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Mr. DANIEL H. PINK (Author, "Free Agent Nation"): My book is about
the rise of independent workers, free-lancers, e-lancers,
self-employed professionals, proprietors of very small businesses.
And the book tells the story of--of how this new worker arose, what
this new worker's role is in the economy and in our lives, and how
it's really affecting the way we work and the way we live.

LAMB: You open up the book by telling us that you vomited on the vice
president of the United States.

Mr. PINK: It wasn't actually on him; it was in his office.

LAMB: It was close.

Mr. PINK: It was close. Yeah, I was--before I chose the more
honorable work of journalism, I worked in politics for many years, and
most recently as a speechwriter for--chief speechwriter for Vice
President Al Gore. And one day after working way too hard, I left a
meeting in his West Wing office, fainted and began throwing up into a
bowl that was a gift, I think, from the queen of Denmark. And that
was sort of a signal that it was time for me to go and choose a
different way to navigate my work and my life.

LAMB: What years did you work for Vice President Gore?

Mr. PINK: I worked for him, '95, '96 and '97.

LAMB: Why?

Mr. PINK: Why did I work for him?

LAMB: Mm-hmm.

Mr. PINK: Oh, I--I think Al Gore is a terrific leader. I think he's
a very principled man, and he was actually a pretty good boss.
He's--for--especially for a writer. He's someone who's written a book
before. He's someone who was a journalist, so he has respect for the
written word, and he's smart and challenging and really a good person
to work for.

LAMB: Actually didn't want to know so much about him as why be a
speechwriter. What--what got you into that, 'cause you also wrote for
Robert Reich?

Mr. PINK: Yes. What got me into speech writing really was my lack
of aptitude for almost anything else. I had worked in politics for a
long time on a series of losing campaigns and eventually migrated into
the policy and communications side of campaigns and more and more
found myself writing speeches, because I was--if nothing else, I was a
fast typist. And ended up falling into that world, and--and liking it
quite a bit. I really--I really enjoyed it. It's an interesting
juncture of the communication side of politics and the policy side of
politics.

LAMB: What's your hometown?

Mr. PINK: My hometown is central Ohio; Columbus, Ohio.

LAMB: So where did you get the idea for "Free Agent Nation"?
What--where did that all come together? Those three words?

Mr. PINK: Well, what happened was that I actually ended up becoming
a free agent myself. After I left Al Gore's office, I decided that I
would go out on my own and try to work for myself, because after, you
know, a decade or so of holding a job I said, you know, this job thing
gets a little bit old after a while. Maybe I can be--make the same
amount of money but have a slightly better life if I work for myself.
So I moved from the White House to the third floor of our house in
Washington, DC, the Pink house, and ended up writing speeches and
articles for a series of--of clients.

Now I was fortunate in that my wife had a job and, therefore, health
insurance. So it wasn't necessarily a plunge into free agency, but
kind of a gentle--gentle jump. And so what happened as I started
doing this is I looked around and I said, man, there are a lot of
people who seem to be doing this. And, yet, I realized our
understanding of this world was remarkably, remarkably small. I wrote
a magazine story for a magazine called Fast Company which got an
incredible response from readers, just hundreds of e-mails instantly.
And--but what I said is--you have all these people who are working for
themselves; we don't really know that much about them. And so I said,
well, how does any nation endeavor to understand itself? Well, it
goes out and takes a census. So that's what I decided to do. For
over a year, my wife and I and our--our young daughter and then
another daughter traveled around the United States, and I interviewed
hundreds and hundreds of independent workers about their lives and
their dreams and their troubles to try to get a census of what this
new world of work is about.

LAMB: When did you do that traveling?

Mr. PINK: I did it in the fall of '98, all through '99 and a little
bit of early 2000.

LAMB: How'd you pay for it?

Mr. PINK: The--the fine people at Warner Publishing, who gave me
a--a nice book advance and allowed me to conduct this research.

LAMB: Is this your first book?

Mr. PINK: Yes.

LAMB: Why would they hire you to do a book and give you the kind of
money you needed to travel all over the United States? How did you
convince them that this was a book?

Mr. PINK: Well, I--you know, I--I explained to them how large this
population of people was, how there really is not a comprehensive
coverage of this phenomenon. And to my mind, and as--as many
reviewers have said, this is really one of the most important, if not
the most significant phenomenon in the world of work today, especially
after the dot-com collapse. There was all this hype about dot-com
this and dot-com that. But I really think the most fundamental
economic change is in the form of how people work and there hasn't
been a comprehensive account of what it looks like, how it happened
and where it's going.

LAMB: How old are you?

Mr. PINK: Thirty-seven.

LAMB: Where did you meet your wife?

Mr. PINK: I met my wife in law school, one of the--probably the only
valuable thing I got out of law school.

LAMB: And what's her name?

Mr. PINK: Well, her name is Jessica Lerner.

LAMB: And--and where'd you go to law school?

Mr. PINK: Yale Law School. So I met--I met my wife at Yale Law
School and...

LAMB: Is she a lawyer?

Mr. PINK: She was. She's now--she now is a free agent. Takes--also
takes care of our kids. But I met my wife at law school, which was,
as I said, about the only valuable thing I got out of law school.

LAMB: Now you--how'd you move around the United States?

Mr. PINK: What we would do is we would usually fly to a particular
region and then from that region kind of be camped there for a few
weeks and then drive out. So we would go to Northern Cal--we'd go to
Northern California, fly, say, to San Francisco, fan out from San
Francisco for a few weeks. Some of the--some portion of it I did by
myself. Los Angeles, I did by myself. Seattle, I did by myself.

LAMB: How old was your daughter--your first daughter when...

Mr. PINK: She was--she started the road show when we--when she was
two.

LAMB: How old--what's her name?

Mr. PINK: Sophie.

LAMB: You now have another one?

Mr. PINK: Eliza.

LAMB: And she was on this trip at some point?

Mr. PINK: She--she came--well, she came into the picture in 1999.
So she missed some of the early stages of the trip and ended up taking
some of the later stages in '99 and early 2000.

LAMB: How many people did you talk to?

Mr. PINK: Oh, boy. Face-to-face interviews was well over 300. I
also did a number of phone interviews. I have a Web site,
FreeAgentNation.com, where I did a--an online census, also of free
agents. So I had about 12--over 1,100 people who filled out a kind of
mock census about what--how they operated their lives.

LAMB: Name one person that you talked to that you thought was
interesting and tell us why.

Mr. PINK: Betty Fox. Betty Fox...

LAMB: Grandma Betty?

Mr. PINK: Grandma Betty, also known as GrandmaBetty.com. Grandma
Betty is a--now a 70-year-old woman. When I met her, she was 68 years
old. And at the age of 67, she found herself in a really serious
predicament. Betty Fox was widowed at a very young age, in her early
30s. And this is at the time that Betty Friedan, another Betty from
New York, was urging women to seize the work force. But Betty Fox
found herself getting seized by the work force. She was widowed, she
had two sons to raise and so she took a series of jobs. The jobs were
not high-level, high-paying jobs. And she would end up losing a job
here and there, all--not because of her performance, but because the
company would go under.

And so finally at age 67, she--this woman, 67-year-old woman in
Bayside, Queens, her company moves too far away for her to commute.
And so here she is, out of work, no pension and a long time to live on
this Earth. And so what she did is she--her--her son Marty had--was a
bank technology officer. He hooked her up with something called
WebTV, which allows people to surf the Internet using their television
set. And before long, Betty started looking around, and she said,
`Wow, there's some really interesting material out here, particularly
for older Americans like me. But it's a mess, it's poorly organized,
it's hard to find things.'

So she started organizing it herself. Her son got her a domain--that
is, GrandmaBetty.com--she started organizing her sites, and before
long, people started coming. She started getting e-mails about where
to make--how to make peanut brittle, where to get--solve certain
health problems, where to buy certain kinds of clothing. And she
would dutifully, in her Queens living room, answer all these e-mails.
And before long, almost unbeknownst to herself, she had created what
the Internet gurus call a portal. And before long, she started
getting advertising and affiliate relationships.

And so here's this woman who went from having no job and having a
somewhat bleak set of circumstances to using the Internet and using
her own gumption to establish a presence on the Web. And at the end
of the book, I talk about Grandma Betty was eventually acquired. She
had these venture-backed Internet companies come to her apartment in
Bayside, Queens, and sit across from her, just as you and I are
sitting right now, and say, `Grandma Betty, we want to buy you out.'
And she drove a very hard bargain and remained--she ended up taking a
nice deal with a company called iGrandparents but remained a free
agent. Still alive, still working out of her living room in Bayside,
Queens.

LAMB: So many of these dot-coms have failed. Does this group make
it?

Mr. PINK: The free agents?

LAMB: Yeah.

Mr. PINK: Oh, sure, because the free agents were not--free agents
had--had less exposure. Free--Betty Fox is making it--is making it
great. These free--the--the dot-coms that failed ended up burning
through, as everybody knows, tens of millions of dollars of venture
capital. Free agents--if you work for yourself, you can't--you have
to make a profit almost from day one. And if you don't make a profit
from day one, you're in trouble.

LAMB: Name another person and tell us a story.

Mr. PINK: Another person who I--I really enjoyed was a woman named
Deborah Risi, who is in Northern California. She worked at a number
of high-tech firms--Apple Computer, probably the most prominent--and
eventually tired of it. Now what was interesting, one of the things
that--that had her make the break--and I heard this repeatedly in
a--in a--in a lot of interviews, and--and it really surprised me,
the--the frequency it was mentioned--was she ended up leaving because
of ethical disagreements with the company. And that really surprised
me in a lot of these interviews. People said, `Well, you know, the
reason I left was I didn't really--I was asked to do something I
didn't think was quite right.' And so there's a sense of people want
a greater freedom of conscience in their work than they are able to
get.

But anyway, Deb Risi left her job and ended up working as a marketing
consultant for herself. She subsequently adopted two children from
Cambodia, so she's a single mom, free agent, and she has this one
interesting element, one interesting part of her story where she
decided to buy a house. And the bank said to her, `We're not going to
give you a mortgage. You don't have a job.' And she said, `Wait a
second. I'm here in Silicon Valley, where companies come and go, you
know, like the sun, and you're going to tell--you're telling me that
you're not going to give me a loan because I don't have a job?
Listen, I've got six clients.' And so she shows her clients. `I've
got six clients. If one of these clients goes away, I'm going to
still make my payments. But if I'm working at WebVan, say, and WebVan
disappears, you're not going to get your payments.'

And so she tried to convince these--this bank loan officer that she
was actually a safer risk working for herself than she would have been
holding a job. And I think that right there says a lot about how work
and risk have changed in America.

LAMB: How would you contact somebody in your survey?

Mr. PINK: That's an interesting question. It's a--it's a very
aggressive reporting job. I would use contacts, and contacts of
contacts. I--I don't know how I could have reported this book without
e-mail. So what I would do is I would send out an e-mail to contacts
in a particular region, saying, `I'm going to do this reporting.
Anybody who I should talk to?' And get a few more e-mails back; I
would ask them questions as well. I...

LAMB: What were you looking for?

Mr. PINK: I was looking for a wide variety of experience and
backgrounds; people who had just started, people who had always been
doing it.

LAMB: But they had to be free agents?

Mr. PINK: Yes. Yeah.

LAMB: So you only interviewed free agents?

Mr. PINK: Yes. Absolutely. 'Cause I was taking a census of free
agent nation. I didn't interview--well, I interviewed a couple of
people who were contemplating going into free agency, but I wanted to
get a picture for the universe of people who were working for
themselves.

LAMB: Tell me everything that a free agent has to be. What are they?

Mr. PINK: In terms of their attributes?

LAMB: Yeah. I mean, what ma--what would make me a free agent? What
would you have to be?

Mr. PINK: Well, you would have to be working for yourself. You
would have to be largely untethered from a large organization and not
dependent on an institution or an employer. So, again, one of the
interesting things here is the term `free agent' is--is an imperfect
term. I mean, in some sense, it's modeled after the term `the
organization man,' which came out in William White's book in the
1950s. And what he said is, when he described the organization man in
his book, he said, `I use this term--I can think of no other better
way to describe the people I'm talking about.' And that's what I feel
with free agents. I can think of no other term to describe the people
I'm talking about.

So there isn't, say, a pure, scientific definition of who's a free
agent and who's not. But people--and even people in the traditional
world of work often think of themselves as free agents. But what I
focused on in my interviews and in my census was people who worked for
themselves.

LAMB: Who was William White?

Mr. PINK: William White was a--a fabulous journalist at--mostly at
Fortune magazine in the 1940s, '50s and '60s who ended up using
journalism as a forum of just incredibly insightful sociology. And so
he--he wrote the book "The Organization Man." He also did some really
fascinating studies where he would--he studied how--where corporations
located and--and made the incredible finding that the main decision
about where a company's headquarters was, was proximity to the CEO's
home. He also spent some time literally standing on the streets of
New York watching how people interacted. So he was kind of an
anthropologist/sociologist/journalist. Just a remarkable--he died
about two years ago--a remarkable figure in American journalism.

LAMB: Did you meet him?

Mr. PINK: No, I didn't. I didn't. He passed away, as I said,
about--about two years ago. And I...

LAMB: How successful was the book "The Organization Man"?

Mr. PINK: The book did very well. The book was kind of a surprise
best-seller because it was a little bit on the academic side even
though it was written by a journalist. And it's really endured over
the years. I mean, you and I could have a conversation about "The
Organization Man" and we can--you can say the phrase and people can
nod and know what you're talking about, because that term has become
such a part of our vocabulary.

LAMB: You say in your book that `managers are toast.'

Mr. PINK: I agree with that, and I'm glad I do, 'cause I wrote it.
The--why are managers toast? Well, I tend to think of most managers
at most companies sort of subscribed to the vice principal school of
management. That is, they act almost as vice principals of the
workplace. Their job is to get people in trouble, to watch what
people are doing, to give people detention, to give people hall
passes. And I think that that way of working, that way of managing is
fundamentally flawed and outdated. Most workers are self-motivated.
Most workers, talented workers especially, need organizations much
less than organizations need talented workers.

So I think the manager of the future is a very different kind of
figure, someone who is in--a very astute judge of talent; someone who
is able to marshal talent for the particular task; someone who
operates--sort of my model for this is--is a combination of Phil
Jackson, the great LA Lakers basketball coach, Penny Marshall, who is
an actress and a writer and a director in Hollywood, and Steve Rubell,
the guy who founded Studio 54, who became a great party-giver. So
it's someone who can attract talent, assemble them for a particular
task, really understand the idiosyncrasies of individual talent and
get the most out of them.

LAMB: Will you be a free agent in 20 years?

Mr. PINK: I think so. I think so. We can have a--we can do this
show again in 20 years and we can find out. But I--I--I--I think so.
It's hard--no--again, there--there are certain, you know--there's
a--you--you write a book like "Free Agent Nation" and use the
terminology of free agency and describe this world as a nation and
people declaring their independence, and it's somewhat--somewhat
misleading, because it's not as if you become a free agent--that is,
if you leave corporate America to go to free agent nation, it's the
same as leaving Cuba and swimming to Florida and you have to turn
around and denounce Castro. It's less stark than that. I think more
and more people in the work force--and this might even be the most
profound change--are essentially going to hold dual passports, one in
free agent nation, one in corporate America, and migrate back and
forth between the two.

Now in the days of "The Organization Man," that was impossible. If
you left an organization and said to your boss, `You know what? I'm
going to try to make it on my own for a few years,' and then came back
five years later and said, `I--I'm ready to come back,' there's no way
they would have taken you. But today, corporate employers are
recognizing that a stint in s--in self-employment makes a worker
extremely valuable.

LAMB: Columbus, Ohio, your hometown.

Mr. PINK: Yes.

LAMB: You--you met your wife at Yale. Where were you before Yale?

Mr. PINK: I was a--I graduated from Northwestern University.

LAMB: In what subject?

Mr. PINK: In linguistics, of course.

LAMB: Linguistics?

Mr. PINK: Yes.

LAMB: Why were you studying it?

Mr. PINK: It's--linguistics is a fascinating topic and in--in a way,
its language that's at the juncture of both science and the
humanities. So I ended up taking both a lot--courses in poetry but
also courses in the psychol--you know, the--the--the circuitry of the
brain. So it--so it's--to me, linguistics was a quintessential
liberal arts discipline.

LAMB: What were your parents doing? Are--are they still active? Are
they still busy? What do they do?

Mr. PINK: Yes. My father's a free agent. He was actually an
organization man for many years. He's a chemist. He worked for--for
over a quarter of a century for a large research organization
connected to Ohio State University. My mother was a schoolteacher;
now she works doing social service programs for older people.

LAMB: What year did you graduate from Northwestern?

Mr. PINK: '86.

LAMB: And from Yale Law School?

Mr. PINK: '91.

LAMB: So what happened then?

Mr. PINK: Well, the--I graduated from college; I ended up working
here in Washington for one of Ralph Nader's groups. Pretty
interesting group that organized buyers of heating oil to exercise
greater leverage in the marketplace. I actually started law school
and left because I didn't like it and ended up going to India for a
while to...

LAMB: What'd you do in India?

Mr. PINK: I worked--I traveled around; I also worked for a legal aid
organization. You can live--in the mid-1980s, you could live pretty
cheaply in India if you were a single man in his early 20s.

LAMB: How--how did you get involved with Ralph Nader?

Mr. PINK: Through contacts of contacts. I didn't work directly with
Nader. I worked from one of his constellation of--of groups.

LAMB: D--doing what?

Mr. PINK: I did media and outreach, trying to get people to join
this cluster of consumers who exercised their power in the
marketplace.

LAMB: First politician you worked for?

Mr. PINK: First politician I worked for was a guy name Sherrod
Brown, who is now a congressman from Ohio. He was--used to be Ohio's
secretary of State. He actually was elected Ohio secretary of State
when he was probably eight years younger than I am right now. And
worked writing speeches for him.

LAMB: And then other campaigns you worked on?

Mr. PINK: Well, the two most prominent figures would be President
Bob Kerrey and Senator Geraldine Ferraro. I worked on Bob Kerrey's
presidential campaign in 1992. I also worked in Geraldine Ferraro's
Senate race. Those are the two most prominent people--politicians for
whom I've worked.

LAMB: In the middle of your book, you find yourself in Terre Haute,
Indiana...

Mr. PINK: Right.

LAMB: ...and you find yourself in the Eugene V. Debs Home and at the
Larry Bird Motel.

Mr. PINK: Mm-hmm.

LAMB: But out of that--I mean, what I'm getting at is--here is this
whole business of where you are politically and the union part of
this. And you--you--you've discovered something there.

Mr. PINK: Yeah.

LAMB: What was it?

Mr. PINK: Yeah. Well, what I discovered is--I think the traditional
labor unions, particularly industrial labor unions, have become passe.
They've become ineffective. I don't think they're necessarily that
great for workers. But I don't think that unions are dead. In fact,
I think free agents--free agency could trigger a rather robust union
movement. But the unions I'm talking about are more of the crafts
unions, the building trades unions, the entertainment industry unions.
What I think is going to happen is that smart unions are going to
recognize that, hey, you know what, we're becoming more and more a
free agent economy. The idea that you can negotiate 10-year
collective bargaining agreements, five-year collective bargaining
agreements with large employers, it just doesn't work.

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Mr. PINK: What unions need to do and what many workers in this
economy are crying out for are a place to learn new skills, a place to
get health insurance and other types of benefits, a place to meet
other people in your profession. And so that's what the building
trades unions do. That's what the entertainment unions do. To a
large extent, that's what the--the sports unions do. And so what I
sort of had this moment in--in Terre Haute, Indiana, of all places,
having visited the Eugene V. Debs Home, this great labor leader who
ran for president, and also staying at the Larry Bird Motel--Larry
Bird is from--Larry Bird went to college in Terre Haute, Indiana--in
professional basketball labor negotiations, there's something called a
Larry Bird exception, where c--where teams in--in--in--in the NBA
there's a salary cap. Teams can only pay a certain amount of money
for all their players. If they want to hire a free agent, they can't
bust that salary cap. But they can keep one of their own players and
bust the salary cap. That's known as the Larry Bird exception.

And what I realized is that more and more work is actually becoming
this kind of AFL-CIO/NBA type arrangement so that I think the unions
of the future, the worker groups of the future are gonna be very much
like the sports unions; that is, they're going to have a union that
sets a--a minimum, maybe a salary minimum, basic working conditions.
And then beyond that, people are going to be represented by agents.
More and more--something like 5 percent of workers who earn more than
$75,000 a year are represented by talent agents.

LAMB: What did you learn at the Eugene V. Debs Home?

Mr. PINK: Oh, I--I learned that, you know, the--the--the idea
that--this notion that the economy is changing and someone needs to
represent workers is not a--is--is obviously an enduring American
tradition. And it's expressed--it expresses itself in fundamentally
different ways.

LAMB: Have you paid much attention to him, by the way, in history
before you got there?

Mr. PINK: Not significantly. You know, there's not much to do in
Terre Haute, so--you know, there are only really two real big sites to
see. And I just sort of inadvertently made this connection.

LAMB: He ran for president--What?--s--five or six times.

Mr. PINK: Yeah, a few times. He was in prison for a while.

LAMB: Released by Warren G. Harding, I believe.

Mr. PINK: I think so, yeah.

LAMB: Pardoned and all that.

Mr. PINK: Yeah.

LAMB: But--but was involved in--can the--in the railroads. Could--is
there--could that duplicate itself, the kind of world we had back when
he was involved in the labor movement?

Mr. PINK: I don't think so. I--I think that that--but--but, again,
that sort of labor activism arose because of the circumstances of the
underlying economy. And I think that--that a new sort of labor
movement could emerge based on the circumstances of this economy. So
what workers really need to--no workers expect lifetime employment at
a single company. But what I--what I think workers do demand and what
they want are valuable places to work, interesting places to work,
benefits--it's a big issues; health-care benefits, retirement
benefits--and a way to learn new skills, because today you--you learn
some skills for a job, it's not like you can do it for 30 years. You
have to constantly, constantly sharpen your skills. And workers are
looking for a venue to do that.

LAMB: OK. Go back here, in '98 and part of '99. You're traveling
around. What's--what's your wife thinking about all this? Does she
like this traveling around and...

Mr. PINK: I think so. I think she likes it.

LAMB: Did she help you in any way?

Mr. PINK: She helped me by taking our daughter to the zoos so I
could do my--my interviews. And--and my wife was a--just an
incredible sounding board for a lot of these ideas. My wife is a much
more rigorous thinker than I am. You know, in law school I was in the
portion of the class that made the top 90 percent possible. And she
was someone who was getting straight As through college, straight As
through law school and has a very keen left-brain sense of what's a
strong argument and what's not. And so I cannot make an argument--I
cannot run an argument past her and--without it getting significantly
sharpened in the course of our conversation.

LAMB: Has it dawned on you that Bill Clinton's 55 years old and he
and his wife went to Yale and met at Yale and--there you are, 37. You
met your wife at Yale.

Mr. PINK: Yeah, I--I think it's dawned on me. I mean, his book deal
was much more lucrative than mine.

LAMB: Did--but--but what was the circumstances you--when you met her?

Mr. PINK: I was in the class ahead of her and...

LAMB: Isn't that about the same situation?

Mr. PINK: You know, I'm not sure. I never really--I never really
looked at the Clintons as a--as a model for my romantic life.

LAMB: Well, the reason I mention this...

Mr. PINK: Yeah.

LAMB: ...is because you're obviously interested in politics...

Mr. PINK: Yeah.

LAMB: ...but you then talking about Bill Clinton as being...

Mr. PINK: Yeah.

LAMB: ...the `just in time politician' of this age.

Mr. PINK: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

LAMB: What does that mean, `just in time' politician?

Mr. PINK: Well--`just in time.' In order to understand it, we have
to take a step backward. American manufacturing h--rehabilitated
itself in the early 1990s through a practice called just in time
manufacturing. It used to be that companies would make a whole bunch
of a product, stick it in a warehouse and have these huge inventory of
products and wait for customers to order them. And we would go into
recessions when you had a big industry--big inventory overhang. Now,
in part, that's what's happening right now in the economy. We have
excess inventory. So just in time manufacturing has not been the
perfect panacea for American manufacturing.

But a company like Dell Computer is a good example. Dell's inventory
l--is only about a day. So someone takes an order from Dell, Dell
goes out and gets the parts, assembles the particular computer that
the consumer wants, ships it to them. I think that our politics are
moving in that direction--have moved in that direction. We used
to--the task of political leaders used to be to maintain a coalition.
Democrats had racial minorities, environmentalists and labor unions.
Republicans had big business, social conservatives. And the goal of
the leaders of these parties was to keep this big coalition intact, to
make sure nobody fell off of the wagon. And, in a sense, it's
basically making sure you have a giant inventory of voters and
constituents.

But I--but because of disenchantment with politics, because of the
rise of independent voters, because of some changes in the economy,
it's no longer possible for--for most parties to maintain these giant
inventories of supporters. So s--effective leaders, smart leaders
practice what I call `just in time' politics. They assemble the right
coalition for the right task. And we see that in--and I think Bill
Clinton was a master at this. Bill Clinton, I think, understood this.
He didn't call it that, of course. I think he understood that, and I
think he was masterfully skilled at doing it.

So you take something like the '93 budget agreement. Passed with one
vote in the House; one vote in the Senate. We had this--and it was a
strange coalition of people who voted for that. Although that one was
mostly Democrats, but--but it was--it was a particular coalition.
Then he passes NAFTA. Well, who--organized labor leaves him,
environmentalists leave him, but he does a coalition of free market
thinkers, of Republicans and fashions another coalition; wins by one
vote. And the coverage of him had this kind of "Perils of Pauline"
quality. `Can Bill Clinton do it?' `Is it going to get the votes?'
`Can he summon the--the will of all these people and pass this thing?'

And there was a--a lot of the commentary was, oh, he's not an
effective leader. Look, he has these "Perils of Pauline" travails in
order to pass legislation. But to my mind, that was very much like in
these days of waning party loyalty, of an even split in the parties,
of very strong special interest groups, that would have been like some
securities analyst saying, `Can Dell fix Brian--get Brian Lamb his
computer? It only has one day of parts. Can it get the CPU? Can it
get the screen? Oh, my gosh, it shipped the product.' And so I think
our politics now, especially right now where the Senate and the House
are basically split, where the last election was essentially a tie,
that our politics are really `just in time' politics, and Bill Clinton
is a true master of that.

LAMB: Does Al Gore practice `just in time' politics?

Mr. PINK: I mean, I think if Al Gore were elected president, he
would have had to. I think any smart leader has to do that in order
to get their--their legislation--to get anything through. I mean, we
have essentially a dead split in this country politically. And
so--and I also think that a lot of the alignment of voters and of
special interests and--and of interest groups is--is no longer
permanent. I mean, Virginia Postrel, her book "The Future and Its
Enemies" talks about dynamism/stasis as a dividing line in how
political thinkers and political groups are operating.

LAMB: But the--I'm glad you brought up Virginia Postrel, because she
endorses your book.

Mr. PINK: Right.

LAMB: She's Reason magazine. She's a libertarian.

Mr. PINK: Right.

LAMB: But you also have Tom Peters, who gives you a strong--`the best
book on work life since William H. White.' What'd that cost you?

Mr. PINK: Cost me sending him a manuscript.

LAMB: Steve Case says, `"Free Agent Nation" is the shape of things to
come in the Internet century.' What'd that cost you?

Mr. PINK: You know what? These blurbs are--these blurbs are free.

LAMB: Did you--do you know these folks?

Mr. PINK: Well, I know Virginia Postrel. I mean, I've met Virginia
Postrel in the course of doing my reporting. I'd actually written a
couple of speeches for Steve Case. Tom Peters, I had--I had met maybe
once in my life.

LAMB: Naomi Wolfe...

Mr. PINK: Yeah.

LAMB: ...the woman that--the alpha-beta woman that advised Al Gore.
She says, `A groundbreaking book, a readable and persuasive
benchmark.'

Mr. PINK: And that--that's partly because women are su--are playing
such a prominent role in the free agent economy.

LAMB: How so?

Mr. PINK: Well, first of all, women are becoming self-employed at 12
times the rate of men. Women--there are a lot of women out there in
the work force who are hitting a glass ceiling and not being able to
make it to the upper ranks of corporations. And they figure they'll
be better off on their own. But there are also a lot of women who
don't even hit the glass ceiling, who look up there and say, `Man, I
don't want to be there anyway.' So they're finding that the best way
to navigate their work lives is to go out on their own, and women, for
a whole set of reasons, tend to be extremely effective free agents.

LAMB: You consider yourself a Democrat?

Mr. PINK: I'm a registered Democrat in the Dis--I'm--well, I live in
the District of Columbia. I'm a registered Democrat.

LAMB: The reason I asked was because, you know, Virginia Postrel...

Mr. PINK: Yeah.

LAMB: ...and Naomi Wolfe and all these different names in here...

Mr. PINK: Yeah.

LAMB: ...where is this heading in politics, though, because your
survey...

Mr. PINK: Yeah.

LAMB: ...your online survey...

Mr. PINK: Yeah.

LAMB: ...and all, tilted more--the--the people that answered are more
Democratic than Republican, you say?

Mr. PINK: Yeah, in the survey, right.

LAMB: Is this a Republican-Democratic split? Are free agents
Democrats?

Mr. PINK: I don't think that either party really understands this.
I mean, I think the Democrats tend to look at free agents as people
who are being cast out into this e--this--this perilous world of work
by evil corporations, and Republicans tend to think of self-employed
people as modern-day Babbitts who don't believe in any role in
government, who don't believe in any kind of form of social justice.
And I think both are fundamentally, fundamentally misguided. I'll
give you an example. You know, today in America, fewer than one out
of 10 workers--belongs in the private sector belongs to a labor union.
Fewer than one out of 10 workers works for a Fortune 500 company. Yet
our politics, national politics especially, are this pitched battle
between big business and big labor, when most Americans have a rather
scant connection to either group.

LAMB: I almost took you up on your offer in this book. I think you
may know what I'm talking about because I read a book a week.
You--you--you're going to make it easy for people like me. I didn't.
But--and that is that you--you have a technique in here, and I've
basically earmarked all of them, where you've got one page on each
chapter that can kind of tell you everything.

Mr. PINK: Yeah.

LAMB: Why'd you do that?

Mr. PINK: I respect people's time. What I'm asking people, as an
author, is to make a very significant commitment to me. They don't
know me. They have to be--to--her--hear about the book, and they have
to make a significant commitment. They have to pay $17, $18 for the
book, and they have to spend perhaps six or seven hours reading it.
That's a significant commitment for people to make. So I want to make
it as easy for them as possible. So what I did at--done at the end of
every chapter was fashion something that I call The Box. The Box has
four elements to it. One element is what I call The Crux, which
explains the point of the chapter in about 150 words or--or fewer.
There's also a--an entry called The Factoid, which is one startling
factoid from the chapter. There is a section called The Quote, which
offers one representative quote from the chapter, and there's an--an
entry called The Word. And every chapter, because of--the work is
changing so fast and our vocabulary is racing to catch up with it,
there are many new words, some of which I've coined myself--tried to
coin myself, that this new world of work has spawned. So I like to
offer a little vocabulary word in every chapter. So the point is,
someone who wants to read this book might not want to read every
single chapter. They can look at The Box, get the gist of it and--and
move on. Other people who want to come back to it--a lot of readers
who've e-mailed me have told me that they--they like The Box, so they
can--if they forget something, they can come back to it and be
reminded of it.

LAMB: Can people get to you on e-mail now if they--they're watching
this show?

Mr. PINK: Oh, absolutely, yeah. I'm--I--even on the book jacket, I
invite readers to e-mail me. My e-mail address is
dan@freeagentnation.com. I answer every e-mail from every reader.
Again, if you're a writer, people are making--I'm so grateful anytime
anybody reads anything that I write, anytime anybody picks up anything
that I write because they are investing their time and their brain
power in hearing what I have to say. And I am firmly committed to
hearing what they have to say, too, and responding to them.

LAMB: Dan@...

LAMB and Mr. PINK: (In unison) ...freeagentnation.com.

LAMB: All right. I'm going to go through and pick out some factoids
and see what you say about them.

Mr. PINK: Yeah.

LAMB: Here's the factoid in the first chapter. `The largest private
employer in the United States is not Detroit's General Motors, Ford or
even Seattle's Microsoft or Amazon.com, but Milwaukee
Manpower--Milwaukee's Manpower Incorporated, a temp agency.'

Mr. PINK: Mm-hmm.

LAMB: How big is it?

Mr. PINK: It has 1,100 offices. It employs more workers than any
other corporation in America today. That is a remarkable, remarkable
change.

LAMB: Why?

Mr. PINK: Why is it a remarkable change...

LAMB: Yeah.

Mr. PINK: ...or why do they do it?

LAMB: No. Why is it a remarkable change?

Mr. PINK: Well, because it used to be that someone could go to
General Motors and work there for 30 years. General Motors would have
this incredible roster of fixed talent and employees and would just be
this behemoth. And now essentially what people are--many people are
doing is working for Manpower. That is, they get a W-2, the--the
paycheck and--and tax form, from Manpower and are the employer of
Manpower, but actually do assignments at other places.

LAMB: Eleven thousand offices?

Mr. PINK: Eleven hundred.

LAMB: I'm sorry.

Mr. PINK: Yeah.

LAMB: Eleven hundred offices, and that's the largest employer in the
United States?

Mr. PINK: Yeah.

LAMB: How many?

Mr. PINK: I think it's up--upwards of one million?

LAMB: Factoid from chapter two. `Two out of three workers in
California do not hold traditional jobs, the permanent year-round,
full-time outside-the-home employment arrangement that is the basis of
nearly all American labor laws and social assumptions.' Why only in
California?

Mr. PINK: Well, because that's where the study came out of. The
study was from the University of San Francisco, and it looked at how
many people in California have the kind of job where you leave the
house in the morning, go to work somewhere else, work for someone
else, do it full-time, year-around. Essentially, the kind of job on
which our social assumptions are based, our health insurance system is
based. And in California, only one out of three workers works that
way, which is remarkable when you think about how our--our tax system
is--is girded to this way of working, our health insurance system is
working to this--is girded to this way of working. Even our
transportation systems are based on the idea that this is the norm of
how people work. And California has been on the edge of basically
every trend in the last 40 years. So if two out of three workers in
California have so-called non-traditional jobs, to me, that's a
warning sign for the rest of the country.

LAMB: Factoid in the third chapter: `85 percent of Americans today
were not alive during the Great Depression, which means most of the
country lacks any conscious recollection of widespread economic
privation.'

Mr. PINK: Privation, yeah.

LAMB: Yeah.

Mr. PINK: The significance of that, I think, is--is quite
interesting. The--the default assumption of work in this country, I
think, has changed. It used to be that the default assumption, say in
my grandfather's day, was the fear of privation. Because the Great
Depression was widespread economic privation, privation that reached
deep into the middle class. But now seven out of eight people in this
country weren't alive during the Great Depression, and they have no
conscious recollection of widespread economic privation. And I
underscore that word privation because recessions, even though they're
painful, are not privation. Or long gas lines are not privation. And
so I think that more and more people today, because of the incredible
prosperity in this country, a country where two out of three people
own the homes they live in, is making people seek from their work not
only money, but meaning.

LAMB: Factoid in chapter four: `A 1999 Lou Harris survey of 1,000
self-employed Americans and small entrepreneurs found that money was
not their top motivator. Nine out of 10 re--respondents said that,
quote, "setting their own priorities and independence influenced their
decision most to go out on their own."' Is that your situation?

Mr. PINK: Oh, sure. And--and actually, that--to me, that was one of
the biggest surprises in doing these interviews--in--in doing these
interviews around the country, and that--that survey simply confirms a
lot of what I found. I thought when I started writing--when I started
researching this and interviewing people that this was a big kind of
hard-headed economics story, that people were being cast to the
periphery by the inexorable forces of information age capitalism, and
that wasn't really what I found. I mean, people were making very
private decisions based on much touchy--touchier, feelier values of
authenticity, of freedom. And almost nobody mentioned money. Not
that free agents don't want to make money, but working this way is
hard enough that people don't--people don't necessarily do it to get
rich.

LAMB: Who was the most--and I've got to be careful how I--what
modifier I use. Who was the most unusual person you interviewed? Or
unusual situation?

Mr. PINK: One of them was a--was a--a guy who is--by the name Bob
Milbourn who's in San Francisco, who came of age in the days of the
organization man, and was so miserable in his company and was so
fearful in his company, which was going through downsizings, that he
asked to be fired. He went to his boss and said, `Please,
just--please, fire me.'

LAMB: What'd he want? The severance?

Mr. PINK: He just wanted--he wanted--no, he actually wanted the
relief from the anxiety of being scared of being--being fired. He
wanted to--he wanted simply the punctuation mark at the end of this
part of his career.

LAMB: What'd he do then?

Mr. PINK: He ended up going out on his own as a free agent, not
necessarily--you know, struggling a little bit, but recognized that
this world of work, working at a big bank, was not for him. But he
lacked somehow the gumption to leap and so he a--asked to be pushed.

LAMB: How many states did you go to, do you think?

Mr. PINK: Ooh, I think it--it was 24? So about half.

LAMB: Well, is there any part of the country you didn't go to?

Mr. PINK: Well, I--I didn't go to Alaska and Hawaii. I didn't go to
some of the big states in the--in the Great Plains--Montana, Idaho,
Wyoming and the Dakotas. But most of the East Coast, most of the West
Coast, a big portion of the Southwest, a big portion of the Midwest.

LAMB: Did you get a sense that some parts of the country are happier
than others?

Mr. PINK: I don't know about happier. I think that in the center of
the country, this form of work is slightly, slightly more exotic than
on the coasts. Seattle and LA and San Francisco, you know, you go
into any Starbucks coffee shop and there are a zillion people sitting
around punching on their laptops. Same is true in New York and even
here in Washington, DC. In the Midwest, I think that there are
pockets where the--the free agent work force is more robust.
Minneapolis is a good example. Chicago is a good example. But in
some of the other pl--in some other places, it's slightly more exotic.

LAMB: Factoid in chapter five: `More than half of American
households now own stocks up from only one in five households in 1983.
In 2000, shareholders outnumbered voters. More citizens owned stock
than cast a ballot for the president of the United States.'

Mr. PINK: Right. I think--and we were talking about the politics
before. I think that is a remarkable fact right there, that we have
more shareholders than voters in this country. And what that does
is--the--the point of that in--in--is to--is to show that people
are--have learned an enormous amount about the stock market,
particularly about the values of diversification. So free agents are
saying, `Why should I invest--if I wouldn't invest all of my financial
capital in a single company, why should I invest all of my human
capital in a single company by working for only one employer? I'm
better off, like--as Deb Risi was--I'm better off with a portfolio of
clients and assignments and projects than I am with a single employer.
I'm diversified.'

LAMB: Chapter six factoid: `Americans work 350 hours more per year
than Europeans and 70 hours more per year than even the Japanese,
whose language contains a word "karoshi," that means death from
overwork.'

Mr. PINK: Mm-hmm. Well, that--that chapter, chapter six, I tried to
figure out how free agents used their time, and what I did was I asked
about 50 people to keep time diaries for a whole week to tell me
everything they did during every half-hour increment of the day, to
try to get a sense of how people navigated the time element of their
life. And what I found is that free agents work about the same number
of aggregate hours as your traditional worker, roughly 41 hours. But
they apportion their time in wildly different ways, very
idiosyncratic, personalized ways. And, you know, I ho--I think that
the--the issue of time and working hours is something that this
country is trying to figure out right now because we do work many more
hours than Japanese work and certainly more than the Europeans work.

LAMB: Why do we?

Mr. PINK: I think it's a mix of reasons. I think for some people,
it's simply necessary to get ahead. If you have a low hourly wage,
you have to work more hours in order to make a living for your family.
But I also think that at the dif--at the other side of the labor
market, there's something more intriguing going on, which is that
people--many people like to work. They work not only to earn a
living--they don't necessarily go to--it's not--it's no longer the
days of everybody goes to the factory, tries to get over with their
job, watches the clock all day, tries to get done with their task as
quickly as possible so they can go home, but I think people get a lot
of satisfaction out of work. And so if you enjoy something, as I
enjoy my work, as many free agents enjoy their work, you actually want
to work a little bit more. So I think it's a kind of a curious mix of
factors.

LAMB: Have you thought of politics yourself?

Mr. PINK: Well, I worked in politics, and that experience was enough
for--for me to swear off of it for a while. For--per--probably
forever, yeah.

LAMB: You don't think you could ever run for office?

Mr. PINK: Oh, no.

LAMB: Why not?

Mr. PINK: Oh, no.

LAMB: What'd you see up close that the average person can't?

Mr. PINK: It's a very, very tough life. Your private life is
incredibly exposed, and I think that--that politics pressures people
to say things that they don't necessarily deeply believe, and that
troubled me a lot. Whereas if you write--if you write for yourself,
you can say what you think and take--and take the consequences. I
also think that the poli--that--that politics is not necess--that
government is not necessarily the most effective way to get things
done. If you work in the executive branch of the government, you come
in thinking, `OK, we can do all kinds of great things, we can change
everything.' And after a few years, you think, `Oh, my gosh, it's a
wonder that anything is accomplished.'

LAMB: You worked for Robert Reich...

Mr. PINK: Yeah.

LAMB: ...the former Labor secretary and Bill--Al--Al Gore, but you
saw the Bill Clinton operation up close.

Mr. PINK: Sure.

LAMB: What's the deal between Robert Reich and Bill Clinton? Why did
they not--I mean, wha--what--what--you hear a lot of criticism now
about Robert Reich. What's that all about? I mean, what did you see
up close? Wha--why was Robert Reich...

Mr. PINK: Well, I worked for--I worked for Bob Reich in the--in
early 19--early to mid 1990s, and their relationship seemed fine. I
have no idea what's going on between them. They haven't--neither one
has let me in on that secret.

LAMB: Well, I just wondered if--if Robert Reich was--when he got out,
whether or not he was discouraged by what he had seen happen, when he
saw what actually happens up close with politics.

Mr. PINK: Maybe. I mean, his book is a very entertaining book
"Locked in the Cabinet." Talks about some of that.

LAMB: All right. Factoid in chapter seven: `One of the earliest
self-organized clusters of free agents, Benjamin Franklin's Junto,
formed in 1727, created a subscription library for its members which
in turn became the first public library in America.' Why is that in
this?

Mr. PINK: Yeah. Well, one of the intriguing things that I found was
you have this notion of people are working for themselves, they're
isolated and lonely, they're stuck in their home offices working by
themselves. And what I found is that many, many independent workers
are fashioning these very small groups that meet once a month to talk
about business, to talk about life. They're sort of one part board of
directors, one part group therapy. And I found this absolutely
fascinating, these kind of self-organized tiny groups of people who
are meeting regularly.

And then I started doing some more research, and I realized, as
always, there's nothing new under the sun; that Benjamin Franklin, in
1727, started he--the very same kind of group that lasted, I think,
for 40 years and became as you--as you said, the basis for the first
subscription library. And it was a group of free agents. It was
small merchants who would meet once a week above an ale house in
Philadelphia to talk about work, and--and Franklin would assign each
mem--one particular member to write an essay about a topic of the day
and they would discuss it. So this idea that Americans--free agency,
I think, is a very, very quintessentially American phenomenon.
Americans have this incredible capacity to form small groups, whether
it's Bible study groups or whether it's support groups for disease
or--or whether it's these new small groups for work.

LAMB: All right. Factoid, chapter eight: `In sociologist Mark
Granovetter's'...

Mr. PINK: Yeah.

LAMB: ...`classic study of how people find jobs, he discovered that
most people found them through contacts.'

Mr. PINK: Yeah. Not through people who they were very close to.
That is...

LAMB: Yeah.

Mr. PINK: Well, the--the--people found--most people find jobs not
through classified ads or through Internet job sites, but through
contacts. And most of their co--the contacts that are most valuable,
he found, were not the strong ties, not your wife finds you a job or
your son finds you a job, but weak ties, one or two degrees of
separation away. Because those weak ties allow you entr--entree into
worlds that you don't necessarily know. So in his study, he found
that most men found their--his study of workers in--in Boston, most
found their jobs through contacts, but not through close contacts,
through somewhat distant contacts.

LAMB: What impact does that have on us?

Mr. PINK: Oh, well, free agency--he described in--in, I think, very
beautiful terms, the--the difference between strong ties--that is,
say, your spouse, or weak ties, someone who you don't know that well.
And he found that what he called the strength of weak ties, that weak
ties allowed you incredible mobility and entrees to new opportunities
and I find that the free agent economy depends very significantly on
weak ties. Someone's social safety net is their--is their network of
contacts, and often, the most valuable contacts are contacts that are
one or two degrees of separation away.

LAMB: Chapter 10 factoid: `More than 5 percent of workers who earn
more than $75,000 per year now have agents to negotiate their
employment contracts.'

Mr. PINK: Right. Well, this goes to the Larry Bird, Eugene V. Debs
point, that more and more workers at the high end of the talent market
want to be able to negotiate the best possible deal, and
they're--they're hiring people to do the negotiation for them. It
used to be only athletes and--and actors would have agents; authors as
well. But now, more and more workers have them.

LAMB: How many agents do you have in your life?

Mr. PINK: Two.

LAMB: And they are? What do they do?

Mr. PINK: Oh, well, I have a literary agent, Rafe Sagalyn, terrific
literary agent, and I also have an agent who represents me for
speaking gigs, David Lavin, who's based in Toronto, Canada.

LAMB: And out of all this, have you gotten speaking engagements?

Mr. PINK: Yeah, a few.

LAMB: What do you think of that?

Mr. PINK: I'm a writer. I'm not a--I'm not a--you know, a--a
dog-and-pony show giver.

LAMB: But as a free agent, where is this all headed for you?

Mr. PINK: Oh, I'm--I'm--I'm just hoping to continue to write books
and have interesting conversations about fascinating topics and earn
enough money to support my family.

LAMB: What's your wife doing now? Is she back to work?

Mr. PINK: No, no. She's still at home with our kids.

LAMB: But you did tell a story--I think I understand you to tell a
story about how you got medical insurance...

Mr. PINK: Right.

LAMB: ...because--you had to--What?--employ her?

Mr. PINK: No, no.

LAMB: Explain that.

Mr. PINK: No, although--although it's possible. It--actually, there
are--there are a number of people who are--who are free agents who are
taking a--a--a twist in the tax code to employ their spouse and
because of their benevolence as an employer, give their spouse a very
full set of health insurance because today, if you're self-employed,
your health insurance--you can only deduct 60 percent of your health
insurance premiums. But companies that employ people and pay their
health insurance premiums can deduct 100 percent. So there's a big
imbalance there as well.

LAMB: How many people are doing that?

Mr. PINK: I don't know. I--I--you know, it's a--I--I don't know if
there's any way to quantify it.

LAMB: Factoid in chapter 11: `Small to mid-sized family businesses
account for about 60 percent of all employment in the world.'

Mr. PINK: Mm-hmm.

LAMB: Surprise you?

Mr. PINK: Well, a little bit. I don't--I--because I think
that--that we're conditioned to take as the norm whatever set of
social circumstances we inherit. And so all of us say under the age
of 70 or--or--you know, basically everybody in America today
essentially inherited this world of large organizations and industrial
economy. And we take that as the norm. But, in fact, it's--I think
it could go down as an aberration. It used to be--the industrial
economy separated work and family. It used to be that you would work
at your home, you would work with your family, and that was the norm.
And the industrial economy cleaved that, and I think that free agents,
in many ways, are repairing it. I work at home. There are tens of
millions of people who--who work at home. And that creates a very
different neighborhood life. It creates a very different family life,
and I think it's mostly healthy. But it also, I think, is much more
in tune with how human beings are wired. And that factoid is from a
very interesting guy at the University of London named Nigel Nicolson,
who is using some of the principles of evolutionary psychology to
understand business today.

LAMB: All right. I'm going to switch to a quote in chapter 12. "If
you have a job and get your health insurance through your employer, be
thankful. It was never supposed to be this way."

Mr. PINK: Right. Again, this is ve--very similar--very similar
point. We take it as the norm in this country, the idea that we get
health insurance through our employers. But that is truly a
historical accident. In the 1940s, there was a wage freeze. To get
around the wage freeze, employers said, `Hmm, what can we do to lure
people? We can't raise salaries. Let's give them something. Let's
give them health insurance.' So they gave them health insurance, and
there are a couple of policy changes that--that hardened that into the
norm. First, the IRS determined that health insurance was not taxable
income, even though it was a value that a--a worker was getting. And
also, health insurance was fully deductible for employers. So in a
very swift am--very swiftly, getting health insurance through an
employer became the norm in this country. There's no economic logic,
there's no moral logic behind it. So that's why you can have this
incredibly prosperous country, even in this downturn. This is a very
prosperous country. But yet, 41 million people without health
insurance because the way our health insurance system is structured
and the way people actually work and live are increasingly at odds.

LAMB: Factoid from chapter 13: `African-Americans make up 11 percent
of the total work force, but 22 percent of the temps.'

Mr. PINK: Right.

LAMB: What's that say to you?

Mr. PINK: It says to me that at one part of the labor market,
particularly temps, workers are getting a very, very bad deal. There
were benefits to an organization man style of work. There was easy
access to decent jobs that paid decent wages. And today in this
economy, if you don't have skills, if you don't have connections,
you're in big trouble, whether you're a free agent or whether you're
not. And often, the burden of this falls most heavily on low-income
workers who are increas--who are--who are heavily racial minorities.

LAMB: Now as you see me go through all these factoids in this
chapter, are you saying to yourself things like, `This little plan of
mine worked. The media is so lazy, they just go to the factoids?' I
mean, is that what you've found has happened in your book?

Mr. PINK: I--no, I find that people have--I find that people
have--ve--very few people who have contacted me have at least admitted
to having read only The Box. But I find it useful. It's a useful way
to have a conversation. There are many people, as I said, who read
the book and say, `Oh, geez, what did he say in chapter 10?' And they
have an easy way to go to that Box and find out what's going on.

LAMB: All right. I...

Mr. PINK: I mean, I'm so grateful, Brian. If you read only the
factoids, I'd be grateful to you.

LAMB: Chapter 14 factoid: `When Franklin Roosevelt established 65 as
the standard US retirement age...

Mr. PINK: Yeah.

LAMB: ...the average American life expectancy was 63. Today, life
expectancy is 76 and rising.'

Mr. PINK: Right.

LAMB: What impact's that going to have to free agentry, in the
long-term?

Mr. PINK: Well, I--I think that our notions of retirement are going
to change. There are going to be more people like Grandma Betty, who
instead of fully retiring, are going to work as part-time free agents.
My father, who is 70, is an example of that. Other people in his
generation are doing that. They're--they've left big organizations
and now are working as part-time free agents. And I think there are a
whole host of reasons for that. One is that today, if you're 70 years
old, you're really not that old. You've got a lot of good years left
in you. And most people, I think, don't want to spend 20, 30 years
playing canasta and shuffle board. They want to do something that is
more meaningful. They want to do something that is more engaging.
And so that--I think that's one force in this. The other thing is
that the--the demographic cohorts behind the baby boom are very small,
and in a couple of decades, we're going to run out of so-called
working age people, and so there's going to be an incredible demand
for retired baby boomers.

LAMB: Running out of time. Can't get all these factoids in. Here's
another one, chapter 15: `40 percent of college students are now
older than 25.' Forty percent of college students are now older than
25.

Mr. PINK: Right.

LAMB: Did that surprise you?

Mr. PINK: Sure. But it also--it also shows that people are using
college in fundamentally different ways. Workers are always looking
for ways to sharpen their skills. They can do it through employers,
but they can also do it through community colleges. And that's what a
lot of people are doing today.

LAMB: This is chapter 16's factoid: `At any given moment during the
work day, 70 percent of desks, offices or work stations aren't
occupied.'

Mr. PINK: Sure. I mean, your desk is unoccupied right now because
you're talking to me. My desk is unoccupied right now because I'm
talking to you. I think that free agency is going to reshape
commercial real estate and the way that offices are configured.

LAMB: What about this one? This is the next chapter. `A 1998 Arthur
Andersen study found that 47 percent of entrepreneurs had financed
their businesses with credit cards'?

Mr. PINK: Yep. Because they are--there are very straight--there are
very efficient capital markets for large companies. The capital
markets for small entrepreneurs are much less efficient, but people
are using their credit cards as a way to boot strap their businesses.

LAMB: So what is your reaction to the reaction you've gotten to your
book?

Mr. PINK: I'm mostly--I'm mostly pleased. The reviews have been,
for the most part, quite good, and, again, the--to me, what's most
gratifying as an author is all the e-mail and phone calls and comments
I get from people who read the book and said that they liked it, that
it--it really explained their own lives, that it gave them a window on
to--a window on to the future.

LAMB: Back to your time with Al Gore. Why did you leave?

Mr. PINK: I was tired. I was burnt out. I felt that I didn't have
any control over my life.

LAMB: What burned you out in a job like that?

Mr. PINK: Working 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

LAMB: Literally?

Mr. PINK: Well, I mean...

LAMB: I mean, the--the...

Mr. PINK: Working basically every day of the week. As a writer,
you're on deadline all the time. And also being tethered to your
beeper. Again, not being fully in control. 'Cause at any moment,
your beeper could go off and your Saturday afternoon is going to be
spent typing a speech rather than doing something with your family.

LAMB: What do you know about him that we don't?

Mr. PINK: He's an incredibly funny guy. He has an incredibly sharp
and sophisticated sense of humor.

LAMB: Why doesn't he let us see it?

Mr. PINK: You--you'll have to ask him that. I think part of it is
that most politicians are not very funny. And so--because in order to
be funny, I think you have to say things that people are thinking but
aren't allowed to say. And politics is almost the opposite of that.
You tell--you--you tend to give these banal blandishments that aren't
particularly interesting, but are utterly inoffensive.

LAMB: Did you ever tell him that he ought to lighten up and be funny
in front of the public?

Mr. PINK: Well, you know, we--no, we--we actually did a number of
kind of comic routines there and he's incredibly funny, has a very
excellent sense of--of comic timing.

LAMB: What's your sense? Will the man ever be president?

Mr. PINK: Hard to say. I think he could be. I think he'd be a very
good president.

LAMB: Do you think he'll run again?

Mr. PINK: I have no idea.

LAMB: Would you work for him again?

Mr. PINK: Probably not.

LAMB: Would you go back into that field?

Mr. PINK: Probably not. No, I don't think so. I think--partly, as
you were talking about earlier, my politics have changed a little bit
or they've--they've matured. You know, I'm--I'm still a registered
Democrat, but by a very thin thread. But I would never become a
registered Republican. I like to think of myself now as kind of a
bleeding heart Libertarian.

LAMB: And what's the difference between being a bleeding heart
Libertarian and being a Democrat?

Mr. PINK: Democrats put too much faith in large institutions and
large organizations rather than in the integrity and freedom of
individuals.

LAMB: When did this trip for you? When did this change?

Mr. PINK: You know, it had been changing over a certain--you know,
in--in a way--you know, there used to be this old joke that a
conservative is a liberal who's been mugged. But today, I think, you
know, a Libertarian is a liberal who's--who's worked in the executive
branch of the government. It's very poorly run. It's--it's not
necessarily the most effective way to accomplish things and a lot of
it is done for self-preservation rather than for effectively getting
things done. But I still believe that people who are being left out
need--need a helping hand to come up. But I think the helping hand is
allowing them to move under their own steam.

LAMB: Here's the cover of the book. "Free Agent Nation: How
America's New Independent Workers are Transforming the Way We Live."
Our author has been Daniel H. Pink, and we thank you very much.

Mr. PINK: Thank you.

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Free Agent Nation: How America’s New Independent Workers are Transforming the Way We Live