy your life while you're being productive. And so that's the theme of this conversation. I will quickly say that Eve Moreau, the Senior Partner and Managing Director of the Boston Consulting Group, joins us also, and of course Mark Beaman, Professor of Psychology and Interdepartmental Program in Neurosciences at Northwestern is also up here. So this is a far-ranging conversation about leisure, which again, will not go past six o'clock. Thank you all. Yeah, thank you so much for staying for this conversation. I do think there's some irony in the fact that we're the last panel and that we're gonna try to convince you that leisure is the new productivity. If we were living by our principles, of course we would just dismiss this group immediately and let everybody head to the bar, but we're not going to do that, but we're gonna make up for it by being entertaining so that it will feel like leisure. I feel pressured. You all didn't know that, don't you? I feel pressured for that. I know, yeah, sorry. This is work for us. But in fact, I think that because this is a group of people who have stuck around to the last panel of a two-day conference, this suggests to me that this is actually, in fact, a very hardworking group of people who probably quite love their work and are exhilarated by the life of the mind, and it may take some convincing to persuade people in this group that leisure is, in fact, the new productivity. So, Bridget, I loved in your write-up in our program you invoked John Maynard Kienza's prediction back in 1930 that by 2030 we would be working a 15-hour work week and that all would have the time to enjoy, quote, the hour in the day virtuously and well. And just to make sort of a lowbrow analogy, some of us may recall that in the Jetsons, which was a cartoon that aired in the 1960s, and that envisioned life in 2060, George Jetson was actually working two hours a week. So, he worked one hour a day, two days a week. And so, for some reason, whenever people envision the future, that technology and progress are gonna give us, they envision this life of leisure, of a shrinking work week. And so, I'll start with you, Bridget, to explain why that didn't happen. Yeah, what, yeah, I think Ben Honeycutt is a leisure researcher that I spoke to for the book, and he said that that's really animated his entire career, what the heck happened? You know, you had in the 30s, and you actually, in the 30s to the 50s, you had a lot of economists and thinkers saying we were on the verge of this coming age of leisure, that we would be able to retire by now at age 38, that we would work maybe six months out of the year, that there was this growing productivity, and we would all have sort of our basic needs met, and so that the rest of the time we could work, you know, kind of these short hours, and then have the rest of the time in leisure. And leisure has gotten a real bad rap, and I have to be perfectly honest, when I was reporting this book, I would get very embarrassed to say, here at the New America Foundation, that I was reporting a book about leisure time. I ended up chasing one of the board members out to the elevators once, no, really, there's scholarship, I promise. And I think that's what's really interesting, we really devalue that sense of leisure, we think it's laziness, or we think that it's just sloth and sitting around.  And Liza, you make the point that many of us are passionate about work, and so sometimes our work hours creep into the rest of our lives, and well, what's so wrong about that? And what is so wrong about that, and what is so wrong about our overwork culture that we hear, and we'll hear from our other great panelists here, we hear in the United States, if you just look at work hours, we work among the most hours of any advanced economy, to save South Korea and Japan. And I will remind you that in Japan, there is a word for overwork, called for death from overworked, called karoshi, and that in South Korea, the Wall Street Journal just reported that they have meditation prisons, where people who are overworked go to check themselves in, and wear like a little prison outfit, just to get away from work. So we're not quite that bad, but I think what's so important to understand is that, so we work these long hours, but then when you look at our productivity, and you divide GDP per hours worked, or to get a measure of hourly productivity, well, we're not that productive, and Japan and South Korea are actually at the bottom of the barrel. So what that means is that we're working long hours, we are just physically present, but after a while, we become these butts in the chair, we don't really produce much. And as we move into, we're talking a lot today and yesterday about moving into innovation and a knowledge economy, and how that's really going to be the stock and trade, that ideas are really what we need. Where do those ideas come from? And we're gonna be hearing more about that, but I'll just close my little section with, as I was thinking about leisureness, at leisure and even idleness. One of the most compelling arguments that I ran into is a story about J.K. Rowling. At the time, and back in 1990, she was a researcher for Amnesty International. She was on a train between Manchester and London. The train gets stopped on the tracks for four hours. Everybody around her busily takes out work, and I'm sure if they had smartphones, they would have gotten answering emails and dealing with their backlogs. She stared out the window, totally spaced out, completely idle, did nothing. And in four hours, the entire plot of the magical Harry Potter series just fell into her head. And now why? One of the reasons could be neuroscience is finding that when we're idle, our brains are actually most active, and that's something called the default mode network lights up, and that default mode network works like little airport hubs that connect different parts of the brain that don't typically connect and talk to each other, so that in that idle moment, stray thoughts, memories, visions, ideas all come together in a very new way, and that's what leads to innovation and breakthrough thinking. Well, that seems like a great segue, Mark Meehman. If you could just talk a little bit about that brain process and maybe you can explain the difference between these moments of insight when something really actually productive and valuable comes as opposed to moments I've had when some just sort of absurd thought comes that it turns out to not be workable, or just moments of sort of feeling stupefied and drifting in a way that's actually not that productive, or extreme fatigue. So what's going on in these moments of real insight? So yes, first I'd point out that a lot of good ideas come up both ways. You can have a lot of great ideas just by analyzing information and continuing to do the same methodical type of thinking that you have typically done, but sometimes you're stuck and you're not sure about the right way to go about solving the problem or you can't quite find an optimal solution, and sometimes those impasses are resolved by a sudden moment of insight, this a-ha eureka moment, this countless anecdotes about them, but as was pointed out earlier, anecdotes are not scientific evidence, so we naturally are looking at the evidence to see if some of what's told in the anecdotes is true and then what are the actual brain bases to sort of separate these processes. And we do see that there's a trade-off between even successful solving of problems, whether you solve it sort of analytically, step-by-step, methodically, kind of knowing the processes that you're going to engage in order to solve it, as opposed to by insight where sort of the answer comes to you, not from nowhere, it has to come from your brain, it has to come from some thinking, but maybe thinking that you weren't necessarily aware of, maybe when you're in the default mode or mind-wandering or other episodes, or just even sometimes while you're still working on it, but it sort of comes from a different direction of your thoughts. And we see actually opposing patterns in some of the types of processing that are necessary to solve by this sudden insight and sort of more creative type of problem solving than a more step-wise analytical type of processing. And there's a real opposition to the types of attention that you engage. So usually when we talk about paying attention, and most of what you're told to do at work is pay attention, pay attention, you know, focus, focus. And in order to do that, whether you're looking at it sort of cognitively or even with neuroscience, you can see that you're actually, in order to pay attention to one thing, you often suppress a lot of the other information and that helps you focus. And that's great for a lot of what you wanna do. But sometimes you need to pay attention to other information that initially seems unrelated but it turns out to be very usefully related to the problem you're trying to solve. And if you suppress to that thought, you're never gonna get it. But if you have sort of a less focused attention, you might actually be able to grasp these sort of quieter ideas that while they don't seem as instantly related to the problem that you're facing, they actually turn out to be related to the solution. And there's particular ways in which they come up that I don't need to bore you with all the details of yet. But the important point there is that they actually can be in opposition to each other and that sometimes one mode of thinking is better than another. So very often I get asked how do we have more insights? And one key response is well you don't always want to.  And so you can put them together using this other form of attention. And it turns out that stress is really good for causing you to focus. So there's this thing called weapons focus that's been talked about for half a century. If you see a threat, you tend to engage and focus on that threat because you don't wanna be distracted. You wanna make sure you can monitor the threat. And so you can have a very sharp, narrow focus.  So. So does that argue that we need workplaces that allow us to be flexible enough that we have that period of time where we're gathering information and we're focusing and we're amassing and then we need a period of time where we can allow those thoughts to work themselves out? Well, I would say at least some of the time you need that. So it's good to have this sort of diversity of skills that you can apply one or the other. And so you might need some time when you're not just constantly stressed. And very often when you're stressed to come up with a solution, someone mentioned competition, like sort of government competitions for coming up with the best solution. And those can be useful for bringing other people into trying to solve a problem. But when you give people a big competition or incentive to solve a problem, they actually often will rush to a very quick and rapid solution that's not actually optimal. And sometimes it takes longer thinking and broader thinking to come up with a more optimal solution. So when you're constantly stressed to do it, you might not work out as well. So you wanna have different moments when there's at least the opportunity to be relaxed and not be trying to come up with something instantly that that could be a beneficial approach. And so Eve, when you do your corporate consulting and you've written about complexity and sort of how to cope with complexity and how to simplify, has the workplace and have our work lives become more complex, has the complexity become exacerbated? And if so, why has that happened? Yes, you're very right. The workplace has become more and more complicated. But I was listening to what your panelists were talking about. And what came to my mind is that we talk about work, we talk about leisure, but what was clear in what you were seeing is that we cannot divide our life in one part which is work and another part which is leisure as though they were independent. In fact, we are a whole and there is an interplay between work and leisure. When our work is stressful, a nightmare, we cannot enjoy leisure. Even if you give me one week of holiday after a no-full day at work, it will not, I will not enjoy this week. I will not be able to read, to play music, to be with my children, to be with my wife. So there is a qualitative interplay between what happens at work and the nature of leisure, first interplay. And second, there is another interplay which is not qualitative, which is just quantitative. If we are not productive at work, we will not be able to free enough time for leisure. So this is where I come to your point, Liza, which is basically our organizations are dealing with a new complexity of business in a cumbersome way. You know, in organization, there are more and more structure, processes, systems, reporting needs, incentives, scorecards, committees, meetings that over-consume, that do not create value, by the way, and that just create work on work. So people have less and less time, you know, based on BC, our company, Boston Consulting Group, we have done various research in the most complicated organizations where you have so many layers, structure, process, systems, committees, scorecards, et cetera, people produce sometimes less, there is less than 20% of value-adding time. So if you take the time spent at work and you look at the time that create value, so basically you divide the value-adding time by the elapsed time, at best you have 20%. So people spend 80% wasting their time, but working harder and harder and longer and longer. You know, in your brochure, you were nice enough to talk about France as a country where there is still time for leisure. You know, I remind you that the legal working time in France is 35 hours per week, 35 hours per week, legal, huh? If you cannot work longer than that, huh? Otherwise you have troubles, huh? You get sent to that leisure prison, you voluntarily go.  Otherwise, okay. So but in some French companies, people have 52 hours of meeting per week, 52 hours of meeting per week in a country where the legal working time is 35 hours. Why? Because these companies are poorly organized again and people have more work on work, more control because they're not able to deal with the new complexity of business. They only add procedures, structures, reporting, control, supervisory burden. And this also, okay, I will conclude here. You're right, our organizations are creating complicatedness which kills productivity so people have less time for leisure and when they are able to be on leisure, they are not enjoying it anyway because of the way work is organized. Well, what does happen in France when there are 52 hours of meetings scheduled? Like who gets in trouble? Anybody? Very good, no, no, who gets in trouble? So to come back to your point, Brigitte, some people are so stressed in these organizations that it's not Karoshi. They don't, I want to make jokes on that because unfortunately it's not Fanny at all, so I'm sorry, it's me who started badly. You know, in Japan, there is a word for death by overwork. Karoshi, as Brigitte said, in France, people commit work-related suicide. They commit suicide at work and of course, often in these companies where there is overwork, but when they leave a letter, what they complain about is not so much the amount of work as the stupidity, the absurdity of their work. You know, being submitted to contradictory requirements, contradictory instructions because in matrix organizations some of these people have 25 managers. 25, it's not two managers. 25 managers and the matrix has 25 dimensions and that of course contradicts each other and these people, this is when they commit suicide. So then the workers' council comes in and say, look, people are killing themselves at work. Why? Because they work too much. Nobody makes a root cause analysis.  This is too subtle. So what does the CEO say? Okay, we are going to work less and to make sure that people work less. Now, the factory or the engineering department will close at six o'clock. 6 p.m., no light, no car park. You have to be out, otherwise you will starve and you have to be out by 6 p.m., mandatory. But at the same time, the amount of work remains the same. So what is the consequence? The consequence is that these guys, these engineers, these secretaries, these assistants, these design engineers, now they have to leave their work at six but to accomplish the same amount of work at home in their kitchen when there is no printer, no computer and they don't have an office, a desk at home.  The root cause is what you said earlier. We are not able to deal with the new complexity of business. Our companies just create complicatedness to deal with complexity. Work loses meaning, people lose productivity and I think we need to think holistically about the work and leisure interplay. Our life is not an addition of both. So you're suggesting that France maybe is not the ideal model. Perhaps we're idealizing it. I'll let you say, but I didn't say very well. There's the rules and there's the reality, I guess. So and as you talk, I mean you talk about the redundancy and the proliferation of managers and assignments and again I think about technology and I think about this vision that technology was gonna free us and it was gonna make our lives more efficient and give us all of this leisure time in which to contemplate and reflect and it just hasn't happened. And I don't know, what role do you feel that technology plays in these? I mean how should we be coping with it in order to preserve these moments when you talk about flow, Bridget, when you are in that state where you're looking out the train window and there's the landscape and how do we sort of banish technology in order that we can have those moments where we fight the encroachment of email and distractions. Are you looking at either of you? I think the technology was, I think Keynes was actually a typo, he meant 15 hours a day. That was the future he envisioned, not 15 hours a week. That's what we have, I don't think that's what he envisioned. Well, if I could, I'll take a stab at that with the technology. I think what's really interesting, I spent a lot of time looking at time use research and what that does not capture is really this work creep that technology has really has brought upon us. On the one hand, technology's fantastic. It's given us the ability to work in different places. It's given us freedom so that you can work when and where and even how you might work best. But on the other hand, because it's so ubiquitous, we can work all the time everywhere. How many of you raise your hand as we have gotten an email from your boss at 9.30, 11 o'clock at night, three in the morning and how many of you have felt like you needed to answer that? So then you never get away. And you are always on this state that they call on call. So you're never really able to flip into that idle mode where you're able to let your default mode network go. You're always in this vigilant state waiting for the next ding to come in. So I think that's something that managers really need to think about. There's a lot of really good social science that shows we manage for hours. We're still managing as if we are still in the early industrial revolution because it's much more difficult to manage by performance, much more difficult to manage by mission. What is it that you're supposed to do? What if you took hours completely out of the equation? It's much easier to say you're in a chair, you're working, okay, done. But that's really the next challenge for managers so to speak is to really figure out what is the mission of this job? What is the performance that I'm expecting? How much is enough? When is it good enough? How will I know? How can we measure that? One of the things about Yahoo, Marissa Meyer got rid of the telecommuting program there and everybody went all up in arms. The thing about it is that was not a really great telecommuting policy. So what would it take to make that a better one? To have the flexibility to do your work well, to kind of crunch the, you know, bound the hour so that it doesn't sort of creep on and on because I will tell you that work creep is not connected, you know, is not captured in our work hours and if you did, then our work hours would be even longer than our data shows. Do you worry that's a double-edged sword at all because if you do it measured on performance, I mean, part of the thing is that people feel competitive in order to advance, in order to be performing well and to get the resources to keep doing well, you have to, you know, outshine your other workers around you, your colleagues, and so they're just gonna work more. There's a way to find the niche. But that goes back to the whole question of what are you measuring? And right now social science will show that we value the people who are putting in the most face time, you know, that face time in the office is what we value. Well, if that's what we value, then that's what we're gonna get and that's how you're gonna outshine by, you know, look at, I'm so good, I'm here at 11 o'clock at night. You know, what if we changed our metrics? You know, and it's gonna depend. It's gonna be different for every, different industries. It's gonna be different for different offices. It's a much harder task, which is why I think we stay stuck with ours.  How about staying stuck with ours but just lowering the hours?  And so what if the, what if it was to, well, although you've said that in France it doesn't necessarily happen, but. But, you know, France is one of the most productive countries in the OECD. You know, if you take as your measure, right, the GDP divided by the number of worktowers. In May, for example, in France, there is what they call the bridge. The bridge is that whenever there is a holiday on the Thursday, you don't go to work on the Friday because there is no point in going back to work on the Friday if you were already on holiday on the Thursday and it will be on the Saturday. Oh, that's so nice. In May, because you have the first of May, you have many saints and so on. So in May, people, depending on yours, you have six days of work in May, that sounds okay. So France is one of the most productive countries. Now, but still, the standards of living are going down in France for, because to be productive like in the industrial revolution edge, as Brigitte was saying, is not enough. You must not be only productive, but you must be creative, you must be inventive, and I think this is what Marc is talking about. And the way of organizing work in France does not allow for that when it comes to technology. I think this is what is good for about this foundation, the New America Foundation, because all what you are seeing here should be taken into account in boards of directors, in the way organizations are managed because organizations are a bit naive when it comes to technology, to IT, to telecommunication. I am, at the beginning, I'm a social scientist. I am an organizational sociologist. And remember, the first thing you study in organizational sociology is work, of course, and then it is stress, stress. So what is the definition of stress? What is the criteria of stress? And I remember my old professor gave me the ultimate criteria. He said, you are stressed by work when you bring work to the toilet.  That's the criteria. As long as you don't bring work to the toilet, you are not really stressed. Okay, now, if you think... Should we take a poll? You know, people are tweeting that right now. Yeah, yeah, now, if you... And some people are reading it on the toilet. If you think about it, if you think about it, what has happened with the smartphone of the Blackberry? Now we bring work to the toilet every time we go to the toilet. So this technology has had a creeping counterproductive effect. And I think what we are missing are people who, through social sciences, through neuroscience, through psychology, brings a little bit of wisdom in the way we use technology. You know, we are just discovering that. And we are like children who play dangerously with a new game without realizing that it should be handled with care. And it is only this kind of sciences that can bring that wisdom. Technology, as you said, is neither bad or good in itself. It depends on how we are used. But, you know, there is a company, by the way, it happens to be a French company by the French real matter called ATOS, which is a high-tech company, ATOS. They have banned internal emails. No internal emails are forbidden. You can use only external emails, but inside forbidden. And you can use Twitter, 140 things. You can use Facebook, but no forbidden internal emails, because emails can be the ultimate sophisticated way to engineer escalation. You know, in the past, if you wanted to copy your boss, sorry, if you wanted to escalate a problem to your boss, you had to take an appointment with the secretary, knock at the door of the secretary. Hello, Mrs. Secretary, I'm sorry to disturb you. I would like to have some time with the boss. Oh, what is it about? She would take the big book, you open it, when you went, no, no, no.  And all these guys will be swimming among problems because of emails and CCs and blackberries and smartphones and so on. So we need wisdom here. This is, again, part of what we call work on work, killing productivity, because, you know, we have a lot of measures on that. It's a disaster. You know what I'm saying? It's fine. You have a new movement, no work on the toilet. I was just going to say, I'd like to have something, I was going to add something. You know, I went to Denmark for the book. And the reason I went there to kind of get back to the idea of leisure is because there were studies there that showed that men and women had more leisure time there than in any other country that they studied. You know, and it certainly wasn't comprehensive, but there were like a group of about seven or eight countries. And men and women had about equal amounts of leisure, whereas in other countries there are fairly large gaps. And the thing that most made me want to go there is because working mothers had more leisure time than men in Italy. It's like, you know, and you think of the cafe culture, it's like, well, what are they doing there? And they had the most pure leisure, or leisure to themselves. Whereas here in the United States, most mothers spend almost all of their leisure time with their children. It's time with adults has fallen off the cliff in the last couple decades here. And so I wanted to know what is it and is there anything to learn from it? And there were a couple of things that I thought were really interesting. Their work is short, but also very flexible, but it's intense. Most places don't have more than say a half hour for lunch and you have a smorgasbord, you just kind of go there so there isn't like these long lunch hours. They do work the 37 hours a week by law and you are out the door at 4.34, you know, or 4.37 or whatever somebody was telling me. And you're actually the bad parent if you pick your kids up at daycare at 4.30. Most people get there at 3.30. So can you imagine? And there was a real commitment to gender equality. I think that's another sort of thing that we don't really talk about that our workplaces demand these long hours of both men and women. And when you're trying to have families, that makes it really virtually impossible for anybody. But there was also this sense of they really valued leisure time for what it could bring to you for your life and then being refreshed in what you could bring back to work. And there are innovative workplaces here that recognize those hours of doing something completely different, changing the channel, brings you in with perhaps an ability to see an old problem in a new way. But I thought it was so interesting that in Denmark they view you rather than here. I can't tell you how many times people have bragged about spending the night at the office or how many hours they've put in. Over there, you get these blank stares and it's like, well, what's wrong with you that you are so inefficient that you can't get your work done in 37 hours? It's a completely different sort of thing that they value. And so you kind of work to whatever the cultural standard is. And I do think that that's something to learn about that a lot of our work hours are because that is what we have come to value, whether we're productive or not. One other thought I had when you were talking about the fact that it used to be that if you wanted to bring something up with your superior, you'd have to go to the secretary. One of the great points that Bridget makes in her book, I think, is the way to just to inject gender into that conversation is that men typically were the executives. And their time, Bridget talks about the fact that men have traditionally had their time protected either by their wife who might say, no, no, he can't be bothered right now. Children stay away. Or the secretary who's saying, no, I can't give you a time with the boss or maybe next week. And I guess nobody has that anymore, right? Nobody has any. I'm not sure that women ever did. And the other side of those emails is for working parents, you're also getting those exponentially proliferating emails from the snack organizer and the soccer team and the trophy chairperson. And so it's coming at you really from both sides, from your internal emails, but also from the external parenting groups. And then people start replying and then everybody's head explodes. Right? I think I would like to speak for neuroscience a bit because at BCG, at the Boston Institute, there is something we believe in what we call the experience curve. You know, the experience curve means that basically the more you do the same thing, the better you get at it. Adam Smith, you know. So if you repeat, okay. So the whole idea, which I had by the way when I started in the career is that if I was able to work 22 hours a day, I would go the experience curve, I mean three times as fast that people who work the normal amount of hour, eight hours a day, which is good because then if you go down the experience curve, you become more productive, so you do more, you earn more, you are promoted faster, et cetera. Until I read about neurosciences and discovered that in fact, in the learning effect, there are two things. Not only repetition, doing the same thing many times, thanks to focus, specialization, division of labor, but also memorizing because if you repeat the same thing without remembering that you have done it already before, the day before, the month before, there is no learning effect. You are like the fish in the bowl who turns without remembering that I've been there already, no, it's new every time. So now, so you need learning and you need repetition and memory. And memory is produced by a neurotransmitter called acetylcholine and acetylcholine, this time I remember, usually I don't remember the name of the acetylcholine neurotransmitter of memory. So acetylcholine is produced only when we sleep. So if we don't sleep, so me when I work with my teams with the BCG consultants and partners and principals, I say make sure your teams sleep, not so much for the work-life balance.  They will not memorize if they don't memorize. There is no learning effect. If there is no learning effect, there is no Boston Consulting Group. So you see there is a natural convergence between a normal good health and even economics. There is a natural convergence. If we look at things smartly, in other sense, you will confirm that memorizing requires a bit of sleep, no? Right, so sleep is very important for memory. Several other things, too. Don't go without it. And also spacing, learning over time, so those are all good ways to memorize. And sleep, we're also investigating how in the way that it's helping you memorize, it's helping you organize your memory. It's sort of pull out the most important patterns that you see, and that is also good for creative problem solving as well. So we're beginning to investigate that. And the other thing that you see is very often, one side of it is people that sort of, I don't believe in creativity or insight, or all you just need is more productivity. And more productivity is good to a point, but the most famous quote for that, of course, is Thomas Edison. Inventions 99% perspiration and only 1% inspiration. But I should point out that even Edison took pains to harness that 1%. You could think that 1%, well, Alexander Graham Bell be Alicia Gray to the patent office by a couple of hours. So we had Ma Bell, not Ma Gray. That was probably less than 1% of the time he spent working on it. And Thomas Edison, he would sit in his lab when he got stuck on an idea. He would sit down and relax. He didn't want to quite fall asleep. He believed he had good ideas right before he fell asleep, which actually, there's some support for that, because that's when you're in a looser state of attention and relaxed. So he would hold a handful of ball bearings, steel ball bearings over a pie plate. And if he fell asleep, he would drop them, and they'd clatter on the pie plate. And he'd wake up and he'd write down whatever he was thinking, because he really believed he got some interesting ideas. So he may have thought it was only 1%, but he knew it was an important 1%. And so you need to go back and forth between these two. You just can't always keep your nose to the grindstone and still expect to be able to always be ultimately productive. And as I was saying earlier, really, I'm just interested in understanding the brain and how we do this kind of problem-solving. But there are implications for that. And one of them turns out that you can't attend with high degree of focus and loose focus at the same time. And so you definitely need to trade off at some point in order to take advantage of all the hard work you did before to then remember it and therefore be trained on it and then to see the right pattern and make use of it and maybe come up with creative solutions as well. And I think that's what's so interesting. When you look at some of the history of breakthroughs, like Sir Isaac Newton, it's sort of like this oscillation between deep study and concentration and these kind of idle moments like you're talking about. So he's somebody that was deeply steeped in the study of physical science. And then one evening after dinner, he's hanging out in the garden, he's idle, it's kind of relaxed, he's drinking tea and this apple falls, it's like, oh, gravity. So it's like you need that oscillation between those two kind of poles. And I think the other things that's very interesting to kind of get back to the sense that leisure being productive, that you need these breaks for your brain, for your life, for your productivity. We talk about these 10,000 hours of deliberate practice. This is something that came out a couple of years ago. 10,000 hours and then you become a master at something. Well, that was a study that was based, that was done by this guy named Anders Erickson out of Florida. And he went over to Berlin to the Academy of Music there and he wanted to see what's the difference between the most excellent virtuoso musicians and the people on the teacher track. And what he discovered is how they organized their days was very much that same oscillation, the virtuosos, they would work in these intense pulses and then it would have intense periods of rest. So the picture of their day looked like these steep mountain peaks, whereas the people more on the teacher track, they kind of had this kind of constant habituation, sort of like the same pattern all the time. So I think that's a really great thing to remember. Yes, put in those 10,000 hours, but not constant 10,000 hours. Successive, yes. You need those breaks, you need the peaks and valleys. So I think we ought to have time for a couple of questions. Are there any questions out there? I see the first hand that went up close to the mic, right there, yes. Hi, I'm Maria Saab. I work with NAF. My question is we've seen throughout these past two days a lot of conversations about technology and moving forward and income inequality and lack of jobs. So the implied notion there is we need to work harder and learn more and do more. Do you think in the technological age where we're moving forward at a really fast pace, leisure and mindfulness and wellness can be a counterculture to all that? Is that a possibility or is that going to be difficult to thrive? Or will that have a difficulty thriving? I think you have to have both. I think that with technology and the fast-moving world, and I'd love to hear what you guys have to say, but it's like it's the same thing. More is not more and more is not better no matter what speed you're living in. You have a thought? Well, to me again, productivity is a driver of efficiency. Sorry, technology is a driver of efficiency and therefore productivity which can free some valuable time for leisure. But technology in itself has no effect in itself. It depends on how our structure, our governance, our processes, our managers, our leaders are using it. And this is not in the technology. It is outside the technology. And if we're not able to invent the new way to, we are going through a new economic revolution. And every time there is a new economic revolution, it enters an organizational revolution. And the first industrial revolution of the 17th century created a radically new way of organization. The one at the end of the 19th century created a radically new kind of organization. Today, we are going through a third economic revolution. We can call it globalization, hyper-competition, the networked economy, whatever. It will entail a radically new way of organizing work, of performing work, of managing work. And as long as we have not found this new way, technology will be used in the worst manner for companies or perhaps the best thanks to luck, coincidence, miracle, serendipity. So we need to think about how we organize for this new economic revolution. And technology is just one ingredient in itself. It will not improve work, productivity, and free time for leisure. It depends on the other parameters, the way we structure, manage, organize work, I would say. That's right there. Hi, my name is Yuvan Chong. I'm from Arizona State University. And my question has to do with, we always hear a lot of this data that's very monolithic about work hours increasing or productivity across all industries and all sectors. And I was wondering if the panelists had any information about this being broken down by different sectors and industries, because it seems to me that this data might be skewed by, say, the financial industry or like if you're a big bank, you're working for a big bank and there's a big merger and acquisition thing going on or you have to be on call for a client all the time, that this might actually skew the data so that it seems that maybe not all industries are suffering from this type of issue. Well, I think when you look at the data and you start breaking it down, two things. What really started happening is sort of like a division in work hours. So among white collar workers, to be really clear, that's where the work hours have been climbing since about the 1980s.  Whereas at the same time, for low wage workers or working class folks, their hours have been falling. So that's why, and then you kind of get this average that doesn't really mean anything because you've got really two very different realities. And then you've got people at the lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum who technically have more, you'd say more leisure time, but that's not really great leisure because you're worried. Or they work less hours in one job but they work multiple jobs because they're not making enough to. Right, and so you're cobbling together a bunch of stuff to just try to hang on and make ends meet. And we've learned earlier today, wages have been stagnant or falling and falling in particularly in that low wage category. So the problems of leisure are there as well but they're very different. And the need and the requirement for leisure is just as critical. The good life requires work, love and play and that's for everybody. The only sectors that have been able to improve their productivity is when, thanks to IT, they were able to have more multitasking. There has been a rebound in productivity in the US around 2000, starting in 1998 and ending in 2004. That's the rebound that basically killed the solos paradox. Remember Robert Solo in 1987 wrote his famous article, we see computers everywhere except in the productivity statistics that we should see improve, no improvement. Well, around 2000, a rebound. But why this rebound in productivity? Only in the industrial sectors where you could have multitasking, thanks to IT. What is multitasking? Multitasking means that in the past when you would go to a bank, let's say 30 years ago, you had the tailor, you had the cashier, you had the sales guys. And when there was nobody to whom you could sell a product, the sales guys was reading the newspaper. And the cashers was taking the money from people coming to cash money, et cetera. And when there was nobody caching and the sales guy was perhaps working with a guy asking how can I open a bank account. Today, thanks to IT, people can be connected to potential customers, have on their computer the segments of customers they need to call. They can open a bank account directly. They can give cash to people. So basically, people work more because they are multitasking. The same guy can act in a bank as a tailor, as a sales guy, and as a cashier, so to speak. But if you think about it, what has happened is that there is more hours of work, sorry, there is more minutes of work per hours of presence. More minutes of work per hour of presence. Less idle time. But the extra minutes of work does not create more value than in the past. And more and more it creates less and less value because a lot of this time is spent reporting, meetings, work on work. So this is why the marginal productivity is overall slowing down. And when there are only 24 hours in a day, so when thanks to multitasking you fill up this time, then productivity improvement are bound to slow down. So this is the only sector where people have seen their productivity improve thanks to multitasking. Apart from that, no productivity improvement because we use everywhere the same management solution that are obsolete based on Taylorism, as Bridges was saying, and based on these hard and soft approaches that I'm describing in my book that are totally obsolete across sectors. Well, yes. I feel that the good life requires now that we break for a cocktail reception. I think we all deserve it. Thank you so much. Thank you all. Thank you.


My name is Adolf van der Velen and I am the manager director of the Faculty of Ethnology from Tilburg University in the Netherlands and so as you see I am here in Kerala and I am here because we have a lot of PhD students from India and I visit now in India because I visit families of our PhD students and really I like this country and I hope that more students will come to the Netherlands to study the English Bachelor or the Master of Faculty Society or perhaps for a PhD project. Really you are very welcome in India and I hope that we will connect in the future in India and the Netherlands.