The Press Box - A Way-Too-Early Analysis of the 2020 Presidential Candidates | Damage Control (Ep. 567)

Episode Date: January 31, 2019

BuzzFeed laid off 15 percent of its staff last week, which does not bode well for the digital media industry (1:35). We're two years away from the presidential election but the Democratic field for president is already looking crowded (18:59). Hosts: Justin Charity and Kate Knibbs Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I'm Justin Charity. And I'm Kate Nibbs. Welcome to Damage Control on the Channel 33 Network, a podcast where we unpack what upsets, excites, and divides us. We're talking about the 2020 presidential candidates. Specifically, we're talking about all the early defensiveness and consternation that surrounds the Democratic candidates, such as Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren. Yeah, we hate ourselves.

We hate ourselves. We hate ourselves really early in the year. But first, we... We need to discuss why 2019 has been a disaster for media companies like BuzzFeed, which just laid off a huge number of its staff. Look, BuzzFeed, I think it's great. We all think it's great that you want to help, but this isn't really what we need from you. Y'all are BuzzFeed.

You do memes and lists. Everybody's got that aunt who has roaches and everything's given. She's like, hey, y'all, what should I bring? And we're like, uh, ice. You bring the ice because we don't want to be picking raisins out of the turkey. That's you, BuzzFeed. You bring the ice. You know, as Dr. King once said, don't go chasing waterfalls. Please stick to the rivers and the lakes that you are used to.

So last week, over a thousand media company employees, many of them journalists, lost their jobs in a brutal round of layoffs at BuzzFeed, the Huffington Post, and the Gannett newspapers. A lot of very talented people are currently. looking for work. And we're trying to understand exactly what this means for the future of media. BuzzFeed, The Huffington Post, and all these newspapers obviously still exist and our staffed with talented people. But this kind of enormous surge of unemployed journalists, I think, is very disturbing. Yeah.

Especially because it's like a lot of them are web writers as we are we. And so things like this always feel like close to home. And they always feel like they're happening like. in our backyard. A lot of people who I really, really admired are now looking for work, and it's just disturbing. And I wrote about why these layoffs happened last week. And it has been very interesting.

So one of the things about writing for the internet is you get feedback on Twitter and emails and stuff. And a lot of people have been writing me and tweeting at me and telling me what they think caused this. and they have been sort of telling me that, you know, it's these journalists' own faults that they were like slinging fake news on the internet. Like it was only a matter of time. I think the public reaction to the Gannet layoffs and the HuffPost layoffs

was very different than the reaction to the BuzzFeed layoffs. The BuzzFeed layoffs were strangely like polarizing. Because people, BuzzFeed like is such a, it's like the, company that sort of represents new media and people have really strong opinions about it. Like that's why so many people are like, well, BuzzFeed doesn't even do journalism. Like, who cares about this viral clickbait factory getting shut down or whatever? I got a lot of comments like that. And I don't think they understand that there was a news arm that was producing tons of really good reporting.

Scoops. Yeah. I think it's like the people who aren't sympathetic to BuzzFeed are. what you've just described. But then there's the other half of it, which is BuzzFeed staff include just some of the most, I want to say like online visible, extremely online people who like, these aren't just people who are good reporters or who like make quizzes, but these are people who largely because they work for BuzzFeed, which is like the most online place imaginable, these people have like very firmly

established, like, presence in, like, digital life. And so there's something about those layoffs where when I was watching them play out online on Friday, that just felt very public. Like, every single individual person laid off, it felt like there were, there were, like, thousands of people sort of acknowledging and affirming and retweeting that person. And I think maybe that's the thing that culturally feels different from, like, Gannett, right? Where you're more so thinking.

of like less online, like older reporters in like different, in smaller media markets than New York. That's what I was going to say. Like the Gannett, like a ton of people off, but since it was sort of spread out across a bunch of papers, and as you said, like a lot of the people weren't quite as online and skewed older, like it didn't have the same impact. And I think in Post, I think they only laid off around 15 people, which is terrible. but like BuzzFeed, this was like such a huge bloodletting.

And also a lot of the people who got fired from BuzzFeed were like super long time employees who were very, very well known and respected both within the company and like on the internet. So it was very shocking. Right. It feels like these things come in waves and waves and media. Because like you and I are old enough to remember when Huffington Post was BuzzFeed. Yeah. Right? And the Huffington Post also went.

Literally was BuzzFeed. BuzzFeed. BuzzFeed was a spinoffernoff project of the Huffington Post. Right. But there was that moment when like Huffington Post was not only as sort of like new and shiny as BuzzFeed would ultimately be, but also it was just as polarizing. And people were either like obsessively reading the Huffington Post or they were like, what is this? Yeah. They were like, why is I like Baldwin blogging? Right, right, right. So I don't know. There's there's an auroboros devouring everything. its wake here. There is a crisis of trust in the media, but the layoffs really have nothing to do with it. There isn't one single cause.

There are a few major causes, though, that I wanted to talk to you about because looking at them sort of gives us a picture of what's happening in the country as a whole, like not just with the media, because it connects to a lot of stuff. So I'll just dive right into chatting about what happened. So with Gannett, that's a legacy. That's like a chain of legacy newspapers. So they started out like the old-fashioned kind of newspapers where you get it and you open it. A quarter.

See? Yeah. There's the newsies. The newsies. Yeah. So the reason they had layoffs is quite different from like the reason BuzzFeed and the Huffpo had layoffs. and I just wanted to explain that briefly because I want to make sure that we don't sort of glide over the fact that a lot of these legacy newspaper people lost their jobs because they're very talented.

So what happened there was legacy newspapers have been in trouble for decades, including when like things seemed like they were good in the 80s and 90s. A lot of them were like family run papers and consolidated into big chains like Gannett and then became publicly traded. which is fine, but it meant that they were beholden to shareholders who wanted to maximize profits, which, like, journalism is not super ideal industry to get into if you want to maximize profits. So they also took on a lot of debt when they were profitable because they thought they would always be profitable. When the Internet happened, they didn't really innovate quickly enough. They lost subscribers who didn't want to pay for the news anymore. were going to get their news from new media companies. When they lost subscribers, they cut staff.

That meant they didn't cover as much. They lost more subscribers. It just became this vicious cycle. So now a lot of hedge funds are basically coming in and swooping up financially vulnerable newspaper chains and newspapers. And Ghana is trying to sell to a hedge fund. So their cuts sort of speak to the fact that they're like going for austerity measures because they want to get bought.

So that's what's happening there. And I want to stress something about that real quick, though, because, like, we're going to talk about web media later. And, like, web media, to me, it makes sense that, like, web media is unstable because it's a new thing. And, like, people are still trying to figure out, like, what the ideal way to, like, make a BuzzFeed makes sense as a business in the first place is. Newspapers, I'm kind of astounded have survived as long as they have because it feels

like you said, a lot of decades have been sort of dedicated to the idea that like no one knows how to make newspapers make long term financial sense. Because wasn't it true 10 years ago that we were talking about like the death of newspapers and the death of magazines? They've been like slowly just languishing. Oh, and I forgot to say another factor when I was talking about how the internet had made them lose subscribers. it also like really screwed up their their advertising revenue because people like online classified

sort of killed paid print classified. So that was also a factor too. And then when it comes to BuzzFeed on advertisements play a big role because BuzzFeed like most new media companies has been trying to earn money through ads and for it and basically every other company that puts content on the internet. That's been getting harder and harder to do because of like the rise of Facebook and Google as distributors. Someone on Twitter said that that they were like the paper boys and that the fact, so Facebook and Google currently get 85% of all ad money. So someone said it was like giving the paper boys all the money. Right. Which I thought was very smart. Right. And depressing. It's idiotous because it's like the idea of personifying Google as like a cute little paperboy.

I don't know. I don't know if that's exactly. Snapping it suspenders. Right, great. So yeah, advertisements sort of are an important part of why BuzzFeed is currently buzzing less. Right. But also there's a lot of different factors. Like BuzzFeed's head of quizzes who was recently laid off blogged about how I think it was like the second most popular quizment.

in all of BuzzFeed. It was just like a teenager doing it for fun. Right. Who was unpaid. He just loved quizzes, which fair enough. I love a good quiz. And so he was sort of saying it seemed like BuzzFeed realized like why would they have to pay a living wage to a staffer in like L.A. or New York and health insurance and stuff. And they could get a teen in Michigan to give them content for free.

Right. Give them like highly trafficking content. Yeah. Or for swag. I think they were being paid in swag, if I recall. That's so dark. That's so like merchandise, like compensation, quote unquote. I've seen a lot of people sort of also blaming this on the fact that consumers don't

want to pay for news, but that's not true. People are paying for news. Some newspapers, like in magazine, New Yorker, New York Times, Washington Post, like, they've gotten what's called the Trump bump where, like, they have, like, more subscribers than ever. They're flourishing. And I think it would be ideal if people could subscribe to some local news sites and some, you know, entertainment or culture, sports or whatever. The sites that really pique their interest that aren't like the big three that don't need their help. But, you know, I feel like it's putting the pressure on people to just subscribe more and more.

I just don't think that's super realistic. Right. There needs to be changes in the way that the digital advertising happens, but like, I don't know how those changes will occur. Some people have been suggesting that this is just another example of a reason why Facebook and Google need to be regulated and broken up. I totally agree, but like I just don't see that happening anytime soon. So this is sort of one of those things that demonstrates what happens. when industries that aren't built like startups, expectations are put on them to grow and be as profitable and scalable as like Silicon Valley unicorns. Right. So my question comes there, which is, and listen, I am not smart CEO, businessman, genius. But I don't totally get

the profitability strategy with BuzzFeed. I don't get how you take BuzzFeed, which is this sort of wonderkind, like, generation-defining website that is defined by all of these almost like irreconcilable things that it sort of cohered into a brand from like reporting on the Mueller investigation

to like producing quizzes about sex in the city characters. And you have... Spoken like a true Samantha. Right. But it's like you have this diverse... It's like this ship. And I don't get the idea of like,

well, BuzzFeed was growing. It's revenue. It's annual revenue is growing. But it's not profitable enough. So we're going to lay off all of these people. It wasn't profitable at all. It was... I think that's getting lost.

Okay, sure. It's revenue is the highest. It's taking a ton of money, but it's... Losing less money. Yeah. Is that, okay. Losing less money. As a relatively young, again, media company,

we need to lay all of these people off for trying to achieve profitability. The BuzzFeed that's left, like, is that a thing you... I don't know how one imagines the emaciated BuzzFeed becoming a profitable thing. So apparently they're in touch. talks to merge with this group nine, which is owned by Ken Lairor. Lair, yeah, I think that's how you say his name. So he was, he's like a VC guy who founded Huffington Post with Jonah Preddy, the founder of BuzzFeed and Ariana Huffington.

His son owns like Thrillist and like, I don't know which, the Lera family owns the Dodo, that animal. Yeah. So they have this media organization called Group 9. and so reports are coming out that BuzzFeed might be merging with Group 9. I guess that's going to make them perhaps more appealing to like an even larger company. I don't really know what their end game is. Because like two years ago or something,

we were all talking about when BuzzFeed was going to hold a public offering. That seems like completely off the table now. Jonah Preddy gave this interview to the New York Times. Last year where he was talking about how, like, media companies should potentially form, like, a super alliance so that they could stand up to Facebook and Google. And everyone was like, that's really out of left field, but okay. Now, I mean, maybe this is part of his strategy that the only way he can sort of rest some control back over, like, the new media industry from these tech companies is to, like, to consolidate. I don't know. Right. There's like a startling amount of uncertainty.

I know. And it's almost like to the point of whimsicality. Like even in talking about the idea of these consolidations, it sounds like some Avengers bullshit. Whereas it's like you're going to gang up to negotiate like better ad rates with Facebook. Like what? I don't know. And it worries me because I feel like one of the big things that got legacy newspapers totally fucked is the fact that they all consolidated in a lot of went public and then they were beholden to shareholders.

And like, they wouldn't have made as much money in their flush times had they remained like independent family owned, but then they wouldn't have had to be as a Ruth. Like it just, I'm very wary of the idea that the way forward for media companies is to consolidate. Or Jeff, you know, Bezos to buy them. Bezos. I guess like the post is like such a weird example of like, it's sort of the intersection of what you were saying before of like a place that does have like strong subscription rates in the Trump moment but that also feels like a bit safer than like a bus feed obviously um yeah I don't know

like it's it's it's hard to know where the money is going it's it's hard to know like where the money is going and like what the trends even are ideally yeah but yeah it's a really complicated scenario, very wary of consolidation. Unfortunately, possibly like my greatest hope at the moment is that when Jeff Bezos gets divorced, McKenzie Bezos will emerge as like the next Lauren Powell Jobs and, you know, swoop in and save at least a few companies. A few companies. All right.

Well, if Mackenzie Bezos is listening, girl, being a media mogul is the best revenge. Please. Help. Help. Distress, S-O-S. We're here with our guest, Senator Kamala Harris of California. Senator, let me ask you this. Many people who put out books two years before a presidential election do so to introduce themselves in a broad way to the American people.

Are you going to run for president? Kate, I'm like super sorry to report to you that there has already been a CNN town hall about the 2020 presidential election. We're not just talking about like, oh, a candidate announced or, oh, somebody's forming an exploratory committee to form another explore. You know what I mean? There's an actual CNN town hall. It was last week. Kamala Harris was the subject of the town hall. She was just doing the whole, and this was in Iowa.

Was this after she announced that she was? Yeah, yeah. She's got a firm rollout. She goes on Good Morning America, announces she's running for president. Then the weekend after that, she gives a speech in California where she does her formal, like,

it's more like a rally. And then she's doing the CNN town hall, right? Pretty, pretty solid, you know, conventional rollout. And Kamala Harris does this town hall, and she gets a question about the future, like post-Oabomacare health care in the United States. and in her answer, she's really leading into the thing that all the Democrats are leaning into, which is like we're all socialist now, Medicare for all, you know, we're all sort of, we're all going to the left in this primary.

And she says something, she says basically like, let's abolish private insurance. Let's move on from that. Which is like an interesting, like provocative idea that seems like she's trying to sort of jump into the, like post-Bernie, post-Elizabeth Warren mainstream. She's trying to be in the mix with the hot new young left. Yeah. But then she gets like some backlash to saying this in a CNN town hall. And she like today, as we're recording this, is like walking it back and trying to walk back to a more centrist position about like the future of health care in America.

And I find this exhausting already. Like I find that like this sort of like hot. cold shift that happened in the course of just a couple of days about a single issue in a town hall that's like eight months way too early to be happening. It sort of encapsulates why I think people are going to feel really exhausted talking about the Democratic presidential candidates. Because it just seems like it seems like there's a lot of them. There are so many. And it seems like there's more coming too. Like, we're not even a lot.

Well, okay, let's say how many you are. There's, they're 90. 90, no, they're not. But there is enough for me to say that there are dozens of them. Yeah, there's dozens. And it's hard. When we say that there are Democratic presidential candidates, like, it's tough because you have people who have declared formally.

Yeah. Kamala Harris is the, like, she's the most declared because she specifically, she did an interview, then she did an actual campaign rally speech. Now she's doing a town hall. then below that you have someone like Elizabeth Warren who technically announced before Kamala Harris but the problem with Elizabeth Warren is that when she really announces that she's forming an exploratory committee

which means that like you still have the part where she has to then come back and say here's my formal announcement video or here's my like I didn't realize that that's the thing they're getting you with the technicalities in small print so technically Kamala Harris is further along than Elizabeth Warren but then like Elizabeth Warren

is further along than someone like Corey Booker who hasn't even announced yet, but it's clearly going to run. He's likely. He is likely. And then you got Joe Biden being like, I don't know if I'm going to run. I don't know. Is Bernie the run? Bernie might run. He was in South Carolina. That's exhausting to me.

Why? Well, we'll get to it. We'll get into it. We'll get it to it. So like, on the one hand, at face value, it's a lot. It's a lot of people doing a lot of things using way too many napkins. But on another level, I want to think that this could be healthy. I want to think that a bunch of Democrats arguing for like a year about the things that matter, like health care in America, I want to think that this could be healthy.

Okay, I think it could be healthy in the same way that like a kale smoothie is healthy. Like I'm going to fucking hate it, but it could be healthy. I don't want it. I'll have to be forced that it. But maybe, yes, maybe it will be good. What do you think about the campaigns so far? Yeah, so I wanted to talk to you about this because I don't really know what I think right now. I'm sort of conflicted.

I obviously want Trump to lose. I'm definitely going to support whoever gets the Democratic candidacy. I will throw all of my support behind them. Not no matter what. Like there's probably some lines, but at this point it seems like any of these people who have declared would be vastly better than Trump. Like I have absolutely no doubt in my mind. So that's one of my thoughts. Including Tulsi Gabbard, by the way.

I just what is, I would have clarified. Maybe you won't agree with this. I would even vote Tulsi Gabbard. I would, no, same, same. I think she's a Hawaiian weirdo, but I would vote for her. Part of me is like all I really care about is Trump losing. That's a pretty big part of me. Yeah.

But then that's not true. I want the best candidate to emerge from this primary. I want a candidate that, ideally I want a candidate that aligns with my values. I'm not really expecting that just because I'm pretty left wing. And like probably Bernie is the closest candidate like from a platform stance for me. But I actually don't want him to run because I think he's way too. divisive and I don't think he's going to win. Wait, you didn't lead with the thing that you've said before in earlier a podcast,

which is that people are too old. Well, he is too old too. But like, that's actually... Headline idea of Kate Nibbs and damage control. No, but like, if he had a viable chance in my mind, I would put my ageism aside and support him. It's just that I don't think he really has a chance. I think he should just be throwing his support behind someone with a better chance.

That's what I think. I know that people might disagree with me for sure, but that's what I think. And so one of the things sort of since like Kamala Harris announced, I've noticed that people are pretty fired up about her one way or the other. There's been a lot of talk about where, you know, people have been criticizing her. I think that there's a lot of legitimate reasons to criticize her background. If you're a progressive, she doesn't have a particular. particularly progressive background at all.

But then other people are sort of saying, why are you, like, scrutinizing this female POC candidate, like, give her a break, basically? Yeah. There's a lot going on. It's funny because I remember the 2008 presidential election. And that was, man, like, I'm remembering who ran, and it was obviously Obama, Clinton. Edwards. Edwards, Bill Richardson.

Like, that was one of the few... It's like, okay, 1988 Democratic primary is like Jesse Jackson versus Michael Dukakis. And like, that's a big moment in terms of like black participation in the primary process. But 2008 is like the first primary for like either party that I think of as like aspirationally diverse. But coincidentally, like a lot of the conversations during the 2008 primary were fucked. They were bad. They were, like, I remember the early stuff that no one talks about anymore. Think about it.

This is like Obama running versus Clinton. And I think a lot of the early conversations about Obama are also the early conversations about Kamala Harris, where it's like you have half of the people in the room being like, okay, this is the candidate for the black people, right? Barack Obama, because that's just how black people were because they just vote for the black guy. But then the other half of Commentariat was like, is this guy black enough? Like, he's kind of a dweeb, he's a law professor. And I just remember these super vapid, problematic conversations that never really knew how to engage with Barack Obama being a black candidate. And what that meant for his appeal to black people and other people. And the same with Hillary Clinton being a powerful woman.

And media never really knowing how to talk. talk about that without being like vaguely offensive or condescending about it. And I think because of the diversity of the 2020 field for the Democrats, it feels like the 2008 election on crack cocaine. It just feels like we're two weeks into it. And I've seen articles where people are just sort of like they're essentializing Kamala Harris to the point of both she's not necessarily black enough, but all. also, like, she's the black lady and I don't care if she's secretly a Republican.

Like, I just really need a black woman to be the person to beat Trump. And it's just like the most reductive, essentializing, infuriating framing for a lot of these candidacies. Like, people are theorizing about who is going to fuck with Kamala Harris or not based entirely on the fact that she's the black lady. And I feel like that's happening with a lot of these candidates already. I think, like, Kirsten Gillibrand is the white mom lady. And, like, that's all really the media has to work with in terms of, like, characterizing her. And that feels condescending to me. Same with Klobuchar, but she is also a prosecutor.

So I think that, like, Stan culture has infiltrated politics in a really destructive way. And it's sort of making these conversations worse. So, like, this columnist for Teen Vogue was saying, I don't give a shit if Camilla Harris is a prosecutor. Like, she should, she's going to prosecute Trump all the way to prison or something like that. That's amazing. That's amazing. That's good.

That person should be a speechwriter. Yeah. And I was like, this is what it looks like when you sort of treat your politicians like superheroes instead of actually looking at what their policies will be. Right. She's going to prosecute his ass all the way. To where? Did she say Guantanamo?

I don't remember. I don't know. But that was the gist. And like, I wonder if we're going to have an opportunity to have a reasonable conversation about the candidates or it's just going to go straight to mayhem. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think Kamala Harris has it worse than the rest because she is both black and a woman. Whereas, like, you know, Jellibrand is a white lady because of black dude.

Like, I almost feel like the 2020 election is going to veer into being a legit parody of what conservatives mean when they say identity politics and scare quotes. Yeah. Right. And I think the Democratic Party could or at least ideally should do better than that. But I don't know. I'm not confident. Or if not the Democratic Party even, if not the candidates themselves, just like the media that have to cover them and the activists who have to interact with these campaigns. But I really do think that, like, that's not going to happen.

Yeah, I don't think so either. Because I want to be able to, like, have critical conversations about Kamala Harris without that defensiveness of... Why are you tearing down the black woman candidate? Right. Yeah, I don't know. I've been sort of mulling it over because I wrote something in 2016 that ended up involving Kamala Harris when she was the... the attorney in Cali. Right, because she's only been a senator for two years.

Yeah. She'll also stress that. She was recently an attorney general. So that's when she sort of, I started looking into her. And what was the piece that you were writing? It was about backpage.com. So she was really instrumental in arresting the founders. She charged them with pimping.

And she's sort of, she, a lot of people in like the sex industries are very, very critical of her because a lot of the things that she did as attorney general and as a prosecutor have been very hostile to sex workers. So I've always thought of her as like really a centrist. I don't think she's progressive at all. I was shocked when she said, made those comments about health care because I didn't expect that coming from her because I've always really seen her as like a Democrat, like an establishment Democrat. Right. Yeah.

And anyways, I don't really share a lot of her politics, but if she's going to be the candidate, I am hesitant to like enter into a conversation being too critical of her. I don't, and I don't know if that's just because I'm like really, really scared of Trump winning to the point where I'm pulling back too much. It's just a weird position to be in. I think it's twofold. I think it's like people who are afraid of Trump winning because Trump is the, the Armageddon for a lot of people.

I think the other part of it, though, is that 2016 was so about that. It was so about having these really bruising, like, fuck Bernie, fuck Hillary. Like, it was so that. It was so all about, like, the Democrats eating each other alive. Yeah. That I think that definitely is informing why a lot of people have entered this with a sense of, like, I don't care if this person is like Woodrow Wilson conservative. Like, I just want to win.

I don't want to relive 2016 where the Democratic Party had an existential crisis on stage for two years. And I get that. But I don't know. I think my basic instinct is that I feel like this cuts against some conventional wisdom. But I think these things are good. I think, I don't know. I think competitive primaries are good. I think they often look ugly, but it's like, I also don't think that the ugliness necessarily has anything to do with like whether the nominee that comes out of that process is going to win or not.

Like, you know what looked really ugly was the 2016 Republican presidential primary and the Republicans won. Yeah. Oh my God. You know what looked really ugly? The 2008 Democratic presidential primary and then the Democrats won. I don't think it's necessarily prohibitively bad for there to be a really competitive primary where people's heads are maybe a little bit too hot. But I at least want to think that if we're going to be hot-headed about stuff,

it's going to be about public policy and about like the new direction of the Democratic Party and not about like these weird racial and like gender caricatures of these action-figured like politicians who are way too old by the way to be treating like their fucking Pokemon and throwing them at each other over trivial shit. You've just like really cheered me up. I feel a lot better about politics.

You feel better about American politics. Not about media. But yeah, that is a, I think, I would like to believe that. You've made a compelling argument. And honestly, even if you're completely wrong, this is still probably the most psychologically healthy thought process to have about it. So when are you announcing your candidacy?

Well, you know, I've been talking with family in recent days. And, you know, I think I'm going to form a fundraising committee. You feel free to contribute. That'll influence my decision, et cetera, et cetera. No, whatever. Forget running. Like our aspiration is damage control in 2019, 2020 should be to host a presidential debate. That's a, boom, that's a goal.

That's achievable. Kamala Harris, come on damage control. Yeah, but also like CNN, you know, ringer partnership. Just putting it out into the universe, seeing what comes back. All right, so we might be hosting a presidential debate this year, but in the meantime, we're hosting damage control. I'm Justin Charity. I'm Kate Nibbs. Thanks for listening.

We'll be back in two weeks.