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What I've Learnt - Adam Schwab · WHAT I'VE LEARNT

• 0:09
  SPEAKER_00: Adam Chwab is a former corporate lawyer, company founder, angel investor, and the co-founder of Luxury Escape, a Melbourne-based travel company.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_00: He's written for Crikey and Smart Company since 2005 and is the author of Pigs at the Trough, Lessons from Australia's Decade of Corporate Greed.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_00: He's a board member of Private Media, the publisher of Crikey.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_00: So, Adam, welcome to the What I've Learned podcast.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_00: You're over there in the UK, which seems a little freer than we are here in uh lockdown Melbourne.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_00: How's it going?
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks, Debbie.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_01: No, it's actually pretty good.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_01: There's a lot of infections here, but nobody, it's very different to Australia.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_01: Nobody's really talking about COVID.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_01: It's not on the front pages, not where people aren't really wearing masks.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_01: Um there's a there's obviously in the back of your head, people know that if you get a cold, you can get a testing kick from the pharmacy and give it because of a quick test and five minutes later, you know if you've I've I think I've done about six or seven and everyone's been negative.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_01: So you can get a vaccine in two minutes.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_01: So it's it's very much a living with COVID situation here.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_01: It's not 100% like 2019, but it's you could very easily live like this and not be overly sort of bothered about it.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_00: That is quite extraordinary and quite refreshing and uplifting.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_00: And I will come back to that.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I just wanted to start off with, I mean, I as you we discussed, I was a newshound journalist myself, and I've worked with uh both Fairfax and Youth Corp, uh, some of people that you know quite well.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I'm actually intrigued.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_00: How does a corporate lawyer find himself on the media trail?
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm intrigued how he got involved with Crikey, which clearly transformed the media landscape.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_00: What enticed you, other than obviously people like Eric Beecher, who I think is wonderful, and was my editor?
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_01: It's a good question.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_01: Me and my co-founder guy called Jeremy, we left our respective jobs in about 2005.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, and I was a corporate lawyer at Free Hills, and he was at ANZ, and we started a backpacker apartments business.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_01: That was our first ever business.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_01: We propped, we had a few businesses as kids, but this is our first ever semi-proper business.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_01: And we had very little capital, so I wish we started renting apartments and we furnished them and got backpackers in, and we're away.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_01: And we did that, but as we were starting that business, it was actually wasn't that time consuming.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_01: So we'd set up an apartment, you'd fill it, and then you'd sort of people just pay you rent and you and you kind of just just wait around.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_01: So it was compared to sort of lawyer days when you're working 14 hour days, I had a bit of a time on my hands.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_01: So I was I'd been a cricket subscriber since Stephen, I think Stephen Maine owned it, made a Stevens, and then Eric bought it uh in 2004, I think, and he hired a different editor.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_01: And I was just a reader, and it was around the time of the Steve Bysar inside a trading issue, I'm sure you can remember.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_01: And I had a obviously corporate law background.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_01: I've never been a journalist in any way, never written anything.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_01: Although being a lawyer, you sort of have to have some basic writing skills, but I was definitely certainly a journalist.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, and there were no journalistic training or anything like that.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_01: But as and at the time, Peter Farris used to run technically what was then ASIC was a contributor of Krake, and he was talking about various corporate crime issues.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_01: So I just sent the editor at the time, just a quick note saying maybe you should get Peter Farris to write about this.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_01: It was something about the Steve Isard case.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_01: I can't remember exactly what the context was.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_00: So it was a complex case, yeah.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so it was it was there was some element saying, why don't we look into this?
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_01: Why don't you look into this?
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_01: And Misha, the editor, who's a great guy, goes, Oh Adam, you used to be a lawyer, why don't you write it?
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_01: I said, okay.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_01: So I wrote an article, my first ever article, it was 2005, I was about 24.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_01: I wrote his article and they ran it, which was a bit of a thrill.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, and then I sent in another one and he wrote another one and he ran another one.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_01: And then I said, Well, you know, my bigger interest is business, right?
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_01: More business than law specifically.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_01: So I started writing some business articles and I started writing it.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_01: And I've written probably 1500 articles or 2,000 articles and stand across like you across all the Fairfax papers, all the news court papers, so covered the whole game of media, really, even though I'm not far from a journal.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_01: Um, did a bunch of stuff on sky business for many years and obviously wrote the book, but it's always been a really side thing for me.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_01: I said I made spend a couple hours a week writing various things, um, often business, corporate governance, legal focused.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, and at the same time, the main career was building a bunch of businesses that culminated in luxury escapes.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_00: It's really interesting to me because you could obviously see the power of the pen to really communicate.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_00: Because I've always, ever since I was young, I've wanted to be a journal and I found it extremely liberating.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_00: Because it doesn't matter who you are, if you decide to use that tool, it can be really powerful and really potent.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, you're outspoken about things you believe in, because I see you on Twitter, um, from corporate greed to GLaDIS.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_00: You've always been vocal, and and where does that drive to take a stand come from?
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_00: Because often taking a stand takes courage.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_00: So, where does that come from?
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_01: I think I've always had a bit of a high justice, a high justice person since I was a kid.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_01: So someone cheats in the game, I never liked it.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_01: So there's a bit of that.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_01: It's probably just in the hair, but I think that the point you made just before was the right one.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_01: Is because I wasn't a journalist, and I could you I could almost just write whatever I want.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_01: When you're working the age from a cadet to a journey, that's your career.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_01: You you write what the editor tells you right, you've got a bit of input in what you do, but you're very much sort of directed as what you want.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_01: I just write whatever I want.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_01: So if you've got to be cognizant of the audience and the editor needs to run it, and in the early days of Crike, only probably 60 to 70% of what 60 to 70 percent of what I wrote would actually ever run.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_01: Um, now it's probably closer to 95%, but not everything runs.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_01: Um I just I'm just the site, I just sort of write stuff that interests me.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_01: And I you obviously have to have a relatively good eye of what people will want to read.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_01: But it's not always certainly the COVID stuff is very polarizing.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_01: Historically, the stuff I've written has been corporate governance focused, and writing for a notionally left-wing audience like Cracky resonated pretty well.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_01: So it was a pretty hospitable audience.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_01: If I wrote a lot about the property market, that's a bit less because you've got the baby movers who are property invested, but in general, the stuff I've written gets a relatively good audience till COVID, where it's such a polarized view.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_01: You've got people, frankly, two significant groups that just are never going to agree.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_01: Each group thinks the other group's selfish inherently, so they're never going to agree.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_01: So you get some pretty um aggressive uh comments about what you like, but then you get some people aggressively agreeing.
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_01: So yeah.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and I think, you know, I mean, look, I've always operated media is a blessing and a curse.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_00: It can inform, but it can derail as well.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_00: How do you think the media in general is doing right now, and not just COVID, but across the board?
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_00: You know, is it an out-of-control steam train or is it the same wolf but just in different clothing?
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_00: Because we now have such a broad spectrum.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, whether it's podcasting like what I do, which is so liberating, which I know you also do, or whether you um, you know, tackle it, it really is a bit of a brave new world in that regard.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_01: It's a great question.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_01: Obviously, the the newspaper industry and in our TV as well went through that massive change as the rivers of gold dried up for 2003, 2015.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_01: But credit to Greg and the Fairfax guys who did an amazing job at keeping that business afloat.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_01: And obviously, now it's it's going really well.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_01: And News Corp's had a great result in the last couple of years, the last 18 months as well.
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_01: So it feels like it'd been a bit of a renaissance.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_01: Obviously, stripping out that cash out of the newspapers, especially, really robbed it of a lot of its great content.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, we just read the Sunday age and there'd be 30 great articles to read.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_01: Now you actually get three.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_01: So it's certainly, I think it's just the information is diffused.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_01: I said it's gone, it's gone to podcasts, it's gone to online channel.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's a bit like TV.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_01: TV used to be an 8:30 movie on Sunday night when I was growing up, and you have the friends, friends on on Monday night, you have your sort of tent pole events.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_01: Now there's way more content.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_01: Netflix and Sam and Binge and Streaming is just yeah, transformed.
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, 500 great shows, instead of 10, it's just diffused across six or eight or ten different platforms.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_01: I think the same's happened with with written media as well.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, no, look, I think that's true.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, you know, you've also got the social media aspect which has transformed the media landscape.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_00: That there's a lot of noise and there's a lot of voices, of which you're one of them.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_00: I'm one of them too, aren't we lucky?
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_00: But I do think it is, and I have a lot of people on my show and I do a weekly, and I get some amazing opinions and exchanges and dive deep in a way that I could not in other ways, like if I write an article, it's a few grabs of a quote, right?
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_00: So you get a snapshot, whereas an hour with someone like an Eric Banner or whoever is just an absolute privilege that you just wouldn't get in another medium.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_00: So the benefit is that the media is now, while there is a lot of noise and there are a lot of voices, I think we also have enormous scope to change the dialogue.
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_00: What are your thoughts around that?
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, but I think I think Scott, I don't think Scott Galloway, who's become an influential podcaster out of the US, who's a new NYU professor, and he's got a big Twitter following, he's got a very big podcast, he's got sort of four or he's on TV, he's got a big following across different mediums, and he talks about written books, talks about how different people approach him differently.
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_01: So someone who reads him on Twitter is often aggressive, positive or negative.
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_01: But people who podcasting one's really interesting because people who listen to my podcast come up to me and have a deep conversation as if they're an old friend, even though they've met themselves.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_00: I find that too, I love it.
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_01: Intimate, yeah.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_01: So you have that intimate relationship with your listener, your listeners slash viewers that you wouldn't get, you don't get when you wrote for the SMH, but you get it in the there's just different mediums now.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_01: I listen to podcasts probably for six to seven hours a week.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_01: I still read all the papers, um, and I still get like a bunch of online stuff.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_01: So you're sort of cramming stuff into a shorter period, but I think you're I think there's there's more information now.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_01: Obviously, it's very picky, but there is, I think the quality of information is no different to how it was in the 80s, it's just now spread over instead of just two newspapers, there's 50 different ways to get that same information.
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_01: Work hard.
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I think that's right.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_00: And and I suppose also, I mean, you're a media junkie like me, so I just read everything and I'm avaricious.
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_00: And also I gather that your perspective is that you do, and I do agree with you, you have to curate in order to be effective, because otherwise it's just an onslaught.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_00: So tell me, the law can be an S.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_00: We'll come to the law because you are a lawyer and we can't forget that.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_00: But the rule of law governs how we live.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_00: And as a corporate lawyer, uh, what have you learned from the law?
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_00: How you know, what has it taught you?
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_01: I love this question.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_01: Law is an issue, but it's it's obviously people who who are lawyers tend to be pretty intelligent.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_01: As in the I'm not putting myself in the bucket, but everyone you work with as a lawyer is always pretty intelligent.
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_01: So you go certainly interesting leaving the law.
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_01: And when we started, so we've run a bunch of businesses since 2005.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_01: So from very small business of just me and Jazz to now you've got 300 staff, so it's sort of medium-sized now.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_01: But you go through an environment where everyone is super academic, to where people aren't people are very street smart, but not that level of academia.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_01: So that I'm always grateful for having done I practiced for a couple of years, then obviously started for five years.
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_01: But the skills you get as a lawyer, unless certain legal skills, legal skills, you become very focused in your niche.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_01: And you if you're an employment lawyer, you don't know much about litigation or commercial, vice versa.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_01: So generally, lawyers have very become very pitch and hold, unless you're a very small firm and you have to have broad coverage.
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_01: But certainly the bigger the firm, the more pitch and hold.
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_01: And I was an MA lawyer, so I was okay at MA and for at a junior level, but didn't know much anything about anything else, barely knew anything about MA.
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, but what you do learn is just fundamental skills.
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_01: One's precision.
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_01: Uh so you if I'm preparing a brief for a barrister for an AR employment case, you've got to be perfect.
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_01: And this is in 18 years ago.
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_01: So every index number is perfect, even though I was only 21 or 22 or whatever at the time, you just learn things have to be perfect.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_01: And if you don't, and law is one of the few professions which demand science is probably like medicine's another one, but law demands perfection and you can't stuff it up, unlike being a investment banker where maybe you can get away with not being 100% accurate.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_01: In law, you can't because you go to a court and you can't quite lose the case because you've staffed up a date.
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_01: So you've got to be really precise.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_01: And it also just teaches you you've just got to be able to work really hard, which again, banking consulting does as well.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_01: But uh so it's a couple of those skills that it's just you the bar is raised to a different level if you hadn't done it.
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_01: I'd love to hire more people out of law and consulting.
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_01: It's they're often expensive because you're taking out of a profession.
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_01: But I find that some lawyers are really risk averse and that they don't go well in business.
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_01: But if you can get a lawyer who understands risk and is willing to take risks, but also understands precision.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_01: A lot of great startup people found there's a being lawyers.
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, commons who are underburned obviously as a lawyer.
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_01: There's you see lots of people who are lawyers who studied law.
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_01: Evan Spiegel, I think, did a bit of law.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_01: And there's lots of people who did law across the spectrum, who, Peter Thiel, obviously, who become great entrepreneurs.
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_01: Uh so I think there's there's something in that, but there's also a lot of lawyers become real very risk-averse.
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_01: So if you're sort of a lawyer at 45, it's pretty hard to reverse that for a few reasons.
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_01: Obviously, you've got the opportunity cost, but you've also got just that way of thinking because of Trent.
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_01: So I think studying law and then doing law for two or three years is actually a really great part to becoming an entrepreneur, a founder.
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, it does give you some great skills.
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_01: And I think I'm big skilled yet, you just don't get bullied, you don't get afraid.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_01: If I get sure I don't get many these days, to be honest, but if you get a legal letter, you sort of go, this is puffery or whatever, this is someone trying to scare you.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_01: No, you just don't get scared.
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_01: I've almost never get scared in that sense.
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that's that legal background.
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_01: And it's great to be able to brief lawyers and to work with external council, having my good friend David Schaefer who runs Cogan effectively is that that in-house council as well as another role he plays there, but just don't get bullied by that.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_00: It's all I suppose what you're saying is you're equipped, you you know, it equips you to go forth in business in a different way.
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_00: When I look at you and and I I see you go from, you know, you've got the media um experience, you've got the legal experience, then you cross the spectrum from media and law to the travel industry.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_00: What lured you across the bridge to embrace the travel sector, other than yay, I can go traveling and wow, this is I mean, it's such a you know exciting, I get it, like I get the entrancement.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_00: And we'll come back to how it's been impacted recently.
• 13:43
  SPEAKER_01: But what what lured you across the divide?
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_01: That's probably giving us a bit us a bit too much credit.
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_01: We basically went from pivoted from one business to another one, uh, and we were never uns like every business we've had have had it has a degree have had a degree of success.
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_01: Nothing, fortunately, nothing really completely failed.
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_01: The one that came close to failing ended up being worth 20 million bucks by some pure act of fluke, uh, no fault of our own.
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_01: But everything else, uh, which was became part of my log, but everything else we did is has actually gone okay.
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_01: Off of it could be maybe being a small base.
• 14:09
  SPEAKER_01: Our first business was small, grown to grew to a reasonable size, pivoted to a corporate apartments business, which we then bought and sold some properties and made a million bucks, which back then was a lot for us, and then pivoted to the restaurant thing, then pivoted to the deals thing, and then pivoted to the travel thing.
• 14:23
  SPEAKER_01: So it wasn't we sort of not a total shift, yeah.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it was just great, it was incremental.
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_01: And we so as we when we had that million bucks from the corporate apartments thing, we we were still 29 at the time.
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_01: We said we could buy a house, but that's not who we are.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_01: We're pretty frugal sort of guys.
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_01: We said, well, we want to invest in something that's more scalable.
• 14:39
  SPEAKER_01: And we just were looking around for ideas and saw the group on craze in the US, which first company to a billion dollars in turnover, and no one had done it here, and we said, Well, we should do that.
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_01: So we started doing that.
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_01: No idea how to run their commerce business, we're just which we're winging it.
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_01: We'd never had an online business ever.
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_01: We sort of just made enough mistakes and learned from them pretty quickly.
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_01: And then as we grew that business, we realized that that business was in some ways challenged, but the travel part was good.
• 15:03
  SPEAKER_01: So we started doing more travel.
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_01: And then we and then a couple years later we go, well, we need to have a separate brand because great brands aren't going to work with Ritz Carlton doesn't work with deals.com.au.
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_01: We need to create a new brand.
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_01: So much came out of a customer need, essentially.
• 15:15
  SPEAKER_01: So we met we knew our hotel partners wanted a really nice, clean, beautiful travel brand.
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_01: So deals.com wouldn't cut it.
• 15:21
  SPEAKER_01: So we needed we kept that brand, obviously, and we still have it, but we would create a travel-only version, and that's then, and then we've just pivoted from that sort of invested in travel and then gone from what we call Flash, which is short-time amazing offers to some of the most beautiful hotels on earth, to now we've got a travel marketplace.
• 15:37
  SPEAKER_01: So a high-end version of booking.com, which is which will be a really amazing customer experience.
• 15:43
  SPEAKER_01: So keep over the years, it doesn't happen overnight, but every few years we pivot to a part of the business we think is a better match to what the customers want.
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_01: And that's happening as we speak, we're pivoting the business again over the last couple of years, not because of COVID, but COVID's accelerated that.
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_01: And I think we're a far, far better business now than we were even 18 months ago, notwithstanding the pandemic.
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_00: But that's really interesting because I have spoken to a few people who have actually if have pivoted, found a way to use this time to grow and create and to expand.
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, package travel's not new, but you've captured a new market and have a strong brand.
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_00: So how do you think you've done that?
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_00: As you say, you you branded it.
• 16:20
  SPEAKER_00: So the minute you have the word luxury, you you know, people are going to go, I want to be part of that.
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that was clever branding, in my humble opinion.
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_00: Um obviously, you know, it does change.
• 16:31
  SPEAKER_00: Like if I'm looking at a packaged travel option, and you know, it does elevate your experience or or your perceived experience, which I assume hopefully is delivered.
• 16:41
  SPEAKER_00: And I have obviously used luxury escapes.
• 16:43
  SPEAKER_00: Other than obviously, the branding, what else is it that you've done you think that has been smart and effective?
• 16:50
  SPEAKER_01: Funny enough to talk about newspapers and both our background or your background, especially.
• 16:54
  SPEAKER_01: We discovered newspapers pretty early.
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_01: So as newspapers were sort of on the start of their die in the two in the mid to early 2000s, so to speak, what one of our co-founders, a guy called Mark, who did a lot of our partnerships.
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_01: So he was his genius negotiator, and he was able to get the best deals on earth.
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_01: We still have the best deals on earth, which is one, and I'm not saying I'm saying that objectively, because you can quite easily compare our prices to anyone else.
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_01: The beauty of travel online is it's very, it's very comparable.
• 17:19
  SPEAKER_01: So we were able to go and get the best deals for Grand Hyde at Bali, the best deals for Softel Singapore, the best deals for Paul Mumaldies, because you can compare it to 50% at 30% less.
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_01: So we were really good at getting these amazing offers, and we have a whole way, and there's probably probably enough time in the podcast to go through how we do it, but we've got a whole sort of way how we how we do that.
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_01: We've got a pretty big team who negotiates with hundreds and hundreds of hotels every day.
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_01: But also we discovered that newspapers are a really good way to communicate this kind of romantic travel notion with people.
• 17:48
  SPEAKER_01: So we weren't the first, but we really spurred that resurgence in travel newspaper advertising.
• 17:52
  SPEAKER_01: Travel has become the biggest, most profitable part pre-COVID of newspapers, both here in the UK as well.
• 17:58
  SPEAKER_01: So newspapers really helped us, but when we became good at really good at digital marketing, so we had a bunch of different things.
• 18:03
  SPEAKER_01: We just tried and failed, and we're just sort of three or four guys who just sort of fumbled our way through it.
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_01: And we're just, we are pretty quick learners.
• 18:09
  SPEAKER_01: So we'll try things, we'll learn quickly.
• 18:11
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, hopefully we won't make the same mistake too many times.
• 18:14
  SPEAKER_01: But we had no, we had none of us had any travel background.
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_01: None of us are, I don't think of myself as a big traveler.
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_01: I'm certainly not a big sort of five, six star traveler.
• 18:21
  SPEAKER_01: We've got two young kids, we've got some sort of family stuff, not the super luxury stuff.
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_01: But what we've always been is super customer focused, and we're trying to become even more customer focused.
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_01: But what we've sort of been is how do we create this great package that customers love?
• 18:32
  SPEAKER_01: And everything we did was focused on.
• 18:33
  SPEAKER_01: So most travel agents are based on who pays them the most, who gives them the highest overrides, that's what Plighthinter will sell, that's what every travel agent will sell, it's what booking.com will sell, it's sort of based on who pays the most commission, largely.
• 18:44
  SPEAKER_01: We were based on what makes us the most money, hence what the customers like the most.
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_01: So we were much more agnostic in terms of what we run.
• 18:49
  SPEAKER_01: So we negotiate the same commission for everyone we work with, and we wouldn't elevate a property because it paid us a lot, we'd elevate it because that's what customers wanted.
• 18:57
  SPEAKER_01: So we always had that really customer-first lens.
• 19:00
  SPEAKER_01: And now how we transition the business, our latest pivot, which is I'm super excited about, is how we how do we build lots of really great customer-centric products to make the travel experience better?
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_01: Travel inherently is a broken experience compared to look at what Canvas done for design.
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_01: It took something that would you have to be an expert adobe, expert in Adobe to someone any something anybody can use.
• 19:17
  SPEAKER_01: We want to do the same for travel.
• 19:19
  SPEAKER_01: Instead of we don't you have to be a travel agent to book this amazing 20-stop Europe trip.
• 19:23
  SPEAKER_01: We want to be able to sell you that stuff really simply and really easily, and also communicate with you during the trip and make your trip amazing.
• 19:28
  SPEAKER_01: So if you land in Florence, we want to here's the top 10 restaurants in Florence, and here's how you book them.
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_01: And here's the top 10 things to do, and this is how you can book them, and here's the that we would have told you where to stay before you booked them.
• 19:38
  SPEAKER_01: Here's just some great articles on on Florence or on Taskani.
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_01: So how do we think there's a there's a huge scope to we've gone from being this great deal-making business, so we we had the best products on earth, to building a marketplace where you can buy lots of stuff everywhere to fixing the trip experience and fixing the in-trip experience, which is what we're working on now.
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_01: So we've got a we've grown our team through.
• 19:59
  SPEAKER_01: We're the only travel business on earth that's grown our team through COVID, and we've invested that purely in 20, 25, 30 developers.
• 20:05
  SPEAKER_01: This will grow to a team of 100.
• 20:07
  SPEAKER_01: So we've got a team of 60 now who are working on how to improve the customer experience through every touch point of the trip, from the dreaming to booking to converting to after you book before you travel and to why you travel.
• 20:17
  SPEAKER_01: And there's hundreds of touch points there that we want to work on consistently and build this amazing travel experience.
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_01: That's what we're 100% focused on at the moment.
• 20:24
  SPEAKER_00: I think what I like about it also is you've tapped into the, I think a lot of people are doing things themselves, like more, more so.
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_00: Like someone like me, right?
• 20:32
  SPEAKER_00: I tend to want to just be in control and be in and plan it.
• 20:36
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm quite capable.
• 20:37
  SPEAKER_00: I can go and get a travel agent to do it, but I like being involved in the process.
• 20:40
  SPEAKER_00: Most of my friends are similar.
• 20:42
  SPEAKER_00: That's what that feeds into.
• 20:43
  SPEAKER_00: Bookings.com is great, but obviously it doesn't offer you a service.
• 20:47
  SPEAKER_00: It just offers you, you can book it, although you can hold your booking it and just be a COVID council.
• 20:55
  SPEAKER_00: You know, that's a separate issue.
• 20:57
  SPEAKER_00: So I I hear you, and I think that you're tapping into the next sort of wave of independent thinking, too.
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_00: It's something that I think a lot of people are looking for.
• 21:06
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, clearly your business must have been impacted by the COVID pandemic in some form, because clearly, well, no one from Australia can come or go, really, except for maybe you in the UK, and about 10 other people I know who've managed to get permits for very, but very serious reasons, you know, not just so.
• 21:23
  SPEAKER_00: What have you done to survive over and above clearly an expansion program that you've referred to?
• 21:28
  SPEAKER_01: I think just on your last point, what I think travel booking is inherently really good fun.
• 21:32
  SPEAKER_01: People, as you say, people love booking travel, but it's really hard.
• 21:34
  SPEAKER_01: Like you're using Excel spreadsheets, you think so.
• 21:37
  SPEAKER_01: We want to get that love, but not but get rid of the bad stuff.
• 21:39
  SPEAKER_01: So that's sort of what we're working on.
• 21:41
  SPEAKER_01: But um, yeah, COVID obviously in March last year, it hit it hit the whole industry pretty significantly.
• 21:46
  SPEAKER_01: And and our revenue went to actually went to negatives because there's heaps of refunds and credits and all that kind of stuff.
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_01: And there's still refunds and credits every day because borders are shutting and opening and all that stuff.
• 21:54
  SPEAKER_01: But we're pretty lucky in a few respects.
• 21:57
  SPEAKER_01: One, we've got an amazingly loyal customer base who are really happy to keep.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_01: Stuff on file credit.
• 22:01
  SPEAKER_01: So a lot of people just delayed that trip.
• 22:02
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_01: We're also lucky in the product we sell are unique.
• 22:05
  SPEAKER_01: So if you buy a MALD's package from us to Pullman for six grand, if you're buying on Booking.com to be 10 grand, if you bought it on Booking.com for 10 grand, you just get it refunded because what if you just buy it on Booker.com in a year's time, nothing lost.
• 22:17
  SPEAKER_01: Our packaging probably won't be able to get again.
• 22:19
  SPEAKER_01: So there's actually real scarcity and exclusivity of what we do.
• 22:22
  SPEAKER_01: So that's one reason people kept their products.
• 22:24
  SPEAKER_01: And we've got a really high MPS, we invest really heavily in customer support.
• 22:28
  SPEAKER_01: We overinvest over-index there.
• 22:29
  SPEAKER_01: And whilst we haven't been perfect through the pandemic, we've got our response down to 30 seconds at some points when there's no mass border closure.
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_01: So when we can, we we overinvest in customer service and customer experience because we know that's essentially the lifetime value of our business is how loyal our customers are.
• 22:45
  SPEAKER_01: So our customers, fortunately for us, have been super loyal and super understanding.
• 22:48
  SPEAKER_01: And some people have needed refunds or certainly credits for their own reason, which is completely fine.
• 22:53
  SPEAKER_01: And we always have encouraged people to try and sort of keep with us.
• 22:56
  SPEAKER_01: And generally 95% have, it's only been a small number who have, but they've generally have good reasons why they can't lost a job, illness, whatnot.
• 23:04
  SPEAKER_01: So uh we've been pretty lucky, but it certainly hit us over the certainly last year, especially.
• 23:09
  SPEAKER_01: Uh uh March, April, May was hard, June was really good, July, August were average, September started coming back, and September to September to May was a gradual improvement month on month for us.
• 23:19
  SPEAKER_01: And then obviously, this when the New South Wales and Victoria happened again this year, sort of dropped off again.
• 23:24
  SPEAKER_01: So it's roller coaster?
• 23:26
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so what proportion of your customer base is Australian?
• 23:30
  SPEAKER_01: Pre-COVID, it was 88% Australia, 12%.
• 23:33
  SPEAKER_01: Uh and the 12% was split over UK, US, Singapore, India, majorly, and then everywhere else.
• 23:39
  SPEAKER_01: So over COVID, two things happened.
• 23:41
  SPEAKER_01: One or three things, but Australian customers obviously stopped booking overseas largely, and we could focus on domestic, which is really lucky that we have a big domestic arm.
• 23:48
  SPEAKER_01: So we could service a lot of the Queensland demand, for example.
• 23:51
  SPEAKER_01: So Australian business doubled over COVID, went from 8 million to 16 million a month in in what we call TTB.
• 23:57
  SPEAKER_01: So that was that was good.
• 23:58
  SPEAKER_01: Obviously, our international business went from 20 to one, so that wasn't so good.
• 24:02
  SPEAKER_01: Not so good, yeah.
• 24:03
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 24:04
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 24:04
  SPEAKER_01: If you look at international markets, particularly US has been a mate, US has tripled since the pandemic started.
• 24:09
  SPEAKER_01: So US business has gone like like a rocket ship because US people can travel and they have been outward the whole time.
• 24:13
  SPEAKER_01: So that's been really surprising.
• 24:15
  SPEAKER_01: Well, obviously, we saw Singapore, UK were really bad, although that this month UK's come back super hard back to pre-pandemic levels.
• 24:22
  SPEAKER_01: India was really good last year.
• 24:24
  SPEAKER_01: They had that big, tragic second wave, they went back to zero.
• 24:26
  SPEAKER_01: And now India's back again to pre-pandemic.
• 24:28
  SPEAKER_01: So it's been a bit of a roller coaster, but overall, yeah, the international has bounced back quicker than Australia.
• 24:33
  SPEAKER_01: Certainly, US has been amazing.
• 24:35
  SPEAKER_01: Um, UK's come back really hard now, and and still waiting on Singapore, Hong Kong because they're obviously a bit more um conservative.
• 24:42
  SPEAKER_00: You're feeling like overall you're seeing an upward trajectory, and certainly, I mean, look, they're talking about December Australia opening.
• 24:49
  SPEAKER_00: I know people trying to book for Jan.
• 24:52
  SPEAKER_00: Um do you think that's realistic?
• 24:54
  SPEAKER_00: And also, how do you protect the, I suppose, the the challenges of, I mean, you've got so many, as you call them, touch points at which literally touch points that are going to need COVID protection from the, you know, and COVID management.
• 25:09
  SPEAKER_00: And how do you ensure and protect for all of that?
• 25:11
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, there's two, we're so in certain country, we're running, we're running two businesses.
• 25:14
  SPEAKER_01: There's the legacy business, which we're we're trying to obviously grow revenue as much back to pre-pandemic levels and grow.
• 25:20
  SPEAKER_01: And we've got called our new business, which we almost like a startup, which is that whole how do we improve, how do we fix the guest experience and how we build a marketplace?
• 25:26
  SPEAKER_01: So sort of that's all since COVID.
• 25:28
  SPEAKER_01: So we've been running almost two businesses.
• 25:30
  SPEAKER_01: So we think our legacy business will continue to grow, and our new business, we think we'll know that.
• 25:33
  SPEAKER_01: So that's the sort of tweak, but obviously we can't invest as much as we'd like in that one because we've got to get money out of this one.
• 25:39
  SPEAKER_01: Unfortunately, this one's now coming back.
• 25:40
  SPEAKER_01: So the last month's been outstanding, and we're a bit of a canary in the coal mine, but because we have a six-month booking window for our uh core product, uh, we've we've had our best Thailand results since February 2020.
• 25:51
  SPEAKER_01: So Thailand's back.
• 25:52
  SPEAKER_01: People are booking for 2022, 2023.
• 25:55
  SPEAKER_01: Compet like people are pretty confident that quantum's gonna start flying in late December.
• 25:58
  SPEAKER_01: So 17 December is when everything's trading.
• 26:00
  SPEAKER_01: We're only Quanta's version, federal government, New South Wales is killing it now, vaccine.
• 26:04
  SPEAKER_01: We're gonna be the high, we're gonna be one of the most vaccinated nations on earth in a month.
• 26:08
  SPEAKER_01: We're gonna be just behind UAE and Singapore, which is in Iceland, so which is great, which is always gonna happen.
• 26:13
  SPEAKER_01: It's just that obviously supply took it longer.
• 26:15
  SPEAKER_01: And in a way, the supply debacle, I think, made the create a bit of vaccine FOMO, and then the and then the Pfizer for even though AstraZeneca is a statistically a better vaccine than Pfizer, people waiting for Pfizer to have that FOMO as well.
• 26:27
  SPEAKER_01: So there's um that FOMO is actually helped help our so we'll get to 90% 18 plus 16 plus, I reckon, in a month.
• 26:34
  SPEAKER_01: And then the first target.
• 26:37
  SPEAKER_01: So yeah.
• 26:38
  SPEAKER_01: And what that then lead leads to is people are starting to book now.
• 26:40
  SPEAKER_01: And and this, we're still in early adopter mode.
• 26:42
  SPEAKER_01: So people booking now are the smart ones getting the really good deals because they know it's the deal we're running to Pala now, we've never run a deal this good.
• 26:48
  SPEAKER_01: Like it's uh we're hence why it's like it's our deals pre-COVID were real were best on earth.
• 26:53
  SPEAKER_01: So this may have been a 35% off.
• 26:55
  SPEAKER_01: We're now at like 60% off.
• 26:56
  SPEAKER_01: This you're just not going to get these kind of products when COVID is done because people go back to normal pricing.
• 27:01
  SPEAKER_01: So the smart money sort of getting it early, booking it, like just book in the package and say, Oh, get my dates later.
• 27:05
  SPEAKER_01: And and the smart money will probably get from that we'll probably have another month or two of this, and then this everybody starts jumping on board, and the deals go back to kind of still good pre-COVID deals, but now's the real, really good time to get in early.
• 27:16
  SPEAKER_01: Because like what we're running now for Pullman Colac, for example, like that's just incredible.
• 27:20
  SPEAKER_01: I bought one, like it's an incredible offer that you just won't get.
• 27:23
  SPEAKER_01: Where is it?
• 27:23
  SPEAKER_00: Where it's where did you say Pullman?
• 27:25
  SPEAKER_01: Basically PCAT, it's right.
• 27:27
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, PCA, yeah, yeah.
• 27:28
  SPEAKER_01: Which is a place called Colac, which is we so look at the case.
• 27:30
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, Faymats, beautiful.
• 27:32
  SPEAKER_01: This place called Colak.
• 27:33
  SPEAKER_01: So it's an amazing sort.
• 27:36
  SPEAKER_01: Um, yeah, incredible.
• 27:37
  SPEAKER_01: And you're basically paying$1,600 for an upgraded room that would have been this is for eight nights, and you would we would have paid like$400 a night for eco.
• 27:47
  SPEAKER_01: Like, so it's just an incredible offer that we won't get again.
• 27:50
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, so now the fine just you're confident, just listening to you, you're quite confident, and based on what you're seeing, that the future's looking bright, that travel will come back, that you've ridden out the sort of, it's been really a two-year, 18-month somewhat armageddon for a lot of people, but uh like for a lot of people in different industries.
• 28:09
  SPEAKER_00: But travel's, you know, been renowned for being just so smashed.
• 28:13
  SPEAKER_00: But I suppose what you're saying is where you operate, you've managed to use it as a time to create the secondary business alongside waiting for the legacy business to build up.
• 28:22
  SPEAKER_01: I think most founders are paranoid optimists.
• 28:24
  SPEAKER_01: You've got to be confident enough to back yourself, but also be paranoid of what's gonna happen.
• 28:27
  SPEAKER_01: So we're we're looking around corners every day.
• 28:29
  SPEAKER_01: Uh had a great month, but things can change if we know that the new variant could come.
• 28:33
  SPEAKER_01: Something could change that that puts us back.
• 28:36
  SPEAKER_01: So we're not we're certainly not buying uh expensive cars and houses.
• 28:39
  SPEAKER_01: We're we're we're still pretty conservative.
• 28:41
  SPEAKER_01: We know dividends are gonna be a couple of years away again.
• 28:43
  SPEAKER_01: So we are very focused on these growth businesses.
• 28:46
  SPEAKER_01: So that's where our kind of our optimism comes from.
• 28:48
  SPEAKER_01: But we're also paranoid that things can go wrong pretty quickly.
• 28:51
  SPEAKER_01: We saw what happened in the pandemic, expect the unexpected.
• 28:54
  SPEAKER_01: So we haven't been able to I'd love to hire an extra hundred people tomorrow.
• 28:57
  SPEAKER_01: So I think we could use them and we'll grow faster, but I don't want to risk hiring 100 people and having to people have come and gone over the over the journey for us over the last 18 months, but we haven't had to furlough or fire people as a result of the pandemic.
• 29:09
  SPEAKER_01: People have left.
• 29:09
  SPEAKER_00: Which is pretty extraordinary.
• 29:11
  SPEAKER_00: But that's pretty incredible, isn't it?
• 29:13
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, we've grown our team by 25%, which I think we're the only ones globally.
• 29:17
  SPEAKER_01: ANB, Book.com, all these guys, all these businesses.
• 29:20
  SPEAKER_01: Remove furlough or sack people.
• 29:23
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, we we've grown our team.
• 29:24
  SPEAKER_01: So and we've gotten people from Canberra, Rassian, and these great Australian businesses, because I think people believe in the vision and want to see the massive problem that travel is broken as an experience.
• 29:34
  SPEAKER_01: And we think we can we think we're in a better position than anyone globally.
• 29:38
  SPEAKER_01: We've got enough scale to invest in it, but not too much scale to left that place.
• 29:41
  SPEAKER_01: So we're not a booking.com who's a big list that makes uh makes$10 billion a year, or uh, we're not Flight Thunder who's this great legacy business, great, they're both great businesses, but really hard for those elephants to dance.
• 29:52
  SPEAKER_01: We can we can dance really quickly because we can we can hire 20 people, which is a substantial part of our dev team, and say, you guys, you solve this problem and let's let's fix this.
• 30:01
  SPEAKER_01: And we've got three million customers who can we don't have to acquire the customers, we've got the customers.
• 30:05
  SPEAKER_01: So we're in a really unique position that we can call scale up, where Atlassian was 15 years ago, where Campbell was eight years ago.
• 30:12
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I'm not gonna say we're gonna be like those businesses, these are strange eyes, but we think we can be a much bigger business than we are today, and more importantly, create this amazing product for customers hopefully love.
• 30:22
  SPEAKER_00: And I think the key to all of what you're saying is agility and being able to adapt accordingly and to not and I I have to say that I love and I really appreciate that you know the last part of our chat is focused on an optimism because you know many of the interviews and many of the people that I speak to have sunk into the COVID uh pessimism.
• 30:44
  SPEAKER_00: Um and look, I know like obviously I think you know, you tweet and and you know you refer to various things um which obviously are frustrating.
• 30:52
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, like I think there was a tweet that this week that you said, you know, the days have really shown the world how it's done, 74% vaccinated, not a single restriction, almost no one dying, COVID no longer considered a socially critical disease, et cetera, et cetera.
• 31:06
  SPEAKER_00: So clearly there's lots of you're across it, you're aware of it, but you're determined to use it as an optimist, you know, to be an optimistic leapfrog rather than a pessimistic, you know, downer because I don't think anybody can really deal with much more of the pessimism.
• 31:24
  SPEAKER_01: It's like I guess think of the role of a of a CEO.
• 31:28
  SPEAKER_01: One, you're allocating capital.
• 31:29
  SPEAKER_01: You've got to allocate capital where it's most efficient.
• 31:31
  SPEAKER_01: So my job is to make sure we don't.
• 31:33
  SPEAKER_01: I can't get COVID wrong and think we're gonna be back 100% tomorrow and spend a million dollars on marketing and go bankrupt.
• 31:39
  SPEAKER_01: So we we can't be too optimistic.
• 31:40
  SPEAKER_01: We've also got to be be ahead of everyone else.
• 31:42
  SPEAKER_01: I'm gonna I and we modeled out four months ago when we're gonna hit this vaccination.
• 31:46
  SPEAKER_01: I got it one day off.
• 31:47
  SPEAKER_01: So I said, I think I said 15th of October is gonna be 16th of October as well.
• 31:50
  SPEAKER_01: So we got we got it pretty close because we just get enough data points that we could hopefully make the right well as close as we can to the right call and how we invest.
• 31:57
  SPEAKER_01: So we're thinking three months ago, I could have pulled back team members.
• 32:01
  SPEAKER_01: Well, this is in the height of this last wave.
• 32:03
  SPEAKER_01: We could have furloughed a bunch of people and said, well, as long as it comes back in October or September, we'll be okay because we know what revenue modeling will happen and we can forecast cash flows and all that kind of stuff.
• 32:13
  SPEAKER_01: And we sort of backed ourselves on that and grew the team rather than shrunk it.
• 32:16
  SPEAKER_01: And we were, yeah, we sure we were.
• 32:18
  SPEAKER_01: My wife tells me I'm too optimistic sometimes on this stuff, but I think I'm just realistic and look at enough data points that the view of fact, there's so many, and I was a very pro-lockdown advocate for the first couple of months in March, April last year, and I was furious that we got locked down, and I pretty quickly realized that the data showed something different.
• 32:35
  SPEAKER_01: And this is not a universal view by any stretch, but and if you're simply looking at deaths of 80, 83-year-old people who are obese, then yeah, it's terrible.
• 32:42
  SPEAKER_01: But if you look at 99.96% of people who haven't died of COVID, it's a hundred times less bad than Spanish.
• 32:47
  SPEAKER_01: If you look at if I'm inherently a data guy, if you really comb back the data, it's a very different story to what the media tells because the media is interested in, as you know, selling selling clicks, selling papers.
• 32:57
  SPEAKER_01: I obviously I'm I've got my own bias, and people are very quick who don't agree are very quick to say Adam's a travel agent.
• 33:02
  SPEAKER_01: He's telling me his own book, and I'm I'm always very quick to disclose obviously my financial interests in travel, but lockdowns are great for our business.
• 33:09
  SPEAKER_01: I know it sounds weird, but COVID zero in Australia was great for luxury escapes because we sell a heap of domestic stuff.
• 33:13
  SPEAKER_01: So broader closures are bad, lockdowns are good.
• 33:16
  SPEAKER_01: But I've been very anti-lockdown because the effect it's had on kids, the effect on mental health is the second-order effects and the first-order effects, I think, are terrible.
• 33:22
  SPEAKER_01: Personally, my financial interests are uh of all lockdowns.
• 33:25
  SPEAKER_01: Dan Andrew's locking down estate for three months last year, was great for us for business-wise.
• 33:30
  SPEAKER_01: And it we had a great three months after that.
• 33:32
  SPEAKER_01: What's terrible is a long, rambling six months, people too scared to travel.
• 33:37
  SPEAKER_01: That's what's bad.
• 33:38
  SPEAKER_01: So I've been very anti-lockdown, even though it's talking against my own book.
• 33:42
  SPEAKER_01: So I like to think I'm holding on as view, and I know I can't influence government policy anyway.
• 33:46
  SPEAKER_01: So it's not as if what I say changes what Dan or Gladys does.
• 33:50
  SPEAKER_01: But I whenever I write an article, I think it talks about it.
• 33:53
  SPEAKER_01: I'm I'm simply writing, can I tell people a perspective they may not have otherwise known or may and may change their mind.
• 33:58
  SPEAKER_01: And I may only change one out of a hundred persons people's minds, but can change one or two people's minds by giving them information they didn't have access to, that's that's sort of a win.
• 34:06
  SPEAKER_01: I want and what I believe, and if it's not popular, so be it.
• 34:08
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, I tend to find a month or three months or six months later, people who disagree tend to agree.
• 34:14
  SPEAKER_01: Like I said, we should have been doing home quarantine a year ago, now people agree.
• 34:17
  SPEAKER_01: So we should have done a rapid test nine months ago, now it's happened.
• 34:20
  SPEAKER_01: We should be doing quite perfect stuff, sort of six or nine months ago.
• 34:23
  SPEAKER_00: You're also, you know, you're yeah, and but I suppose what I also can pick up from you that you accept that, you know, when there's a shift in your perspective, and that's part of if you're like a mature media person, you go, oh wait, I can reflect on that, and maybe it is a different lens, than being able to honour that and say, well, okay, I had that lockdown perspective then, now I can see benefits and new data come on board.
• 34:46
  SPEAKER_00: So it makes complete sense that you know you've got that capacity, and that's actually critical to be effective, I think.
• 34:53
  SPEAKER_00: Certainly I find that, and from what you're saying, you do the same.
• 34:56
  SPEAKER_00: But your optimism and your enthusiasm, which is great, is clearly what drives your business and your success.
• 35:05
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm very grateful for you taking the time to come on the What I've Learnt podcast to chat to me about all things, media law and travel and COVID, I think.
• 35:15
  SPEAKER_00: But um, but most importantly, the optimism that we're all going to be traveling again soon.
• 35:20
  SPEAKER_00: And and I think there are a lot of people who are jumping at the bit just can't wait to get, you know, to wherever.
• 35:28
  SPEAKER_01: I love it, right?
• 35:29
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks, thanks for the questions and uh can't wait to can't wait to watch more episodes.
• 35:33
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 35:33
  SPEAKER_00: Well, thank you so much, Adam, and you have a good night um over there.
• 35:37
  SPEAKER_00: Good day over there in the QA.
• 35:38
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, you're a good night.
• 35:39
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, give an A holiday to be a good one.
• 35:43
  SPEAKER_01: Oh yeah, I will be.
• 35:44
  SPEAKER_01: Don't you worry, I'll go to the video.
• 35:47
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 35:47
  SPEAKER_00: All right, well you take care, Adam.
• 35:49
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks so much, yeah.
• 35:55
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks so much for listening.
• 35:57
  SPEAKER_00: The What I've Learned podcast will now be coming to you weekly, with new episodes released every Tuesday.
• 36:03
  SPEAKER_00: I'm blessed to have so many wonderful guests coming on the show.
• 36:07
  SPEAKER_00: So check out my What I've Learned Instagram for updates.
• 36:10
  SPEAKER_00: Meanwhile, stay tuned, kind and curious.
• 36:13
  SPEAKER_00: Love death.