Scott Wallsten:
Hi, and welcome back to Two Think Minimum, the podcast of The Technology Policy Institute. It’s Friday, September 29th, 2023 and I’m Scott Wallsten, President of TPI and your podcast host. Today, we’ll be talking with Professor Michael Smith about his ideas on how not only are traditional universities on the cusp of being disintermediated, if we can bring that word back, but also that they should be as they cater primarily to the elite leaving others behind.
Let me introduce him briefly. Mike is a Professor of Information Technology and Marketing at Carnegie Mellon University. He studies business and consumer behavior in online markets, specifically markets for digital information and digital media products. His research has been published in leading management, science, economics and marketing journals and covered by professional journals like the Harvard Business Review, Sloan Management Review and press outlets like The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Wired and Business Week. Mike has a new book out called The Abundant University: Remaking Higher Education for a Digital World published by The MIT Press. And in fact, it’s very fitting that we’re talking to him today because exactly one year ago today, we talked on this podcast about some of the issues that you were still developing. So it’s time to follow up. Mike, great to have you.
Michael Smith:
Scott, it’s great to be here. Thanks for having me.
Scott Wallsten:
So why don’t you start us off by giving your elevator pitch. Tell us about the book, your central ideas and why everyone should care.
Michael Smith:
The central pitch to the book is what we’re doing today in higher education is financially unsustainable, I’m going to argue it’s morally unsustainable. I think the problems are systemic, which means it’s going to be really hard for us to change them from within the existing system. And I think technology gives us a new way to help students discover their talents, develop those talents and use those talents to the benefit of society. And I think we in higher education ought to be really excited about that.
Scott Wallsten:
And you think the universities are not ready, they don’t see it coming?
Michael Smith:
Society’s ready for it, our students are ready for it, I think employers are ready for it and the really surprising thing to me, as I’ve talked to my colleagues, is higher education is not ready for it because it really doesn’t fit into our existing way of doing business, and I’m using that word intentionally, and we’re very scared by it. One of the things I’m trying to convince my colleagues is there are a lot of other industries that have been disrupted by technology that look a lot like us that have actually benefited in the end from adopting it.
Scott Wallsten:
So I assume the reaction has not been all positive?
Michael Smith:
The reaction has been really surprising, a decent amount of anger. At one particular school, I had a professor red in the face, angry with me saying, “You wouldn’t go to a doctor who didn’t have a four-year degree, would you?” And as I usually do, I figured out the right answer to the objection on the plane ride home. And the answer I think is, I go to plenty of doctors, I have no idea where they graduated undergrad, I don’t even know where they graduated med school. All I know is that they’re board certified and they came recommended to me by someone I trust.
Scott Wallsten:
So you never look up at their wall to see where they graduated from?
Michael Smith:
No. I think we are way too comfortable and confident in the status quo and not at all as skeptical as we should be about who’s benefiting from the status quo.
Scott Wallsten:
Before we talk about the status quo more, let’s just go back in time a little bit. We know that people have predicted the downfall of the modern university as we know it, actually not modern, it’s been around for so long, and each time it’s always right around the corner and it hasn’t been. So why is this time different?
Michael Smith:
I think particularly going back to Clay Christensen who made some provocative, bold predictions back in the early 2010s, I think the logic behind the disruption argument was we’ve made education abundant, we’ve made access to faculty abundant and that’s what we need to transform the university. What I’m trying to argue in the book is that there’re actually three reasons, three drivers of power in higher education. One is access to the scarce seats in the classroom, the second is access to scarce faculty experts, and the third is access to the valuable credential that is going to allow you to signal your skills to the marketplace. A lot of the transformations we saw in the early 2010s made the first two things abundant, what we didn’t change was the third one, was the value of the credential. And I think that is necessary to change and I think that is starting to change. I think we’re starting to see employers de-emphasize the four-year degree in hiring.
Scott Wallsten:
So the first one was access to the faculty basically, to the teachers?
Michael Smith:
Yeah. First one was who controls access to the scarce seats in the classroom.
Scott Wallsten:
Access to the classroom itself, not necessarily to professors?
Michael Smith:
Yeah. The first one’s access. And by the way, all this goes back to the research my colleague Rahul and I did 10 years ago on disruption in entertainment. The quote at the time was we had a senior executive in 2013 from a major studio come to our class and Rahul asked him during the Q and A time, “Are you at all worried about the threat that Netflix and Amazon and Google might post to your business?” And he said, “You know what? My business is different. The same six studios have dominated my industry for the last 100 years, there’s a reason for that. That’s not going to change.” What’s fun about the quote is he’s right, the same six studios had dominated his industry and it’s not like the internet was the first technological shift he’d faced. So Rahul and I tried to unpack why had six studios dominated the industry. And our argument was they controlled access to the scarce financial and technical resources you needed to make content.
They controlled access to the scarce channels you needed to distribute content. And they were able to use copyright law to create an artificial scarcity in how you got access to content. And none of the technological shifts they’d faced over the last 100 years had changed that and they were facing a set of simultaneous technological shifts that were changing that all at once. Right at the beginning of the pandemic, I heard the then president of Ohio State University get asked almost the same question and give what I heard to be almost the same answer. This wasn’t what he said, but what I heard him say was, you know what? My industry’s different. The same 60 universities have dominated my industry for the last 500 years, there’s a reason for that. That’s not going to change. And so part of the argument in the book is going back and saying, what has driven the power of universities? A small number of universities. And I really think it comes down to access to the seats, access to the faculty and access to the credentials.
Scott Wallsten:
And so last you left us with the scarcity for the first two is gone now and the third remains?
Michael Smith:
Relaxed the scarcity for the first two but didn’t really change the third one. You can take as many edX classes as you want, it’s not going to add up to a four-year degree in the marketplace. But if that were to change, I think higher education would change.
Scott Wallsten:
Right. But that’s a big if. What’s the catalyst for that?
Michael Smith:
The catalyst for that is ironically or interestingly, I’ve got a slide I use when I present this deck and it’s got a whole bunch of headlines from outlets on the right and the left saying employers are deemphasizing the college degree.
Scott Wallsten:
Let’s pretend you’re holding it up. Everybody imagine.
Michael Smith:
Yeah, I’ll hold it up. And then the next build of the slide is a quote from each of those articles saying, “And we’re doing it because we want a more socioeconomically diverse workforce and we know we can’t get it by relying on four year degree granting institutions.”
Scott Wallsten:
Those are quotes. Is there any evidence in the data to suggest that people are doing more than playing lip service to that?
Michael Smith:
I think if you look at what Amazon’s doing in terms of its workforce training, what Starbucks is doing, what Uber is doing, what Google is doing, I think we’re seeing a lot of employers vertically integrate into training their own workforce. The other thing we’re seeing is we’re seeing employers rely on alternate sorts of credentials. So one of the things I talk about in the book is a guy in Brazil, Gilberto Titericz, who graduated from a middling Brazilian engineering school, worked for the Brazilian state oil company and enjoyed participating in Kaggle data analytics competitions and had gotten so good, he’d risen to the top of the Kaggle leaderboard. And all of a sudden he was getting recruited by Silicon Valley companies, not because of his degree, not because of his work experience, but because they could see this guy’s good at data analytics. I’ve got an independent signal of that and I don’t have to rely on the brand name of the university anymore.
I’ve heard from a buddy of mine who’s a journalist is if I’m going to hire someone as a journalist, I want to see their Substack. I want to see whether you can write and now I’ve got an independent signal of whether you’re a writer. I don’t care whether you graduated from Columbia’s journalism school, I want to see samples of your writing.
Scott Wallsten:
But I wonder, I look at resumes too and when you put out an ad, you can get hundreds of applications and you need some way to filter and people I think use things like schools. Which I totally am on board with what you’re saying, I think it’s an awful way of doing it. But when somebody says, “I want to see your Substack,” I don’t imagine journalists sitting there and reading a thousand Substacks, what do you do?
Michael Smith:
The four-year degree has always been a crutch that employers have relied on or a signal, maybe that’s a more polite way of taking the 500 applications you’ve been given and getting it down to the 10 you’re going to interview. Who went to the best universities? Who got the best grades? I think what we’re starting to realize as society, and like I say, I’d argue as employers, is that if the financially elite gets to go to elite schools, then we’re filtering based on something that I’m not comfortable with.
Scott Wallsten:
Right. For example, a third of the students being legacies?
Michael Smith:
Yeah. And honestly, the book started out as a book about disruption and I think it ended up as a book about social justice. About halfway through the book, I started to realize just how unjust the way we give admission to people is. Raj Chetty’s done some wonderful research on this topic and one of his findings that I talk about in the book is that if you’re a kid born into a family in the top 1%, you’ve got a one in four chance of going to a highly selective school, top 80 school.
If you’re a kid born into a family in the bottom 20%, you’ve got a one in 300 chance of going to the same school. And when I talk to my economist friends, I say, “Hey, I’m an economist, I believe in the efficient allocation of scarce resources. If we in higher education genuinely believe that rich kids are 77 times more likely to be capable of an elite education than poor kids are, then we’re doing just fine. Our selection mechanism is doing exactly what we want it to do. But if we don’t believe that, and I don’t know anyone who does, then this is a terrible way of allocating access to the scarce resource.”
Scott Wallsten:
Right. I completely agree with everything that you’re saying. It’s just an awful system that we have. But let’s say that what you’re saying does happen, what would we be giving up? What are the costs? Everything has costs, even if the net benefits are large, what would we be losing, do you think?
Michael Smith:
I think we would be giving up a lot of the unique residential experience of the on-campus college degree. I think research, in some contexts, most higher education research is heavily subsidized by tuition dollars.
Scott Wallsten:
I was going to ask about that.
Michael Smith:
If those tuition dollars go away, I think the research is at risk. When I look at it though, I think the benefits outweigh the negatives. If we look at this as an alternative path. I’m not arguing, let’s burn down the university. What I’m saying is we’re leaving out a lot of students, we need to create a viable high quality alternative path that doesn’t involve four years of your time and a quarter of a million dollars of loan debt.
Scott Wallsten:
So you’re saying places where people go to build networks like a certain university in Boston, not in Boston but near Boston, as they’ll tell you right away, would be just fine?
Michael Smith:
Cambridge? Yeah, either of the Cambridge Universities. Yeah, they’re going to be just fine. Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, I hope Carnegie Mellon, they’re all going to be just fine.
Scott Wallsten:
It’s an interesting implication of what you’re saying that in order to fix this problem, which is a social justice issue, the elite universities get to stay and the lower tier universities will disappear. Essentially, you’ve got this weird paradox then because in this new system that’s important for rectifying social wrongs, the elite universities will stay and all the lower tier universities will go away. Not all, but that’s what you’re saying, right?
Michael Smith:
I think the lower tier universities, and I say that with no disrespect, are at much more risk than the elite universities.
Scott Wallsten:
So the universities that serve not the very top tier of society are ones that aren’t doing their job right?
Michael Smith:
No, that’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying that the community colleges are trapped in a system where you can get an associate’s degree, but it’s not going to get you anywhere near the traction of a degree from an elite school. You can go to a second or third tier college, and I won’t name any, but you can imagine, and it won’t get you the same job market outcomes as you would get if you went to an elite school. Where elite is defined by the marketplace, not me, to be clear. I would love for us to create a system where people can signal their true skills without having to rely on the brand name of the university. That’s just not the system we have today.
Scott Wallsten:
So you think this is something that should happen, then just looking at other industries, you don’t want the incumbents to realize that it’s happening to them until it’s too late, otherwise they’ll block it, so maybe you should hope that they don’t read your book. But also, if they do see it happening, this provides an interesting political economic approach for them to block it because incumbents in danger go to the government to stop it, to maintain their position. We’re spinning out this hypothetical, I mean I am, so who knows, but have you thought about that as you go into the future?
Michael Smith:
I’m more optimistic about my colleagues, although I could be dead wrong. And the argument I’m trying to create in the book is I teach disruption, I teach how technology disrupts industries and the end of every good disruption story is, and the incumbent died. Blockbuster, Blackberry, Britannica, dead. If you tell that in class really well, it’s depressing and if you tell it really, really well, there’s some kid in the back row who’s going to say, “Can you give us any examples of an industry that responded well to technological disruption?” And my answer is the entertainment industry. The entertainment industry got hit with massive technological disruption and I think if you look at what particularly the labels and the studios have done to respond, it’s been really innovative. Was it hard? Absolutely. Has it been effective? I really think so. So then the next question is, why was the entertainment industry able to respond when so many other industries had trouble responding?
And I really think it was because they realized that their model was different than their mission. My model of business is selling shiny plastic discs for $15 to $20 a pop, my mission is creating great entertainment and getting that entertainment in front of an audience. And I think when they realized that the power of their mission actually allowed them to flip from opposing technological change to embracing it in all the ways we’ve seen, what’s the parallel? I would love for my colleagues to take a step back and say, “Hey, if my mission is helping rich kids get a leg up in the job market, then I’m doing just fine. But that’s not my mission. If my mission is helping kids from all sorts of backgrounds discover their talents, develop those talents so they can use those talents to the benefit of society, I need to change.”
Scott Wallsten:
And most of them change by not having a job anymore? Not that that should ever be a reason not to change, but we won’t need nearly as many professors.
Michael Smith:
We won’t need nearly as many professors, I’m pretty clear about that. And I’m also pretty clear about humbly saying I might be one of those professors. I think we’re seeing some pretty impressive leadership in the stories around Arizona State University and Southern New Hampshire University, Georgia Tech’s Online Masters, but of leaders saying, “I can’t deliver the education that I want to if I’m bound by the physical classroom and if I’m bound by the existing system.”
Scott Wallsten:
Now maybe explain a little bit about what they do and why it’s working. Because it’s exactly what you’re saying, it’s an incumbent who sees the truth, sees what’s coming and is innovating to survive.
Michael Smith:
That’s very much President Paul LeBlanc, who’s the president of Southern New Hampshire University’s story is he came into Southern New Hampshire, it was a struggling university that was in financial distress, let me put it that way. And he said, “We need to change how we do business.” And adopted online education and now it’s actually a thriving university, running a surplus. And the other thing that I talk about in the book is over the last decade, a period of time where college tuition on average went up by 40%, Paul LeBlanc at Southern New Hampshire has kept his tuition exactly the same, $10,000 a year. That’s leveraging all the scale advantages of online education and it’s allowing him to bring in people who wouldn’t have otherwise been able to afford a traditional, pricey on campus degree. I think what President Mike Crow is doing at Arizona State is very similar. He’s focused on, I think their motto is something along the lines of, “We judge ourselves by who we include, not who we exclude.”
Scott Wallsten:
One of the things that inspired you to write the book is the disparities and outcomes? And you’re describing inputs. Is there any evidence on how the students at these online universities do after they graduate?
Michael Smith:
There’s a whole bunch of evidence on their ability to allow people to graduate with a four-year degree. I guess to be totally honest with you, I haven’t seen the evidence on job outcomes. I’m sure it exists, I just haven’t looked at it. It’s a good question.
Scott Wallsten:
Next book?
Michael Smith:
Doubtful.
Scott Wallsten:
You just mentioned that you could see that maybe you would be one of the people who could be affected. If that helps allocate resources more efficiently, what is a better thing for someone like you to do?
Michael Smith:
Well, let me put it this way. There’s something really weird about how we structure research and teaching in the university. The first weirdness is we promote people based on their research, not their teaching. The story I tell in the book is I was told by a respected senior colleague when I was graduating, when I was getting my PhD, “Don’t spend any extra time on your teaching because teaching is not going to get you tenure. Spend all the time on your research and do a mediocre or average job as a teacher. That’s the path to success.” Pretty early in my career, I was at a conference with a senior colleague who I knew was going to be someone who was going to either recommend or not recommend me for tenure later in my career. And so someone I wanted to impress. And he said, “How are things going, Mike?” And I said, “Well, thanks for going well, I’m getting papers out. And oh, by the way, I won the teaching award in our program last year.”And he looked at me with disdain and said, “It sounds like you’re spending too much time on your teaching.”
There’s this disconnect. But the other strange thing is, my value to the academy, what I got tenure for was becoming the world’s recognized expert, whatever that means, in this incredibly narrow area of my field. My value to the academy is I’m a specialist. When I teach, I teach like a generalist. I teach Erik Brynjolfsson’s work and Catherine Tucker’s work and Ed McFowland’s work and Natalia Levina’s work. Wouldn’t it be better if you could hear that work directly from them? Even more than that, wouldn’t it be better if you could hear a diversity of opinions? I talk about in the book how Anita Elberse, at Harvard, and I do research on the long tail and we have very different viewpoints on it, and she might be right. Wouldn’t it be cool if you could hear my best argument from my position and Anita’s best argument for her position and make up your own mind?
Scott Wallsten:
You’re kind of making an unbundling argument. But if you go back to video, there’ll be people who wanted bundles to be unbundled and choose everything a la carte and now people say there are too many choices and we’re probably going to see consolidation. Is there any value to some of those things being put together for students?
Michael Smith:
So I think I would argue, and you can push back on this, I would argue the reason people are frustrated right now with video is slightly different than what I’m talking about. They’re saying, my frustration is, I don’t know where The Office is and I don’t know where 30 Rock is. I’m subscribing to six different platforms and each of them has a set of content that is distinct. What I’m talking about is, A, can we make the content available? And B, can we use data to help you find exactly the right content for you? Data about your prior educational performance, your educational background. I think about this a lot with watching my kids learn calculus. If you go to YouTube and search on integration by parts, you’ll get 500 videos explaining integration by parts. What I really want to know is the one that’s going to resonate with me, given what I already know about calculus and given what I don’t know and given how I learned. We don’t have the data yet to make that connection.
Scott Wallsten:
Although probably the answer is the Khan Academy.
Michael Smith:
Possibly the answer is the Khan Academy because their production quality is so valuable.
Scott Wallsten:
They’re so good. Yeah.
Michael Smith:
So stinking good. I’ll give you another one. My daughter in her senior year in high school was the president of the STEMinist club. So take feminism and combine it with STEM and you’ve got STEMinism. So my STEMinist daughter heading into her senior year wanted to take AP Physics and her high school said, “You can’t take AP Physics because you don’t have AP Calc. You can’t take AP Calc because you don’t have precalc. And you can’t take precalc because we’re not teaching it this summer.” And so she took a class from a platform called Outlier.org and the class offers credit at the University of Pittsburgh if you pass the class. So our argument was, are you really telling me that if my daughter passes the class that gives her credit at the University of Pittsburgh, it’s not good enough for high school calculus?
But what was interesting is it was taught by three different professors. It was taught by Tim Chartier, taught by Hannah Fry at the University College London and taught by John Urschel, African-American scholar who had just finished his PhD in Math from MIT. And who, oh, by the way, before he went to MIT to get his Math PhD, was the starting guard for the Baltimore Ravens. So just munch on that for a little while. What was cool about the way they taught it is as a student you could choose which of these different faculty you wanted to take. Because they all taught exactly the same module, but in their own voice and you could even mix and match.
My STEMinist daughter immediately gravitated towards Hannah Fry and I mentioned this to a colleague who said, “Oh, Mike, there’s a bunch of research on this showing that in general women perform worse than men in STEM classes and that difference goes away when the class is taught by a woman.” And by the way, the same thing is true for underrepresented minorities. Tend to do worse and that difference goes away when the class is taught by someone who looks like them, who they can identify with as a success. It’s really hard for us to deliver that in the traditional classroom, but we know we can do it online.
Scott Wallsten:
I assume the class was small enough where your daughter could interact with this woman, right?
Michael Smith:
No.
Scott Wallsten:
No? Interesting.
Michael Smith:
Yeah. She was giving prerecorded lectures. Outlier is started by the same guy who founded MasterClass. If you think about MasterClass production quality, it has MasterClass production quality. How do you do the interaction? You do the interaction in online communities. Where again, you can divide up into people who you identify with, whatever that means.
Scott Wallsten:
What did your daughter come away thinking about your ideas? Because I assume you talk about them at home and there she is using them, which I can imagine a kid just not wanting to admit at all. But what did she think?
Michael Smith:
I think she resonates with it. She’s been kind enough to send me highlighted pages from the book. But I think this notion of everyone learns at a different pace, people are going to resonate with different examples and our old model of everybody has to go at the same pace and everybody has to hear my examples isn’t necessarily working, particularly for people who might not fit in the traditional model.
I’ll give you another example that I just love. I gave this talk at University of British Columbia and I was talking to somebody on their faculty. He was teaching in the business school, but he got his undergraduate degree in electrical engineering where I got my undergraduate degree too. And he said, “I never understood Fourier transforms until last week when I saw a video on YouTube about Fourier transforms and for the first time ever I recognized what they’re for and why they’re important.” Wouldn’t it be cool if at the time… He could do it mechanically, he could do the math, but he didn’t really understand what they were for. Wouldn’t it be cool if at the time we could say, “Here’s a great example of why we’re doing Fourier transforms and you can watch it at your own pace. And here’s five of them, this is the one that I think is going to work for you. This is the one, this is the one, this is the one that will actually target it to you.”
Scott Wallsten:
So your argument focuses just on universities, but why only universities? I mean, why not high schools? I mean, at kindergarten you need teachers so the kids don’t eat too much sand and in middle school probably also, so they don’t eat too much sand. But at some point, university is an arbitrary cutoff and maybe any cutoff is arbitrary.
Michael Smith:
Yeah, I wanted to be very intentional. It was decision early on in the process of saying, “I teach at a university, I want to criticize my own dog food.” I’ve never stood in front of a high school class and I think K-12, even high school is materially different than what we’re offering in universities.
Scott Wallsten:
But it’s interesting, now you’re saying exactly what you said the movie studio guy said. “We’re different.”
Michael Smith:
I’m not saying we’re different in the sense that we can’t be disrupted, I’m saying we’re different in the sense that we offer a different bundle of attributes.
Scott Wallsten:
Right. So that’s not what you feel [inaudible 00:27:17]? Got it.
Michael Smith:
I think K-12 is offering a whole bunch of things, including what you said, don’t eat too much sand.
Scott Wallsten:
And I did not need to denigrate the teachers. My kids went to public school, still go to public school.
Michael Smith:
I’m just wondering whether we could do better in colleges and universities, and like I said, I wanted to criticize my own dog food. It’s up to somebody else to criticize K-12. Give thoughtful recommendations. How about that? Instead of criticize. And I think it’s particularly important for colleges and universities, given how fast technology is changing in the workforce and given the importance of mid-career re-skilling and training. Maybe you say, “This isn’t all that important, Mike, for somebody straight out of high school.” I still think it is, but I’m happy to disagree with that. But if you’re somebody who is in the middle of their career and wants to gain new skills and you can’t take 18 months off to get a master’s degree and you don’t have $100,000 to do so, wouldn’t it be cool if we could use the technology we have available to us to give you the opportunity to gain those skills?
Scott Wallsten:
You talked a little bit about this earlier, but one of the costs might be research that doesn’t happen because teaching cross subsidizes research, which I would totally agree with is not fair to the students. But just look at your own book and of course your own work, it’s very heavily cited. You cite others very heavily, of course, as one should. How many of those papers would’ve been written if there wasn’t anybody to fund it?
Michael Smith:
This is the hard question. I don’t know. I can convince myself in my quieter moments that I’m very clear in the book that the elites are going to be just fine. What proportion of the high quality research is done by elites? I don’t know.
Scott Wallsten:
Also, most research isn’t high quality.
Michael Smith:
How do we define quality? I do think there’s an important role for research in the academy and I really hope that will be maintained and I think it can be maintained even while we offer a new path, a new alternative for students who don’t happen to have a quarter of a million dollars to take one of our degrees.
Scott Wallsten:
Have any reactions been surprising to you so far?
Michael Smith:
The most surprising one honestly has been just the absolute entrenchment of many of my colleagues. Honestly, the most, most surprising one was the intense pushback that universities aren’t a business and therefore you can’t use market-based logic to think about the university.
Scott Wallsten:
Yeah, that’s bizarre.
Michael Smith:
At least two of my referees for the book at MIT Press basically said that, “The university is not a business and therefore you can’t use market logic.” And I think it’s coming from Clay Christensen was wrong and he was a business school professor and here’s why he was wrong because we’re not a business. As a parent, seeing my three kids go through college. Heck yeah, this is a business. You’re sending out advertisements, you’re giving me promotional discounts, you’re targeting me.
Scott Wallsten:
They’re definitely sending you a bill.
Michael Smith:
They’re definitely sending me a bill and you won’t give a transcript if I haven’t paid that bill.
Scott Wallsten:
Right.
Michael Smith:
If you define a business as someone with shareholders, maybe we’re not. Yeah, we’re a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. But if you define a business as someone who provides something of value and charges money for that in a competitive marketplace, then heck yeah, we’re a business.
Scott Wallsten:
We’ve been talking longer than we should, so we should probably leave it there. Mike, thanks a lot. This was really great. Your book is fascinating and it’ll be interesting to see what happens as we continue.
Michael Smith:
Fantastic, Scott. Thanks so much for having me. Always good to talk to you.
Scott Wallsten:
Yeah, likewise.
