Hot Doc Sale Bonanza, Corporate Travel Management Survives for Now, Albo Kinda cuts Business Class, Why Consumer Businesses Shouldn’t Shut during Christmas and Busiest Airline Routes

I mean, if I was you, I'd be putting extra security on my house after that remark. It's in Melbourne. I'm Adam Schwab. I'm a deer shifland. And this is the Contrarians with Adam and Adir. And we are back episode 163. We've seen somewhat of a Christmas miracle here, because Adir is at least 10 minutes earlier than I was for this episode. There's a waiting on the line. What's the irony of that? I'm not sure they are, but. The irony is that we're starting 20 minutes late. We had a few. We had a few. Now I'm now taking up the job of producer, because Mark is with his family today. So that's where things went awry. Well, I was very happy to get on early. It's nice to be organised. Don't expect it for 2026. It was just a goodbye present. A Merry Christmas present for 2025. But it won't be continuing. I was hoping you may have turned over a new leaf. I haven't. To you. Or any new leaves. Are you a new year's resolution sky? Do you know where that new leaf saying is from? Do you know what leaf it pertains to when they say turn over a new leaf? No. I didn't think. Is there's not a well-known fact about that saying? Because, you know, there are some sayings people use and they don't really know what they're saying. Like, when people say the proof is in the pudding, that's not the saying. You know what the saying is? No. The proof of the pudding is in the eating. What is it when the proof is in the pudding? Someone baked the proof in the pudding and you have to go and find it. It means when you eat it, that tells you if it's any good or not, as a pudding. So that's that saying, just to correct that. And turning over a new leaf, that means you've got a book, a notebook that you're riding in and a leaf is a page. And it's turning over a new page of the notebook. Not like it's not a tree that's being turned over. So one of the many things lost to, I don't know, when people used to write with a pen and pad. What was your question? So some question you asked. I can't remember the question now. It's been that long. You've just sidetracked me. How was your week? How was my week? Well, it's very nice to, that we made it to Christmas, because most people are off. And that means my barrage of daily emails. It's not happening at the moment. So it's very nice. I actually flew up to Sydney with my daughter. And I found points on corners in business class. I mean, you don't get that every day. That's the Christmas day special. How it advanced, you booked this two days. Oh wow. Pretty good, right? And I have to say, the experience on that airline, on Christmas in business class, was really incredible. Apart from the fact that the plane is about three and a half thousand years old. And I had to like, you know, run it along the runway, flinstone style together to take off. Generally speaking, the actual quality of the influx service was amazing. The amount and quality of the food that I was offered on Christmas day was crazy. They were like 15 different desserts. I don't generally eat like cookies, raspberry cow, the covered chocolate, the chocolate, like whatever you know, raspberry is covered in chocolate, Portuguese tart. I don't really usually eat these things. I looked at it and I'm like, that looks pretty good. I couldn't believe how good it was. There's one day here, and Contas Domestic Business Class knocks it out of the park. I reckon Contas Domestic is the best domestic carrier I've ever been on globally. Well, what do you do? A competition of two in a juopoly? No, I mean globally. Obviously you take domestic flights. Obviously, the US is particularly bad, but like domestically. Oh, I see. Well, that is an interesting comment. Well, I don't think I've flown enough airlines domestically. I'll tell you, it beats Air India. Although Air India wasn't terrible when I flew it domestically, it got there and people were friendly. I just, the food to me was a bit hard to eat, right? Because it's very spicy. That's interesting that you say that. Tell me what you think about this. How much do you think it costs Contas today? Not to open its Contas Club lounge in Melbourne, and only use the business lounge. Oh, really? Usually they open just the business, usually they just open the Contas Club lounge, not the business lounge. I've never seen them do that. Well, I did the reverse. It was packed. Packed. Packed. Because the thing is, a lot of people have access to Contas Club. When I was 20, I was desperately trying to talk my way into the gold wing or whatever it was for Anset and the Contas Club. And it was tough to get in and very expensive to sign up, and quite exclusive. And now, I mean, Virgin is the least exclusive. It feels like there's more people in the Virgin Lounge than an actual terminal outside the lounge. What do you think it would have they would have saved in Melbourne? 10K for the day? Oh, that's a great question. But why not that much? Yeah, no, not that much because there wouldn't be that many. It's not 100K, right? You agree with that. Obviously, you're paying, but obviously some pretty significant penalty wages. And there's also the fact that you're forcing people to work on Christmas Day when they may have otherwise been with their families. So that's probably the bigger cost. Right. It's probably more of an emotional thing. But what's the maybe 20 staff? Right? 20 staff. So I think you're going to make me feel bad about what I'm about to say with your whole, the emotional side of making people work on Christmas. I don't know if you've noticed this though. When I walk around at Christmas, if I go to the right neighborhoods, like parts of George Street and Chateauwood and Sydney, basically it's Asia. Nobody's celebrating Christmas. I mean, it's packed. Everything's open. So there's enough people in this country that don't celebrate Christmas that they'll be happy to get their triple time or whatever they get on Christmas Day as I did when I was a doctor. But do you think that business lounge was a barn, that coin to business lounge? Yes, a barn. I was over full when I was in there. You think that's worth the brand damage for saving 10 or 20 or $30,000? I reckon they used to cancel it, not just Christmas Day. I don't know if they still do. They used to, they used to like, shut one of the land just for like two weeks for memory, like the whole court festive period. I wasn't just Christmas Day. So sort of, if that's the case, that definitely adds to your view that the whole kind of emotional Christmas thing is actually moved, if they're shutting it for a whole fortnight or whatever they do used to. Like companies spend a lot of money building brand, brand equity. We talk about this a lot, a lot of money. Quantess, the reason they can charge such high fares is because they have such a desirable brand for the traveling public. It just seems to me, when you're spending, what's their marketing spend a year? 100 mil? Probably. They spend very little on marketing. Like, especially for business that side. Most airlines actually don't spend much on marketing. These are their expenditure items. I'm looking at 2024, but these are the salaries, wages, and other benefits, aircraft operating variable. I mean, that isn't actually even English by the way to put it out there. Fuel depreciation and amortization. And then, you know, share of investments for equity method, net gain and disposal. Other, that's their expenses. And then some finance expenses. I'm looking at other expenditure, which is notes seven. And they do have a marketing and advertising line. And it's as expected quite low. It's 220 million. On a business that does profit, let alone turn over. So it's got negligible advertising. Yeah. 220 million. All right. So I set up, so my point is even more, I mean, that's very interesting. And we should talk about that another time. I mean, yeah, you think that it's not there. It's in other because it's so small. But the point is this. I thought I said 100. It's actually 220. So that's a lot of money. It's a lot more money than what it costs to keep a lounge open. That's for sure. And like, that's what I feel. They believe that the business lounge is a worthwhile differentiator for their business. Domestically, it's the second most valuable cohort of customers. If you assume the chairman's lounge has the most valuable cohort of customers. But it's a significantly more valuable cohort than the Quantist Club. Because the people that are in business lounge include like platinum ones. And platinum one, you could almost argue the platinum one have more value than many of the chairman's lounge members to the airline. And platinum one, a treated better than chairman's. As in they go, they have higher preference for upgrades, for example. So that's our Quantist view. So that too is in that lounge. $220 million on marketing. And then come Christmas day for whatever the incremental cost is for whatever their reason. They might not be able to. They might have some problems with the employment agreements they've got. Could be the case, right? But if you just move, like if we accept that and say putting that to the side, the idea that they would go and cause any risk of brand damage whatsoever to this cohort of customers, if the reason is to save some money on Christmas day, because the flights are not that full, that to me would be a crazy, crazy decision. That would be the classic example of penny wise and pound foolish to me if that was the reason. So anyway, it was a barn. I couldn't even get a coffee. Like the line was too long for me to stand and learn to get a coffee. We're probably being like, I think you're right. I actually totally, more so if they shut down for like two weeks, which they used to, but I think we're being unfair picking on Quantist maybe, because we do, I talk about this every year, this growing cohort of businesses. And we talk about how this podcast never stops, podcasts in that bucket as well. But a growing cohort of businesses that shut down for two, three, four weeks over this period in Australia. It's obviously less so in the Northern Hemisphere, because it's just a much smaller holiday. So in the UK, for example, people panning for three days, Christmas, everything shuts, and everything's pretty much back to normal with a couple of days. So within three, four days, certainly straight after New Year. So Australia, by virtue of Christmas and the summer holidays, being contemporaneous has a longer period. But I never understand why business has shut for two, three, four weeks over this time. Because they want holidays, that's why. Surely you can hire people, well obviously, paying more because there's a lot of penalty rates around. But I think your point, people just don't understand, small business owners and even medium business owners, don't understand the brand damage you caused by A) not serving your customers, so they're disappointed. And B) you're sending your customer to a competitor. Let's say you own a restaurant. You're sending a customer to a competitor restaurant. That's right. You're giving them a free CPA. So this customer never have tried this other way. They would have only gone to you, never considered somebody else. Instead, they're forced to consider somebody else. They may like them more than you. Yes, there's no acquisition cost effectively for that restaurant, because you're wiping out the alternatives for them. So anyone that's in the market will go to them. I can tell you when I was walking around Sydney today, anything that was open food wise, not literally anything, but almost anything, it was packed. You'll notice what I had to get a coffee from today. Look at it wake up. Can you see that? Nightmare. So you went to the number one seller of coffee in Australia? I did. I did the McFa. That's McFa for our listeners. By the way, it's better than the Starbucks coffee I had earlier today. I'm not a coffee drinker. I thought McFa was actually a pretty decent standard, but I'm not a coffee drinker. Oh, well, you're going to comment. I mean, if I was you, I'd be putting extra security on my house after that remark in Melbourne. It was a lovely overall experience with Quantas. But I do think these little things, my view is that there are certain decisions to get made in business that seem very smart as a tactical decision and are very bad as a strategic decision, but nobody looks at them like that. One is this lounge thing. One is, as you said, closing for an extended period and sending customers to your competitors. I think people look at that in a tactical way. By that, I mean, they say, you know, is this going to save money? Do we really need to spend it? Is anyone really going to stop flying Quantas because the lounge. Look, no one who was going to be in the Quantas Club is going to complain that they're in the business lounge and do the business lounge flies? Are they going to care for one day? So that is a tactical decision and they might not be wrong, like it might not drive switching. But it is a strategic mistake to do things like that. It's a. So I tell you what was open and closed today, which is interesting. You know, McDonald's, they're all franchised, obviously. So when I was in Chattswood, the Mac is right next to the station. They was open. Pumping. Pumping. The Mac is 200 metres around the corner in Chattswood Malls closed. Yo-chi closed, Starbucks open. There was no rhyme or reason to what was open and closed. Yeah, I never understand why some places close on Christmas and others. Like, as instead of food, I understand most places are shark as Christmas itself is. Yeah. Probably the biggest day of the year for many people. But I don't know, I say why some places at the same brand. Is. You'd think McDonald's an insurer consistency across the brand. Yeah, well, they don't because it's franchise where Starbucks is company owned. The only people doing better than Starbucks today are the Starbucks staff who I think are being paid triple time. Yeah. Which is someone said to me, like they basically paid for an entire overseas trip by working at Starbucks and like Christmas and New Year's. But it is many hours as they possibly could. Yeah. I love saying that, but I love saying staff. I love smashing it out over this period. Like, you get totally. I get the merits of penalties or not. But you see the. I remember once we worked 16 hours straight at Coles because I was getting double or triple time one day because just it was. It made so much sense. Not sure if it was legal. But. Well, that's a thing. Like when I was an intern, like what I tried to do is make sure that I passed double time before Christmas camp. Yeah. And so then I was trying to stack triple time on top of double time. I don't know. I can't even remember if it worked. But I remember I gave it a go. But it's not easy because I think. Yeah. I think that there's limits to how many hours actually let you work. But the limits are pretty high. Like I definitely worked more than 150 hour fortnights on many occasions. Actually, I think my calls may have been 14 hours, but it was still a long day. It was double. It was two, seven hours shifts, I think. But, you know, I love saying that. I think just around, I think Quanters has enough brand strength in switching costs that I think it actually does an impact them. I think you're not going to. You know that in February it's back open. You probably appreciate it more. It's probably not. And I think actually that you could argue it's technically a smart move because you're showing the non-business people how good business is. This is what you can get if you spend a bit more money if you get to platinum. You could just a bit of a. It's a bit of a waving in front of their face a little bit. So you can hike a bit of genius in Quanters' move and using the battle lounge, not the worst lounge. Maybe. I don't know. Well, since we're talking about airlines, I've got a quiz for you that you might have seen. I hope you didn't. They released the busiest airline routes 2025. Did you see this? I saw the headline. I didn't read the articles. I'm glad you asked me. Oh, I'm very excited about that. Okay, we're going to ask you some questions about it. You'll know. I mean, like, you know things that aren't in your industry. Like, this is in your industry. So this might be brief. Mike is not here for us to ask you questions which is disappointing. But this is my first question. Every single one of these top 10 most busiest routes in the world has something in common. What do they all have in common? They're all domestic. Yes, nailed it. Oh, my God. You're too good at this quiz. Yes, exactly. So one is that's so logical and so canner-insuredy for the same time. So you're absolutely right. Then I'll say, nine of them have something else in common. Maybe you'd say eight. Maybe you'd say 10. But at least eight of them have something else in common. And I think you might even say nine of them have something else in common. I think a lot of them would be in Asia. But I don't think it's nine. Well, that's it. You're two out of two off straight off the bat. You're batting like perfect at the moment. Yes. So like Melbourne and Sydney is not in Asia. And there's another one that's not in Asia. But like, it kind of is in Asia. I guess it's the tip of it's the edge of Asia. You want to guess which country that one is? Edge of Asia. It's not like India. No, India's Asia, India Southern Asia. Unless it moved or something. No, this one is in the Middle East. Oh, is it must be. It's not Emirates. Saudi? Yes. Do you know what cities it is? Oh my god, you're very good at this. Oh, it's going to be Riyadh in somewhere. Riyadh in Mecca. Jedah, Jedah. Go for the big cities. All right. So now, Melbourne's Sydney slipped. And so what does they slipped one position from 24 to 25? Where are they now? Why did very quickly read the headline? I got a feeling it dropped to fifth, but I could be wrong. Fifth or sixth? It dropped to sixth. I remember when it was third. Well, I think it's. I'm pretty sure Melbourne Sydney is number one by revenue. Not by passenger's flown, because it's so expensive. Well, that would make sense. We're going to get to this point. There's. Oh, you answer questions. I've even asked yet. Well, let's talk about that to begin with. So Melbourne Sydney, do you have any guess of like, in AUD, let's call it, what the average fare per seat is? Virgin is obviously cheaper than Qantas. You've got jet star on there as well. I reckon the average fare is return or one way? One way. $200. $150. Okay. It's risen. And so how do you think the number of seats? There were nine million seats flown between Melbourne and Sydney. It says Melbourne Sydney. It doesn't say Melbourne Sydney, Melbourne or Sydney Melbourne. So I don't really know what that means, the nine million. But like, how do you think that compares to pre-COVID? Like, what do you think it's up down the same relative to 2019? Down slightly. 10% down passengers. I'm quitting this podcast. It's a spot on. Basically, the fare is up the average fare. And so my guess is this, you tell me if you think I'm wrong about this. I think demand is down 10%. We know. But I think available seat kilometers or whatever you want to use as a measure. I don't know what measure is used. I think that's down like even more so that everything is almost full now. And they get to make the last revenue. Is that correct? Yes, they've got much full planes and people paying more. So it's so much more profitable for the airlines now. Because what you want is all that really matters is load for these airlines. And the more load, the more you can yield. So the airlines are getting the best of both worlds. Really full planes, less planes and charging more per seat per kilometer, which is a metric. So now I'm going to ask you a few more questions because just so good at this, you can have a go at number one. But you might want to start off by telling me which country you think number one is. I'm going to say Korea. Is it used to be Korea? Oh, God. Yes, South Korea, that's correct. They have, I'm just going to tell you this, like they have 14.4 million seats. Melbourne's in the head nine. What two airports is a patrol? Oh, I saw it in some way. I don't know the other one. Carima. Well, the other one is very fascinating. So luxury escapes. If you were a Korean business, this would be your number one destination that you would sell. Does that help you by any, at all? By me saying that? Is it a ski resort? In it's called the Hawaii of Korea. I don't know. It's called Jeju. I'd never even heard of it. So many Koreans go there. It's basically treashing the island. That is the number one most popular destination. It's like 14.4 million seats compared to 9 million Melbourne Sydney. They have nine airlines competing on that route in South Korea. Jesus. Yeah, it's so popular. Now you're going to tell me this. Which country has the largest number of routes on this list? I presume China. Well, you're wrong. I'm so happy. I tricked you on that one. Yeah. There's a, they are actually number two. I can get number two. Is it Korea? There's number one? Nope. Korea only has that route. Is it Japan? Yes. We keep guessing you'll get there eventually because you know it's Asia. Yes, exactly. So Japan has two, three, and seven. So I'll tell you seven. Seven is the Japanese equivalent of salt to Jeju. It's Tokyo to Okinawa. Okay. So that's number seven. That's almost as popular as Melbourne to Sydney. It's only 10% below. So that's them going to surface paradise basically. Yeah. But what do you think that the number two and three are they're both Japanese? Well, they're Tokyo to summer, okay? So you can tell me the somewhere. Is Sapporo one of them? Yes, that's number two. My god. That was lucky because that's not the only city I've really been to in Japan. Other than Tokyo, so that was a, that was a gas knot. What if I told you the next one? Number three is mostly famous for a disaster. Oh, is it? Oh, not Hiroshima or. Not that bad of a disaster, but kind of a. You can actually feel it in there. Yeah, you can actually see them. Yeah, for Kuoka. Yeah, okay. Yeah, so there. So I think the list is, and so only the only. Nothing has moved on this list except Jeddah Readd swapped places with Melbourne Sydney. Okay. And Shanghai Shen-Jen came into number 10. It was number 11. I don't know what it displaced. And I'll tell you the other ones just for interest. Hanoi Ho Chi Minh City. Okay. Mumbai Delhi. I thought that would be bigger. It's 7.6 million seats. Number eight, Beijing Shanghai. I thought that would be bigger as well. It's kind of the same as Mumbai Delhi. It's hard to know why Mumbai Delhi and Beijing Shanghai are less than Melbourne Sydney. Yeah. Given they're both the two primary cities in much bigger populated countries. Yeah, it's bizarre. It's. But they are. I've got the numbers. They're numerically less. And the last one is, I said Shanghai Shen-Jen. That is a very interesting list, I think. I like a lot. I think that reinforces my view on contours being the best domestic carry in the world. Because I don't think any. Like you look at the. Obviously you pay a lot for it as well, but look at Korea with nine airlines competing on it. You're getting a bunch of low costs on there. And also he says on the air. I can't. Think of the US. The US is no one even. Like US domestic experiences, horrific. Yes, that's true. Just as an aside, American cities are not generally as populated. It's my much more spread out population. And so. Like the air traffic. There's massive air traffic across the US, but my god, the planes fly everywhere. Like there's so much of a distributed population. And obviously the. Do you know what the busiest air point in the world? Speaking of. Obviously, US being a queue. BZ, I'm going to go for Dallas Fort Worth. B-Dop miles off geographically. At Lantern? At Lantern. Oh, there you go. The harbor is one of those. I think United's Harbour, right? Oh, yeah, United's Harbour. Here's my last two questions on flight routes. What is the biggest. The most seats on an international route in the world? Ooh. Oh, I'm trying to think which route has lots of low costs. You have to think of short trips in Asia. Because that's the way you should think about popular flights. Like. So to not so tall Shanghai or so tall Hong Kong or something? Well, you're kind of close, but I'll give you this hint, which will probably give it away. It's an international route that one country would vehemently disagree as an international route. Is it Hong Kong to Shanghai? No, well, Shanghai and Hong Kong are in the same country, definitely. Oh, no, because I can't Hong Kong consider themselves different countries. So. Oh, no. This is. This is keep going with your line of thought, though. Is it Taiwan? Is it Taiwan then in somewhere? I think it's Taiwan Hong Kong, yeah, exactly. I'm actually surprised at that. That's super popular. And the other one that I think might be the one behind that, the one that every country in the world thinks is an international flight. Let's call it. Is a Middle Eastern flight between two. one enormous city and one city that we've already talked about for a domestic reason. In the Middle East, they're not to buy in Jetta. No, not to buy in Jetta. This is. No, I'm telling you, Jabanger are not on here, but like one of. This is an international flight. That is the second busiest international route between two Middle Eastern cities. One city is enormous and one city is not as big, but we've already mentioned the city on our list, the second one, the not as big one. Okay. So the second city is a react. It's a flight that goes to react. And it's a flight that originates from Cairo. That is the busiest non-Asian international route in the world. Can I give you. That was a great quiz. Can I give you a little quiz on my own? I've got two quizzes here. I'll work out which. I might only ask you both, given this is our special holiday episode, but okay, I've had this quiz for ages. They're even wanting to ask, "World's most popular e-commerce sites and a big caveat." "Big caveat Amazon is differentiated by country." Because Amazon have like different URLs for different countries. So like dot you dot code. You're okay, etc. etc. And so does another business. But it's just Amazon, this other one, it's split up. So I will, if need be, combine them. And this includes Chinese sites? Yes, it does. All right, well, that's a disaster. I'm bad enough at this with sites in the West, let alone going for Chinese ones. Well, even though Amazon split, I'm still going to say that the number one e-commerce site in the world is Amazon, US. Is that right? Yeah, absolutely right. By a pretty decent margin. So I want to quit this quiz now. Can you guess monthly visits? Or do you want me to give you the monthly visits so you can anchor off the Amazon's monthly visits? Yes, give me the monthly visits. And I'll, Amazon's US monthly visits, 2.7 billion. Billion? Billion. Oh my god. So that is roughly eight visits per American per month, including the newborn, including a newborn American in that. As an aside, I looked at my Amazon, not count for something, but I bought about 50 things from Amazon this year. So I've clearly been there a lot. Yeah, I would have been the same. I'll be the same. I mean, my daughter is buying stuff on Amazon. I would say weekly, but it might be, it might be more than four times a month, to be honest. So yeah, I mean, they just make it so easy, right? And they're prepared to lose money on the little purchases to get you to make the big purchases. And so that they would not be closed on Christmas day if they had physical retail. All right, so their number one, number two, am I staying in America for number two? You are not. So you're actually going, outside America for the next one, for next two, or outside America. And then I have to go with China. It's like, I'm very bad with these Chinese sites. It's like, that's pretty good. You got the country right, which is a big guy. I'd be waiting. Well, there's one and a half billion people. It's probably going to be odds on to be them. Is, is Ali Baba the biggest Chinese e-commerce site? No, it's well behind. Number two is like the world of weChat. I don't really know if that's e-commerce or not. It's not Tencent. Okay, Tencent. No, okay. Like she couldn't have risen that quickly. It's a hotline. That's not China. I think that's not China's focused anyway. That's internationally focused. Where are they? To be out of Singapore or something. Where do they say they're out of Singapore? You're missing them. I thought this is actually a pretty obvious one. I'm missing them because I just had a mental blank on the name of it. That's why. As you close, 1.6 billion. So it's not that far behind Amazon, to be honest. Is that the one, Yahoo. What did Yahoo? Yahoo was Ali Baba. Oh, that's Ali Baba. You're going to say this and I'm like, "How the hell did I not say this?" Say it. Timo. Timo. Oh, well, I wouldn't have said that. So I didn't know that Timo was China focused. Sorry. This isn't views from China. This is views. Amazon.com/usreviews/us because it's.com. I could also have some people who went to the.com. But Timo gets global views. All right. All right. All right. So that's through. There are country-specific ones. But they're the specific URL, for example. co.uk. All right. So this is why Amazon is terrified about Timo. Because all those Timo purchases, presumably, are predominantly coming from outside China. It would be my guess. I don't know. That's a lot of visits. And I would say in the West, what none of those visits existed five years ago? Yeah, I agree. Basically. And so this is all that's predominantly, if Amazon is so dominant, what that means is that the majority of visits to Timo or visits taken away from Amazon. That's unless you believe in incremental purchasing, which some of it will be true, but not much. Oh, some from Ali. I think a chunk from Ali as well. Because it's probably more like Ali than he or may be Amazon, but it really doesn't help Amazon. And so you said that 10 cents is far down. And Ali, Baba is far down. So just to compare, so Amazon.com, 2.7 billion, Timo 1.6, Ali Express, 646 in third. Okay. Are they third? Okay. All right. Who do you think, fourth place surprised me? Like fourth? If you can get fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh. Fourth, fifth and sixth. I can't even get number two. How am I going to do that? Yeah. And I gave you the country. So yeah, I think we're a little hope here. But have a crack. Did you say this is China as well? Or you say we're back in the US? No, we're out of China. This chart only had two. And we're done with China. Amazon UK? Amazon UK is back down number 12 with 370 million. So it's well behind. It's about half of what number four is. So the biggest country is, like this is how I think about it. You've got the US. That's the biggest economy. China's the second biggest economy. And so then now you start thinking, what's the third biggest economy? And so you're thinking about things like Japan, Germany, those types of countries. I don't know what would be popular in Japan. Do I know, is there a Japanese one? You know pretty much all these businesses. You've heard of them. Who you've heard of all them? Like Amazon.de. I don't know how big Amazon is in Deutschland. Amazon.de is number 10 with 487 million. So it's definitely out there. So it's still way down the list though. But you need, I'm talking number four now. And don't forget, this could be back to countries I've talked about. Like the US, for example. Walmart. Walmart is number. About number eight. If this was family feud, I would be doing well in this quiz. Because you know, family feud, you can do any order, right? So unless this on the survey says, it's actually number seven. Walmart's definitely up there. And probably growing better than most. So you're not miles off there actually. It's pretty good. But there's one ahead of Walmart. There's a couple ahead of Walmart that you've definitely heard. One, the hundred percent you've heard of. Could we call it the forgotten man of e-commerce? ebay. ebay, which is number four with 6.35 million. Number five is Russian, I think. Ozone at five, two, I never heard of that. I think it's Russian. Number six, you've mentioned Amazon Japan. Is that the main e-commerce site in Japan? Amazon Japan. I find that astonishing. There's another two in Japan that are on this list. And it's the same business. Do you know what that business would be? If you add it up, is it ahead of Amazon Japan? Is it owned by his soft bank? I don't think it's owned by soft bank. I don't think I know what the Japanese business is. E-commerce business. Rakuten. Oh, I do know that business. Yes, I do know that business. Rakuten collected a whole range of different e-commerce assets. Yeah, it's from around the world. Almost universally junk. Like there, there's great Japanese e-commerce business. And they went on a spending spree of junk. Treat well in the UK, which is like a book well fresher business. Like a beauty book and it's been a bit of a disaster. It's still going. It's been a bit of a disaster for them, I think. They book comparison businesses. They bought cashback businesses. They just bought junk basically. There's the Indian businesses. There's Amazon, India at 435, and the flip-car, which is about a third of the size. Yeah, Macaroon Liberation. So the thing about India that people don't realize, often with e-commerce, is India is not a very internet connected country relative to its population. And so whilst they've got this enormous population, a lot of people are actually not buying online. On a regular basis, what China's quite different to that. And that is why India, with its enormous population, is just consistently underrepresented on all lists of countries for economic-related activity. And my hope is that they climb up those lists. But it's not, if you've been to India, you can see some of the challenges in India climbing up that list, basically. We found that out the hard way. We launched India as our first global, New Zealanders side, as our first global business in probably 2016. And it was really difficult. The point was we still have an offer. We still sell there, but we don't really have anybody on the ground there. We have sort of a finance team there. But and some support. But our Indian team, we went back. It's just, we had a great team, great bunch of people. But it was just a really hard market. You can't sell over the phone. There's a whole bunch of strange laws. And what was the final note on the conference for us? They basically announced this bizarre hotel tax. If you sold a hotel to an Indian person, the hotel was offshore. You pay this huge, they're going to charge this huge amount, basically all that margin. So we said, okay, we can't. And they eventually didn't go through with it. We said, we can't operate. We can't reach so much off and risk. We're like, you just chuck this random tax to kill the business over and out. With no reason or rhyme or reason for it. Definitely culture is very different to the West. Like I love the, I don't say I love the culture. There's parts of it I don't love. Like the waiting is not loved by me. But there's parts of the culture I really, really love about India. But it is very, very different. And you know, you can ask Ken McIntyre, next time you talk to him about real estate.com. Tell you what he's plans for that Indian business. Because you know, like it's a minus-gill, thimble-sized business relative to RIA in Australia. With the population that is, you know, like 30, 40 times the size of Australia. More, like 60, almost 50 or 60 times the size of Australia pretty soon. So like I think India's an unusual business and an unusual market for business. And Ecommerce is not anything like it is in China and India. Yeah. And as we learned the hard way, I was chatting to Michael Miller actually a couple of years ago. And he was more bullish on the Indian business, to be honest. He obviously only RIA board runs news call here. I think it's going okay. It is a growth business for RIA, you remember? I mean, we talked about it. It is like the only international business they could actually get to grow, right? It's just tiny. Can I give you one more quick quiz? Well, I've got you in the quiz mood, because it's a great time of year for quizzes. That's super quick, you can. Most movie ticket sold in the US by number of tickets. So this basically is a way to work out the most popular movies without having that inflation adjusted thing, which is never quite right, because everybody underestimates how much inflation there was. So I see. So the most popular movie by ticket sales in history. I'm trying to think about a quiz I would be less more ill-prepared to answer, and less able to answer off the cuff. Maybe if you ask me about celebrities, I was going to say make up, but I'm going to actually do better on a make up quiz. The skincare, I know a bit about skincare. What else would I be this terrible at about? I mean, it's hard to think of much, not be this fashion maybe. You definitely know some of these movies are pretty obvious. Some are a bit tricky. I'm going to say them, and they're going to be an order, and you're going to say, are they in the top 10, okay? Yeah, I'll give you the top 10. We'll pass. Star Wars the original. You damn played yourself, and you've come real high. That was number two, and you hope. So for someone who was so dismissive of their own ability, you've nailed it the first. Why don't you think Mike could have done better than that? Now, I'm just trying to think of the most popular movies that I can think of. We're a bit anchored to how much cash you make, which is relevant, but there's a lot of older movies in here. No, I'm going to go for old stuff. I'm going to go for classics after this, but like, ever time is that there? I mean, that's not there, surprisingly. That shows you how much box office revenue is not correlated with this quiz. Yeah, and either avatars on there, actually. And by the way, that's even more of an indictment that it even sounds, because you're not saying what percentage of the movie going public bought tickets, the population at the time of avatar is significantly higher than it was at the time of Star Wars, and presumably on the movies before that. And so movies like The One's Up We Know As Classics, like Kessa Blanca, was that big at the box office or not? I think it was, Decent, that was during the war. There was a lease. I don't know either. Yeah, I think that was pretty stressful. I'm just going to go for a lot of these mega movies, I guess, and hope that lots of people went to see them. Like Superman? Like the Christopher Reeves Superman? Yes, number five. I think what happened with a lot of these movies is that in Star Wars and the classic example, people saw Star Wars two, three, four, five times. The Star Wars sold 178 million tickets in '77. There was only probably that many people in the States at the time. So I think there were different years back then, people, there was a longer release window. So I think Star Wars out for a year. Some people saw it multiple times. Versus now the release window's like a month. No streaming. Yeah, that's going to be streaming in a month. Streaming back then, like this. And like when you look at number one, if it wasn't me that you were talking to, it was just a regular human being, not consumed in detainment, would you be like, do you total more on how can you not know number one? Or is it confused? It's nuts. It's like you got off course, but I wouldn't have got number one. Are they all, are any of them comedies? I didn't think so. So you know that, you know they basically don't make comedies anymore. I don't know if you've noticed that, but like, they don't make comedies anymore because not enough people go and see them. They put them on streaming. Yeah. And they don't really put them in the cinema anymore. And so there's a Jurassic Park? Nope. Think of it older. There's only one movie I'd say that is recent era. And even that, wasn't that new? It was new, actually. Once in the last 10 years. But I don't know how many people went to the movies, like really old-like. What was that sunset boulevard kind of movie? No, but most of them are in the sort of World War Two to Vietnam War era. Oh really? That's very much. Ben Hur. No. Was not big in the Ben Hur. I don't like this. How great is this? Tell me another one. Number one, Gone with the Wind. 203 Millions, which means significantly more than the population. I gave up on, I was going to go through 100 classics, but I didn't know which classic was going to be on there. I was just going to reel through them. They're quite classical. Then two stars was three sound of music. For, I'll give you a clue with four Steven Spielberg. Well, that's not a clue. How's that a clue? Were you directed it? And it was the number one movie I think at the time. ET. That was my idea. Yes, ET. Okay. Yep. Number six, 10 commandments. Number seven, another Steven Spielberg movie. Close in Canis of the Third Kind. No, that wasn't that big. Known for its great soundtrack. Jaws. Then you got Dr. Javago, the Exist, Snow White. And number 11, there's 11 of some reason I'm here. His Star Wars Force Awakens is really the only sort of modern movie on there. That was the only one after 2000. I was going to say, is that the only Star Wars one? Do you not find it bizarre that Star Wars is number two, but return of the Jedi, not return of Jedi. What's the second one? Empire Strikes Back. Empire Strikes Back. That question, by the way, is going to just make people dramatically diminish their opinion of me. Not many people, but some people now will think I've lost all respect for that guy. Or maybe that. Maybe that will increase our opinion of you. By not knowing the second Star Wars movie. I mean, like I've known it for my whole life. And just in this moment, I forgot the name of that second movie. Anyway, how can Empire Strikes Back not be on the list if Star Wars is number two? I think Star Wars, I think Empire Strikes Back was a lot smaller than Star Wars, rather than UIs, for memory. There was a fair gap. And Star Wars, did people not think it was good? Well, I think Star Wars, you hope, you don't get many movies that are out this end of a three-year. That was pretty incredible. That just captured the zeitgeist. And what was a relatively low-budget movie? And Star Wars, the 11 number 11, what was that? The Force Awakens. Force Awakens, yeah. Is that like one of the numbers in the movie series or not? I think it was the. Was it a spin-off? Number seven? I think it was episode seven, wasn't it? It's bizarre that that one suddenly pops up again, isn't it? Or not? The last three Star Wars were huge at the box office. Were they? But obviously. Yeah, massive. One of her saw number one. Yeah, that drop. That drop. What was. Which one did they do? Four, five, six, right? That was. Number one was Jar Jar Binks. Yeah. Number one was 1998. No, no. Oh, once I saw that, I was like, well, that's it for me on Star Wars, I'm done. It was such a shame because it was like the first three was so. As in episodes four, five, six were so good, and then it really felt away. Hey, that's a classic example of a character that should have died at the very beginning of a movie. And that whole movie would have been a lot better with him dead early. Taking out the first three, as in four, five, six Star Wars, I think, did you watch Andor last couple years that it was on Disney? I watched The Mandalorian. Yeah, I didn't love The Mandalorian. I watched The Andor. It was basically a Western, right? That's just a Western set in space. Well, when George Lucas made Star Wars, you home, he effectively set it as a spaghetti, Western based in space. That was his intention. Right. I thought Andor was incredible. That was since the first three Star Wars as in episodes four, five, six, that was by far the best. It was. He just captured that. Is that streaming? Is that on Disney? Yeah, it's worth watching this two great series. It's excellent. And I don't like any other Star Wars stuff. Do you think there's ever going to be a movie that gets on this list again in the next 15 years, given streaming? Don't think so. I think it's. Yeah, I think it's gone. Because there's too many other things to do. Like, there wasn't. This is going to sound ridiculous, but like in the fifties, there wasn't that much to do, entertainment-wise. So you got the washing machine. I'm not being facetious in saying what I'm saying here, by the way. You got the washing machine, and you got some other household appliances. And then you said, "Well, what are you going to do with my time?" That's definitely women said that, right? And because like, their whole lives were just totally consumed by housework before all of these households' technology was developed. And. And. Like, there was not that much to do. Like, there was a lot of free time that appeared after in the post-war period. And not that many things to do. And TV was not good at that time. Like, it was pretty bad. And yet, the radio. And I don't know what else. Like, we're rolling a hoop down the street or something, right? So like. So I think the movies would have been a great, great, great source of entertainment. And then all those live cabaret shows and stuff was like. Like an era. Such a different era of entertainment. And then we're going to super quick, make up some great stories coming up after the break. And we're back. And the Prime Minister announced last week that he's going to finally force families and politicians to fly economy class, rather than business class. And limit the use of entitlements to flying to and from cabaret or the local MPs area. Can I just say those two, when this happened, I posted three changes on LinkedIn that had to happen to make this reasonable with community standards. One, economy travel. Tick. Two, you can only use it two and from camera. Tick. The third one, he didn't do. I thought the third one was really important. The third one is, if you have any business to do in camera, you cannot use the taxpayer fare. So you know, this. Which is the Greenswoman whose husband is a lobbyist? Sarah Hanson Young. He should never be allowed to use taxpayer-funded tickets. He's a lobbyist. He's workplace. His parliament house. So he didn't have the guts to do that last one. The business ones is completely outrageous. Why are they flying five, six, seven hundred dollar tickets for someone who's not even with the MP at the time? I consider. You can sort of understand MPs flying business. I don't love it, but you can sort of understand the MPs flying the flying business. But why is someone who's not even with the MP fly? It's just. That's completely outrageous. That was even an overall ad. I'm not sure all MPs should fly business, by the way. It's not all people in a company fly business. The people at the top of the company fly business. And so maybe ministers and shadow ministers fly business. Why is everyone flying business? Certainly not the partners. So they got the partner of a backbench of flying business, historically. Look, what a joke. The kid of a backbencher. Yeah. Alba indicated that consideration should be given to new mothers and fathers, and to children who are essentially dependents as well, to make sure they don't disadvantage parents. Like, I'm not quite sure how this is even relevant. Like, what? Well, none of those tickets are being used by those people. Virtually none, right? I've read this a long article about this before. The thing is that Bondi, that totally overshadowed this catastrophe for the government and created a much bigger, genuine catastrophe. Totally. That was also a catastrophe for the government. But with this. You know, there was his whole expose in the Australian, I think it was, which is the people that use these, other people with adult kids. Of course. Not with young kids. And the people with young kids, like, they're not the ones predominantly using this, or using it at all. And the heaviest user of it was someone who flew their wife, like, for every parliamentary sitting. But this was a member from, like, some country place, right? And he just wanted to maintain the relationship with. Like, I'm actually all right with that. Like, all right, maybe shouldn't be a business class. But I don't mind. Like, I'm actually okay with flying your wife or husband or partner or whatever it is, in every sitting period, if they want to be in Canberra with you. That's exactly. God knows why the helicopter is Canberra. Nobody wants to be forced to be in Canberra. And if you want to live there, that's fine. It's up to you. I'm not sure every. I think it should be. I think it should be a cash limit. I think you should say, you've got 10 grand, or whatever it is, in cost. And you can spend a however you like. If you want to spend on 10 business class tickets, that's fine. If you want to spend it on 40 economy tickets, that's fine. If you want to go overseas, like, I think everyone should get a certain amount, maybe based on level. That's such a better way to do it. Well, what they should say is, you've got 5K on Quantus and 5K on Virgin. That's what they should say. Spread it around. Well, even if you said you've got 10K, that applied Virgin, because you're getting better value for money most of the time. So, well, that is a very interesting point. You know, the only way to get politicians to actually genuinely choose the cheapest fare on the day is capping them in how much they can spend for stuff they want to buy with these tickets. That's what I just said. You give everybody an allowance. And you can spend your allowance over the year. That's a great point. That's how we're. That's very much. We've built our Luxurious Games business travel platform. I've spoken about this before. We basically say businesses can give their employees a budget, per trip. You can take a tour. We can do it a few years as well. We do a per trip. And if you can save money, well, basically, the employer gets a percentage that back to them in the form of Luxurious Credit. So, we've gamified it so that employees are treated like they own the business. And. That's great. You need that adversarial approach. That's great. And I think I'd love to see the government do that as well. Well, the only challenge with that, by the way, I'm actually completely agree with you. The one challenge you'd have to deal with is someone from like who lives in Sydney and someone who lives in Longreach. I say that to be ironic because that's where it's going to start. Yeah. They're going to have very different cost of travel requirements to get to Canberra. And so, you'd have to adjust the base on the electorate that they serve. Yeah, and how we do it for LEDT is we have based on based on the city pair. So, if you're going Melbourne Sydney for three days, that's got a budget. If you're going Melbourne to Perth, that's got a different budget obviously, because it's much more expensive. I think that's great. That model. It's really quickly. Somebody listens to it. I can't imagine it's going to happen. Hopefully somebody listens. Well, why would that ever happen? They're number one. This is the trajectory of this whole debacle. This is the trajectory. Number one, yes, this is the Prime Minister. Yes, it looks terrible, but like I don't hold the hose. That's like the equivalent of I don't hold the hose, right? I don't set the prices that complied with the rules. It was the closest I don't hold the hose moment that I've seen Elbow have. Firstly, place defense, because you know, they've got this political decision they've made that they're not going to hand skelps to the opposition. And so, they just will defend everyone, even if it's unreasonable. And by the way, I think my general experience when I was talking to people about this, again, Prie Bondi, was a couple of people said, "Well, she shouldn't have to quit because it was within the rules," which I didn't necessarily agree with, but everyone that I spoke to, a hundred percent of a not-inconsequential number of people said it's ridiculous and offensive. And people were genuinely angry that politicians were doing this. And I just say the Labor side, because that's who kind of got the heat. And I'm sure that some heat would have spread across. It was the Greens as well, right? But I'm sure I'm not absolving the Liberal Party. I just don't know that they did it, but presumably they do. So, I think that's where it started. And I think politicians are always desperate to let other people make the decisions about what they can spend on entitlements. So they can always say, like, you know, I don't hold the hose. So what's it good to do with the man? I just, if they say to me, you can spend $4 million a year on first-class flights or private jets. Well, of course, I'm going to do it, because that's the rules. And like the thing is, just because the money is there, doesn't mean you have to spend it. I always say to people, think about your actions like this, just because it's legal, doesn't mean it's right. If you've got a business relationship with a friend, and you can screw them legally, and it's totally legal for you to screw them, and then you choose to do that, it doesn't mean it was okay to do it just because it was legal. It's still ethically and morally wrong. Don't hide behind just what's legal. Like, make it, don't do things that are illegal, but you don't have to run every law because it's there. Like, you also can make ethical decisions for yourself. This is just symptomatic of. Portitions in general, around the world, but Australia, especially where, there's no value, there's no consideration given to the value of money. We'll spend, whether it's on the NDIS, or whether it's on travel for themselves. It feels like Portitions view, debt, as just something that is irrelevant. We don't need a worry about it. We can steal from the future generations, and spend it on today. And whether we're spending on on boondoggles to get us votes, or we're spending on first class flights, and business class flights, it's all the same sort of pot of misfeasions from these people who just don't care about young people incurring this debt. Well, apparently before boondogg, the Prime Minister had planned to neuter this issue with this particular thing before Christmas, because, you know, like, he had a great year, the Prime Minister politically, and then Parliament rose, and it was looking great, and then he had this, and then he had boondays, a bad end to the year for him, right? In fact, the only thing that people were more opposed to than this is, I saw a survey two days ago, so I said, "Week and a bit after boonday," that said, "How do you rate the Prime Minister's efforts on combating anti-Semitism?" 56% said, "No good." And only 23% said "good," and you think about that 23%. That is fewer than the number of people that vote "labor," let alone the number of people that vote "labor" and the Greens. So he's got people who are supportive of his side of politics, saying that he's done a terrible job of combating anti-Semitism. These last two issues for the year, very different in tone, obviously, but both, they're terrible for the Prime Minister, and I think that they could do real damage to his popularity, and he's very lucky that he just had an election earlier on this year, and there's a long time to learn next election. But that guy, we have to be honest and say, in the last two months, month and a half, when you look at him, he's looked. He actually looked at his physically shrunk as a leader, like he's looked worse and worse and worse every time he's spoken on these two issues. Speaking of travel, let's move on to corporate travel management, which we talked about a couple of weeks ago and in the last month, which has been. Now I've been suspended, obviously, from the ASX, because they haven't submitted their financials for July, for June 2025, so they're now six months late, more than that a second. And in some good news, well, some relative good news for CTM, it's one of. We're pre from its Lenders Announce the ASX a few days ago that it has. Something has $177 million in the bank, and it is claimed that its Lenders have extended $65 million in bank guarantees, and a further $75 million in revolving credit that's slightly down on the debt funding they had previously, but not much down. CTM also bizarrely stated that it's extended it's 2025 reporting deadlines of 30 June, 2026. That's a full year after the actual period occurred, which is I've never heard of this happening, a year delay in financials is staggering. CTM also comically noted that as part of its debt facilities, it has agreed to obligations, including enhanced financial reporting commitments, which to me seems a little bit weird, given they've just delayed their financial reporting by six months. I'm not sure how they could possibly be enhanced, and some other confidence they didn't disclose. Early in the week, this is something I wrote, I brought up, but somehow they've gotten I added to agree to let CTM continue trading after entering into financial security agreement, while its financial statements are being finalized. This could end up with a lot of egg on I added as face if something does go wrong, and airlines are out of pocket here. So we'll see how that plays out. That's, I guess I added it was in a bit of an embittier's position that they sort of take the plates away, and CTM definitely go under, or they don't take the way plates away, they might go under. So you kind of feel for a little bit there, a bit of a rock and a hard spot. What is that? It's basically an elected representative body that's the union movement for airlines. So it represents the big airlines. I'm not sure if it's 100% of airlines, but it's the big airlines. And if you want to sell air tickets yourself, you need to have a night. So you can go through consolidators, who are like a sort of corner, almost like a wholesaler, and they can do your air for you, but if you want to do the direct sort of air selling yourself, you need to be eye out elicist in every country, or globally. It's amazingly similar to the world of mortgage-broken. So back in the day, if you were a mortgage broker, you would write individual deals with the banks at the very start of the industry, or early on in the industry, and you would have direct deals with ComBank and A&Z. And then the number of mortgage brokers just grew and grew and grew. And the banks didn't want to have to manage all of this. And then intermediaries popped up, right? These broken aggregators, and it got to a point now where you can't really sign a deal with a bank. You have to go through an aggregator if you're a mortgage broker, and they take their little clip, and some of them provide software and whatever else it is. But you can't do a deal directly. So when you do a deal with Virgin, or Singapore Airlines, will you deal like, are you signing a contract directly with the airline to sell their tickets? There's a few different levels. We've got an incredible guy who runs our business, who's come from STA, and more recently, hello world. So he's got great relationships with airlines globally. So we'll do a lot of what we call private deals, essentially, which essentially is a way of getting slightly more margin. Because obviously margin air is incredibly small. It can be sort of 4%, 3%, 2%, 0% sometimes. So it's a really hard product to sell with that kind of, like this is gross level, little loan net level. So it's a really low margin business. Obviously a high purchase price, but low margin business. So there's a couple levels. You've got to get the agreements with the airlines directly, but then you've got to be able to sort of physically be able to sell it. So which in fact, I was getting these I-Hart applates. Otherwise, so we can get a global out of license, but what generally people do is get it by country. So where was the I-Hart are in Australia, where I-Hart are in Abysium and New Zealand, but we're not I-Hart are in other countries. We're not I-Hart are in Italy, for example. So if we want to sell tickets in Italy, we have to go through a Consolidator, presumably in Italian Consolidator, who resells it for us. So it's a bit of a confusing sort of area. So CTM obviously would have plight. I-Hart applates pretty much everywhere. And operates our big business. And had I-Hart said, no, you can't sell anymore. They would have to go through Consolidator, which they could have done, or just would have simply impacted profitability. And then margin, yeah. And what about with hotels? Do you have, like I know, you have individual deals with a lot of hotels. But beyond that, all the hotels you don't have individual deals with, you sell on your website, there must be a Consolidator equivalent for hotels. Yeah, they're called beddanks. So you may have heard of webbeds, which is only used to be the old path, the old webjet. There's one called hotelbeds. Expedia has the biggest, got Expedia partner solutions. Bookings got a pretty big one, a go-to, which is no more bookings going. So there's about a hundred of them globally, or more than a hundred. And you get, like, relatively niche ones in certain countries. So I rack it down in Japan. For example, we've talked about rack-to-number four. They've got a pretty big one. In Japan, D'Natta, it's got one in the Middle East. So a lot of these businesses who are really specialised in certain countries, will effectively, and what essentially happens with online travel agencies, everybody shares the content. So booking in Expedia, I think, are really firm competitors. They'll sell product to each other. So how much would they keep? Because it's interesting, like, so booking.com will sell direct to you through their site. And they're going to keep what, 20% of the price, let's say, bullpark, can be more for booking. Okay. But yeah, caught 20 roughly. And so then, sometimes they won't sell the hotel room, but they kind of will facilitate the hotel room anyway. And so how much do you think they're keeping? They're not keeping 20% of the price. Like, 2% and the other 18 goes down the line. Yeah, as a consumer, if you go to booking.com, you'll often see the cheapest option is what's called a partner deal, or partner offer. And it's almost always the cheapest and almost always the strictest terms. Like, not refundable, you get a upfront, by the law, but you're going to save 20% or whatever it is. Those partner offers are almost always sourced from someone else. That's what they call partner offers, not direct offers. So there's obviously partner offers are generally go okay, and you're paying less, but there is a risk, because there's a middle, it can be multiple little men involved. There is an extra degree of risk where something can go wrong. But hang on, when you say it's a partner, do you mean it's not coming from booking.com's own pool of hotel rooms? It's coming from somebody exactly. That could come from Expedia, the come from an OTA, an online bedbank, you never heard of, could be hotel beds, could be where beds, could be any number of bedbanks. So when I think it could be data, which is just Japanese. I think I'm booking.com. The way I should think about it for hotel rooms is, there's the booking.com website. On that website, they're selling hotel rooms from the relationships they have directly with hotels, as well as running some rooms that are being sold from non-booking.com relationships that they make available. And in addition to that, they're also selling hotel rooms from their own relationships off their site in other places, maybe on Expedia, or maybe on luxury escapes or something, right? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, we bar from a go, don't know, not booking, but they're same business, essentially. And do they pass almost all of the margin down the line to whoever's doing the selling of the room? That is a great question, and it's very opaque. Ultimately, we don't know, because the bedbanks don't tell us. My gut feel is, if their margin is 20%, they probably keep about 6 to 7%. Well, that's crazy high. I mean, that would be the equivalent of retaining 30 to 35% of the margin on a product. Well, the only circuit caveat, unless there is, it's a low margin take. So the total takes only 20%. So you're only taping 7% of the total. So it's relatively small as a gross margin, but yeah, it's obviously much less work selling to a bed-of-be sale than a bed-of-say sale. Would you want me to tell you what I got paid as a cashback business from hotels.com? Yeah, tell us. They've had me, I think it was about 7%. Yeah, that's pretty standard. There's a bit of dark arts that happens here, and the way. So what often happens, especially if a sophisticated online travel agency, you're dealing with a number of different bed banks. So whoever gives you the best price, you'll take. Well, obviously, agnostic the products largely commoditized. So if Webbeds gives a better price on hotel beds, or Stubi gives a better price on Webbeds, we'll just go with whoever gives the best price, and the pricing's constantly changing. So whoever's got the best price, you have the hotel, is one who gets the best price usually. So I'll tell you what the stack of people getting clipping the ticket is when you buy on a cashback website. So the customer buys the cashback website gets paid. The cashback deal aggregated gets paid, because that's who the deal is coming from. Then. Well, cashback also goes direct as well, sometimes that may, this depends on. It's super, super unlikely that hotel.com will sign a direct deal with a cashback provider. Like maybe shopback or have one. Shopback, maybe, maybe, right. But shopback of is 3%. So if they do, they're keeping like. I mean, shopback, I mean, now shopback's very profitable, because like I can't use cash rewards. But like I've noticed that some things have dropped. Like hotel.com is 3%. Now it's barely worthwhile. It was 6% on cash rewards very frequently. But so there's generally aggregated getting paid. Presumably that aggregated gets a direct from hotels.com, and then hotels.com is paying the hotel. There are so many people clipping a ticket along this journey. It is actually insane. That's the problem. And that's what you have with bedbanks as well, and OTA. So you often dealing with somebody you don't even know. So it definitely, that's why the beauty of what we do, and when you have a direct exclusive deal with the hotel, if something goes wrong, where on the phone to the hotel, straight away. And so the direct stuff is great. It's usually the best deal, and also the best, if something does go wrong, it's also. Back to CTM though. I guess you'd say it's a pleasant surprise. In one sense, they've been able to, I guess, live another day. The one 77 million in the bank, I'm not surprised. They told you they weren't going to go broke. Well, you got to see, I think we said, we said 30 June, so there's a lot of time here. Plenty of plenty of life to play out here. But they're not even going to report their results, but then I think to get back on the boards, I think they may need an issue of perspective. So there's actually still a real chance that these guys never tried again. Even if they do somehow remain solvent, which is still like, there's still a 160 million maximum refunds that have to come out of this business. So the only thing I think of, they somehow told their customers, we can't refund you. You're going to have to hold on as long as we need. And customers have said, OK, because it doesn't make a huge amount of sense. These customers have been installed from CTM, as in the refund owed to them and CTM just collected it. Like if you're, you often see, we get this sort of travel agent publications every day, every week. And every sort of two or three months, you see, Johnny Smith, travel agent in Manley, is gone to jail because they, someone got a refund, they took it to their own bank account. And these people got a jail. Because these guys are a big public company. They don't go to jail because they haven't been any public company's got a jail. And they're doing exactly the same thing. They're stealing the stolen money that should have been paid back to the customers. And this is like, you understand once or twice, whatever bad systems. This was systematic over years, without stealing money. But you know what we call this? This has got a name in business. It's called Too Big To Fail. And so all of these investors, these funds that have pumped money in, they don't want this to go to zero. And all of these lenders, they don't want this to go to zero. And all of, and Ayada, presumably, because they're so big, like, it's not going to be good if they go broke. There's not good news for Ayada. And so we get into the, start getting into the travel equivalent of Too Big To Fail. It's not the same as the banking. Right. Doesn't bring the system back. But like, this will cause, this will cause enough damage to enough people with vested interests that they want to keep it going, almost at any cost, I think. We saw in the UK, Thomas Cook, which was a massive business, that went down, took probably longer than we expected. But that was a huge insolvency. You imagine, not flight centers, obviously, really well run, profitable business, but almost a business with the same brand, Kasha's Flight Center, going down. That was catastrophic in the UK. So that was allowed to go down. It does reach a point where the Shurei's up. But they let the first one go down, right? Like, Lehman Brothers, they let that go down. And then they're like, oh, you've been, we can never let that happen again. So like the first one sinks. And then they're like, well, that was terrible. Like, let's keep the rest going. What price? Let's say, because you can trade these stocks. Like, they're not tradable on the ASX. But you can still get your hands on some if you want some. Like, someone will sell shares to you for sure now, they will, right? These funds would love some liquidity with their stocks. Like, thinking about their closing price when they were suspended. So just correct. I'm an error last week. I thought it was 1.6 billion. It was actually kept at 2.6 billion before it's just got suspended. Because there's got to be a price where you're going to buy these shares. There's got to be a price. $1. As in a company value of $1. I wouldn't pay any money for this business. I don't think it survives. So if you had shares, if you were unfortunate enough to own shares in this business now, and I came along and I said, you know, the last price was what, 2. What do you say? $2.2 billion. I'll pay you $220 million valuation for your shares. So you take a 90% percent hair cut. Would you sell loose to me? Totally. Because you get a tax loss as well. So do you know the sort of rules for getting a tax loss? Yes. You either have to sell or the business has to be wound up with a formal, yes, that's right. It's not easy to get the tax loss. I had that issue once. I thought that once and steadily, once the sort of businesses off the board, you can just claim a tax loss. I found out the hard way you can't. You have to essentially have that. So I had to find for a business that I owned that was listed that basically died, but sort of stayed on as a zombie business. I had to find someone to buy the business for a dollar from me. If I'm buying my shares for a dollar from me, and they got the upside, if there was, I don't know if there wasn't the upside or not, but I just wanted to claim that tax loss. And I thought you could just claim it. I was very wrong. Yeah. Well, the fact that you said that you would sell at a 90% discount, and maybe I could, like, I could probably get you to sell at a 95% discount. It's hard to know. I would tell it to 99.9, but I was going to claim the tax loss. You would, but I tell you the thing with you, though, is that you didn't believe in it. And so there's no emotional kind of admission of wrongness, right? Like rock, like easy for me to say. Yeah, but my gut feel is that you might be able to go around behind the scenes today and go to a whole lot of shareholders and offer them some petent sense in the dollar of the last share price. And you might get to 20% or you might get past 20% and have a shot of just taking this thing over. Like, I think that is the window opportunity of a transaction. Now, I mean, like, I don't run around doing it because, like, as you said, like, the risk is just too high on this thing. If you're in the high risk game, I mean, God knows what the debt is trading for in these businesses now. Well, it's not much, there's very little debt. I've got that revolver and it's not a business tank fleet that has much debt. Just no bonds, right? No, I think that the trouble I have for this one is there's, you've actually got negative cash. When you're factoring the refunds, you've got less than $0 cash. And the business before this all happened was losing money. So maybe it flips to, has he started really made money, but it hasn't last couple years. So the question is, I don't know how much money you need to keep the lights on as the big question. Do you not, do you not think you could make money out of this business? I don't know enough about it. I'm just basing off their historical performance. I don't think, because I don't think that we're so close. And operators, they were obviously not good, but I don't think they were incompetent. So I'm just not sure, I'm not sure there's a business here. And you think the likes of players like Flight Center, who are obviously much bigger and have a corporate business. And Navan, who is just a tech business base. I mean, they're not really, they've got people on phones, but they're heavily tech focused. You think this business corporate travel might be wedged between those two things in terms of being able to make money. And you think what would Flight Center be willing to pay for it? They pay something because they're getting the customers. Yeah, getting the customers. But I wouldn't be like, they'll probably get the customers anyway. So I'm not sure they'll be willing to pay that much. They may be the flight, so you pay a couple hundred million bucks for the customer base. Maybe. Well, if I'm Flight Center now, am I just not ringing every fund manager, ECP been along, however, else has got funds in this thing. So I share this in this thing, saying, I'll buy these at appearance. You can write it off and building a blocking stake in this thing and then, you know, playing that game. I mean, I feel like the game I'd play for Flight Center today. Well, at the same time, going after everything, one of their customers, very aggressively, is what I'll be doing. And Flight is a very, very, very unbusiness. So I'll be shocked if they weren't doing it already. This is a lot to play out there, but to be a year and not submit your financial statements is a disgrace. So shame on you, corporate travel management and to the investors who bought in. They've got all sorts of problems. We'll just go into it. We'll finish up a most popular segment. The our famous M&A Deep Dive, of course, brought to you by Terrem Capital, our great-mate Scott. Terrem acquired technology companies to grow sustainably over decades. The books you have the way of Australia. If you're thinking about selling, getting some cash from your business or your hard work, discuss how it might work at terrem.capital/contrarians. We know they're a very good operator down at Terrem. And today is that we actually do have an M&A Deep Dive today. And that is our friends at Hotdog, of the year you're a doctor, so close to your heart. And obviously I'm a small indirect shareholder in both Hotdog and a direct shareholder in health engines. So a close issue close to my heart. So you've got to see in the street talk last week that Potentia Capital, Andy Gray's private equity firm has agreed to acquire Hotdog Australia's largest JPE booking platform for $250 million. Potentia outbeard P.E. giant PEP, Pacific equity partners to get the prize. He's understood Hotdog is making around $10 million in EBDA on $40 million of sales. And most of that EBDA has come from turning on telehealth about a year ago. Straight talk report that Hotdog's online platform makes 25 million appointments annually. I'm half a third A million Australians with 23,000 JPEs. Straight talk claim that Hotdog has a 70% market share, which I've got on good authority is completely wrong. Its market share is more like 55%. But still has done extremely well in the last six or seven years. Hotdog was founded in 2012 or co-founded by Ben Hurst, who was a doctor who worked at the Melbourne Port Phillip Prison. The business struggled initially, but formed really over COVID, and overtook health engines market share across the board. Hurst is understood to own around 15% of Hotdog and will make about $40 million, which is a great result for Ben. The move is especially interesting given health engine, which for disclosure, I'm a direct shareholder in, has been rapidly gaining ground on Hotdog and recently released its AI receptionist product, which is seen in incredible growth. I rate to be seen where the potential of PEP, who is the underbitter on Hotdog, and of course owns the Magentist business, which is founded by Michael Maynard McConnell. We'll make a play for Health Engine or the Command Business. Magentist itself is a roll up of Citadel Health, well-being software and genie solutions, as run by Rachel Powell, who we know, and used to be a seek executive, and Rachel's done a great job there. A combined hotdog, Health Engine business, we've talked about this before, would have potentially $100 million in turnover and profits of upwards of $25 million. So I did. This is a right up your alley, a medical M&A deal. What are your views on potential buying Hotdog? So you've got some insight into these businesses and this process, and I've got some insight into these businesses and this process, and I said I wouldn't talk publicly about any I'd gleaned from my various discussions with Health Engine and with shareholders of both businesses. So I'm going to try and speak precisely, but I'm not saying everything that I know about this just out of respect for those people. Maybe the first thing I'll say that will make me unpopular is that I think if you got healthy, so Health Engine and Hotdog belong together, the fact that nobody could ever get them together was not because it didn't occur to anyone. I would have had a dozen people over the last five years say to me, will you please help me get these two businesses together? And for one reason or another, we won't go into the dirty laundry here, but for one reason or another, they would never go together. They would just, it just wouldn't happen. And so I thought that that would be severely value damaging for each of those two businesses. But what the hell do I know? Because somehow Hotdog is meant to get a price of $250 million for a business that I think if you put it together with Health Engine, maybe that's worth $250 million. And you know, you got a business here that is sub-scale. I'm going to say things that are critical, but what I really want to do is say something nice first, which is, I think the resilience and persistence of Hotdog and Ben Hurst, who I only ever met once, is very impressive. Nobody has a negative word to say about Ben Hurst as a human being. In fact, all I hear is the polar opposite of what a good guy he is, how not motivated by just, you know, like corporate greed or anything like that, he is, he just is like, you know, stand up guy, etc, etc. But I think it is trickier for a founder to merge with a competitor than if there were two independent CEOs, because obviously, like Health Engine, it's a whole different kettle of fish, right? That would be a much easier, probably more open to merging kind of transaction. Well, Health Engine was run by, that was founded by Marcus Till recently. Marcus is obviously still involved. Dan Stinton does a great job running it now. I think he's been a incredible, yeah. My dad's great, I was a sort of a manager CEO, but Marcus a tremendous guy. The other dude that founded it with him is also a tremendous guy. Like I met them years and years and years and years ago. Is he about Adam, Adam Yathmore, different, yeah, exactly. And like Dan is doing great and I'm sure that Dan would have found it pretty easy to find a way to merge these two businesses together because he doesn't have the baggage of having competed with totally the other one for his whole working life. I think Marcus has low ego as well and Marcus would have been more than happy to do a deal that was made sense. You might be right about that. But generally it takes special founders or a special founder to find a way to merge with the competitor for the benefit of everyone when they've dedicated so much of their life to trying to destroy that other competitor. And it's not easy, like I'm not saying that in a critical way. Now I'll say some things. So this is a sub-scaled business hotdog. What's the revenue for him? I think, I think, just on that before you move on, I think that it appeared to be that the hotdog side was less reluctant to do a deal than the health agency, historically. And I think they've now been largely vindicated to getting this $250 million price, which nobody thought they'd get. Hotdog was more reluctant to do a deal. And I think it was more reluctant to do it. Yes, I agree with you with that. I think that, yeah, well, they have been vindicated because sometimes like your lottery numbers come up. But I think if you look at the $40 million making 10 growing, I think it grows at sort of 25, 30%. 10 EBITDA, 10 EBITDA. Yeah, I think so. Yeah. That is not making 10. That is making 10 EBITDA. Yeah, but we're talking EBITDA. 25 EBITDA multiple is top-year, but not out. We see this as sold on revenue multiples of 10 times, 15 times. So it doesn't, it's not completely outrageous. All right. So this, I'll just say the bare case. Could rather than me saying, I think these negative things, because I'm not sure. I'm not know it well enough to think anything negative. So, but I'll say the bare case from arms length based on not using any information I know that I gleaned from the inside just using publicly available information that's been reported. So this is what you could say. It's a $40 million business. It's not growing like a rocket. What do you find as rocket like growth? 30 plus per cent. Oh, I think it's, I think it's in that ballpark. Well, not it's core business. So let's come back to that, right? So maybe I should say that. The core business isn't growing like a rocket. It's got as competitor that's equally as large and well run. So that would be a negative for me in acquiring it as well, unless your plan was to acquire the competitor. And that's a big unless. I think, and this comes, I think this deal hinges upon putting them both together. Well, that is a great position for health engine to be. And if that's the case, and they're going to get $500 million for their business, because like, like, I think health engine is pretty happy to compete against this acquisition by a PE business. This is my understanding broadly of what he has been going on in this space. This telehealth, I've got some issues with telehealth. I always joke with telehealth. It's not a joke. I'm actually being serious. If you want prescription medicine, as long as it's not like crazy stuff like open or something, which is a bit more hesitant. But if you want prescription medicine, you just do a health consultation. You get charged a Medicare fee. It doesn't even add a pocket. And you just say, yeah, to repeat, I've had this before. But nobody checks, like, it's fascist what's going on. I think that, like, this is not going to stay like this. It's undermining medicine. And this is not me, you know, with my comments about things like eucalyptus, which is very narrowly focused on a particular niche. I'm talking about broad telehealth consultations. And so what we've seen is various models for the rapid rise of telehealth consultations. And a few businesses have done that. And it looks to me like hot talkers done that especially well in terms of generating revenue from it. They basically turned on telehealth. I think that 18 months ago, two years ago. And that basically credit most there. But that is my understanding. Yes. And so I'm not saying as much as I know about this, but I'm talking in broad terms. Okay. And so I'll say this in broad terms, the greatest growth you ever get as a percentage is from zero when you don't, when it's not on to like, when it's turned on 12 months later on the like for like. And then it gets harder for like for likes. And then there might also be a question about whether what other parties are going to do in this space, not just health insurance. And there's lots of parties. So as these people called, holler health, I don't want to advertise them because I think it's way too easy to get prescription medication from them, which I might have, that might have even been a better ad for them ironically. But like, I think this space isn't unknown. This telehealth space. These businesses are so obviously sub-scale as a standalone business that they, to say, I know you can't bargain on winning the lottery like this. Like they should have gone together. Potentially smart. They've got good returns. They must have seen something to pay this price. But it is very instructive that Mark McConnell, his business, did not with the underbitter. So they are a business rolling stuff up. You would think they would have great synergies rolling this up. And they've said, "Nup, too expensive." I think private equity, like generally, good private equity operators with a strong track record like Potentia, they figure out ways to make money. But it'll be very interesting watching them make money here. And I don't think they're going to get a bargain from Health Engine because I think Health Engine has no fear about competing with them whatsoever. I think as a standalone purchase, 250 is on the top. So I would don't know what the terms are and there could be some preference in those. Well, I've got some businesses to sell you. If you want to pay 25 times EBITDA, I'm going to stack up some businesses and you can pay me 25 times EBITDA and cash for every one of them. You're paying a lot more for a West farmers, for example, which is growing at 10%. So if you look at what the public markets are offering up, compared to the garbage on there, and West farmers are not garbage, I should add, West farmers are actually a high quality albeit highly over their business. Well, let's just call West farmers' bannings, basically. All bannings and office works, both excellent businesses. And I think there's also isn't a Kmart in there as well, which is a draw in the crown. Yeah, but West farmers is basically bannings, isn't it? That's the business. Can I have some pretty decent business? But what you're paying for is dividend, reliable dividends, the likelihood that the, I mean, I think it's overvalued, but like, at least I know why I'm paying so much for West farmers. Yeah, so you've got a 33 PE for West farmers. You've got a, is it 60 PE for Chemist Warehouse? So you've got, and they're obviously very high quality companies that get me wrong, they're amazing businesses, but you're paying a fortune for these businesses versus a much faster growing hot dog. The ability to potentially roll up health. Like you roll up health engine hot dog. There's so much duplicative cost. There's great, so health engine release, this AI receptionist thing. And my understanding is it's deflecting like 50% of calls. So that's, and they'll get it to 100% soon as it's back. So you can get rid of receptionist or you can save costs or have receptionist doing multiple things. That's a huge win for dentists, GPs, et cetera, who are using the platform for very, it's very low cost. So you may be paying 10 grand, you're saving 100 grand. You roll that across hot dogs platform. Suddenly you can charge their extra, and there's these great revenue synergies. I think the combined business makes at least 25 million bucks, potentially more, is growing 30%. That's a really nice business. All right, that's great. So what are you going to pay for the second piece of it? Well, maybe 200, 250? Okay. So you've got 500, so you've paid 500 million bucks for a business making 25, 30, growing 30%. That's, to me, sounds good. Well, you've already got it to 30. So like the thing is this, I agree with you, it's got potential. It's more than a market later, right? It's basically owns the market. But I think, you know, you've gone from 10 millivit, but down to 30 in the, somehow you put some pieces together. So I agree with you, there's some synergies or whatever. But I just, I feel like hot talk was 150 million dollar business. It took 13 years to get to 40 million dollars of revenue. We know that the chunk of that revenue was driven recently by this telehealth thing. And so if the, and so I think you're, what are you betting on with that 250? So you think one of the things you're betting on is roll up, maybe. So you're going to assume number one that magenta will be happy to let you buy health engine. Yeah. So that could be a bidding war. I think it's a good idea to get it. It depends how much you might have the potential fund is and how much they prepare to pay. But, but pep, I mean, pep is huge, right? No, I don't love pep for reasons I'm not going to go into on this show, but like, but there's something got a lot of money. They're probably one, I think pep, I've never dealt with pep at all, but that'd be, if not the best, one of the top three PE funded Australian history in terms of success, for short. Yeah, I agree with you. And so they're ferocious, right? So basically, it's not a late Amazon that they get the second piece of this roll up, like they're going to have stiff competition for it. That's why I say to you, I reckon health engine might be the smaller business getting the higher price. Like sometimes it's not about quality of business. It's who wants to buy you. And I just don't understand why potential didn't do both deals simultaneously. It's a bit the chicken that is a bit of a tourist in the hair, but multiple times. So you had health engine with it, sort of by far the biggest business in 2017, 2018. They remember they raised from Sequoia, Sequoia India. Now it's different name. And then probably had a bit of a period where they just probably focused on the wrong, a bit unlucky with COVID and they're sort of focusing on the wrong thing. And hot doc executed beautifully over COVID. They had some great tools that allowed GPs to really function very well. So COVID definitely helped hot doc and it was great timing for them. So hot doc then leapfrogged. But it feels like health engine now are coming back. The AI stuff's going really well. They dominate dental. They're catching up on GP because I think hot doc were focused on this and focused on monetizing. So no, I'm with you on this, but why you don't agree with my sentiment, which is you go to health engine at the same time. I can promise you a health engine will take 250 for their business because it's not as big. And so like based on you saying it's 55% market share in them saying it's 70, it's one of those. It's not like neither one of those is less than half. Yeah, it's slightly more than half. Yeah, they're not definitely not 70. There might be 70% of GPs better relevant because you're looking at the whole market, the whole business, not just GPs. And so I don't, again, like without saying anything up from the inside, it's hard to imagine the shareholders in health engine are not taking a $250 million valuation for their business. And so your whole little theory that you've got going there about 30 million of EBITDA, maybe it's true, but if you want to play that game, go to health engine at the minute you know that you're an exclusivity on this deal and a RAM at 250 deal through an health engine. And that's the end of the game, right? Like you just say, we'll give you this on the same terms, just we'll just run the same terms for you as we're doing on this deal. But give us exclusivity, don't go to market. Isn't that the way to play this deal? That's how I would have played the deal if you really believe in the rollup of these two. Yeah, who knows? Like I haven't spoken to, certainly haven't spoken to HotDoc. And I don't know the potential guys. So it's hard to know what they're thinking. What was the raise at for HotDoc? The most expensive valuation previously. Oh, I got a feeling it was 120. All right, so people made money out of it. Yeah, I think, like I'm an indirect shareholder of our Ari and Ben at right click because they came in pretty early. And that was actually not here. I always be critical at the time because HotDoc was struggling there, but it turned out to be an actually incredible investment for right click. And like that funds actually done really well. They've had a few great, and they're good operators Ari and Ben obviously. But yeah, I think they came in at like 40 and there was subsequent rounds up to 120. I could be wrong, but that's what I think it's around that level. So I think everybody in HotDoc, obviously the four fans have done very well. I think I think Airtree is the biggest shareholder in HotDoc. They've done extremely well. I'm pretty sure Airtree are actually trying to sell their stake at some point. And I think for the best they didn't. So Airtree, the Airtree fund will do very well again. It's been a great story from Craig. And this was Craig's investment. This one, and obviously Daniel's done other ones. So there's a lot of winners out of this deal. So it's actually a great result for the ecosystem and fantastic for. So if you invested 40 and it goes to 250, presumably after dilution, you probably still made 5x on that investment. It's my guess. And so 5x in 13 years, I mean, you'll take that. That's pretty, oh, listen, that because I'm pretty sure right click came in in 2017 or 18. Right. So 5x in seven years. Yeah. Well, that's a good investment. I mean, how much money you can deploy, but like, you know, Airtree were a bit earlier, but Airtree had a big chunk of, I think Airtree was sort of upwards of 40% for my understanding. Couldn't be around that. So Airtree have done exceptionally well here. So I mean, that's more than a 40% internal rate of return. 5x, like seven years. I mean, you take that every day of the week and you take, you'd like to take half that every day of the week. It's actually a great story on persistence. So if you go back to 2009, 18, 19, Health Engine obviously had their issues with Airtree will say, which has been unlucky, but Hot Dog were almost in a relevance. They were a clear number two well behind and they, it just shows the value in persisting and you know, they had a bit of luck in COVID, but they put themselves in the right position to execute. They focused on GP and they built a great product. They really focused on product in that sort of 16, 17, 18, 19 years and we're in the right place, the right time to have that great explosion drew it. And then obviously, tell the Health Health about again the second time. I feel to be reversed now with Health Engine last three years investing in product and Hot Dog probably focusing on profitability. So they kind of have switched a few times. So both great stories, both great Australian business stories built incredible market places in in a, what was a really fragmented sector and tried. I'm in the UK now. If you want to go to a doctor in the UK, good luck. You actually can't. There's like this, these platforms don't see it's to various industries. It's actually super easy. So consumers have been the biggest winner out of this. I think like it's, it makes it so easy to book like if my doctor's booked out. I'll jump on Health Engine and find another one in two seconds or I'll talk about can't find something on Health Engine, but I always can. It's actually an amazing service for customers. It's great for practitioners. So much more efficient. It's really great. Win, win, win for the say and really what market places are meant for. So this is actually a really great new story for everyone. Customers, practitioners, shareholders, founders. I say no loser here. So if I'm a direct investor in Health Engine, like you might be, why am I disclosed that? No, I get that. I think I love this transaction, don't I? There's a great transaction for you. Yeah, I think you get this. Sometimes you say, and this is your whole is in my business. You'll see like another business getting a price and they go, they're annoyed, oh, why wasn't this asked? How did these guys get all that money? I saw this and we were extremely happy when we saw this result because ultimately it sets a mark in the, a such a benchmark in the market. And obviously it means you've got a financial buyer who, who will be much less emotional as you talk about before, then potentially a founder. And I sort of see where the founders are coming from and why it could be hard, but obviously financial investors don't have that issue. They're purely about profit maximization. So yeah, as a health, I'm obviously a tiny shareholder and hot dog and I'm a bigger shareholder and health engine. I was rapsing this deal. This is one of the best deals I've seen in a long time. It just as for the ecosystem as a whole, it's a great result because we haven't seen many exits and this is a greater shrimp, a business in potentially buying a greater shrimp business in hot dogs. So I was delighted to say this news. Again, straight talk, nailing it. They don't miss much. So it's a great story for the ecosystem. It's always interesting to think about who leaks it to them, who leaks this deal to them. Anyone because it's such a great result for everyone. No, but this is not when it was leaked. It was leaked like four weeks ago. I mean, in fact, it was leaked earlier, but like we knew four weeks ago that this was almost certainly going to close. Well, it's just whoever was worried that it wouldn't close by Christmas leaked. Didn't they just put some time pressure on the other party? And so I don't know which of them was worried it wouldn't close. But I suspect, yeah, I suspect actually it's impossible to know which one wouldn't have closed because it's always a banker. It's always a banker that leaks the questions who's banker. Exactly. Exactly. But like I think if I'm the generally if I'm on the cell side, I'm trying to hurry things up rather than buy side code, I want my money totally. But from what I hear about Ben and the team at hot dog like they're not trying to just doing trying to grab a bag of cash. So I'm not sure their side would have leaked it. But you're right. It's always the banker. We never know. We never know who it is. I think health engine today, I mean, anchoring is real. It's a real thing. And this has just been anchored to 250. And so if health engine, health engine is almost certainly going to start with a two. And I would not be budging for less than 250 if I was health engine today. I think get a really good investment banker and create the auction of all auctions to try to put maximum pressure on buyers. And I'm not sure that you need to do it today. You can do it in a year. I'm actually not aware of it. I'm obviously not sure how to do health engine, but I'm not a big shareholder. So I'm not really sort of up to what on earth is going on there in terms of day to day, or even sort of the intercom to corporate level. But what I do know, and I'll sort of spoke to them six months ago, and they're executing really well. And the AI stuff's going really well as in the reception of stuff's going really well. So I think that's the most important. I think what they need to focus on is how do we make this business the best business we can. And ultimately business is a bought, not sold, and a smart buyer will see good performance. And I think putting these business together, we said it when I think we had one of the shows six months ago, we said that this just makes so much sense putting these businesses together. They go beautifully together. And you've got, I've got what makes even better is that one strong, so hot dog strong in GP, health engine strong in L.I. They both have obviously some interest in the other. That's what they're really strong at. And even operationally, they've both got different strengths. Once, one's health engine is better at marketing and AI and hot dogs really go to the telehealth stuff and call it the practice management stuff. So they actually have really complimentary strengths both from a customer and an operational perspective. So it's such an obvious business to put together. Like, I got no idea what price health and general get or only like that. I'm not sort of speaking to them about any of that sort of stuff, but I'm sure they'll do a great job with it. So this is my, I'll finish with this. This is my macabre prediction, which I hope doesn't come true, but I've just got a bad feeling it will. Basically, someone is going to have a telehealth consultation and they're going to end up dead because of it. And it will be someone that is very appealing to the media. I don't mean a celebrity. I don't even know what I mean because what I mean is other, this would have already happened. People would have died because of telehealth consultations in my view. And so people die because of actual health consultations as well. I suppose it's self-driving car issue. Yeah. Right? And so someone will end up dead because of a telehealth consultation. It will be very media friendly to run the story and there'll be an outrage. And then some like the tip of the iceberg dodgy stuff will start coming out and people will be more outraged and then the industry will end up regulated properly. That's my guess of how this is going to play out in the next couple of years. So I hope I'm wrong about that. But I do think some of these telehealth consultations I've had with general telehealth have been so ridiculous. Mind you, I'm going to keep using them because there's a great purpose for me. Like I know much more than the average person about what I need from health. I just don't have a script book, right? But like it's just so ridiculous, some of the stuff that's going on there that I find it hard to believe some disaster is not going to happen that is kind of very, you know, like media friendly to get lots of clicks. And ultimately that is what drives change. Well, I just hope and I hope the same with self-driving. We know that self-driving cars are 90 plus percent safer than. Oh, yeah, they'll be killing someone soon for sure. I think I think I hope for you, the media looks through this and well, we'll say, I think there's been a few issues self-driving cars and largely there has been reporting. But I think people have been pretty rational and hopefully telehealth, I grew with the telehealth as a bit of a wild west. But I think overall, like if you look at the UK, you can't see a JPE. Like having telehealth over here is a massive improvement because at least you can see someone. So and especially take out. I hear you, but we have to be realistic about how the media works and how human beings function. I don't know if you saw the self-driving car that drove through the area that had been shut down by police. You saw that right through the middle of the crime scene and because like it looked fine for the self-driving car. And so, you know, there's all these edge cases and, you know, God forbid some kid is killed by a self-driving car, but it's inevitable. It's going to happen. And as soon as that happens, there's going to be this enormous irrational backlash against self-driving cars. But I don't think it will be permanent. I think ultimately this technology will be adopted on mess, but it's inevitable that it's going to happen. The beauty is because they've racked up millions of chips already and we've got the proof of 90% safer. I think people are, if that, if self-driving had killed a bunch of people initially, then it would have been really problematic. Now there's, now they've got a bunch of runs on them and say we telehealth. They've got a bunch of runs on the board. I think people, and there's also that sort of, they're cognitive dissidents. It's so cute how you show, it's so cute how you're so rational. There's not how human beings work. They're going to put the face of that poor kid on the front page of the newspaper. I think there's a bit of an amiss theory. I think if you've been using a self-driving car, if you've been using telehealth for two years and you've had a great experience with it and someone dies or someone gets hit by a car or whatever it is, then you go, well, I've been using this for ages. I've been fine. These people were, that was, they did something wrong. It was an edge case. I think people are more rational than you give them credit for and I think people will look past. I'm more fragmented now, so it's hard to get something in the, obviously you have a bond in Damascus, that's different. I think for these isolated cases of things going wrong, I'm much less saying bearish or sangwine than you are. I think we're at the point where this stuff, where that's telehealth, whether it's self-driving, is largely enmeshed in human psyche. Now, certainly Western Australian, US, UK, psyche. I actually don't think that extensual threat is the threat that you are worried about. No, well, I don't think it's an existential threat, but like I do think, my predictions have been good so far. I picked two of the three things that Elba was going to do about entitlements and he should have done the third, by the way, he just didn't want to because, you know, mates and himself, he's the biggest griffy in them all. Yeah, well, he's got his own plan, he doesn't have to worry about this stuff. And also the corporate travel, so far I'm right about the two big to fail. We'll see how it goes. And I definitely accept that I might be end up being wrong about that, but my general, I know we're going to do some predictions or something on the next episode. Well, I'm going to say you've segway beautifully into next week's, our famous prediction, one of the favorite episodes about a year for our listeners where we go through our prediction. We see who got it right, who got it wrong last year, which is always good fun. I'm always, I know you always reject this, but I'm terrible at general predictions, but I think what I can predict is I understand a lot about how human beings think and respond emotionally to things. And therefore stuff like the entitlements thing or stuff like what, like this is how I feel about this telehealth thing or the self-driving car, which is still to be proven, but like, I think I have a feel for how people are going to react emotionally to situations. And so it's much less a prediction and much more of it just feels natural to me how that's going to play out. Whereas predictions of like, you know, where's the market going away? Interest rates are going off on that much harder. Well, last year, as in the predictions for last year, you did really well. So I'll be very interested to see how we go this year when I, so what I do is I go through last year's episode and rate ourselves, but I might have just picked a lot of numbers last year to be honest and they just happen to come up. Now, I mean, we've got, we both got the interest rates thing dead on right. That was remarkable when everybody said interest rates were going to get smashed and drop a lot. And we correctly predicted they wouldn't this year. We were a little bit off with it, but we just didn't see how we go for it. But we love predictions, not because we want to be right or wrong, but really catalyzes conversation as to what may happen next 12 months. The same person who loves predictions loves quizzes. I'll give you that as a hint. Mike? Yeah, Mike, that's it. On that note, we'll say farewell. As you know, where their podcasts that never sleeps, the only podcast in the world that goes straight through the break and through Christmas. Thank you, I'd be jumping on in the middle of your holiday. We will be back of course on Saturday for our Ask Us Anything episode. And then back again, as always, choose to have our big episode with predictions next week. We'll see everybody. So have a great year, as you know, I don't sell about new years, but have a great year years. And I'm sure you'll have a fantastic time, buddy. What have you do? Happy new year to everyone. Thank you.