Ask Us Anything: Are traditional medical clinics still worth it? + Is Substack undermining traditional media?

0:00I'm Adam Schwab. I'm Adir Shifflin. And this is The Contrarians with Adam and Adir.

0:08And we are back. Episode 174, Ask Us Anything. Happy Saturday. We will get straight to the questions, Mike. All right. First question this week and send them in anytime on LinkedIn or any other way you can get in touch with us. This week's first question comes in from Shimmy Broadie on LinkedIn. Shimmy asks, has COVID effectively marked the beginning of the end for the traditional medical clinic? Long waiting rooms, short consultations, and purely physical care delivery. With telehealth now mainstream and growing interest in weight loss drugs, preventative medicine, and alternative treatments, such as psychedelic therapies, what does the future clinic actually look like and what role do bricks and mortar practices still play in Australian healthcare?

0:58Your thoughts? So when was the last time, I don't want to pry Mike, but like when was the last time you were physically in a doctor's surgery? Like was it like a year ago or more recently? It's a good question. I'd say probably six months. And do you use telehealth? I don't really use telehealth I have a really good GP that I've got a great relationship with and I would bend over backwards to get an appointment with him so I think that is a preferable situation but I'm like on the one hand I know some stuff about this that the average person might not know on the other hand I'm super biased about it right because I come with my my prejudice of the background that I have right and but this is my broad view on this a relationship with a GP is fundamentally important to ongoing health like you don't only take your car to the mechanic when the wheel falls off or when it doesn't start and so I don't know whether people go to the dentist regularly I do like I go every six months in fact the dentist said to me your teeth are great only come every year and I'm like no no I'll come every six months and so I don't know if people do that with dentists they should also be doing it with GPs at least once a year you should go to your GP even when you feel fine and let the GP do a checkup or whatever and over the age of 40 you should be more vigilant about that and I think that needs a GP that you can trust and that you feel safe and comfortable with unfortunately the GP that is going to be able to spend time with you and see you consistently as an ongoing patient is the GP that does not bulk bill.

2:37That is just a fact. And so there are not many better uses of money than paying for healthcare. And so I would encourage people to say once a year, at least once a year, bite the bullet, pay to go to a good GP, have a relationship. And like, that is how you avoid, you know, dying suddenly of something that you didn't pick up essentially which is very important obviously then I would say this if you're going to a GP that doesn't bulk bill then there are some things that are probably not the greatest use of money for example if you go to that GP and the GP prescribes medication to you and then you need repeats of that medication I don't mind like one or two repeats of that medication coming from bulk bill telehealth.

3:23You know, you can pretty much get that easily from telehealth. But on the third one or after six months or whatever, make sure you go back to the GP to get the repeat and pay just so that they can stay on top of what's going on. And I think that GP clinics, when they do telehealth for repeat medication, they should find a way to bulk bill for repeat medication. That should not be out of pocket stuff. It's a quick consultation. It barely even needs a consultation. Why can't the GP itself, because why can't your GP telehealth that yeah they can but it's a gp a good gp is not going to bulk bill there's this myth that like gp maybe earns a million dollars a year they don't like a bulk billing gp maybe i think they'd earn 250k a year a bulk bill in gp there's very few bulk billing gps these days but just to give you an idea of maybe what they'd earn and the consequence of that also also would be that they would have to do maximum 15 minute consultations but maybe 10 they might have to get six an hour and just churn through them that is not a way to live life as a doctor and that is not a way to live life as a patient so that's bad and so fundamentally i don't really mind like you know my views on medicare are people that are wealthy should not get money back from the government and we should leave the money for people that don't have the money to see a gp but i think um it's hard to pay a good gp enough money for their time for a telehealth consultation and so I don't mind if that comes from some third-party telehealth but I really don't think like if you're sick oh my stomach hurts it's hurt for two days I've got a fever I need to see a doctor I do not support telehealth on that there's no examination and it's really hard to take a proper history so the reason I you know give you kind of detail there is my view is not I don't think much should change about the way that a clinic works and medicine works except the low value stuff that could be done by telehealth but then I'll say something controversial which will now get me cancelled within the medical fraternity which is I think a nurse with some specific training on top could easily prescribe the repeats of the drugs and you don't need to go to a doc back to your GP for every repeat just the way they do a lot of the heavy lifting in the surgery around taking blood and giving immunizations, et cetera.

5:45So I hope it doesn't change too much in the future. I don't think that's highly controversial. I don't think that's a highly controversial view at all. I think most people are fine with nurses doing that stuff. Outside the medical profession. Yeah, sure. Because nobody wants that remuneration cut for more supply. But I think anybody, the demand side, which is 99 % of people are very happy with that. I think to the original question, I don't think my GP experience has changed. Like, yeah, I'll do the odd telehealth i don't actually very rarely go to gps a bit more this year because of the leg break but generally actually very rarely would go but how sick do you need to be to go like tell me what would take you to a gp coma coma uh broken limb um no it'd be pretty rare i go to gp i've got an excellent gp as well what about if you had flu-like symptoms like oh i can barely get out of bed i've got a really high fever why would i go to gp for that i just get a cold and flu but if you let's say i'm going to be specific now oh if i need antibiotics potentially because i can't i need you know that prescribed but i very rarely i don't hate taking antibiotics i'll take it if i really have and i'm going to say this in broad terms so i don't alienate an audience but if you had like some significant changes in your gastrointestinal behavior like when you went to the toilet or some stuff was going on and there were weird things going on there like would that prompt you to say oh no i gotta go to a gp only if i think i need antibiotics something prescribed to me that I can't buy myself.

7:05That's the only time I'd ever go to a GP. But your medical training maybe didn't cover when you need antibiotics. Yeah but my experience with doctors in this case is like there's really a very rarely helpful in my experience with me personally. All right but I'll be more explicit than this okay. So let's say you go to the toilet and there's blood or there's like it's really dramatically changed and you know like I don't know I'm going to be specific and say it's like black and tarry they're both signs of bleeding. So would you look at that and say oh that's been going on for like a week I'm really worried about that I'm going to go to the GP and have that conversation about that yeah thankfully it's never been an issue but if that happened potentially I would I say that because you know that's how people miss things like bowel cancer they ignore stuff like that and then you know four months later when it gets really bad or something obstructs or whatever then they go and it's like well it's too late like you should have come four months ago one thing I hate is bulk billing I'd much rather pay something you can pay charge me 70 bucks, 60, 70 bucks.

8:02I don't want to wait an hour to save 70 bucks. It's just the numbers simply don't add. I'm close to adding up. So I think we're going to see more and more concierge healthcare that we're seeing in the States. So whether you're paying 10, 20, 30 grand a year to get your own personal doctor, and Scott Galloway talks about this a bit on his show. Once you hit a certain level of income, having a private doctor essentially, I think is really worthwhile. And a lot of people on this pod probably are in the demographic that can afford that i think it's not a bad investment to be honest it's that one so you go from bulk billing to call it pay for play to personal physician i think is obviously the next step up uh and i think we're going to see more and more of that what do you get with a personal physician you can call you can text them at 2am they come to you text them at 2am yeah like they effectively act as like a like a wealthy person has in the u.s so you would advocate for the um more dramatic polarization of healthcare care services based on wealth what what i know is the nhs socialist system in the uk is the absolute worst system all right but we're not going to bring that here that's what bulk billing is that's what people are trying to do with bulk billing so people are constantly trying to do that yeah i agree bulk billing is terrible but i think in australia going to a gp like you generally don't i mean you don't have to wait a month to go to a gp you might have to wait a couple of days to see your gp that's the problem is often when i do want to go to a gp for whatever reason and i want to go straight i don't want to have to wait for two days i'd much rather pay double and get me in straight away rather than some someone who's paying a fraction or nothing or whatever who's just whose time's not valuable to them at all just not so much skipping the queue but just clogging the queue so to speak it should be a much more pay-to-play basis like what we talked about private schools a couple of weeks ago how private schools allow public schools to be better it's taking money out of that put it pumping money into the private system eases the public system more are you more um trigger happy in taking your kids to the doctor well my wife would tend to take them and yeah we're definitely more trigger happy with kids although my kids are touch wood very rarely ill like they might have one sick day yeah if that they've had years without having any sick days i touch wood that that continues but we've always just drummed into the mentality that you unless they genuinely are really sick but they're very rarely get sick and when they do get a cold they're back better in six hours so maybe they have a day off school worst case but it's pretty rare that they're ever sick and it's pretty rare they're sick for a long period of time we've been really lucky in that regard so touch wood that continues because there's a lot of people who aren't that lucky with kids.

10:19There's nothing worse than a kid who's got an illness and the people who deal with this day in, day out. And it's incredibly difficult. Great question. Mike, on to question number two. Question two today from Aman Narang. Thanks, Aman. He asks, can you give your opinion on business brokers slash buyers agents? Are they as reliable as homebuyers agents in terms of finding a good business especially for someone who is looking to buy his first business or franchise great question oh i know a man one of life's lovely guys a man this is a very idea question this one well you know what like i don't this is a tough question because there's all these brokers running around selling businesses but the idea of like someone that helps you buy a business is very interesting.

11:11I mean, buyers agents, they're not that old in Australia, right? Like how long do you think they've been around for, 20 years? I've never really heard of a buyer. It doesn't surprise me to this but I've never heard of them to be honest. In business you mean? Yeah, I've obviously heard of in property but I've never heard of in business. Yeah, and so neither have I. And then when you think about this, I tell you who does have great content on buying a business and that's your old mate Blake at Flipper. I was going to say Flipper's probably the best place to start buying a business. Who worked for you.

11:43You know, you're on my list of people that are happy for someone that used to work for them doing well subsequently. Well, you're the equal top place on my list of those people together with Leonard Hathaway who runs Buzz. You are both so happy when people that leave you like go and do great things somewhere else whereas I'm like feel so destitute when they leave and take it personally and think it's just against me. We're actually having a Lux alumni event next week, which Blake will be at and some other great alumni events. That's exactly the kind of thing you would do, whereas, you know. Look, I do feel that way after time, but in the moment I just feel like, oh, another person has emotionally abandoned me.

12:21I think it depends. If someone stays six months then leaves, that's a bit different. Like if someone gives you five years of incredible service and then goes and gets a role that you couldn't offer them, That's quite different to working for a competitor. I more care about when they leave in terms of what the business was doing. Like one time I had people leave in really hard times and I really felt abandoned and I did channel George W. Bush, you're either with us or against us at the moment. But anyway, so I think if you go to Flippa and you look at their content for buying a business, they've got this like, I don't know, Flippa University kind of thing, I think they call it.

12:57I think that content is really good and really helpful to set the basics of like, even more than the basics of what should you look for from a business when you're buying a business. So I think that's really good content. I've never heard of someone whose job it is to go and help people buy businesses. Now, do I think that would be a good job? So I don't know many people that would be good at that business for a start and then if you were good at that business wouldn't you do it yourself maybe not because maybe you can't run them maybe you just know what's a good business to buy but it does feel like a bit of a hole in the market now that i think about it like how does it work when someone buys a house on your behalf like a buyer's agent do they split the comms with the seller agent no no it's complete that's in the u.s they do in the u.s everybody uses a buyer's agent so quite different in australia it's getting bigger but It's usually the sort of higher end properties.

13:55I think you paid a fixed fee. It was probably a percent or two of the buy price. So if I buy like a$4 million house, well, maybe I pay them 2 % or something? Yeah. So 80K? 20 grand, 30 grand? Yeah, whatever. Yeah, 80K. Yep, whatever that equals. So the thing is this. There are not many people buying$4 million businesses. Mostly people are buying$1 million businesses, generally speaking. It doesn't really. I'm not sure that economics work in business. But someone's selling that business. But maybe the thing is when you're selling a business, so if I sell a business for someone and I get a million dollars, that's like a huge windfall for them.

14:33And if I say 50K is going to be coming to me, but I'll get you an extra 50K on the sale or I'll get you them. Because, you know, when you're running a private business that's worth a million dollars, maybe it's doing 200, 250K of EBIT and pay tax on that and whatever. Like you're not very wealthy from that basically. and so this million dollars is a huge win cash windfall and probably you're willing to part with fifty thousand dollars i wonder would you be willing to part with 50k if someone helped you buy a million dollar business i just want to i'm trying to unpack a bit the helping is it are you finding the business or you're doing due diligence on the business so there's very two separate things are you sort of discovering the asset or are you saying this is a good or a bad buy and this is the risks yeah both i'm not sure you can outsource this is my point like i think when you i think you can and should in many cases outsource for property because buyers agents especially instead of higher end markets just know properties you don't know about and they can deal with agents plus yeah tons of stuff off the marker right yeah there's off the markers up and they just know how to deal with selling agents better and it's a dumb asset so once you own the house you own the house you have to run it versus a business where you've got to run this business and you've got to be comfortable understanding the market understand the business knowing the risks i don't think that's the kind of thing you can delegate to a one-off transaction to an accountant or to whoever you're going to do who doesn't really understand the business who is going to be running the business who's got no responsibility if it goes wrong you can't sue them like i'm just not sure there's any point there i think you could definitely get someone to do some dd for you and just check like a lawyer to check do they own the assets so they have the correct like some basic dd stuff you know when you look at a profit and loss and a cash flow Like, in about two minutes of eyeballing it, it becomes instantly obvious what the risks are with that thing.

16:18And then you can probably say, this is what I hope is the good stuff as well and look into it more deeply. I think someone could help you understand that, like understand directionally what are the risks that this business might run into. Yeah, but I think the problem is, like, for me or I to do that, and without pumping up our tyres too much, like we're probably as good as anybody at doing that but we charge you a million bucks to do that like we're given the responsibility and the risk and the fact we got other jobs if you're going to get a local accountant to do it and pay him 50 grand you're probably not going to get the caliber that's going to be that helpful i reckon how would you do the dd like if you're going to buy a business i'll give you an example of a business let's say you're buying a business well you and i both bought lots of businesses as part of our day-to-day operations but i never feel like if I'm buying a big business that's, when I say big, 10, 20 mil of revenue, et cetera, that's bigger.

17:12Yeah, the station science business. I think it's easier to assess and it's got let's say 30 staff. It's easier to assess that business for me than a business with$3 million of revenue and 12 staff because that$3 million revenue business and 12 staff can go to$0 million of profit and minus half a million dollars of profit in the blink of an eye. There's less margin of safety in businesses that have less competitive advantages, clearly. And that's a much more stressful business to buy. Like when I look at the flipper businesses, because like I love, you know, some people, I don't know, some people I guess look through car websites because they love cars.

17:47I just like looking through flipper because I love businesses. And I'll buy businesses on there if they're perfect and they fit in. But like – but I love looking at it. And when I look at those businesses, I just find it hard to get past the risk of a lot of those businesses. Especially with the founder leaving. And then I'm always suspicious about why are they selling a great business now. Like would you sell a great business and get a couple of million dollars now if you thought this thing could rocket and you could make five times that amount in three years' time? Yeah, it's clearly a massive red card.

18:23The only reason you should be selling a business is if you're too old, you're retiring from working, there's obviously something's happened to you, you can't run anymore, or you've got another business that's killing it and it just makes more sense to devote time to that one. Other than those three reasons, there's probably no reason to be selling really. I tell you the best seller reasons as a buyer, okay? I tell you the best seller reasons. And by the way, since I know Aman didn't ask for this advice, he just wanted someone to help him, but we can't do that. So I'd say basically, this is one thing I do.

18:54I try to keep the founders with some equity exposure to get paid out based on a future upside. But I think good reasons for someone selling a business when you're on the buy side, like family succession, that's a great reason. Like that's clearly someone's run this business, they've gotten old and nobody wants to take it over. Another reason that I came across was a business I was actually pretty keen to buy, but I was going to buy it with someone and it didn't quite work for them is there were some people that ran a business and it got bigger than they thought it was going to get. Like it just started generating$4 or$5 million of revenue and they were like, I can't manage a business like this.

19:31I'm not the – like I wanted to do a little business and it became big and like I'm stressed and I'm going to lose it. That's a good reason. I like that because I know I've got the skills to take it to the next level. So there are some good reasons but, yeah, I'd be cautious about that type of thing. I also want to say this. I don't want to say this person's name because I don't want to sell them out because they've got a good model going. But someone told me when they buy businesses off business brokers, because there's so many businesses and so few buyers, they basically wait until like it's been sitting on the market for a while and then they pretty much say I'm going to give you no cash up front.

20:11I'm just going to give you a clip of the revenue over time and you can make more money than you asked for. but like that just means I don't have to type any of my capital in buying this business and I can use it for working capital to run your business and that could be a win-win because those vendor can get a great result still they're just not getting it up front obviously they're taking a risk they're effectively vendor financing in some ways but fine and if I wanted to buy a business and I wasn't sure where to start I would go to Scott at Terim Capital and say I'm not selling a business I'm buying but like maybe you can help me buy this and maybe you can just teach me some stuff and whatever because I think he really knows how to buy these businesses as well.

20:48I think the big key and what Scott's great at is actually running the business. Like if you can't run the business better than the person selling it, there's a real question, should you be buying it? So don't just buy it and think you can run it as well if you've never had an experience selling widgets or whatever the hell it is. Like you want to be bringing, if you're maybe you're 25 and you're great at digital marketing and you can get a business that's never done digital marketing and improve it. Is there synergies with your skill set? And that business would be the question I'd be asking more than anything.

21:15So otherwise you sort of might very well make it worse. So if I was going to buy a business for the first time, especially if I was younger, I would go onto a Flipper type platform, which I guess is Flipper, and I would buy a business that was a bit profitable that cost about$50 ,000 and I'd try and haggle it down. And I think Flippa might even have some money to lend you or something as part of the system as well. By the way, I've got no stake in Flippa. In fact, the people at Flippa, they forget that I introduced them to the people that ultimately funded that business. So how quickly… I thought that was me who introduced them.

21:55I know you. I'm sure you do think it was me. We both introduced them to the same people. Do you get any memory of your good deed or not? I've certainly never got a thanks from those people. Oh, my God. I got worse than that. They basically said, oh, were you the person that introduced me? And then they said, I won't say who said this, and then they said, oh, you didn't invest. did you? I'm like, no, I was never going to do this. Oh, too bad for you. So not only did I not get thanks, I got mocked. Salt in the wound. Oh, my God. Anyway, so I would go on. I had no cash at the time and that's why I didn't.

22:20But I knew that would be a great investment. And Blake's done a great job running it. And it's been a great global business running out of Australia. So I'd go on to – the one person we have to say nice things about is Andrew Walsh who is involved with that. He's still chairman, isn't he? I think he chairs it. He's the guy that ran probably the first ever good high-quality tech sale, right? Hit-wise, right? So we can't say enough to nice things. I never see Andrew enough. So was she enough? But like, so. He refused to play golf with me early in the morning. He won't play golf before eight. He used to play with you.

22:49Oh, I didn't know that. He played once with me at six. I think that was it. Wouldn't do it again. Ah, well, fair enough. I support that wholeheartedly. So, but I will say this. I'd buy this business for 50K. I'd make sure it was profitable. I'd step in and run it myself for two years. And then I would try to say, okay, what are all of the things I missed when I bought this business that I didn't notice? What are all the things that were harder than I was expecting? What are all the little gems that I discovered that I didn't know were there at the beginning? And I would do that for my first business for a couple of years.

23:20And then I would move on and buy a more substantial business, assuming I hadn't turned that 50K business into a million-dollar business, right? But, like, you need to – you can't go straight to the big leagues, I don't think, if you haven't done this before. Yeah, and look at our – we started a backpacking apartment business with 50 grand, to your point. Yeah. And then went to a corporate apartment business. Then went to a food ordering business and the deals business. So yeah, we had a sort of 10-year apprenticeship or a seven-year apprenticeship, which was super helpful. Great, amazing question, actually.

23:49We'll go to a super quick break. Back with our last question in a moment.

24:01Mike, question number three. Final question for this week comes in from Calvin. Calvin asks, I recently joined Substack and I'm pretty impressed by the quality of writing and opinion there. Is Substack exposing how much value actually sits with individual journalists rather than traditional media brands? You write on Substack or not, Adam? No, I've never written on Substack. I think our newsletter is on Substack, isn't it? Yeah, Bowdoin, who does that great newsletter, pumps it out on Substack. I think we have over 10 ,000 subscribers now. So that's gone unbelievably well given we haven't put that much effort.

24:40It's just all Bowdoin doing all the work and we're just sort of sitting back. Bowdoin doing the work, no AI, because we had a long chat about that and the guy is slogging it out and churning out the content. So, like, hats off to him. So I don't use Substack, but let's not make this question about Substack because there's a limit to how much content you can consume, right? But let's make it more broadly, which is in the traditional days of media, you had to broadcast out content and have distribution because the individual could not have distribution unless you published your own publication, which people did do.

25:13And so you had newspapers and I'm going to talk about newspapers here because written content and the newspapers gathered up all of these good journalists and they surrounded it with advertising and they got subscribers and they churned it out and you couldn't do that as a good journalist. Now, what we've seen with people like Joe Astin is probably the archetype of this example, is a journalist who, in fairness, made their reputation at one of these publications, which is, you know, that's how football in the US works. Like you go to college, you make your reputation in college, and then you bring your fans with you when you go to the NFL and play in the NFL.

25:50And so Joe obviously made his name at the AFR and then went and did his own thing that's going tremendously well and is demonstrating that as a prominent followed journo, I more call it kind of a media personality, you can build your own following. I would say this podcast is kind of evidence of that as well. Like we've been able to build our own following just around our own brand. And I think some journalists can do that. The question is, one, can you do it straight off the bat i think unlikely i think it is easier to leverage the distribution of an existing media platform to build a following and build your reputation to begin it's almost you can but it's almost impossible to do it with like joe's the classic joe was the number one journo in the country most well known most recent business journal best most well known or maybe any journo um and he took that huge brand he'd built leveraging off the afr brand to obviously to rampart uh and obviously and the other one's barry weiss who obviously yeah did the free press in the States now is running CBS for the Ellisons, but I think she went from New York Times to Free Press and sold up$180 million.

26:57Yeah. But she wouldn't have done that without New York Times. Then you've got Ben Smith at Semaphore, which admittedly is an events business as well. And you've got Ben Thompson at Stratechery. Was Ben Thompson a journalist? I'm pretty sure he was. I don't know anyone who's done this without being a journalist first and without building the brand first. Kara Swisher has done it, probably was the first to do it potentially. She's now done lots of things, but she was at Wall Street Journal and her and Walt Mossberg did the All Things D stuff. So they kind of had that hybrid model and then she went and did her own stuff.

27:26So yeah, it happened a lot. And I think it's a great way to do it. I think it's really hard to do it unless you've got a brand. And the other way you can leverage that brand is, you know, Alan Collard created his tip sheet, basically the Eureka Report, which did tremendously well. And I don't want to sell it as a tip sheet. I just use it as a broad term. So there is a cohort of journalists that can just do their own thing. And we should say also with Joe, like he is also adding other people's content onto his platform it's not just him presumably because he doesn't want to write seven days a week in order to maintain the quality of content and give himself time but this question is also asking does it is there a ton of value in citizen journalism is that what is that what medium shows and i have to say this which again is maybe not going to be that popular with people more broadly because everybody can write and by that i mean is literate, like people are literate, they can physically write words and understand them, it might feel like anybody can write good quality content.

28:28And I think what social media has demonstrated is that is absolutely not true. And almost nobody can write good quality content, or even get the facts right, or say something that is smart. There are some people that can do it. And definitely, lots of people can do it within a narrow domain. But I think very few people like journalism is a real skill set and a real talent and I don't think just creating a platform for individual distribution overcomes that fundamental fact in life and so I don't think that anybody can just pile onto medium and suddenly big up build this huge following and I think the sad consequence of what I've just said maybe the proof of what I've just said is the way most people build a following for their content is not with high quality content it's with deeply polarizing extreme content and i think that sadly is the consequence mostly of giving everybody a distribution platform for the words that they write i stand corrected ben thompson actually wasn't a journal he was a microsoft employee that's even more interesting as was ben from acquired i think i think where you've got maybe really and i guess you could put us in this category to an extent or we've been writing for a long time as well but i think if you got really deep domain knowledge and slowly i think the quiet guys and ben thompson they just really slowly built their brands and that obviously they were the quiet guys of ec so they had deep domain knowledge in sort of vc growth business uh ben thompson worked in marx has had deep technical domain we obviously have run a bunch of businesses that have that sort of so i think if you've got real credibility you can potentially do it but it takes you a lot longer if you if you don't have a joe style following so joe could flip the switch and be profitable within a few months i suspect that's really unusual but are the same but it is for an individual like that is a real financial commitment to subscribe to rampart it's not like i'm paying a dollar for an article or something like that and the problem that largely exists is that people don't really want to pay for content like people don't even want to pay for content on new like big brand news sites like anytime i post something and it's behind a paywall i now have to write this is behind a paywall because when i didn't i would just get some comments where it's behind a paywall it's like well you know you need to pay for quality journalism and good journalists deserve to be wealthy that's something else people don't realize like well that was because the news the news sites just completely stuffed it up in the in the late 90s when they should have been charging from day one and they never did so that was and took probably was a wall street journal was the first to do the hard paywall i think but Now most have paywalls of some, whether hard or soft paywalls, but it was a sort of 15 years of pain that almost killed them all.

31:11I don't think we're at the end point of what the media landscape is going to look like with individual journalists. Like micropayments has not taken off the way that I expected it to. It might be because it's very cumbersome, but sometimes I see an article, let's say it's in Bloomberg or something. Now I don't want to subscribe to Bloomberg, but I want to read this article and I'd pay a dollar to read that article And I just want a simple wallet that says, take a dollar out of my wallet and give it to Bloomberg and let me read this article. And I suspect that Bloomberg would be okay with that.

31:41Well, even if it's like 20 cents or 30, it should be like less than that even, whatever it is. I've been advocating, I was advocating this 20 years ago, I reckon, and nobody's ever sort of taken it seriously. But don't you think the problem is predominantly one of mechanisms? Yeah, it should be built into Chrome or whatever the web browser is, where just this article is 5 cents, 10 cents, 30 cents, 50 cents, whatever it is, dollar. and it just automatically charges your card like Apple Pay. I totally agree. And I think that would enable more journalists at the least to create a side hustle from their skill set.

32:14So I think in the old days, like I'm in real old days, like 60s, 70s, being a journo, that was a good job, right? I mean you had a good life doing that and like it was not easy but like it was a good job. And now like a lot of journalists find it hard to make a decent living. a lot of publications will get rid of higher paid journalists just to constantly get the junior cheaper people in because they're all struggling to make the economics work. I'm not sure. And there's a bit the reverse as well where you've got the high-flying, big-name journos, the John Stenschelts of this world who obviously collect millions of dollars a year, flying private jets around the world.

32:48If you reach that sort of pinnacle of the profession, you can get paid a lot. So I think there is – and I think the Australian, when they went after John and they poached him, they did it for that – he's almost a brand in himself. Joe obviously was a brand. and it's why he was paid that million dollars a year plus. So I think there is definitely an element where, and obviously seen a lot in New York Times is a classic example with Thomas Friedman and Maureen Dowd and all the sort of roster they have, and Wall Street Journal probably the same. I think big papers, publications have realised there is definitely some value in the branding of the journal.