Untapped Innovations: Ryan Streeter on Workforce Development & Economic Opportunities
Ryan Streeter: [00:00:00] This narrative that, that working class people are frustrated with the direction of the country solely on economic terms just doesn’t seem to match up with what they tell, uh, people in surveys. And rather that they, they are more bullish about their own economic future, but frustrated that they live in a country where they’re misunderstood, taken for granted.
Ryan Streeter: For granted, or kind of send it to
Wyatt Smith: welcome to Untapped with UpSmith, a show diving into ideas to build the future. I’m Wyatt Smith, founder and CEO of UpSmith,
Alex Hudgens: and I’m Alex Hudgens, UpSmith’s resident storyteller on Untapped. You’re getting real talk and real help. We’re bringing you industry experts and inviting guests. Son to share perspectives on what they’re building.
Alex Hudgens: We’ll even workshop their business challenges in real time. Expect practical advice, inspiring ideas, and even some fun. We promise
Wyatt Smith: ideas, build the future
Alex Hudgens: and the future is bright.
Wyatt Smith: It’s time for Untapped with UpSmith. [00:01:00] Thanks
Wyatt Smith: to another episode of Untapped with UpSmith. We’re grateful to have Ryan Streeter along with us today and a really exciting conversation about the skilled worker shortage and what we do about it. It is good to be with you. Thanks for having me. We are thrilled to have you aboard. Uh, Ryan is a dear friend and someone who I call on for advice often around how to think about this problem.
Wyatt Smith: Uh, Ryan, you’ve had a really interesting set of experiences in your career. Um, would you start by just sharing a little bit with everyone listening about where you focus your time and about how you got to where you are.
Ryan Streeter: Great. Thanks. Um, great to be with you. Wyatt and Alex. Thanks for having me. Um, professional ADHD is kind of what jumps off the resume when you look at it.
Ryan Streeter: I, I tend to think there’s a thread kind of weaving it through, through all of this. But I’m, I’m basically, um, kind of a blend of a public policy wonk and a political philosopher. Kind of it’s the [00:02:00] two parts of my career that have kind of run in tandem. I started out as the latter and kind of turned into the, into the former.
Ryan Streeter: Um, so I, what that means is I’ve mostly spent my career working in think tanks. Public policy research organizations where you’re trying to use the best tools of social and economic, uh, science, policy to address big questions. Um, and, uh, I’ve been fortunate enough to work across a range of different issues.
Ryan Streeter: Cities have kind of always been the organizing concept for me. I’ve always been interested in urban policy issues. That’s kind of where I started out. And so everything that sort of relates to that from, uh, the affordable housing situation to the state of schools and cities, uh, the state of public safety and these sorts of things.
Ryan Streeter: And the, the theme that sort of tied it all together over the years is just, uh, an interest in upward mobility and particularly an interest in upward mobility for people that, that don’t live in the best places that don’t live in the neighborhoods where upward mobility is most likely to happen statistically.[00:03:00]
Ryan Streeter: And so, uh, I got involved in my career very early on in looking at these questions of, What are the conditions by which somebody growing up in a part of town where most people don’t go to college, maybe where there’s a lot of crime, when they succeed, why do they succeed? What are the things that, that drive that?
Ryan Streeter: And very early in my career, I landed on this, this interest in what I call sort of the non economic drivers of economic success. That is households, schools, community organizations, friendships, networks. And so developed also a very, uh, kind of deep interest early on in social capital and the whole, uh, that has really developed, even in my professional life, from where it was when I started to where I am now, the amount of work that’s been done to look at the quality and nature of relationships and what they mean for upward mobility.
Ryan Streeter: So I’ve, I’ve done that, uh, that kind of work on a number of different think tanks. Uh, that’s taken me into a couple of stints in public service, always the executive branch. I seem to not be a legislative person. I’ve worked for a president, a governor, and a mayor. And now I’ve ended up back at the University of Texas where we’re [00:04:00] building something that would look like kind of a think tank on a university campus focused on a broad set of issues related to personal, political, and economic liberty.
Alex Hudgens: We were having trouble on the ride over here because it’s like we could ask him 8, 000 things and we only have 45 minutes. Oh man. Okay. I have so many questions based off what you just said, but first I need to know, are you from a big city? Like where did the love for cities come from? And do you have a favorite city in the U.
Alex Hudgens: S.?
Ryan Streeter: In the U. S. You just qualified the answer for me there.
Alex Hudgens: Ooh, okay, give me the non U. S. answer then if that was easier.
Ryan Streeter: The, um, well, to answer your first question, I grew up in a suburb of Chicago, um, until I was 12 and then moved to a suburb of Indianapolis. So, grew up in the burbs and had a great sort of childhood and, and experience.
Ryan Streeter: Played, you know, football on the football team and for the, for the, the only high school in town and those sorts of things and kind of truly an Americana kind of upbringing. went to college in a city [00:05:00] and then ended up just living in cities for a while and just found that the rhythm and pulse of them I was in Chicago for college and Found myself just absolutely enthralled with everything that the the city offered and the the way the lights never turned off at night the energy and really just the the mashup of of people, people from all different backgrounds and, and countries.
Ryan Streeter: And there’s great ethnic neighborhoods in Chicago too, with great food that’s been there for over a hundred years and just wandering through the city just kind of helped me fall in love with it. My wife and I lived in Germany twice for two non sequential years around graduate school time. And Found ourselves walking to the market, walking into town, bumping into the same people at the pub.
Ryan Streeter: I have friends to this day that I met way back then, and we came back from that experience looking for neighborhoods in the U. S. that kind of approximated that, places that had a sense of human scale, proximity. And, uh, we’ve always done that. I, I have two adult kids now [00:06:00] and they’ve never had a backyard or garage in all of our moves.
Ryan Streeter: We’ve always kind of lived right in the city. So I, I, uh, I don’t, I’m not the kind of urbanist who tells everybody that they have to live in cities or morally judging them if they don’t, it’s just our preference. We’ve just really benefited from that over the years. We spent a little time, a couple of years, actually more than a little time in London, and that still is my favorite city.
Ryan Streeter: It’s not a U S city, but. London is kind of, you know, New York, Los Angeles, and Washington, D. C. rolled into one. You know, you have those, those aspects of it, and it’s a bunch of cities together, right? I mean, the, the, the shift in architectural styles, and the, the, the way that certain parts of the city kind of center on their high street there, and just everything that London offers, I think, is, is great.
Ryan Streeter: Um, so outside the, the U. S., I would say that’s, you know, my, my favorite all around. Here, here in the States, um, you know, honestly, um, I like this place. I like Austin a lot. I like A place where people are making, creating, building things. I was here for a little while, left for almost seven years in D. C. [00:07:00] And, uh, was really happy to come back.
Ryan Streeter: Because in Washington, no one’s doing any of those things.
.: And
Ryan Streeter: my friends, and very good friends, and I’ve got some of my closest friends in my life are in Washington, D. C., but They probably got tired of hearing me complain about that when I lived there. Do you know what it’s like to move from Austin, Texas to Washington, D.
Ryan Streeter: C.? It can drive you crazy. Yeah. This is a fun place and I’m glad to be back.
Wyatt Smith: When you were in Washington, D. C. this last 10, uh, your role at the American Enterprise Institute was very focused on domestic policy and like ways to think about policymaking to create human flourishing and good outcomes. We think a lot about workforce development and I’m curious about from your time leading that work.
Wyatt Smith: What are learnings or insights you developed about what is effective workforce development policy and and what does it look like? such a big question
Ryan Streeter: and You have people in your life in orbit who are smarter about this than than I am but what I would say is that This area and this is where I commend so much the work of UpSmith and what you’re doing to focus on this really [00:08:00] really important part of our economy our workforce demography, our future, um, because it is one of these areas in public policy.
Ryan Streeter: And I say this as someone, you know, as I indicated earlier, kind of a generalist bouncing around, you know, to a range of different issues. This is an area that has just proven to be somewhat impervious to uh, innovation and reform that we’ve seen in other areas, such as K through 12 schooling. We’re, you know, 30 years in on an experiment to, um, challenge sort of the main line delivery of public school education with other types of models.
Ryan Streeter: For you, we started out with charter schools and vouchers. The first two laws, one in Wisconsin, one in Minnesota passed within a year of each other. I think back in the early 1990s, we’ve seen that explosion and now, and especially in post pandemic, you’ve seen this acceleration of acceptance of all kinds of models, right?
Ryan Streeter: But the, I think the acceptance of the models of innovation, whether it’s hybrid schooling or now we’re moving into education savings accounts, it comes on the background of a decades long movement [00:09:00] of, of reform, which was predicated by over a decade of research and trying to come up with some solutions to the problems with mainline schooling.
Ryan Streeter: And you can see that I’m seeing a major sea change even in housing policy in the same way in the last 20 years, a real shift in the way policymakers across the ideological spectrum are focused on, you know, what’s driving affordability, housing problems with affordability. Uh, we’ve changed kind of our theories on that over the last 20 years because the research has gotten better and you’re starting to see people experiment, um, at the municipal level with those findings.
Ryan Streeter: Now let’s, let’s change the way we, the way we design, the way land is used for instance. Workforce development is one of these areas where we just haven’t had that same kind of movement. We’ve, we’ve got a federal policy that we’ve, we’ve redone the acRyanym on it a few times over the last couple generations.
Ryan Streeter: And I would say that it, it is, it’s an area where for whatever reason, we haven’t had the kind of jolts to the system that would help, um, states and localities that are using federal resources think [00:10:00] differently. about how they, how they deploy workforce development and resources. And so where you see success around the country.
Ryan Streeter: Um, it’s almost always because of entrepreneurial factors locally that are happening within the flexibility and the contours that the policy allows, but not really the result of the explicit policy itself. Yeah. That sounds a little general. We can get into some of the more specifics if you’d like, but that’s what I would just say.
Ryan Streeter: It’s a, it’s an area where. Um, where policy entrepreneurs who kind of want to make a name for themselves as real innovators, if they’re interested in that kind of thing, could be focusing for the next couple of decades. Well, I
Wyatt Smith: think just for the, for listeners benefit who maybe are less, uh, familiar with the way this works, we’ll take one of those word salad acRyanyms, um, and, and the workforce innovation act as an example that we owe a system and the way that those dollars move through is largely, um, a model where it comes from the department of labor, and then we’ll go either to states or.
Wyatt Smith: workforce development boards. There are many of them with great people working hard to get good outcomes. But, um, [00:11:00] our observation is that often they’re like very formula driven. There’s like a very top down, this is the way that it works. And, um, that’s set from some sort of a central authority. Um, I’m curious about your take on why it is that way, like how it came, came to be that, and then what are some of the ways it plays out?
Ryan Streeter: It’s a great question. And you’re right. It’s, it’s a, it’s a certain structure that’s been created, which I think had a lot of rationale back when it was made. And I think there were other policy, uh, development efforts back when this was created that followed a similar type of model. And as you mentioned, you have these boards, which are sort of regionally determined and it sounds devolutionary and it is at its nature, you’re, you’re trying to put decision making authority close to where the jobs are.
Ryan Streeter: You want to have a. a board that’s constituted by people that come from the area, um, where these dollars are being deployed through community colleges or through technical training programs or what have you, you want the leaders from the major employers kind of involved. You [00:12:00] want the people from those institutions involved.
Ryan Streeter: And so it makes sense from a devolutionary standpoint, we’ve, we did that when we reformed welfare in the 1990s, we went from a system where we paid, uh, low income people just to cash check based on a formula to making block grants to states, which then further devolved it to regional areas to help people get fine jobs.
Ryan Streeter: And so in many ways, the programs are sort of designed the same. The thing that is challenging about the model now though, is that the changing nature of a labor force and the changing nature of the employer community in a region. is almost always happening in ways that that model can’t anticipate and see.
Ryan Streeter: And so those, those boards take time to figure out how to deploy the resources to certain types of programs. And I think you can make a pretty good case and maybe an empirical one, an observation that, that, that would, would stand the test of scrutiny. And it’s almost always backwards looking
.: that
Ryan Streeter: you’re, you’re making decisions about where to send workforce training dollars based on where the economy was [00:13:00] growing a couple of years ago.
Ryan Streeter: A lot of times the data that is used from the federal government actually does have a lag, um, when they’re, when people are using federal data. And so I think now the, the problem is how do you, how do you actually match individual aspirations? Someone’s looking to make a change in their career. They’re looking for the first job and they’re trying to find that training.
Ryan Streeter: How do you match that desire? With what’s actually happening in the regional economy that they’re in and match it through a mediate, a mediating structure and a training program or whatever that actually is, is connected to where the jobs, jobs are growing. You know, I’ve, I’ve gone in, I’ve gone and looked at workforce development programs in a number of different states and it really is amazing.
Ryan Streeter: It’s sometimes it sounds ridiculous to say this, and this isn’t a criticism of well meaning people, but you know, you’ll find that. Decisions sometimes will be made as simply as, you know, a local state senator’s brother runs a restaurant supply business and all of a sudden there’s a, you know, a training program for these things, you know, [00:14:00] and so the, the, the, the political sort of factors determining who’s actually getting paid to train people are actually very real and, and so the question is, can you actually introduce reforms that disrupt that, um, problem?
Ryan Streeter: Yeah. And that’s what I think, that’s where I think the winds of reform are blowing or should be and where there’s real opportunity for creative
Wyatt Smith: minds. Yeah.
.: Keep
Wyatt Smith: going. One thing that’s surprising I think for lots of folks too is that a lot of the dollars are going to things that are not necessarily workforce training related outcomes.
Wyatt Smith: For example, in North Texas where, where I call home, there’s a round between the, the The Dallas Workforce Development Board and the surrounding counties of 14 counties or so in North Texas, around 300 million a year is invested in, in workforce development through that channel. And 80%, 70 percent is childcare, subsidy related.
Wyatt Smith: And that is important for helping someone who is a single parent and more often than not a [00:15:00] single mom who’s navigating a transition back into the workforce or maybe was out of labor force and wants to. Rejoin, um, it is surprising to many people though, that the majority of the dollars aren’t necessarily going to the training program for that person.
Wyatt Smith: It’s the, it’s a subsidy to enable them to have their kids taken care of. And so given that you’ve studied a lot of examples of what works, um, I’m curious about bright spots, cities, regions, places where you’d say they’ve really got it figured out something cool is going on there. What comes to mind?
Ryan Streeter: Well, I think the, what first comes to mind is, is the places that have figured out how to deliver training in a way that’s really data driven, uh, in terms of using tools that are available to us to see where growth in the labor market is, are, are doing well.
Ryan Streeter: And some states have done more than, than that. with this than, than others. And so, um, yeah, I mean, here in Texas, there’s actually been quite a bit of good work that has been done there. Tennessee’s done, done some, some really remarkable work there. You’re seeing it in [00:16:00] pockets, um, around the country. Ohio has done some interesting things.
Ryan Streeter: I mean, you, you have, you have, I think a lot of bright spots. Um, and there, and like I said earlier, they’re almost always, Explained by kind of the local ingenuity and entrepreneurship of some industry leaders, um, some local political leaders, people that say, we’re just going to create the program that does these kinds of things that have been missing in the, in kind of system, system wide.
Ryan Streeter: And so I think, one, when you have associations and networks of employers, and there’s a couple of manufacturing groups around the country that do this, where, you know, they work with a community college partner to design a curriculum that’s specific to what they need, and they also look at the whole person, and I think that’s an important one.
Ryan Streeter: Those, those, uh, employers have also figured out that, you know, The benefits of a four year university degree, we now know from some really interesting research has been done around the country is often it’s not your degree. It’s all that other stuff that you get to do during the four years in college.
Ryan Streeter: You have to work in teams, you have to give presentations, you have to hit deadlines, you have to do all those things. which often are not part of the life of someone that’s having to go [00:17:00] through a two year associates degree or getting a technical certification. And so I’ve seen some, some pretty good, um, associations of employers who actually the curriculum will involve those types of things to leadership development and training, the ability to problem solve, be able to work in teams, these things that we used to call soft skills, but they’re just not really, um, it’s really important for maintaining kind of a reliable, uh, group of, of employees.
Ryan Streeter: And so I think Uh, where, where you see that rolled in to the technical curriculum, that’s a really important thing. Secondly, being able to work with, I won’t name some of the proprietary companies, but companies out there that are actually out there getting a really good picture of where the jobs are growing in a regional area and using that information and delivering it directly to people.
Ryan Streeter: is, is a real challenge. It’s just crazy that we can find the best Thai restaurant, you know, in 10 miles here. But it’s hard to find, like, who’s, who’s actually delivering the best welding program in an area that’s delivering the kinds of jobs that the person who signs up for a welding program hopes that they’ll get, right?
Ryan Streeter: And that information exists out there, but finding a way [00:18:00] to put it in one place combined with other public data in a way that’s as simple as delivering it to someone’s phone, he’s searching for it. Um, is, is another thing and some people are starting to experiment with that as well. But I think, I think that, you know, trying to, to replicate the benefits of a four year college degree in a more short term enviRyanment, like I mentioned, is, you know, some, some of those things, taking that seriously is important.
Ryan Streeter: And then just disaggregating all the noise that’s between the individual and the information that they need to understand their own labor market is kind of the, the really big fRyantier of, of reform possibility, I think.
Alex Hudgens: Mm. That’s We need five hours,
Ryan Streeter: please. I don’t know how you get there. I mean, you know, it takes money, but I think redeploying some of these resources for these sorts of things, allowing resources to be used for those types of data tools would be important.
Ryan Streeter: And then learning from some of the other reform areas, too. I mean, probably allowing people, to, um, access training resources more in the form of a voucher or at [00:19:00] least as kind of a staged allotment of funding that they can access when they’re taking the next step in the program to facilitate completion, which as we know is always a really big challenge.
Ryan Streeter: I, I once had the CEO of a large state community college, just one of the biggest ones in the state. When I asked him about their very low, uh, Yeah. He was like, well, my life happens for people in this population. I was like, that’s not a good enough answer.
Wyatt Smith: Um, you know. I think it’s surprising to many people to learn that often the finish rate is 10, 15%.
Wyatt Smith: Yeah. How many of those programs. And it is true that people enroll in those programs for different reasons. Not everyone necessarily is enrolling to earn an associate’s degree. Um, but if you still control for the folks that are there for enrichment or, you know, continuous continuing education that still.
Wyatt Smith: Much lower. Our observation from having talked to lots of people pursuing the programs is that there’s a bunch of friction And you know that you need to earn more money and the timing doesn’t work out And so therefore you don’t sustain One of the things we’ve been interested in learning about opportunities for is [00:20:00] deploying it through employers where it’s tied to your job And now you’re earning money while you are pursuing that credential and I’m curious about Examples you’ve seen where the dollars are more flexible and could be routed to An employer to offset some of the cost of that training anywhere that’s that’s working I think it’s working in other
Ryan Streeter: areas, you
Wyatt Smith: know,
Ryan Streeter: and and I think that is I think that’s part of the reason why welfare reform worked really well in the 1990s um, a lot of people out of the gate said it didn’t succeed but then when people studied it including my My now former AEI colleague scott windship, you know looked at um the amazing effect of moving kind of almost an entire generation of people out of a state of non work into work.
Ryan Streeter: When you look at how there’s a lot of flexibility, the way those resources could be used. And so, um, they could be used to help people get what they needed to just get ready for their first job, um, to, to purchase equipment, um, to buy the things that they needed to be successful at work, to get the training that they, that they needed.
Ryan Streeter: Um, [00:21:00] it’s okay to trust people who don’t have perfect information to make good choices in their lives. Sure. So. Um, and so I think that, uh, allowing participants in these programs to direct those, those dollars would make a lot of sense, whether we call it a voucher or some other mechanism. And then, to your point, more directly.
Ryan Streeter: Um, employers will often know that the people that they’re hiring are going to need, uh, certain follow on certifications or whatever, and the employee kind of trusts them to do that. Right. You get the job and you expect that in order to grow in this company, if my employer says, you know, actually, in order to succeed in this job, um, we think, you know, you should go on and get this, this next certification and we’re going to pay for it, you, you’re going to do it.
Ryan Streeter: Mm hmm. And so there is that, that employer employee trust relationship, which is a very real thing. Mm And, um, so we should use that, um, instead of, uh, being overly prescriptive about what funds can’t be, be used for. So I, I think, I, I, I mean, I, I think we’re long [00:22:00] past the point of funding institutions that do the training and funding the individuals that need to be trained and funding the employers who.
Ryan Streeter: will benefit from, from that training and making that our, that, that our focus. And so that again is happening, um, almost in spite of our policy in places around the country than as a result of it. And so from a policy perspective, I think we should just change that the next time we come up with a new acRyanym for the federal policy.
Ryan Streeter: Um, but in the meantime, there is a lot of flexibility that mayors, that governors and their staff have, and that local consortia of employers have to actually utilize those resources to achieve some of
Wyatt Smith: that. If you’re an employer listening to this and you’re thinking to yourself, gosh, I would love to lean in and participate in a program like that one, but I really don’t know where to start.
Wyatt Smith: What advice would you have for them? Hope
Ryan Streeter: that your local political leadership is open to innovation, which is going to be probably a point of despair for most of the listeners because that’s not often [00:23:00] the quality that comes first to mind when you think about your local political leadership. But. You do, you do need that.
Ryan Streeter: Um, you need a governor and their staff who actually, um, understand some of what we’re talking about. So that would be, that would be the, the, the, the main thing. But I would, I would say that, um, if you’re an employer working with someone like you, up Smith, everyone, I assume if you’re listening to this podcast, you know, you know what, uh, what up Smith does, but finding, finding people in your orbit who actually have a connection to to the trades and have a connection to the others in your community that are actually have some experience doing this would be, would be important.
Ryan Streeter: But I think that finding another set of your colleagues, even if they’re your competitors and kind of joining forces to essentially lobby your workforce development system, the way it’s structured to allow you to have a greater say in the way that those resources are deployed and show them what you would do with them.
Ryan Streeter: I think that’s. [00:24:00] That’s the best thing. At the end of the day, most political leaders are going to be motivated by showing that they achieved results with these sorts of things. A governor or a mayor is going to want to say, we formed this workforce board and we’ve seen X amount of growth, you know, in these particular trades or this amount of wage growth or this much job attachment or what have you.
Ryan Streeter: And, uh, they, they have those interests for political reasons. You as an employer can actually use those to your, to your benefit by, by, by working with them. And I think that, uh, almost always is more successful when you come at it as a consortium of, of, you know, employers in a similar, in a similar field joining together.
Ryan Streeter: Um, I’ve, I’m from Indiana originally and have done a little bit of, I haven’t, I spent most of my professional life outside of Indiana, but have been back there a couple of times. And there’s a, a professional Basically an association of the largest employers within the greater Indianapolis area, which is one of the best corporate partnerships I think I’ve seen [00:25:00] anywhere.
Ryan Streeter: I think some of your listeners from other cities might raise theirs up, but I think my hometown actually figured this one out really well. Central India and a corporate partnership. And if you go look at kind of how they’re structured, um, what drives that economy from, from life sciences being a huge one, bioscience is a major center there to transport and logistics to a number, a number of different things that kind of are, where you have a lot of different, different companies there.
Ryan Streeter: And they just kind of took matters into their own hands probably a couple of decades ago and, um, just decided to invest in creating an infrastructure where this kind of. collaborative kind of training can happen, you know, so they have a, they have a lot of say, kind of what happens in terms of the development in that, that part of, of the state, which is obviously the economic center for that state.
Wyatt Smith: Yep.
Ryan Streeter: Um, in getting out ahead of where training dollars are, are going, because they’re, they’re going to be the likely important ones. employer for a lot of the people that that are going to school to get trained in their in their sector and that’s That takes high levels of social capital and trust, you know, not every city’s uh comprised of the kind of right combination of people to do [00:26:00] That this was manageable in a place like indianapolis.
Ryan Streeter: There’s some other examples, too But that’s a great one Um, and it’s been it’s hard to think of the growth and success of a city like that where I put indianapolis and columbus Ohio is kind of You know, rust belt cities, quote unquote, that have more similarities with sunbelt cities, just in terms of how they’ve been growing over the last decade or so.
Ryan Streeter: And, um, and I think, you know, in, in the case of Indianapolis, that’s a good example of how, um, a formalized partnership can actually really play a role in achieving those kinds of outcomes. Right. Growth in those sectors, lots of people moving there, um, being employed in those sectors which actually pay well and create a, a good upward mobility path.
Wyatt Smith: We love Indianapolis. It’s a great place. And so, so one last question for me on that topic is, you, you, you formerly were a senior executive on the staff of the governor of Indiana, and you were watching as that, you Was forming. What reflections do you have on when people would approach you looking for help and it was effective?
Wyatt Smith: One insight is come with a consortia, come with people that are in your trade association and, and you’re doing some hard things. Are there other insights or [00:27:00] recommendations you have on how to work effectively with people in those roles? Pay attention to what a political
Ryan Streeter: leader says that he or she wants to, to be doing and come with ideas that fit there in a political enviRyanment to someone can come with a great idea, but it’s like, we’ve already got like 13 priorities.
Ryan Streeter: And so it has to kind of fit within that, uh, trying to go change a politician’s mind after they’ve been elected to office to steer is, is challenging. So trying to. And I say this not just as someone that served as a policy advisor to a governor, but as someone in my think tank role who’s actually gone and sat down in the room with governors and their staff and tried to get them to focus on important things.
Ryan Streeter: A lot of times, you know, they, they have certain agendas that they’re pursuing and you have to figure out how to kind of help them succeed, which is, I guess, coming back to a point I made, I made earlier. Um, I think that the, um, the thing that is probably, uh, maybe understudied, but really important. is the way that employers fit within ecosystems that are sort of regionally determined and thinking very [00:28:00] creatively about that.
Ryan Streeter: And so I think one, one thing that can be very helpful to an elected official, a governor, their staff, uh, the mayor of a large city, city councilors of a large city is the way in which certain sectors of the labor force are, um, you know, reflected in, you know, the, the employment base of a number of different firms that, that have an awareness of the kind of ecosystem that they’re a part of and are playing a constructive role in making it better.
Ryan Streeter: So when you’re, you know, we realized we, you know, we didn’t plan it, but all of a sudden we’ve got, you know, a lot of people in life sciences or, you know, in one of these other sectors, and then you want to be a part of a solution that involves bringing more talent from outside your city or state to that area.
Ryan Streeter: What that means. That might mean taking an interest in the human capital development there, whether it’s the K 12 system or the, the workforce development system that’s there. It might get you, uh, interested in housing issues. Um, depending on where you are, you might not [00:29:00] have, you might have a shortage of housing for the kind of people you’re trying to attract if you’re going to grow.
Ryan Streeter: And, and I think where you’ve seen, um, Economies that are growing, like do this like hockey stick thing or something that approximates it. Um, regionally speaking, it’s often because whether it was planned or not, somebody figured that out.
.: Had a couple
Ryan Streeter: of leaders from the business community as some political policy entrepreneurs get together and realize that we’re all going to succeed more effectively here.
Ryan Streeter: If we can try to figure out what this region is going to look like 15 years from now. and, uh, and thinking of yourself as a member of a community that way. You may be collect, you connected and you will be, if you’re an employer in a, in a growing place to a global economy. And you’ve got, you know, you have relations all around the, the world.
Ryan Streeter: Um, depending on what, what line of business you’re in. Um, but you’re always still a citizen somewhere, a resident somewhere. You’ve got a, you’ve got a headquarters address somewhere. And, uh, and I think that’s, that’s the thing that is really, really [00:30:00] important to get. And you can’t just do it by going around copying people.
Ryan Streeter: You know, I, I’ve lived here once before, I’m back in Austin again. I’ve lived outside of Austin long enough to know that everybody comes here to study Austin, right? They want to be like Austin. And it’s like, you really, don’t just try to be like Austin because you’ll lose, right? You know, um, go Austin’s going to out Austin you.
Ryan Streeter: Yeah, that’s right. Exactly. Austin’s still weird.
Alex Hudgens: There’s the question.
Ryan Streeter: Go find what, um, your kind of, um, inherent indigenous. strengths are and see if you can, can, can build on that. And, and I think where you, where you see some of these bright spots around the country, geographically, some of that’s been happening, some of it planned, some of it unplanned, but it’s where when you see dynamic growth, where, you know, you know, not just here, but whether you’re talking about Nashville or, um, or some of the fast growing cities in Florida or, you know, the, the, um, uh, the place, or I mentioned even the quote unquote Rust Belts.
Ryan Streeter: I say quote unquote, cause I’m from the Rust Belt and I don’t, you know, I like calling the nomenclature is yeah, you know, the Columbus in Indianapolis is, um, you see that growth not just happening purely by accident, but because there was just enough people [00:31:00] who figured out the kind of geographic strengths of the place and what it means to actually grow.
Ryan Streeter: work together that way. And I, lots of states have kind of 50 versions of the same bad idea when it comes to economic development. A lot of smokestack chasing, you know, a lot of trying to tax credit structures, try to lure this factory across the state lines, um, or whatever. Um, and not very many have thought creatively about how to think of their, their state as a collection of regions.
Ryan Streeter: And to ask employers to kind of play ball on that. We tried that in Indiana. We created a regional strategy, which I think was actually pretty, pretty effective. And the current governor, Eric Holcomb, maintained a good bit of that and actually kind of built it up in some ways. And I’ve seen that in some other states as well.
Ryan Streeter: But anytime you see a fast growing city, that’s kind of what’s happened. Somebody, you know, Um, some collection of people figured out that we have, uh, something of an ecosystem that we need to understand and understand what it would look like in its mature state. Um, and then work together to, to develop that.
Ryan Streeter: So I think understanding [00:32:00] yourself as a part of that ecosystem is important. That’s not, that’s not always what you’re, you’re kind of trained to think of first
Wyatt Smith: off. Yeah. Good mayors matter. We were talking on the card over about how Alex would be a really good mayor.
Alex Hudgens: Is that what was said? Thanks. I have a question.
Alex Hudgens: Thank you. I would love to be the mayor of, and I don’t know. I live in New York, but I’m from St. Louis and a lot of what you’ve said, I’m like, which St. Louis would harness what St. Louis could be. Great bones. That’s a great way to put it. The art being one of them. How do you, the most basic way I can ask this is how do you remain hopeful?
Alex Hudgens: Cause so much of what I’ve heard, this is undercurrent of like, Work together and be creative and humans can do this. And meanwhile, every headline is AI and all this scary stuff. And it’s very easy, at least for me, to get cynical and depressed and all of this. But there’s just this, like, energy of, come on, y’all, coming off of you.
Alex Hudgens: When you’ve seen the red tape and you’ve been behind the scenes and you’re in policy, [00:33:00] where’s the hope coming from? That’s
Ryan Streeter: what I want to know. It’s a good question. Um, I’ve been fortunate in, as the result of my professional ADHD and moving around a lot, I seem to always move into places with construction cranes.
Ryan Streeter: That’s been my metric of sort of dynamism. You know, it’s a good leading indicator. Yeah. When you’re living in the middle of construction cranes and the sounds of construction and all of that, it actually, you know, you can complain about the road closures. I’ve had a couple of flat tires from driving over, you know, the results of that in my own neighborhood.
Ryan Streeter: But, um, that, that, that sense of kind of forward progress is really, really amazing. I have sat. You know, in places that have been maybe in recession for the last 15 years in this country, you know Their regional economy has not grown. It’s been growing the wRyang way and looking at, at people my age sitting, you know, in a restaurant looking out at a landscape that looks the same but more tired than when they were in high school in that town, you know, and I think that has [00:34:00] a real downward effect on the human spirit and, and actually makes those, you know, places actually, you know, of, of things to take root, you know, and we see this not just here, but in other countries as well.
Ryan Streeter: And so we want more distributed dynamism in this country. It can’t just be in coastal cities. It can’t just be in all the hotspots. More people need to be making, building and creating stuff around the country. Um, because it’s really important, not just for the economy. It’s important for the socio economy.
Ryan Streeter: It’s, it’s important for kids to grow up in a, in a place where they have a sense of aspiration. And where they know that their aspirations could be fulfilled if they, if they, if they want to, without having to move too far away from, from home.
Wyatt Smith: Ryan has a general contractor who is great, which is not always the recommendation.
Wyatt Smith: That’s what I’ve heard.
Alex Hudgens: I live in the city, so we’re not doing that, but
Ryan Streeter: even worse, I have some friends that have tried to do some, some work in Manhattan and that sounds like the worst. I mean, talk about like corrupt, impossible and
Wyatt Smith: that’s the dynamic.
Ryan Streeter: Yeah,
Wyatt Smith: for sure. I’m curious. So when you, when you do speak to [00:35:00] this person and, and.
Wyatt Smith: He’s thinking about how to get a lot of skilled trades people on his team. What challenges does he share?
Ryan Streeter: Yeah, that would be interesting.
Wyatt Smith: Yeah,
Ryan Streeter: I could ask him that,
Wyatt Smith: you know, yeah,
Ryan Streeter: but he’s just he’s he’s in it We’ve just been blown away because we’re like I’ve said to be we’ve got this great contractor
Alex Hudgens: What?
Alex Hudgens: Tell me more you
Wyatt Smith: were sharing some insights about like what it means to be working class in the United States And I’m curious if you just could synthesize that from your research, which what are some takeaways you’ve
Ryan Streeter: Yeah, over the last few years and while I was at the American Enterprise Institute, we built up a large survey center, the Survey Center on American Life.
Ryan Streeter: And just to fill in gaps that we saw in public opinion research and survey research on questions that didn’t have to do with politics, since everything seems to be filtered through a political lens these days, and look more at how people are doing just in the communities where they live. Um, we’ve done surveys on friendship, on trust, on the loneliness issue, social capital, how [00:36:00] often people hang out in third places like cafes or the dog park or whatever.
Ryan Streeter: And so we, we, we were generating a lot of that, that, uh, uh, survey data and it produced some really interesting findings and, and I could geek out on that for a separate podcast and all the cool things we found. Um, but along the way, when there was so much discussion in Washington, D. C. about working class concerns, and I think both the left and the right overinterpreted the, um, the working class frustration, anxiety, alienation, in very strictly economic terms.
Ryan Streeter: The left has a history of doing this. The right has joined that in more recent years, and understanding kind of, um, the parts of You know, the kinds of parts of the country that, that Charles Murray wrote about in Coming Apart or that Bob Putnam wrote about in Pulling Along, yeah, um, where, where you’ve seen a lot of economic stagnation and you’ve seen a lot of detachment from the labor force among people that didn’t go get a four year college degree, like what’s going on there.[00:37:00]
Ryan Streeter: And we had a definition of the working class that we developed with Brookings in a working group during this time. And so I just took that, would pull that sample. And when these surveys were large enough that you could get meaningful subsamples. I’d pull that sample out and just look at how working class people are responding to questions about their economic future, about the future of the country, about other culture war hot button issues.
Ryan Streeter: And what really became clear to my colleagues and I is that, um, working class people are generally more optimistic about the future of the country. It’s the, it’s the college educated progressives on the left and increasingly so on the, on the right. College, college educated Trump supporters were actually like just as negative about the country as the highly educated progressive left, which is, oh, you know, say, is the American dream alive or dead?
Ryan Streeter: Both of those crowds would say it’s dead. And Trump and Bernie Sanders both campaigned on it being dead too. So we shouldn’t be too surprised. They tapped into this kind of, you know, part of their, their base. Um, working class Americans and especially working class black and Hispanic Americans are very bullish on the future of the country and whether their lives will be better.[00:38:00]
Ryan Streeter: Five years from now, where you, what you saw, though, was the sense of cultural kind of disconnection, you know, not trusting people in high places, not trusting cultural elites to make the right decisions, feeling cut off from them. I think that’s where the, the division is. And you, I think if you just hang out in, in communities that are overrepresented by people, or the majority of the people would fall into what we call working class sort of demographics.
Ryan Streeter: Thanks. Um, I think you see, you know, more frustration with the way that families are falling apart or not hanging together, some of the kind of community based concerns that, that are evident in a community that’s struggling, people being concerned about that kind of a thing. Um, yeah. Talking about those things more than they are talking about maybe the jobs that went to China, unless you live specifically in a, in a community that was directly affected by a China shock, that you, you basically will see, um, in the literature as well, that where there’s lots of churn in the local economy, a dynamic place like this, [00:39:00] Um, like where we’re sitting, even though it becomes expensive because of that growth and housing here is becoming a problem for sure in a way that it wasn’t even five, five years ago.
Ryan Streeter: You actually see people, um, in the trades and people without four year college degrees also benefiting from that churn because the opportunity to move from one company to another exists. Yeah. And if you’re a sole contractor, um, Um, working with another contractor and you’re living in a dynamic area, there’s a lot of work to be had.
Ryan Streeter: And there’s, there’s job hopping happens everywhere. And it happens in working class communities as well. And where that happens, the reported job satisfaction is pretty high among people without college degrees when they live in places like that. So this, my point is just that this narrative. that, that working class people are frustrated with the direction of the country solely on economic terms just doesn’t seem to match up with what they tell, uh, people in surveys and rather that they, they are more bullish about their own economic future, but frustrated that they live in a country where they’re misunderstood, taken for granted or condescended to.
Ryan Streeter: Yeah. So I think that’s, that’s just an important, [00:40:00] important takeaway that when, as a matter of policy, If you’re trying to quote unquote, get the vote of a working class voter coming at them with kind of elaborate sort of pro working class policies like industrial policy or certain wage policies and all that stuff, it’s, it’s probably not going to have as much of an effect on their vote as you think it might.
Ryan Streeter: Because their concerns are actually, um, more bread, more bread and butter and actually more aspirational. It’s pretty encouraging. You look at the survey data, um, because, um, There’s hope in these parts of the country that we were told, um, don’t have hope.
Wyatt Smith: Yeah. And is it, it maps to our experience. We, we built software largely for users who might come from a working class background and our experience has been that most people don’t build software for that user.
Wyatt Smith: So most software that exists is conceived for a person who lives behind a computer. And so those, those products and the applications of those products are largely about that person’s lived experience. And so thinking about how to design products to serve people who. are working with their hands or working out of a truck [00:41:00] who are spending their time on the road.
Wyatt Smith: It’s a different lived experience. And if you can put that person at the center of it and work backwards from what’s going to solve their problem, you have a chance to build something special.
Ryan Streeter: Absolutely. Yeah. It’s great work that you’re doing and more people should be focused on specifically that issue that you just mentioned.
Ryan Streeter: So I think the, you know, the energy that I, I kind of. If, if, if anything’s exuding from me, it’s having spent a lot of time around people in these places that are doing this. But I also know what it’s like to hang out in some of these places that are, that are tired as, as, as well. And that’s, that’s difficult.
Ryan Streeter: So our, our national politics doesn’t focus very much on these issues, and our national politics is almost now by design. I mean, it’s basically built to make us hate each other. Um, it is, I mean, there’s, um, we can, we don’t need to go down that trail right now, but I think that’s, that’s a claim that’s justified, not just by my own observations, but even in some pretty interesting empirical work.
Ryan Streeter: I mean, it’s the, we need to, we need to fix our electoral system, we need to fix the way our, our parties have weakened, and all these things. Um, but right now, when we look to the national [00:42:00] discussion, it’s, it’s always pretty scary and it’s kind of, there’s a lot of despair, but when you look at survey data from across the country over the last 10 years or so, when you ask the same sorts of questions, we did a lot of this at AEI and we have a big survey center that we built up there.
Ryan Streeter: Two thirds of the country are still in this place where they’re mostly concerned about the things that we’re all concerned about every day, that everybody is. Yeah. Um, the future health and safety and prospects for their children. That’s right. Um, the, whether their community is the kind of place that they want to still be living in five years from now.
Ryan Streeter: What, you know, what, what makes me love the place I call home and could it be better? public safety concerns, the quality of the schools. I mean, this is where people’s minds are. And when you ask questions where you, you, you measure intensity, when you ask someone, how do you feel about this issue? And you give them an opportunity to say, I care about it very much.
Ryan Streeter: Um, I care about it somewhat, or not a lot, or I, you know, or I hate, you know, hate it. You find that Generally speaking, it’s highly educated people on both sides of [00:43:00] the political spectrum that are really amped up, um, on, on the polls, uh, overly politically active, overly online, and, um, we all know some of them, God forbid we are some of them, um, but the, um, uh, it’s still a minority percentage wise of the, of the country, and, um, When you, when you make your way down from the federal level to the state level, you see, uh, the, the trust in our institutions ticks up a bit, you know, over the last 40 years, trust in the federal government has, has created the most.
Ryan Streeter: State governments follow behind that same trend line, but local governments have maintained their consistency for about 40 years. About three quarters of Americans still trust their, their local leaders. Now, does that mean that local governments have less graft and corruption than federal? No, in some cases, the worst examples of that kind of stuff are at the local level.
Ryan Streeter: There’s something about proximity. There’s something about the knowledge that you can, can affect your local leadership’s thinking about stuff, or at least be [00:44:00] involved in a way that matters. Um, gives people. Um, and those that want to be, you know, creative locally kind of licensed to do that. And so employers know they can shape the, the, the way that local leaders think in a way they can’t really get the members of Congress to think unless you really have high powered lobbyists in high places.
Ryan Streeter: And so I think there’s, there’s a lot of really positive activity going on around the country, um, where people regardless of what they said about each other on, on social media, um, when they’ve sat down next to each other at a, at a town hall meeting or. Um, in, in, around a boardroom when they’re trying to figure out what the local workforce board where to invest new dollars that they roll up their sleeves in the, and they get to, they get to work.
Ryan Streeter: And so this, this country is, is great because of the competitive federalism that we have. We have these 50 states, we have cities within those states. We have different policies in those states. People vote with their feet, people move around. Uh, we can compete with each other in a way that you can’t do in Europe, um, in a way that you can’t do in other countries.
Ryan Streeter: And that really. Um, makes [00:45:00] us, uh, kind of full of vitality. It’s just not, it’s not as evenly distributed across the country as I’d like to see.
Wyatt Smith: Yeah. We’re getting near the end. I think lightning round is our,
Alex Hudgens: yes, also everything we’ve just discussed. I’m like, I think I’m going to be the mayor of St. Louis
Wyatt Smith: mayor of St.
Wyatt Smith: Louis. You heard it here first. That’s right.
Alex Hudgens: Give me years and years, baby for that
Ryan Streeter: campaign.
Alex Hudgens: Thank you. You will be tapped. Can you please help me? When he says lightning round, my number one concern is book recommendations. I would love to know. You kind of know who our audience is, but this can also be personal, Rex.
Alex Hudgens: What should we be reading?
Ryan Streeter: Let me stick with the dynamism theme, because I could go in a lot of directions, um, because I always have too many books on the nightstand that I’m reading at the same time. My people. Um, so I’m a really big fan of Deirdre McCloskey’s Bourgeois Trilogy. So it’s this masterful work of economic history, um, told over three volumes.
Ryan Streeter: Which really provides amazing historical context [00:46:00] on sort of the miracle hockey stick, you know? How was it that we went for all this time and then we get into the 1700s and the 1800s and just Almost by any measure personal wages household income, you know We see this spike up and we we live, you know on the back of this like two centuries of amazing progress Right that would have been completely unknown to those who went before us and McCloskey’s the all if you just Type in Deirdre McCloskey’s name and just bourgeois.
Ryan Streeter: You’ll see the three. It’s three, three books. Um, and also I’d recommend Edmund Phelps Mass Flourishing. It’s about a decade old now. Phelps won the Nobel Prize in 2006, um, devoted himself to the study of dynamism. After that, he’s got a number of interesting academic papers. Mass Flourishing is kind of his book, book length treatment of the topic, which, um, I think if you want to understand how Policy can actually change culture.
Ryan Streeter: It’s an important read that there used to be societies in the developing world that create, built, [00:47:00] made things. And through a policy of kind of corporatism and, um, kind of regulatory capture, you can actually diminish the human spirit that way right now people don’t make and build things in certain parts of Europe where they used to.
Ryan Streeter: And there’s probably a good reason there where we see that happening in the English speaking world. It’s usually following the same. I say the English speaking world because you see this in the UK, um, you see it in the US in certain parts where, where we actually are making decisions from a policy standpoint that make it, It’s less attractive for people to actually put out a shingle, start, build, um, create something new.
Ryan Streeter: It’s getting harder in many places and for, for a number of reasons. And this is a great book for kind of understanding that and kind of inspiring yourself, um, for the, about the possibilities.
Alex Hudgens: You had me at three volume series. Yes. A series. Any podcast recommendations besides Untapped with Rob Smith? Oh
Ryan Streeter: man, I, I listen to pod, so first of all, I, because of where I live, I never have a commute.
Ryan Streeter: So I only listen to podcasts when I run. I do try to run enough during the week, but it takes me a while to get through like one Lex Friedman podcast because it’s like, you know, [00:48:00] I can’t run for three hours. Right. Um, so, uh, yeah, so I’m, I’m not the best podcast recommendation. Clearly this one. Um, but actually I, I like to get out of my zone when I’m listening to podcasts.
Ryan Streeter: I like to listen to the history ones and I like to, I like to listen to, to science too. So I’m, I’m really kind of deep into the dark ages podcast right now. I’ve had this kind of years long obsession with the move from the Roman, the fall of Rome to the rise of Europe. Like what we think of as Europe and that, what we call the barbarians, that phase, right?
Ryan Streeter: And you want to look at, like, really interesting shifts in political economy. Um, sure. Yeah, look at that. Are you aware of the Roman
Alex Hudgens: Empire question that’s been floating around social media? So you actually have been thinking about
Ryan Streeter: it? I don’t think I think about Rome every day, but maybe I do, actually.
Ryan Streeter: It’s possible, you know. It
Alex Hudgens: started with you. It started in Austin.
Ryan Streeter: That’s right. Exactly. Um, no, I, I, uh, I think that’s kind of a, an interesting, um, An interesting season that, um, Carlin’s Hardcore History is another one, which is, is good on a whole range of things. But he’s got my son, who’s also a, he’s an economics and history major, um, [00:49:00] sent me this one on the, the Vikings in Charlemagne, which I’ve also gotten into as well, which is, is great.
Ryan Streeter: That’s again, part, it’s on the back end of this period that I’m talking about, but you want to look at the shift in societies from a, a one sort of governing structure and, and approach to the economy to this really messy multi century evolution. It’s, it’s a fascinating story.
Alex Hudgens: Love it. Last question
Wyatt Smith: if you were to go back in time and give advice to your past self With the wisdom of your future self, what would you tell
Ryan Streeter: that person?
Ryan Streeter: If you told the political philosophy major that he’d be spending, you know, a good bit of his career, you know, dealing with social and economic science, probably would have been better not to be self taught, but to. So, no, that’s I would I’ve had Uh, young people, I think one of the great things about doing what I do at a place like AEI where you have a lot of young people who are out of college and you hire as research assistants or here on a university campus, I have a lot of, of young people asking for coffee for a half an hour to kind of talk about their, their next steps.
Ryan Streeter: And um, and so I’ve often given that advice when they, [00:50:00] they say, I want to get on this path. I’m like, you can do a lot with that degree, only this much with this degree. Yeah. Think about that. So, um, no, I would say that. understanding how to not take yourself seriously and learn how to manage stress, um, and pressure and anxiety early on.
Ryan Streeter: Instead of thinking that your youthful resilience will give you a pass on that for a while, um, would have been, been better to, to know. I, I’ve, I’ve always tried to have a lot of energy and work out and do the kinds of things that allow you to do that, but never really started taking seriously how much, um, an approach to kind of managing those things in your life that weigh you down could, could have been done earlier and building those habits and practices so you’re not learning them.
Ryan Streeter: Farther down the road, you know, when you, if you’re single and then you get married, you look back at what, when you were single and you’re like, wow, I was stressed about stuff that was not that big of a deal, you know, and then you’re married and then you have kids, right? And then with you, all the stuff that kids bring, you’re like, man, remember when it was just us, the stuff we [00:51:00] were stressed about that wasn’t that big of a deal, you know, and what I’ve learned is it does every phase of life brings things.
Ryan Streeter: to you that, um, are going to create anxiety, create stress and all that. And there are things that you can do to, to, to manage that. There’s a lot of good podcasts on as well. And you’ve probably heard that old, that, that old kind of metaphoric lesson, which is if, you know, if there, if you’ve got a vase in fRyant of you and you’re given a bunch of rocks, gravel and sand, start with the rocks, then put in the gravel and put in the sand, um, building practices in your life to do that.
Ryan Streeter: Uh, for me, there’s calendar management, you know, issues, uh, the things that are really important, grouping them together on the calendar. Um, and not trying to intersplay, you know, there’s certain things that are mission critical for what you’re doing vocationally or what you’re doing personally that you need to devote that time to it.
Ryan Streeter: Then there’s the time on the calendar for the other stuff. The way my brain works is I like to put those things in separate buckets. You know, if I’m going to be, you know, You know, diving into some deep research or making some really important decisions with colleagues about the organization’s future, that needs to be here, [00:52:00] and then all the sand can be over here.
Ryan Streeter: Um, but if you fill up your life with all the sand and then you have a hard time fitting the gravel and the rocks in the vase, you pay a price for that. And building practices in your life very early on that allow you to do that, I think, is important.
Alex Hudgens: That’s so good. And I’m like, what’s your morning routine?
Alex Hudgens: What is your nighttime routine? One million more questions, but you have, thank you for making space in your calendar for us. This will be a, Like, can I get a 30 minute Zoom coffee like once a week just to bounce live questions off of you? Keep the conversation going. Please. That’d
Ryan Streeter: be great. No, this is fun.
Ryan Streeter: Thanks for, for having me and, and for being here in Austin and, and good luck with, uh, the ongoing work that you’re doing and, and the, and the continued future success of this podcast.
Wyatt Smith: Yeah. Thanks for your wisdom. Uh, this is a big mission. It requires a lot of really, uh, Thoughtful people to advance it. And the work that you do is really central to that.
Wyatt Smith: So we’re grateful for you joining us. Thanks for being a part of it. Thank you. Thanks for tuning in to another episode [00:53:00] of Untapped with ups. We’d love it. If you’d share this episode with anyone, you know, who might benefit from our discussion
Alex Hudgens: and don’t forget to subscribe, leave us a review wherever you get your podcast and connect with us on social media or at UpSmith.
Alex Hudgens: com.
