Colorado's Attorney General Phil Weiser on Antitrust, Federalism, and Price Gouging

Scott: Hi and welcome back to Two Think Minimum, The Technology Policy Institute’s podcast. Today is Thursday, May 28th, 2020. I’m Scott Wallsten, president and senior fellow at TPI. I’m joined by Tom Lenard, senior fellow and president emeritus. Today we are honored to have Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser. Phil Weiser was sworn in as the state’s 39th Attorney General on January 8th, 2019. Before running for office, he served as the Hatfield Professor of Law and Dean of the University of Colorado Law School where he founded the Silicon Flatiron Center for Law, Technology and Entrepreneurship and co-chaired the Colorado Innovation Council. He’s also served as a Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the US Department of Justice and Senior Advisor for Technology and Innovation in the Obama administration’s National Economic Council. He served in President Bill Clinton’s Department of Justice as Senior Counsel to the Assistant Attorney General in charge of the antitrust division, advising on telecommunications matters. And before that he had also served as law clerk to Justice Byron White and Ruth Bader Ginsburg at the Supreme court. And everybody who knows Phil knows he’s a force of nature in keeping so many things running and writing so much and contributing to so many aspects of law and economics and technology. Phil, thanks for joining us.

Phil Weiser: It’s really a pleasure to be with you guys.

Scott: So the first thing I want us to talk about as a little bit about federalism. So you’ve been an advocate for a long time for a cooperative federalism where States and the federal government work together in creative ways. How do you feel about that now? Do you think that that’s alive and well or are we moving more towards an era of kind of adversarial, dual federalism?

Phil: We’re of course not going to know what now looks like until a long time from now. Great story on this, by the way. Henry Kissinger is with Zhou Enlai as part of the opening up of the China-US relationship and he says, what do you think about the French revolution and Zhou Enlai says, it’s too soon to tell. So that gives you a Chinese perspective on history. The American experiment had federalism baked in from the beginning. To take an often-used phrase that Justice Kennedy said, our constitution split the atom of sovereignty. The classic idea was you could only have one sovereign. We have two. The United States of America as a sovereign state, nation and states, which retain their own sovereignty. That principle was captured beautifully in United States v. New York. Justice O’Connor articulated, the federal government cannot commandeer states to make them do things that, to the people of a state, you might think, oh, our state is doing this, but really, it’s not the state that doing it. It’s the federal government commandeering the states and that’s a principle that I would say is alive and well. The anti-commandeering principle, we indeed fought for it in a recent case where the federal government was trying to misuse a grant program which had never had strings attached, it wasn’t authorized as strings attached, to impose certain requirements on us as Coloradans that we didn’t want to do, vis-a-vis our state and local law enforcement. So that principle is it the foundation of cooperative federalism. And the reason is because for a state to cooperate with the federal government, that has to result from a choice. So as you both know well, the Telecommunications Act invited States to cooperate with the federal government in implementing this whole new competitive landscape. What was critical was that States could opt out and say, I’m not cooperating. And they have that choice. What the Fed’s had to do is step into superintend the regulatory regime themselves. It happened once, by the way, Virginia. And if you guys remember the FCC had to oversee interconnection agreements because the state public utility commission said, we’re not playing. That was an architecture that I believe is healthy. The States are invited to cooperate and the states are free to say, we’re not doing it. And the states have their protection against commandeering. Whether we are seeing an erosion of that, it’s too soon to tell. I am fighting for that principle. I’m fighting for that model. I believe it produces better results.

Scott: So let me ask you about two possible tensions with it. One is, this is sort of pre COVID, so we might ask whether this has changed since, but with the digital economy there are lots of arguments across issues, privacy, antitrust, all of those things, we could go into more detail later, that there should be a single federal rule. The argument is always we don’t want to see a patchwork of rules, always, the word patchwork comes up a lot, contrary to a lot of things that you’re arguing for. But if we were to follow that logic, it would erode lots of states power. But you can make an argument that almost anything having to do with the digital economy involve interstate commerce. The other side though is the government, the federal government’s less than strong reaction to the pandemic where it’s left the States to deal with it on its own. What do you make of those two things?

Phil: I’ll give you two economic responses. You’re probably familiar with both theories. One is a theory of the second best and the second is it depends. So first, the theory of the second best. Yes, you are right. In an ideal world, we’d have a first-rate national response to the pandemic where testing capability was developed by the federal government and the states were working collaboratively following the lead of the feds. That’s not the world we’re in right now. We’re in the theory of the second best where the states have effectively been on their own and have been able to, in many cases, including Colorado, reasonably rise to this challenge. That’s actually the case with, right now, data privacy and data security. In the best world, the first best world, we would have what President Obama called for, which is some form of a federal privacy bill of rights and we articulated it based on broad principles. There was going to be a lot of room for tailoring. And it would say things like if a company is collecting the data of a consumer, the consumer has the right to know that, the right to know whether it’s being sold, how long it’s being stored, and basically companies would be prompted to be mindful about how they manage data. That is a protective regime that I think would serve consumers and indeed the digital economy well. It’s never been adopted at the federal level. What’s that created? A vacuum. And so states are now doing their own data privacy, which is not the first best world, but it’s probably the second. Some states are acting unwisely but it is, in my mind, worse to have no one doing anything and so states filling this vacuum. The second point that I would make here is it depends. There are some areas where the states are not, let’s say, implicating these digital interconnected concerns, so collection of data happens across state lines, no question. Thus the theory of the second best.  But there are other cases, delivery of healthcare for example, where it’s inherently local. When you show up to a clinic and you’re on a Medicare advantage plan, you’re in Colorado Springs, that’s your market. This has been litigated as an antitrust matter. It is a local product market. It’s not a nationwide product market. In that case, having us as the Colorado Attorney General’s office able to step in and oversee antitrust issues, including mergers, are fundamentally local issues, provides a valuable backstop and in some cases provide local tailoring opportunities or even the federal government could just say, we’re not going to bother, you guys take care of it. And so I don’t think federalism is, let’s say, swamped or replaced by the digital economy. What I would say is ideally you have this done thoughtfully, where you have national leadership where it makes sense. And if that national leadership doesn’t emerge, then federalism is at least a theory of the second best. Alternatively, there’s going to be lots of areas where the local and state governments are naturally playing the role. And it’s good to have them there.

Tom Lenard: Getting back to privacy for a second, as you know, one of the major, perhaps the major impediment to the enactment of a federal law is the issue of a state preemption where there’s obviously strong feelings on both sides. What’s your view if a federal law is passed, should it preempt the States or not?

Phil: I’m a big fan of what happened in Dodd-Frank, where we have preemptive national standards, but state attorneys general can enforce them. And part of the reason here is, we’re seeing this right now actually, with the CFPB, among other agencies. If you get a federal agency that is inert or is not committed to the mission, if you put all the eggs in the federal basket, again, states might look better on a theory of the second best, but if you can figure out a way to square that circle, where States can still play a valuable role, even with national standards, you may get the best of all worlds, which is you build yourself some redundancies, some resilience without potentially creating the chaos of multiple standards. So that’s what happened in that law. I actually could see that happening in a privacy law and obviously it’s a case by case, because there’s some cases where there are harms that are different locally. In those sorts of cases, preemption, I don’t believe has the same force behind it. But in a case like privacy, where, again, as Scott noted, it’s hard to comply with a whole bunch of different rules, there could be real efficiencies having a national standard. If and when that’s appropriate, I would like to see state AGs having enforcement authority.

Scott: So let me go back to your example about healthcare for a second. So like you said, healthcare is very local and when somebody has an emergency, you’re not going to be choosing among hospitals around the country where to go. You’re going to go, some balance between what’s the closest and what’s the best hospital within some very small distance from your house. And so hospital mergers have been a big deal, but the pandemic might be changing some of that, not the hospital aspect of it, but people can now do more telemedicine across states lines. And that’s sort of upended some of the state licensing rules. How would you go about thinking about that aspect of it? I mean we’ve got state licensure issues and now possibly a changing market definition, for at least some parts of medicine.

Phil: Beauty of antitrust is it’s fact specific. And in so far as we really see telemedicine as a viable alternative, that changes how we define markets. I don’t think you’re going to see telemedicine surgeries anytime soon. So, to your point, if you have to get some kind of procedure, I don’t think you’re going to get it via telemedicine. So you have to define which markets are subject. And similar, if you have to pick up certain drugs, pharmaceuticals that have to be authenticated that it’s actually you, it may not be wise to have those go through the mail, for example. We’ve seen a huge problem with opioids where wrong people get those drugs, for example. So I do think there’s situations where you’re not going to see it done via broadband internet connections. In so far it is, that will affect how to define the market. With respect to the role of local oversight, I think it’s important that we be disciplined about what the markets are. I also think you raise a real important point, which is about licensing. That is going to be an interesting challenge because in so far as you have someone doing telemedicine in Colorado, I believe the current expectations are that they be licensed to practice medicine in Colorado, even if they’re doing their medicine from Kansas. And a quick question here is always going to be how are licensing schemes operating. Are they operating in the way they’re intended to ensure quality control, oversight, or are they unfortunate barriers to entry, and that’s going to be an ongoing conversation.

Tom: Well, you can get back to antitrust for a minute. Your office is involved in some of the biggest antitrust issues around these days. The Google case, Google investigation, Facebook investigation. By the way, if you want to give us some little prediction about what’s going to happen I’d be happy to hear that.

Phil: Well first I’ll start, Tom, by commending you, you can’t be commended enough for this. During the 1990s you stuck your neck out about the Microsoft antitrust case, as a antitrust case worth bringing. And that it was a model of a good section two case. And just to give people a reminder, who weren’t as familiar, you famously had Bill Gates saying to Netscape, you can sell your company to me because I see it as being a threat to our monopoly or we will cut off your air supply. That sort of predatory behavior is antithetical to the antitrust laws. It hurts consumers and hurts innovation. And so the question, in both Facebook and Google, two of the companies you’ve mentioned and we’re on the executive committee of both those investigations, did anything similar happen in these cases? Has Facebook or Google engaged in predatory tactics? And the challenge of antitrust is to sort the wheat from chaff, which is legitimate business, efficiency enhancing conduct, versus predatory conduct, which has no purpose other than to undermine rivals. We’re in the middle of that and as we get to the other side, we’ll be making public where we come out. And this is a great virtue of our antitrust system. We can’t just say what we think and then all of a sudden the companies have to react. We’ve got to prove our case in court. So that’s a discipline that we take very seriously and I have great appreciation for. And so unfortunately, all I can say is stay tuned.

Tom: Let me ask you about how we do antitrust in this country, obviously gets to this federalism issue. I mean, if we were designing a system de novo, do you think we would design a system that had two federal antitrust agencies with overlapping jurisdiction plus 50 plus other antitrust agencies basically dealing with the same issues? Is that a good way to go about it?

Phil: I believe it was James Madison who said if men were angels, there would be no need for government. And he also said ambition shall check ambition. So the design of our institutions reflects a skepticism of concentrated power and a skepticism of what James Landis believed the new deal would be, which is that we’d have great experts leading top down institutions who’d always get things right. And the fact that we have this fragmented antitrust system can be criticized, Tom, the line of criticism that you were evoking, as incoherent. An alternative explanation is it is more resilient, more redundant and more adaptive. And what I would say the ultimate check is the courts, because we have to adopt judicially manageable standards that are in place by judges. And so ultimately I have the right as Colorado’s Attorney General to bring a case in federal or in state court under state antitrust law. I have to prove that case and that can contribute to the development of antitrust law. The fact that I have that right and so to 49 others or 50 including DC’s AG, is a strength to our system. There can be diversity of views as things percolate up. I believe in a world where you don’t have perfect knowledge by a supremely expert enforcer. This is actually a fairly adaptive system. Europe takes the opposite point of view. So if you take your argument to the logical extreme, Europe says, we want to have a central regulatory authority that handles antitrust issues. And when we decide something that is the law and although you can appeal it, it’s like appealing a regulation which gets deference and takes a lot of time. And so I think our system actually has been very adaptive even though it provides, let’s say, more checks and balances and uncertainty in the result.

Tom: I kind of agree, but especially in this digital age where all of these companies are not even national but global in scope, it somehow seems a little bizarre almost that a small entity could challenge a business practice or a merger or something that affects a company and consumers of that company that are operating on a global scale.

Phil: Tom, that same principle is true if Israel challenges a multi-national companies merger.

Tom: Yeah, that’s true.

Phil: And tries to halt the merger. So we are having to adapt to this issue and this is where trying to build harmonization is important and what happens as a practical matter with states is we do, wherever possible, multi-state investigations and we have to do that harmonization within our working group so as to avoid the spectacle of what you’re talking about and what can happen more likely is the feds and the states or coalition states part ways, that happened in the Sprint/T-mobile case and that gets worked out by the courts, less likely to get multiple different States doing essentially different things on the same issue.

Tom: Do you think we have a general problem of underenforcement or too lax enforcement in the antitrust area?

Phil: Yes. If you say to me is the problem that antitrust enforcement has been too robust or is too robust or not robust enough? Here’s what I would point you to, and you can go talk of different industries, but let’s talk about airlines. Obviously pre-COVID. We have seen concentration in almost every industry such that our economy is more concentrated now than it’s probably ever been, which is not healthy from an innovation standpoint, consumer welfare standpoint or an innovation standpoint. In airlines we had a great natural experiment. A bunch of mergers went through, on the other side of those mergers, and I forget the exact years Tom, but people can look it up, a huge drop in oil prices. In a competitive industry, if you have critical wholesale inputs and I don’t know the numbers, but let’s just call it 25% of the cost structure of airlines is fuel. If that went down by a substantial amount, you would think you’d see prices go down to consumers. That didn’t happen at all in airlines, it happened at the pump, so prices went down at the retail pump, but they didn’t go down in the airlines and literally, there’s a fun New York Times article about this, they gave away free peanuts and made record profits. That can only happen when there’s so much concentration. This is what Fred Kahn was afraid of. Fred Kahn said, we have to get rid of the stasis of regulation which is actually helping incumbents and prohibiting entry and stopping innovation, but we need sound antitrust enforcement, so we have sufficient rivalry to protect consumers. In many markets, we don’t have a lot of rivalry in airlines, prices have gone up and consumers are worse off and we can talk about different sectors. Not all sectors I paint with the same brush. We are seeing more four to three mergers for a reason, even three to two mergers, because the economy has gotten more and more concentrated. Businesses are seeing how much they can push this and the job of antitrust is to say, if we are really worried about prices going up, innovation going down, quality going down, we’ve got to stop that concentration.

Scott: So like you said, everything is fact specific and I don’t know if you’ve looked in more detail at the airline industry, but entry recently hasn’t been particularly successful. At least one regional airline tried to launch on its own and it didn’t make it. And why do you think that is? Is it because something about the incumbent airlines makes it impossible? Is it because gates clocks are controlled in some weird way, is it because we don’t let foreign airlines compete here? What do you think was driving it?

Phil: Part of what you’re getting at, which is super important for an agenda, our nation’s economic policy should include a commitment to competition policy, innovation policy. When I was at the national economic council, this started getting more and more attention. Jason Furman ultimately launched a great initiative around this, and I would commend this, because you pointed to a key regulatory point. To the extent the regulatory system reinforces the dominance of existing companies, we have to be concerned about this and we need competition advocacy. Slots for airlines is a real cause for concern. You can say the same thing about spectrum for wireless. Do we have regulatory structures that are not facilitating entry? I do think that is a big point. A second point, we all look back to the 1990s when there were a lot of upstarts, and one of the phenomena that happens was predatory pricing and I mentioned mergers before and my concern with a lack of, call it vigilance, on merger review. My second big concern for antitrust in airlines, would be the failure of predatory pricing. And here it was a failure of the courts in applying an overly conservative standard in a case involving American Airlines, and I believe it was Vanguard Airlines, where we saw a level of response to an upstart that I believe can only be explained by a desire to exclude the rival and part of the challenge here was, if you look at marginal costs as the critical way, and you define it sufficiently narrowly, as the court did, airlines have such high fixed costs, such low marginal costs. It’s impossible to bring a case. I think the better methodology would have been did the airline do something that vis-a-vis the other use of the airplane caused it to make less money and Doug Malmuth would call this the profit sacrifice test, which is a way to think about monopolization concern, and that test wasn’t used appropriately in that case. They were allowed to get away with, what I believe was, predatory behavior and that was also important in limiting the level of rivalry that we otherwise could have in airlines. Then the final issue, and this is one that it’s just going to be hard. There are clear advantages of scale. We have issues like frequent flyer programs, people develop loyalty, brand name awareness. Those are earned advantages that can happen. That’s not an antitrust concern and in some cases that will explain levels of concentration

Scott: And I discovered my life improved once I started ignoring frequent flyer programs, just going with whatever the best flight was at the time. Since we’re talking economics, you recently signed a letter that brings us right into sort of classic economics teaching issue, which is price gouging. You joined several other attorneys general to ask Amazon and other online sellers to ban price gouging. But price gouging is complicated, right? I mean on the one hand, just as a person it gets your blood boiling when you see prices jacked up in an emergency. But on the other hand, high prices encourage entry and if you keep the price low, odds are the good just won’t be there when you want it rather than it being there at a very high price. So you must have been thinking all this through as you signed the letter in this sort of odd situation. What did you think about it, how did you balance these things?

Phil: I appreciate the chance to talk about this. When I talk about price gouging, I invariably endeavor to differentiate what I’ll call the normal operation of supply and demand from opportunistic selling and extreme price gouging. What do I mean by that? First you have to set the benchmark. So a problematic price gouging situation is, oh, we were in a crisis. Demand went way up, supply went down. Prices are now more than 10% they were before the crisis. In almost all cases, that’s normal supply and demand. That’s what the market does. However, here’s what is not normal. You are in a situation you desperately need a good, an opportunistic seller sells it to you, 800% more than a reputable seller would sell it to you at the same time. And so the challenge for enforcement and for price gouging is to sort the wheat from the chaff. And as we see potential price gouging cases come out of this crisis, the challenge will be to say, are these cases focused on somebody who acted in a way that we all would say, our blood’s boiling, they were trying to take advantage of somebody. The most extreme example would be you’re bleeding and someone says, I’ll sell you a band aid. It’s going to cost you a hundred dollars, because you need it right now. That’s unfair. And then this is a point that, not either of you, but there’s some economists who would say never ever ever do anything about price gouging. And what that misses is fairness has to be baked into our system so that people know who they can trust. Now the case here for price gouging is not as strong as let’s say the going after lemons. People would sell a used car, where they didn’t disclose a harm. But I do think part of what the goal of reasonable enforcement related to price gouging is we need to build trust that what’s happening in the economy isn’t opportunistic, taking advantage of people when they’re vulnerable. So that’s how I think about price gouging. If you read a letter closely, you’ll note that the benchmarks are to reasonable sellers at the time, at a price well in excess of what they’re selling.

Tom: So is your office bring price gouging cases, currently?

Phil: We are looking at some cases, we have not been actually yet in court on this issue. If and when time comes that we have to do so we will need to make our case.

Tom: And are there laws on the books already that define price gouging?

Phil: Colorado has a situation that’s like a few other states and this is an important, valuable point to make. Our laws are not specifically tailored to price gouging. We don’t have any artificial percent increase over the status quo ante. Our laws are general UDA, which is the catch all phrase. But in our case it’s unfair, deceptive, unconscionable trade practice. So if I want to go after your price gouging, I would say that person who sold that band aid or fill in the blank, hand sanitizer, red ventilator acted in a way that was unfair and unconscionable. And I would make that in contrast to people who did it in a way that was fair and appropriate.

Scott: So let me go back to that band aid description. Let me play this terrible economist and mostly reveal why everyone hates us. But let’s say that this guy, he’s bleeding and he needs the band aid. The person who has band aid has been told to only sell them for some reasonable price, which probably means that by the time this guy needs the band aid, there are no band aids. And if he’d been charging a hundred dollars a band aid up to that point, people who would just want to have band aid around just in case bought them and this guy doesn’t have one, right? That’s the classic argument, is that just too hypothetically silly given the state of our supply chains and so on?

Phil: Like any good economist, you’re starting from an assumption and the assumption that I would unmask is you have a seller who is intending to be responsible and a repeat player. My assumption is, and I think my assumption is born out right now, in the time of a crisis like this, you get a whole bunch of irresponsible sellers who enter into the market opportunistically, often saying, how do I make the quickest buck, even if I am harming people, acting in a morally offensive way, and my view of consumer protection is a fundamentally conservative and foundational principle. Tim Muris gave a great speech at a conference Tom hosted way back when. It’s really important that if someone is acting in that way, you often hear the fly by night operator example, that we have a way to come down on them, because part of the problem for everyone in the economy is when you get opportunistic sellers, irresponsible sellers, and they’re able to get away with it, it just erodes trust more generally.

Scott: So an example in our current situation, may be that Purell raises the price and that’s just more supply and demand. They’ve been in the market for a long time. They’re going to be in the market for a long time. The guy who drove around to rural areas and bought up all the hand sanitizer at dollar stores and then tried to sell it at a 300% markup, made it not available to the rural areas anymore and sort of more of a fly by night.

Phil: Chances are, by the way, it’s worse than that. Chances are he’s diluted the product so it’s not as high quality of product as well. And you’ll often see price gouging go hand in hand with deception about what’s being sold either. You can also replace face masks in this hypothetical as well. A lot of times people are selling face mask and they don’t do what people purport them to do. Or we actually have our cases on this Tom, testing. People say, Oh, we’re giving you an FDA approved test. And of course, no, it hasn’t been approved by the FDA. They’re lying about it. And we try to, as a first order approximation, to say to people, you need to be reasonable. You have to be truthful. And if you act deceptively, we’re going to call you on it.

Scott: We’re running out of time, but I wanted to, first of all, congratulations on arguing before the Supreme court. So it must be a nice accomplishment-like feeling. What was that like? This is a very non-economic question, but you know, you’re standing there talking to the Supreme Court justices, trying to convince them of your case. Well, you know, what are you thinking about when you’re doing it? What’s it like answering their questions?

Phil: The pandemic has thrust all of us into unfamiliar surroundings and the Supreme Court did not have this over Zoom. They instead had it over the telephone. So sticking with a 20th century technology. And they had to make some adaptations and this was a really neat thing, to get really meta here guys, it’s something you’ll appreciate, Larry Lessig, who we all know from the technology world, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace is a great work about the internet economy and talks about architecture and how you can make architectural choices either enabled or disabled by technology. And so I’ve thought a lot about this during this time. We’re not able to do normal things in physical space, but we’re able to create virtual space. And Larry and his book talks a lot about, then, virtual games that people play. I think Second Life was one of those games that was happening back then. And the Supreme Court had to rearchitect how you did Supreme Court arguments not doing in person. And part of the architecture that was really interesting was it was a structured conversation where each justice got a certain amount of time to have a dialogue with me as opposed to the normal free for all. And I liked it on a couple levels. First, and this doesn’t get talked about enough, for introverts out there, the free for all is pretty intimidating, both for judges and also for advocates. Clarence Thomas rarely asks questions at argument and that is a loss for arguments because he asked great questions. How do I know that? Because in the May session, with a different architecture, this more structured format, Justice Thomas asked questions in every argument and in my argument he asked what was a, let’s call it a heartwarming question. And it was heartwarming on two levels. One is because it made my case so well, B) because it invoked to one of my favorite all time characters, Frodo Baggins and the issue in the case that I argued was whether or not electors were free agents, as Larry Lessig, as it turned out, was arguing, or whether electors were potential proxy voters on behalf of the people of the state and I argued that Colorado views our electors as proxy voters and it requires them to vote the way that people of Colorado vote. In doing so, I said if Colorado could not exercise that control and electors were free agents, you can have bribed electors and Justice Thomas asked the question, couldn’t an elector vote for Frodo Baggins on the theory of Larry Lessig’s case. I said, if states have no power to remove electors, then yes electors could vote for Frodo Baggins or, in violation of the 14th amendment, for someone who engaged in a rebellion and that sort of engaged conversation happened with each justice. It also gave me more of a chance to make my case in a search for truth as opposed to a firing squad where it feels like the justices are maybe arguing more with each other than engaging in dialogue with the advocates. So this change of architecture and format I actually enjoyed and to make it even better, they broadcast it or carried it live on C-SPAN and so there was much more awareness and engagement than there otherwise would have been.

Scott: So people are asking this question across everything and we don’t know the answers, but will some of this remain after the pandemic? Will this format, which seems to bring out so much more of people, including Justice Thomas, which is amazing, for him to be asking questions. Will any of that continue?

Phil: I do think we already have a lot to reassess and a lot to take stock of. Once we’re on the other side of this pandemic, there will have been a lot of experimentation, there will have been a lot of limitations in our current economic system and we’re going to need to look at both ends. What did we create new muscle around, new opportunities around and what was shown to be weaknesses? So for example, on the weaknesses front, supply chains and a lack of resilience, whether it’s on testing capacity or food in some cases is going to merit reflection. Are we stretching our supply chain so thin as to undermine resilience? And I think you’re seeing some discussions about resilience as a value that you wouldn’t otherwise see. And then with respect to doing things virtually, I do believe we’re going to get a lot of questions about, wait a minute, do we need to have the meeting in person or can we do it virtually, worked fine before virtually or the Supreme Court changes format, we learn from that. That’ll be up to the Supreme Court. I am a fan of experimentation and we certainly are being forced to experiment right now.

Scott: We’re out of time. It’s probably a good place to leave it. Phil, thanks so much for speaking with us. It’s always fun to talk to you. I really appreciate you taking your time to do it.

Phil: I feel the same way. I enjoyed the conversation. 

Tom: Thanks a lot.

Scott: Thanks.

Phil: Thank you guys. Take care now.