Robert McChesney on Journalism’s Decline and Breaking up Tech Giants to Save Democracy
Interview by Salvatore Laimo
This transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity
RIFT Magazine: Hey everyone, it’s Sal Laimo of RIFT Magazine, here today with Robert McChesney. Robert McChesney is the author of several books on media and politics, professor of communication at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, host of the weekly talk show Media Matters on WILL-AM radio, and cofounder of the media reform organization Free Press.
Robert McChesney: I should probably correct or update your biography of me - I have retired as of last year as a professor and I stopped doing the media matters interview show 9 years ago approximately? So, yeah. Dated biography.
RIFT: (Laughs) I appreciate the correction, and congrats on retiring!
RM: Thank you.
RIFT: So today we’re gonna talk about media, the internet – that’s the general direction. In listening to your discussions, one of the things that stood out the most to me was, you discussed the socialist origins of the internet. That’s pretty foreign to me, so can you briefly discuss the history of the internet and the trajectory of its socialist origins to its hyper capitalist applications today?
RM: Yeah, it'll be a long story. I’ll condense as much as possible, but the important thing to remember for most people today, I think someone immersed in the internet and digital communication assumes that it was something that free market genius created, and only in America could these brilliant minds and entrepreneurs in this pursuit of profit and magical technologies come together in a cocktail to create this revolution, and they go hand in hand, when, in fact, I think the evidence is pretty clear that the internet only exists today because of massive government investments to keep it going, driven first and foremost by the Pentagon, who saw it as something valuable for their military purposes and that only the private sector really became interested in decades after it was first launched in the 1960s and 70s. The only private sector interest was giving contracts to help the government with this thing, the ARPAnet, and later the internet, but it was done almost exclusively with military spending. And all the heavy lifting on the way it would develop the protocols was done at a handful of research universities, oftentimes public, at University of Illinois where I taught, and Michigan, MIT, Caltech, Berkeley…a handful of schools basically were doing all the heavy lifting on the protocols bankrolled to no small extent by the Pentagon federal government.
And famously, in the early 1970s, the government approached a team from the phone monopoly and said, “You know, this thing is costing us money. How would you like to take over and run it for us?” And AT&T turned them down, said, “We cant make any money off that thing! You do it. There’s no future there.” At least that they could see. Or if there was a future it might challenge AT&T’s monopoly and they didn’t want to mess with it. So that was the history of the internet. And so, when people say, “Well, why did the United States develop the internet?” It was really because of aggressive public sector spending that stayed with it, when no private sector group would have any interest in pursuing it.
Now, in the 1990s, really starting at the beginning of the decade, after really 20 years of relatively slow growth, it exploded — first on college campuses, and then across the country. In short order it became ubiquitous, by the middle of the decade really, and certainly by the end of the decade. And at that point, commercial interests became very interested in it. But even in the 1990s, during the internet boom, and the emergence of the worldwide web, except for being an internet service provider, there was no sense of how you made money on this thing. One of the great lines from the middle of 1990s was, people active on the internet said, “It's unclear who's supposed to pay who. I mean, do I pay you? Or do you pay me?” And how you made money, what they used to call ‘the killer application’, was pretty much unclear, and that didn't become clear until broadband became the order of the day by the beginning of this century, by the beginning of the 2000s. And then suddenly it became clear that there was money to be made, but this is deep into the history and development of the internet that this becomes the case.
RIFT: It’s kind of interesting to think that AT&T would turn down something like that.
RM: Also related to that, in 1980 or 81 there was a movement afoot. Email had already started and was being used in government circles, in a handful of circles, but not in the general population, and there was a movement basically to have the post office take over emails because they saw that eventually something to replace a lot of postal mail to the post office would be the natural public agency to conduct it, because they have a history of managing communication without censorship, they could safely handle it, and it looked like it would have to be a monopoly, and the post office is set up to be a monopoly. And there was opposition by that point from AT&T and from commercial interests that the post office get involved. And had Reagan not been elected, had we had a different government in power in the early 1980s, it might have been we would have gone that direction, and that could have theoretically given us a very different history of the internet. But that's all, you know, here or there at this point. But it was certainly by no means clear in 1982 what we would have today would be the order of the day. No one conceived of that.
RIFT: So the progression of the internet has led to social media websites which are incredibly powerful, and useful — to a degree. They rely a lot on algorithms, and we’ve seen a lot of these algorithms spread misinformation and conspiracy theories en masse. And they have real life consequences. We’ve seen things like QAnon, a massive movement motivated by…I can’t even get into that philosophy…and there’s Brexit and Cambridge Analytica. How do we deal with these sorts of networks of misinformation? I know the government is floating around changing section 230. Should we be making any changes to section 230 to combat this misinformation?
RM: I think this discussion begins by assuming that there are going to be a couple of global monopolies, specifically Facebook and Google, but a few others, that own the world and we can't mess with them. God forbid. They’re basically god's gift to the human race, these monopolies, with founders worth $200 billion. And if you start from that premise, it really limits what you can do, and I don't think you can solve the problem.
Journalism has been eliminated. We no longer have journalism.
But before we even talk about those internet monopolies, and the vast fortunes they've created, and the empires that are there, and the power they wield, we should understand that, which is spoken about less frequently but is every bit as important, as the internet has emerged and created this space for QAnon and sophisticated conspiracies, or unsophisticated ones, and sort of pummeling people with bogus information, while all of this is taking place something else is taking place concurrently that makes it possible that gets a lot less attention. Journalism has been eliminated. We no longer have journalism. And this is something people under the age of 35 or 40 probably don't even know what journalism is. What they think is journalism isn’t it. There used to be a time not too long ago in the United States, say, certainly 30 years ago, and absolutely any time before 1980, when every community in the country had newsrooms of people who covered their community and actually got paid a living wage to do it. They were often times unionized. So if you were a city of 50,000, it had a daily newspaper, a major one. And if you were in a city of a million people you had large newsrooms and newspapers and TV stations too, weekly publications. So there was information available about what was going on in your community, what was happening politically. And that system was not perfect; in fact I made my living prior to the internet writing about the flaws in the journalism from that era. But it had resources. It had a lot of resources and a lot of working reporters. All of that is gone now. I don’t know where you live, but basically, I suspect there's hardly anyone covering your community. You want to know anything about it? It’s just not there. That's how it is everywhere. All those jobs are gone. So there's no journalism anymore.
So when something comes along that seems ludicrous, QAnon is a good example, well in the olden days, if there were some whacked out conspiracy that doesn't hold up to the slightest investigation, a local reporter might have talked to the people there, written an article, and they would’ve shown how it was complete B.S. And people in community would’ve said, “You know? That sounds like a lot of junk.” But now there isn't that, so all you're left with is people get QAnon and that's all they're exposed to.
I think the first order of business for anyone concerned about this is to put pressure on politicians to come up with a system to fund journalism
So the first way and the democratic way to deal with misinformation, conspiracy theories, intentional lying like Cambridge Analytica, and distortion to warp people's understanding of what's actually happening, the way around that is to get journalism back. The first way to do that. If we had journalism then the problem would still exist, but it would be much smaller, much more easy to address. And it wouldn’t require any censorship. It wouldn’t require anyone locking up someone for their opinions. It would just mean that you’d have actual journalism. And so I think the first order of business for anyone concerned about this is to put pressure on politicians to come up with a system to fund journalism at a sufficient level that we have a competitive, independent, uncensored free press, which we don't have now. We just don't have a press system.
I should explain why journalism collapsed, because a lot of it is due to the internet. Not exclusively. Part of it's due to the huge monopolies that sort of ran journalism into the ground by the 1990s and early 2000s. But when the internet came along it basically killed the model to make money off commercial journalism, which, the money in journalism — newspapers, magazines, radio, television — came from advertising. That was where the majority of the income came from. And when advertising went to the internet and disappeared, then those companies couldn't keep reporters on anymore, they started to shrink, and their readers started to say, “Well there’s nothing here. Why should I read this or pay you to read your paper?” And it became a death spiral, which we’re at the very end of now. So there’s hardly any paid reporters left. There’s some, but, you know, in terms of resources, daily newspapers, which are basically the main source of news still today, their online versions, where their original reporting is done in most communities, are making approximately…the total revenues that go to those industries is less than one tenth of one percent of our GDP. Fifty years ago it was one percent. It's gone down by 90 some-odd percent. There’s hardly any resources at all compared to the whole balance of American history.
Until we address that, we’re never gonna be able to do much about QAnon, because basically Qanon’s running unopposed. Cambridge Analytica is running unopposed. Unless there’s just another self-interested party that wants to battle Cambridge Analytica like King Kong versus Godzilla, but then who do you believe? The the point of journalism is so you have something you can believe. And it backs up as evidence and there's competing news media and they're all trying to get at the truth to some extent, and once you lose that, it opens the door for charlatans of all stripes, and that's the world we live in today. So i’d say journalism is the key to solving that problem.
RIFT: That’s an interesting dichotomy – the rise of the internet and the decline of journalism. I also feel like the hyper-capitalism of the internet is kind of leading to this unhealthy addiction to the internet and social media, which is also becoming breeding grounds for extremism. Do you think big tech companies exploit this? This kind of unwellness that people have? This attachment that leads them to these wild rabbit holes?
RM: Of course, they do! I mean how do they make money? They make money by people going to Facebook or Google, clicking on stuff, loading up their computers with information about you so they can sell you stuff. If you’re not on the computer, if you're not coursing around with their services, they're not collecting info, they can’t make profits off you, so of course they want you to be addicted to it. They'd love to have you online 24/7 if they possibly could. The more you're there, the more you click around, the more you give them information, the better. And that is a problem. Yeah, I think it probably is a problem, probably not a healthy thing. But certainly they have no incentive to reduce that; their business models build on developing that.
RIFT: I feel like local journalism would improve that too. There would be less reliance on getting your news from the internet, therefore you’re spending less time on the internet.
RM: Let’s be clear. If we had funds to create local journalism, the vast majority of it would be consumed online. The days of print and ink are over. They’re never coming back. It's like the days of horse and buggies aren’t coming back. It's an antiquated technology for the most part. There’ll be some of it left, but not very much. So it will be online; it’s just that the quality should be superior.
One of the problems of local journalism online too is that once you go online, distance is no longer a relevant cost factor, it doesn’t really influence, so that's why there's not much local stuff. Because if you're online, basically anyone can access you anywhere in the world, unless the government stops it, but certainly anywhere in the country, and most places in the world, which means the cost is so low that that's why you get these monopolies. They dominate the entire world in their market, not just one community. And that's a huge change, and that's one of the things that undermines the ability to start local media because if you do a local…where do you live?
RIFT: I live in Marine Park in Brooklyn, NY.
RM: Okay, you live in Brooklyn. If someone starts a really cool online news site in your neighborhood in Brooklyn, someone in Moscow, Russia could read it just as well as anyone in your neighborhood. The whole idea of localism is undermined by digital technology which, again, underscores how important it is to have clear policies to encourage localism.
RIFT: One point that you talk about is the accessibility internet. High speed internet isn’t really widely available among black and brown communities and internet companies don’t really want to create infrastructure in rural areas. How can we ensure the internet remains a public tool accessible to all and how do we get there?
RM: Well, one thing we can do is get rid of these ISP companies like Comcast and AT&T, and get rid of these cell phone companies like AT&T and Verizon. Those are companies that do nothing of value. They have contributed nothing to the human race. They’re basically parasites. And what they are really good at is buying off government officials and regulators, so they get these monopoly licenses, so there's only a few companies left you can get your cell phone service from, so we pay a fortune to these companies. They don't deserve that money. You pay much more than someone does in Germany or France for the exact same service, probably a worse service. It’s only because they have a monopoly and they own the politicians. So the first place we start is take the profit out of the network. We started it. They got these monopoly cable licenses, phone licenses, they’ve transferred them to the control over the internet - that's got to go. These guys have no function whatsoever, the ISP community, the cellphone community. And then when we do that, we can take a lot of the surveillance out too because a lot of the way they get their income is by surveilling us and selling information, using it as they want. And if we did that we just say, “Look, broadband access is a human right. Everyone gets it for free. We're going to set up these networks and anyone can use them”. That is an entirely rational way to do it.
The only thing preventing that is these companies have the hall of fame of lobbyists…AT&T, Verizon. You talk about lobbying power? I mean, that's what they do. Their whole business model’s built on owning the government and controlling politicians. It’s not built on innovation, they don’t innovate anything. We have this old, clunky network compared to most countries because they're getting dragged kicking and screaming into innovation. They try to get the government to foot the bill whenever they can. So, dealing with this ISP monopoly and ideally ending it. And we’ll pay them for their costs. I don't want to expropriate their property. If they actually invested in some line, compensate them for what they spent and then say, “See you later guys. Go find some other way to make a buck. We don't need you.” And set it up so it’s like the post office, it’s just like an accessible system. Everyone gets it. Just by being here you get it, period, no questions asked. I think that's a rational system and we wouldn’t be having such an inane conversation over this issue.
RIFT: I also wanted to ask you how you felt about Trump’s banning from all the social media platforms following the January 6th insurrection, or whatever you want to call it, on Capital Hill. People were celebrating his removal from social media platforms and I kind of get it, but we also saw a lot of prominent left wing platforms taken down. I think Hood Communist, a black communist publication, their Twitter was taken down without any explanation. So with that said, what does that say that these tech companies can remove a sitting president from their platforms?
RM: Or a human being, period. I mean, I think it's not a good thing at all. I think it’s very bad. I understand that when you have a fascist insurrection trying to overturn an election, people aren't real happy that someone’s lying about it and getting massive publicity. I certainly wasn't. But again, the answer to that is journalism that does its job. I just don't think censorship, in this case, was a smart play because, like you just pointed out, it's not like Twitter is our best bud. Who do you trust to censor? You shouldn't trust anyone. That's why we oppose censorship. The solution is of course to have real journalism or resources for journalism to counteract the lies that someone like Trump propagates. But yeah, the idea that we want to start censoring Twitter or any of these people, or allowing them to censor and applaud them for doing it too, all of that wreaks, it smells bad. It smells bad because we don't trust Twitter, they're out to make money. They might censor Trump because they saw he lost the election and they understand they want to be on the good side of the Democrats, because the Democrats are about to come into power. So what happens if Trump actually won the election? They have to keep them up then? Well then what’s the difference between us and a dictatorship? Nothing. That's what an authoritarian state does. So yeah this whole thing about having Twitter or Facebook censoring people I think it should make anyone alarmed. It’s a principle we should oppose. It's a principle. Period. End of Discussion.
We have to come up with a way to break up these giants…to remove their power, or we might as well throw in the towel on democracy.
Now at the same time, that does lead to a more important question: why the hell does one company have so much power over speech (i.e. Twitter)? That's the real issue here. What do we do about the Twitters, the Facebooks, the Googles of the world, the Amazons, who have these massive monopolistic empires that are the most valuable companies in the world today? What do we do about the power they hold? Is that legitimate? And I think that is, along with getting rid of the ISPs, taking care of journalism, is the third great communication issue of our time, which is how do we address these internet monopolies?
And I do think that one thing is pretty clear: having these monopolies is inimical to having a democratic society. Great concentrations of wealth lead invariably always to massive gross inequality of income and wealth, to increased poverty, corruption in governments becomes much greater because the wealthy can buy off politicians who are much more likely to pay attention to them. So we have to come up with a way to break up these giants, to deal with them, to remove their power, or we might as well throw in the towel on democracy. I just don’t see how the two can coexist. And I think that's a discussion we're going to have in this country.
Now, I don't think any of the politicians will be leading us to that discussion, or most of them won’t because they're getting their checks signed by these monopolies for the most part. They're very happy with them. And these monopolies are smart enough, like in the case of Twitter, to throw some bones at the Democrats when they have power, and then if the Republicans come back in they’ll probably throw some bones that way.
When you have a monopoly…you know, these companies are so rich not because they're such geniuses. When you have a monopoly you make what economists call, ‘monopoly rents’, because you're the only provider, or the only real provider. You control such a large amount of the market that you’re really the only major provider. You make huge amounts of money simply because no one else is doing it, and that's what's called a ‘rent’. You don't really deserve it, even by free market economics. It’s not deserved income, it's just due to your monopoly.
If you're going to have an institution that has to be a monopoly, it's what's called a natural monopoly, it just functions best, like the post office, well then it should be publicly owned. It should be non-profit. It should be transparent how it's run. It shouldn't be a profit center for Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates or anyone else. They shouldn’t be worth $200 billion because they have a monopoly. They haven't done anything to earn that money. Nothing. Bill Gates’ net worth went up like $50 billion last year. He has had nothing to do with that company for the last year. $50 billion! This is absurd! This is absurd!
So that issue’s one that’s gotta come up. We've got to deal with it. We take care of journalism, we take care of the ISP monopoly, we take care of these internet monopolies — those are the three areas that we have to work on — and we do that, and we're a long way on a path towards having a far better society and dealing with the great communication issues of our time.
RIFT: In the last chapter of your book, Digital Disconnect, there were mentions of Marxism to demonstrate why capitalism allows for this gross accumulation of wealth, and why it doesn’t allow for a society to provide for its citizens. How do you use Marxism to analyze and come up with solutions to these problems with big tech? Because I also noticed that it’s not entirely communism, your solutions. You do not want to expropriate businesses, but you do want them to be publicly owned, which I think is appealing to people because I don’t think people necessarily want communism. I think people fear over-centralization. But I do think that it’s interesting to explore alternatives that are not capitalism or communism. So can you speak about that a little bit?
RM: Sure. Well, clearly at this point, in many ways it's going to be the great issue of our lives. It’s unavoidable. It hasn’t always been that way. I'm 68 years old and when I was coming of age there was sort of an active left, ‘The New Left’ they called it, but it was still very clear that was on the margins of society, at least it was to me, that the great bulk of the American population was not really tuned in to what I was dealing with, and what my peers were dealing with in the early 1970s.
When I went to college, I was very interested in learning about how capitalism worked, very interested in learning just conventional economics, and also studying critical theory, Marxism, and so I had the privilege at the college I went to of reading Marx's work. You only studied one thing at a time, so with a group of people we read pretty much all of Marx's major works chronologically over the course of, like, 10 weeks. And this was after we had done some history and some other stuff to set us up for it. So it gave me an opportunity to sort of really get a sense of who Marx was, what he was writing about, what the issues were, and so, it had a great influence on me, as I think anyone in that class, it had a great influence. But I wouldn't say that you would read my work and call me a Marxist because, while he influenced me, he influenced me not in like, this is how you programmatically solve the problems. I don't think you would read what I read of Marx and say, “Oh this leads to the Soviet Union.” There's no connection there at all. That's entirely a different phenomenon that comes for very different reasons much later, you know, 70 years or so after or 50 years after he’s pretty much done his lion’s share of his work. But it does have a methodological value, and it also is very useful for trying to sort out what's going on.
And so if you read my books, and I've written a lot in the last 30 years, I wrote a ton of books, and I think the references to Marx…I doubt there’s more than 5 or 10 in the twenty books I’ve written, if that. It's not like I’m evoking Marx here and there. Quite the opposite. But I would say that that tradition has influenced me. Many of the people who would consider themselves Marxists, economists especially, what they’ve written has had a lot of influence on me. Not just them though. Keynesians have too, in terms of economists. They’ve been very influential on my development.
But Marxism sort of laid out one thing that's really crucial, which is, it said that built inside of capitalism is a fundamental problem. That on one hand the nature of capitalism is that it makes a much more social world, it brings people together, the pursuit of profit basically draws the entire world into one unit eventually over time, that's its logic. We become much more social creatures that way in the sense that we’re linked. But at the same time the nature of capitalism is that the benefits and profits accrue to a small number of people increasingly at a global level, and that’s a tension within capitalism that eventually will burst. It has to lead to a post-capitalist society. And I would say that fundamental point, what I think is called the ‘supreme contradiction of capitalism’, is being proven true before our eyes today. Capitalism can't solve that problem and it never will.
It's pretty clear to me now that there's not a place for the Amazons, Googles, Twitters of the world. They are criminal enterprises.
But at the same time, what's a post-capitalist economy? I think the only way to solve a problem like this, and what you learn from the Soviet Union, among other things, is the solution is democracy. The solution is to it make our democratic institutions so strong — meaning journalism, meaning the right to vote, meaning political parties — that participation is easy and encouraged. And then the first issue you have to settle in a democracy is what sort of economy you’re going to have, and it's something you debate, you experiment with. I think that there may be a place for profit making for a long time. I was a small businessman for years; I understand it. There may be. But I mean that's a political decision. I do think it's pretty clear to me now that there's not a place for the Amazons, Googles, Twitters of the world. They are criminal enterprises. They have these huge monopolies, they’re making a fortune, and they can buy off the politicians to keep their fortune. As long as they run the world, we're in trouble.
RIFT: I like the idea of completely nationalizing the political process because oftentimes when we talk about politics and democracy, we don’t really discuss how the political process is kind of alienating and how it’s not really an inclusive process like it’s supposed to be. But if it were, things probably wouldn’t be the way they are now. We probably wouldn’t need communism.
RM: There is a great book out by a woman named Nancy MacLean that came out like five years ago now called Democracy in Chains, and the book basically chronicles something we're living right now, which is how at some point in the last 50 years the right-wing, the Republican Party now, that’s taken it over, determined their policies were unpopular, that they couldn't win elections with their policies and so, among other things, they had to pack the courts with people who would interpret the Constitution like they wanted, because they couldn't get those policies passed by Congress, and they had to also sharply reduce the ability of people to vote. That was crucial. That's what we're living through now in Georgia. That their numerator was never going to be very big, so they had to shrink the denominator to win elections, and this is something they’ve understood for decades, and they've been working at it for decades, and now it’s sort of really becoming fundamentally clear.
And one of the ways the right-wing has found to win elections is they had to come up with a reason for people to vote for them. How do you get people to vote for slashing taxes on rich people, getting rid of education, and social security? That's a tough sell for most people who aren't rich. They’re saying “Well, I don’t know if that’s such a good idea”. Well, one of the crucial mechanisms that’s been used and is being used now is play on nationalism and racism. That has a long history. But, you know, that was Trump’s strength. The people that voted for Trump weren’t into the traditional, like, slash taxes sort of stuff, but they were definitely too fired up by that racist, or anti-immigrant message.
Capitalism drives this brain-dead expansion without any concern for the consequences
And that's sort of the world we're in now. Democracy is getting to be such a problem for the system, the interests and demands of people when they’re fully activated really make it hard to maintain the status quo. That's why the battle for democracy isn’t just about elections, and the right to vote, and civic issues; it's really about what sort of economy we’re going to have. Because if we had easy voting, same day registration, universal voter registration, and sort of the traditional things that we're looking for, we would have, in short order, a far more progressive country. The people in this country are much more progressive than you'd ever know based on elections, the people in Congress. All these rules have been put in place to minimize popular control. And we need to do the exact opposite, we have to maximize popular control. And once people feel like political activity actually pays off, “Gee, I’ve got better schools, I've got breathable air. This is sort of cool!” Once people see that connection, then the sky's the limit.
RIFT: In a discussion you had with Democracy Now you mentioned that the current internet crisis works in tandem with climate change, and nobody’s going to be able to be apolitical at this point. Can you explain the relationship between the internet crisis and climate change?
RM: I can't remember that interview especially well or the point I was making but I will say that when we talk about the sort of generational existential issues facing the world right now, it is manifest most immediately in the climate. Clearly there are two or three great threats to human survival: the environment is one, nuclear war is the other, and both are closely connected to capitalism. Capitalism drives this brain-dead expansion without any concern for the consequences. “Let someone else deal with it down the road. As long as I’m making money now, that's all that counts”.
And that goes back to the point I made about the strength of Marxism. Marxism points out that the short-term obsession of capitalism makes it incapable of dealing with long-term social problems. And so to the extent democracy is truncated, dealing with the environment becomes more impossible. The process of dealing with climate change is directly tied to the process of making societies more democratic, making these institutions work, and that means you're going to be changing the way our economy works. I think anyone who studies the environment, to my knowledge, understands we have to fundamentally change the way our economy works. It’s not simply about recycling. We have to actually begin to rethink our relationship with the material world if we're serious about surviving the climate crisis. And so, by definition, if you talk like that, it’s a Democratic socialist undertaking, at the very least, but it's a democratic undertaking. And someone could make a compelling argument, may have evidence that, “Hey we can let these companies do their thing and they'll solve the climate crisis”. Let's have that debate. Let's see the evidence. But let's have all the evidence, and have every position out there and get involved. I suspect we would head in a very different direction once we start taking it seriously.
So I don't know if that answers your question, but I think no interview on the state of politics today should avoid dealing with climate change during that interview, because if you don't deal with that, you're just missing the boat.
RIFT: Well I’m glad I mentioned climate change!
RM: I'm glad you did too.
RIFT: Robert I really wanna thank you for the time that you’ve spent with us today. I really appreciate the conversation and the insight.
RM: The pleasure's mine. Good luck with everything and keep up your work.
