Transcript 0:00 [upbeat music] Before we get to this episode, quick message from our presenting sponsor, Beehiiv. 0:14 Here's something Beehiiv showed me that I think a lot of publishers in this audience need to check out. The Center Square is a nonprofit newsroom with a small internal team. 0:23 Now, after migrating to Beehiiv, a platform built for publishers who wanna own and scale their audience, they now run a dozen state and national newsletters entirely in-house. No outside agency, no added head count. 0:37 Their open rates went from fifty-two percent to seventy-two percent over nine months. Now click-through rates increased forty-two-point-four percent. 0:44 RSS automation alone saved more than fifteen hours a week, and the Beehiiv ad network added a newsletter revenue stream that previously didn't exist, one that runs without a dedicated sales team to manage it. 0:57 If you are running multiple newsletters and wanna see how that kind of operation actually works, go to beehiiv.com/trb. 1:05 That is B-E-E-H-I-I-V.com/T-R-B, and book time with their team of newsletter and growth experts today. Thank you to Beehiiv. Welcome to the Rebooting show. I am Brian Morrissey. 1:19 We wrapped up TRB Audience Summit last Thursday in New York City. We had about two hundred and fifty media leaders participate in the event. It was a great day of not just content, but also connectivity. 1:29 I love, I think, that events have to connect people to, to each other, and I think we did a good job of getting, of creating the context that allowed that to happen. 1:38 I got to lead several conversations on the main stage, which were in addition to our conversational case studies in the private salons that we had embedded in the event. 1:49 In this discussion, I was joined by The Guardian CEO, Anna Bateson, for a conversation about The Guardian's future path amid all the uncertainties caused by AI. 1:58 This was obviously in the background of all discussions at the event. Anna had a great phrase about not being too vegan about AI while making certain to maintain audience trust. 2:11 She has a no-nonsense approach during this unsettled time that I think is kind of ideal because there is so much uncertainty in the direction of the information economy, and it is probably best suited to have media companies that have a clear identity, that are focused on doing the basics, like establishing a direct connection with an aud- with an audience, and modernizing their product to be multimodal. 2:34 These are things that Anna and I discuss in detail in this conversation. Now here's my discussion with Anna. [upbeat music] I was, I was handed this before I got on stage. The seat beside. 2:52 And it was, it was US page views across major publishers this summer. It's a very gruesome chart. Yeah. There's a lot of down. But the good news for you, Anna, is that The Guardian is this, is- It's the blue bit. Yeah. 3:07 It's less down than all the others. Yeah. So which is- Which is presumably why you were given it. [laughs] Yes. By, by a source- Yeah... on your team. A smaller decline is, is now y- you know, it's the new up. 3:19 Is that winning? It's the new up. [laughs] It's the new up. Yeah. So let's just start there. Like, what is the... You know, how, how is The Guardian seeing? It says it's down eight percent, right? 3:30 I mean, you look at the, The Washington Post in this chart. Again, it's from Comscore. 3:33 It's, like, forty-five percent, which is also very reassuring for me because over my entire career, people have been, like, bragging about Comscore numbers to me, and then off... now they're finally stopping- [laughs]... 3:44 from doing that. You notice? Yeah. Don't trust the data. Yeah. So tell me about the traffic declines, and how are you mitigating those? 3:52 Well, I mean, the traffic declines are real, and you know, it's, it's no surprise to anybody why. I mean, you know, you've got completely fundamental change within search. You've got change within Apple News. 4:03 You've got the rise of, you know, chatbots and people's consumption of news within them. 4:07 I mean, Ofcom published some data, I think, this week or last week, that twenty-one percent of people in the UK, of adults, b- now report that they get news within AI experiences. 4:18 Now, I think they would, they would include AI overviews in that, so but still, twenty-one percent. So that's a completely new behavior that didn't exist, you know, two years ago. 4:27 So it's something that everybody's got to recognize and navigate and, you know, respond urgently and accordingly, which is, you know, prioritize direct relationships, meaningful relationships with human audiences. 4:39 You know, really think about our products and the place that they kind of are gonna play within their lives and then within the ecosystem. Think about the role of podcasts, of newsletters. 4:50 Think about the evolution of the form of your journalism. I think that that's the other sort of fascinating transformation, this shift from being predominantly text. 4:59 And we had some amazing statistic that we publish the equivalent of two novels a day. 5:04 And so, so we're engaged and, you know, as many others are, in a process of rebalancing that because, you know, you've got to adapt to these changing audience s- behaviors, but also this need for a more visual, more video, more audio, more multimodal kind of, you know, form of delivery of journalism. 5:21 Hmm. And so I think you have to believe in all of those bits of transformation and be led very much by what audiences are doing and make sure that we're adapting and evolving accordingly. 5:30 So I wanna talk about the text bit for a bit. Yeah. Because is that based on data or vibes? Maybe both. 5:38 [laughs] Well, I mean, like, well, like, I, I think there's, like, this idea that people are consuming text less, but I'm just wondering, like- Well-... does that show up on your dashboard? 5:47 Or is this something you're like, "Okay, I see where a lot of things are going, and so we need to be less text-centric"? Well, I think it's both. 5:56 So you can definitely see that people are consuming more video, more video and more, more audio. 6:02 You can definitely see that those forms are coming together, which is interesting as well I think that text is still incredibly effective as a form for certain sorts of storytelling and certain sorts of kind of information delivery but are people beginning to consume less of it because they're doing spending time with other forms? 6:19 Yes, I think we are seeing that and, you know, the fact that they are now spending so much time with video, et cetera, is just it, it, you know, it's a sign that their time is being spent elsewhere, so we have to pay attention. 6:30 Okay, so what are you doing specifically to address that? I mean, obviously you're doing more video and audio podcasts. What else? 6:38 Yeah, I mean, we're doing a whole series of reskilling and training across the board so that people have, you know, kind of much more sort of adaptable and evolving skills. 6:47 We are going desk by desk really and thinking about how we can change ways of working, so how that from the moment of commissioning to production to kind of actual publishing you think about the different forms of, of output that are available to you and you don't just automatically think about the commissioning of a story. 7:04 We're paying attention very much to different sets of metrics, so less about page views. 7:09 I mean, page views still matter and audience reach still matters, but actually how can you see engage time as something that's really sort of important about where people are spending their time and sort of, you know, how their engagement is kind of evolving and moving. 7:23 And I think it's a, it's a long-term transformation process, you know, and you... and over that you reskill, you re-accommodate, you rebalance. Mm-hmm. So I mean, The Guardian has a long history. 7:34 I mean, obviously in, you know, the UK- 205 years... 205 years. Mm-hmm. You've been through a lot, right? You've moved to the US and been successful. 7:43 A lot of British publications see the US market and they say, "Oh, yes, absolutely." The, the- Big market... it's a big market, same language. Yeah. Kinda culturally I don't- we're not sure if it's still similar. 7:55 Yeah, it's totally different. Ah. Anyone who thinks we're culturally the same has never, you know, spent a lot of time here. Right. But yeah, no, it's very seductive, right? It's huge. 8:02 You know, you think you speak the same language, you think it'll be transferable. Yeah. What have been the challenges? 'Cause there's another... I guess and I keep getting older- There's another wave... 8:10 like there's another wave coming, and I've, I, I'm usually been skeptical of, of this, and I understand the r- the rationale for it. I mean, the UK's a much smaller market- Yeah... than, than the American market is. 8:23 But what was... what were the biggest challenges in building? 'Cause you- Huge... you, you have been successful. Yes, but we've also... I mean, we've been sort of doing this on and off for 25 years. Yeah. 8:33 I mean, and actually it was pointed out that it's now 15 years since we launched our dedicated US edition, but we were here for a good 10 years before that, at least we were kind of, you know, trying to build an audience here. 8:45 So for us, what happened was we began to notice after 9/11 that there were audiences that were seeking out Guardian content and Guardian reporting of the horrific attacks and, and I think it was at that point, because of course digital was enabling that kind of discovery, and I think it was people who were really specifically looking for a non-American perspective on a very American story. 9:10 And so on the back of that we began to see whether or not this was, you know, a, a market that we could, you know, penetrate, and there's that wonderful arrogance of when you're British and you think, you know... 9:19 and, and also it was at that first stages of, of, of digital where it just seemed that it was all gonna be, you know, expansive and the democratization of access to information. 9:28 And of course, in those early days it was wonderful. You, you know, you went from being a parochial newspaper bounded by physical distribution to actually being able to kind of access a, a global audience. Mm-hmm. 9:39 I mean, we were the ninth biggest newspaper in the UK when we were, you know, before we were digital, and we went digital very early, so we were able to take advantage of the, you know, kind of the beginnings of Google and the beginnings of that discovery. 9:51 But, but over those 25 years, I mean, we've got so much wrong. I mean, we invested heavily in the US. We had to pull back. We went again. I think we tried to be a really general, you know, sort of news kind of offering. 10:03 We tried to do what we did in the UK over here, and it didn't work. Then we sort of became something rather different and more specialized, quite worthy. That didn't really work. 10:13 We had a series of British editors who came over, and I think it's much harder to be a British editor and actually understand what really is going to work and h- and, and how you can resonate and be sort of relevant within, within this market. 10:29 I mean, Kath, our editor, she talks about, you know, being sort of, uh, noticeably Guardian but with an American accent or with an Australian accent or with a, you know, kind of European accent. 10:39 So you have to be sensitive to the environment that you're operating in but then true to the values that define you. Yeah. And- You can't be too British. No, you can't be too British. No. Well, you know, it depends. 10:50 Some things about Britishness are good. And I think we finally got it right, and we finally got it right in, uh, in about the early... sort of about 2020, 2021, and it... we, we got it right, and we sort of... 11:02 we had a new editor. We had a new leadership team here. 11:05 Just as others began to really vacate, I think, the space that we can uniquely really oc- occupy, and as others have sort of either tapped to the right or the center, we can, you know, we can be in a space where we are explicitly progressive but still about kind of quality, you know, factual news. 11:22 And I think that, that we are also, you know, freely available. I mean, we're a very open model, and I think crucially it's this global perspective. 11:31 I mean, a lot about the stories that I think people are most interested in at the moment, there is a real appeal of being able to tell them from a non-American, you know, imperial kind of point of view. Yeah. So what... 11:45 like explain, 'cause you've, you've tackled like niches like in, i- in the US, like, and they're, they're not the ones that I would like- What do you mean? 11:53 Well, like I mean like, like World Cup and like, you know, what we call soccer- Yeah... is, is one thing. You, you call that niche. I call it [laughs] Well- I call that mass, but you know. I mean, I guess, but maybe not. 12:04 I mean, maybe it is now in the US. I guess what I mean is like, you know, the, The Guardian in the UK is, is, is different than The Guardian here. Yes. 12:12 And like you mentioned before that you had tried basically to replicate the same, you know, model, but like now, you know, there are certain areas that you focus on in, in your US operation. Yes. 12:26 So I mean, w- we're ch- we are very, very strong now in hard news, political news. We've invested a lot behind that. I think we, as I say, I think we deliver something that's genuinely distinctive. 12:36 And what's interesting about it is, of course, we are, we're serving a market here in, in the US but also, you know, Trump, you know, your kind of current political sort of dramas are of interest to everybody around the world. 12:49 So we don't just serve an audience here with, with what we're, we're publishing and r- reporting on, we actually... You know, everyone around the world, it's the biggest story, basically. 12:58 But then beyond that, we really try to look at where we have real areas of, of sort of depth and expertise and richness from the 200 years of publishing- Mm-hmm... in, in the UK, and how... 13:10 Where is there an opportunity to take that and bring it to the US and do something that isn't, you know, overly well-served already? And so soccer is a really good example. 13:19 You know, we've got an inc- huge, you know, sports team in the UK. We have an incredible heritage and history of reporting on football, soccer, and we have a real tone of voice about it. 13:29 You know, it's not just match reports. It's about the game. It's about the kind of the, you know, the, the, the business, the stories, the players, the whole thing. 13:37 And so actually, to bring that to the US and to do it when you were just beginning to cross over from being marginally niche interested to actually being majorly interested in it because it was the World Cup, you know, that felt something that we could do something very different in, and I think that's how that's proved to be. 13:52 Yeah. So it's where can you find the others of those verticals or, as you say, niches that w- I think are relevant and of interest here, but that we can do in a particularly, you know, Guardian way? Yeah. 14:03 So when you think about, like, w- the business right now, like, how much is, is, of it is... Like, what's the breakdown between US, UK, and then I guess it would be Australia? Yeah, and well, Europe. 14:14 We're big in Europe now. And then sort of rest of the world. So the US is $80 million now, over 500,000, you know, recurring supporters. So that's, you know... I mean, we're £282 million total. 14:27 So, you know, the US is a, you know, it's a big piece of it, and it's the fastest-growing piece. Okay. So let's talk about 2031. Mm-hmm. Is that US piece the biggest piece? Like, do you... 14:38 Is there, is there a path- Y-... where- Yes... at least... Oh, there is. I, y- well, yes. I think, um, so answer yes to both. 14:46 Yes, I think the US piece will be the biggest piece in, by 2031, and it will be the biggest piece of something that will have grown as well. I think we'll be one of... 14:55 I think we'll be in the top three news organizations in the world. Okay. Who do you look at as your, like- Rivals?... competitor? I mean, New York Times, BBC. I think we will overtake CNN. Okay. 15:11 Hopefully from growing and not CNN shrinking. Well, maybe both. Okay. Fair. Let's talk a little, a little bit more about 2031, right? So you've had a lot of success with this voluntary donations model, which in- Yeah... 15:24 in a way, like, you know, as I say, like, the, a legacy, we often have treated it as a negative, but it is like, you know, definitionally, it's a gift. It's a bequest. Yeah. 15:33 But, you know, like, as you said, the, The Guar- The Guardian has put a stake in the ground around openness, right? Yes. And so, like, putting up a paywall wasn't really i- in the cards, I don't think. 15:45 Like, it would've been difficult to square with the, the mission of the... Or do you think that there, there can be, like, a paywall for The Guardian? I think that... So we have paid products. Yeah. 15:58 So, you know, you know, you already pay for our app. Yeah. And we have other paid products. 16:03 So I think that I don't think that we will ever have to put up a paywall that is a sort of hard paywall or even a dynamic paywall on, on what we're publishing kind of, you know, every day. 16:14 I do think that there, there will be areas of, you know, our archive and our site and sort of some of our products that will be paid for, and some of that will be, you know, we will ask you to pay in order to be able to consume, and some of it will be voluntary. 16:27 Okay. And that i- y- you see that as the main dr- driver of the business still in, like, five years' time? I think that will be a very important, like, driver of the business. 16:38 I think advertising will still matter, and I think advertising will evolve and adapt, but I think our relationship with certain kind of, you know, really key partners and brands will endure, and I think that that will, you know, still be important. 16:51 And I think that you will see the emergence and the growth of, of licensing revenues, and I think what that looks like both on a sort of, you know, a sort of large kind of licensing model basis but also on an individualized kind of agentic basis is, is the unknown, but it's, I think, going to be an important piece of 2031. 17:10 Okay. So you're agnostic as to whether people are, are accessing The Guardian's content directly through The Guardian or through a different interface. 17:20 I'm agnostic if the, if the business model has traveled, and if we're being compensated for it, either directly from, from, you know, the, the human or the kind of the agent or the, or the platform with which we're showing up, then I'm agnostic about it, but it's, the crucial bit is the level and the value of, of compensation. 17:40 Do you... Is it a, is it a challenge to, to, to do, like, a five-year plan now? Yeah. 17:46 [laughs] I mean, I think five-year plans were always I mean, they were always- Don't tell my board, but they were always an exercise of, you know, fiction. But- Based on a true story. Well, based on a forward projection. 17:58 [laughs] No, I mean, the best piece of advice that I, I got recently was we, uh, we had on our board somebody who had just spent a lot of time working with DeepMind, and, and he said, "I really wouldn't spend any time doing a five-year plan. 18:11 You know, even the guys at DeepMind don't know what's coming in sort of, you know, 12 weeks' time. 18:15 And you can waste an enormous amount of energy and your time doing forward projections, which you'll just have to rip up." 18:21 And he said, "Spend your time worrying about the, the capabilities and skills and adaptability of your organization and your culture, because you've just got to be ready for rapid change, and you've got to be able to, to cope with it- Mm... 18:34 and, you know, sort of react accordingly." And so, you know, we have a five-year plan, and we will continue to invest, you know, in making our five-year plan not so much a work of fiction, but a work of aspiration. 18:44 But yeah, I think that, that anyone who thinks that they know what's going to be true in five years' time is loony. 18:51 [laughs] So you talked about, like, you know, you, you know, I think a lot of times people talk about, like, how they, they need to reskill and have adaptability, like internally. Do you think you're there yet? 19:04 And by that, I mean, I would guess you have some AI pushback internally. You know, because a- AI's not very popular in most creative production fields- No... 19:15 and, and in journalism, and for, for a lot of really good reasons really. Yeah. 19:19 And then on the o- so on the one hand, you have, you know, executives at publishers who are, are saying how unfair it is that these, these AI companies distilled the entire internet and stole content. 19:33 And then on the other hand, they're saying, "Hey, you guys all gotta use these AI tools because we gotta be more efficient." Like, how do you get around that? 19:42 Well, so first of all, I think it is, it is not an acceptable position to take that you reject the tools completely, or you reject the technology, or you stick your kind of, you know, fingers in your ears and hope that it will all pass and that we'll all go back to kind of a normal world. 19:57 I think it's incumbent on all of us to understand the technology, and you can only really understand the technology by using it. 20:02 So we have a whole set of training that, that some of it's mandatory, some of it's kind of more optional, some of it's sort of just about equipping people with basic understanding and skills, how to use the tools that are available to them in, you know, in the right way and in a responsible way and an ethical way. 20:18 Some of it's much deeper than that and much more like an apprenticeship of really beginning to think about how could AI be applicable to our workflows or kind of our use cases. 20:28 So we're trying to equip everyone with basic understanding through to much deeper understanding about the technology so that we can become familiar with it, you know, b- understand it as an organization and potentially then deploy it. 20:42 But we would never force people to use it, and we would particularly not force people to use it in the most, I think, human sort of centric pieces of what we do. 20:53 And we also wrote principles three years ago, which we still kind of adhere to, which were very much about, you know, transparency, respect, you know, the sort of how we would use it and how we would talk to our audiences about if and when we used it. 21:07 But, but we do have a lot of pish- we do have a lot of pushback on it, and we do have a lot of anxiety about the technology and the tools, both for ourselves, but also for the world, and I think that that's completely legitimate. 21:19 I have enormous amounts of sort of sympathy for that. And I think it's so... I mean, we were talking about this. It's so different from the first wave of digital- Mm-hmm... 21:28 you know, of digital kind of change and disruption and, and, and how optimistic we all felt about what digital would do, and, and indeed, going back to the conversation about coming to America, y- you know, there was a period where you did feel it was genuinely utopian, that, you know, digital would kind of transform so many things and, and, you know, you make access to quality information, which would be great for society and democracy and citizens and, you know, kind of happy days. 21:53 This time it's so different. You know, there's none of that optimism. There's none of that sense of, of, of belief in both where the, where the technology's coming from and to what end it's going to be put. 22:05 You know, and everybody is anxious for the world, for the kind of impact on climate, and for themselves, you know, the, and the impact on their jobs, and I think you have to be sympathetic about that while at the same time not, you know, allowing a kind of sense of veganism about it because that is just to ignore, you know, or not to understand what's happening in the world. 22:25 And, you know, our audiences are certainly using it, and the environments that we operate in are definitely changing because of AI, and therefore, we have to understand it, and we have to work out how and where it's appropriate for us to use it because it will end up being able to amplify the things that we need to do. 22:41 Yeah. Do you see any signs that in the data that users, at least like r- regularly, the audience, is changing their habits, like, dramatically? Yes. I mean, I th- I mean, I think we do see that in data. 22:58 We see that in data both in, in referral, in usage within, you know, kind of new, you know, new products. I think you see it... I mean, as in, you know, I've already cited the Ofcom data. 23:10 I mean, you see it both in what people are reporting for themselves, but also just in the sort of usage that, you know, gets, gets shared, which is clearly audience habits are changing. 23:20 How much, how much sort of those habit- the habits that are happening at the moment then endure, or whether or not they then also continue to evolve, I think is the sort of unknown. 23:30 It feels like we're at the very early stages of, of, of that kind of sense of audience behavior. But I do think that you've got this very interesting paradox, which is everybody's using it, 23:42 everybody sort of hates it, and it's actually possible that it's bad for us in all sorts of ways, and all of those things are true. Okay. And then you want everyone to adopt it. 23:53 And then, but then you also want everyone to adopt it. Well, I- That's like also the challenge, right? But, but, but that's, but that's a very sort of sweeping... 23:58 You know, I mean, we want people to experiment, and we want people- Yeah... 24:02 to use it where it's appropriate, but that doesn't mean that we are forcing everyone to adopt it or that we're forcing them to use it in places that we would deem- Yeah... 24:10 to be inappropriate or- It seems like you're not like an AI maximalist. Like, where... I, I'd asked Nick Thompson, you know, and he... And a lot of these are hypotheses, right? Mm-hmm. 24:19 About, like, what the direct- what the shape of the media industry is in 2031. Do you have like a hypotheses? And, like, where would you plot it as in, "Okay, we'll, we'll, we'll leave the doom aside"? 24:30 [laughs] Assume, assume that we are still here- Yeah... in 2031, right? But, like, are, are you like somewhere in between, like as far as your hypothesis about how this will, will- Yeah... will play out? 24:42 Meaning, like, the maximalist case is this overturns the entire industry. There might not even, even necessarily be one. And then the, the sort of minimalist one would be more- We're all going back to print. 24:56 Yeah, we're going back to print. Yeah. The... What, what did you say? You used a great phrase, pretty vegan. Yeah. Vegan about it. 25:02 Yeah, there are groups of v- there are groups of vegans who kind of believe that we're all just, you know, a couple of months away from just going back to print. Yeah. Yeah, and now boringly, I'm probably in the middle. 25:11 I mean, I think that, that if you look at, if you look at audience behaviors and, and you look at kind of the adoption of new products, actually behaviors endure, you know, existing behaviors endure for much longer than you think they're going to endure. 25:24 And even though this is the kind of the, the greatest sort of pace of change that we've ever seen, and that is the thing that kind of gives you whiplash how quickly things are moving, I don't believe that you're going to... 25:36 You know, I do believe that some things are gonna genuinely stay the same. I think that we will still have human audiences. We will still have products that we, that are our own, that people come to. 25:45 We will be kind of, you know, obsessing about our relationship with human beings. We will prioritize trust, you know. 25:53 But then there are many things that will change, and, you know, I think we are gonna have to adapt and redesign and reconfigure in order to be relevant and readable by agents, and we're gonna have to really think about what that means and what that looks like and how you then get the business model to follow or how you give people entitlements to Guardian sort of, you know, experiences within other products. 26:15 I think we're going to, you know, need to kind of continue to adapt and change our, our, our form of our journalism, and when we talked about that. 26:23 I think we are going to have to be willing and able to reveal much more about the process and the rigor that goes into journalism and why it matters and, and why people can trust it. 26:36 And I think those are going to force us to do things in a different way to the way that we do it now. 26:42 So there is gonna be a lot of change, and I also think we're gonna be ch- showing up in a whole variety of new surfaces, some of which will be very disruptive and different to the ones that we show up in now. 26:54 But I don't think everything is going to be disintermediated. 26:57 I don't think everything is going to be synthetic and automated, and I don't think that some of those, those pillars of, of kind of, of, you know, kind of sort of, you know, truth will disappear. 27:09 Do you think the majority of your journalism will be accessed by agents or will be intermediated in some way, shape, or form by an agent? I mean, I don't know. I don't know if the majority. 27:23 I, I definitely think a, a, a high proportion will be, but I don't know if it will be the majority. Yeah. 27:29 See, Jeff Bezos has a, a great expression that I like to, to, to use, which is like you should focus on the things that won't change- Yeah... rather than what will change. 27:37 So what are, like, the things that you focus on that just won't, won't change in five years? 27:42 Well, I think, you know, I think you will still need to be completely sort of, you know, centered around audience and understanding of audience. 27:50 I think we will need to continue to prioritize and, and invest in, you know, direct relationships and meaningful relationships with humans. 27:59 I think we will have to continue to prioritize trust in all of the things that that means. And I think that, that fundamentally we will continue to do journalism. 28:08 I mean, I think that we will employ human beings who will be engaged in doing journalism. 28:14 I think the form and the output that that journalism changes, that, that journalism takes will change, but I think it will still have human beings at the center of it. I think we will still have apps. 28:24 I think our website may become something that is more of, of a, a, a, more of a sort of service to kind of the agentic audiences rather than, you know... 28:35 That's where you might have, you know, the majority of traffic from agents rather than humans. Okay, so the we- website might become m- majority- I think it-... bot. Yeah. Okay, made for bots. Yes. Okay. I... 28:49 This is a little bit outside of that, but, and I know this is the final question, but has, has Trump been good for business? Yes. He has been. Like, how good? Like, can you... 29:01 'Cause I guess what I wonder is, like, you know, like- It's not, it's not good enough. It doesn't make up for the tr- you know? I know. I know. But there was, like, you know, the Trump bump one. Yeah. 29:08 And then, like, Trump came back, and it was like, "Wow, this is a, this is... This show's a little tired at this point." But, like... No. No, Trump is... Yes. 29:17 I mean, people are, people are, you know, very interested, very angry. They really want to understand and know. And so, yes, y- y- you know, in that particular way, he has been good for business. 29:30 He's also been good for business because, because of his, because of the, the desire by a set of billionaires to become his, you know, friends and to sort of bend the knee, there are, you know, peers or competitors of ours that have, you know, moved away from the space that we can now occupy, and that has also been good for business. 29:50 Yeah. And you've been able to, you know, market on that too. Yes. That's all good. Yes. Awesome. Yeah. All right. Thank you so much. Thank you. This was lovely. Thank you. This was great. 30:09 [outro music]
