Your questions on crisis communication answered.

Commical – Episode title: Your questions on crisis communication answered

Published 01/04/2020 on Chasing Albert website, spotify and apple podcasts.

Marie 00:00
And now, it's Commical by Chasing Albert.

Marie 00:03
John, Oprah, Steve Jobs, Andrew Denton — to me, these guys are masters of communication. The rest of us — well, mainly you, because I'm a pro — fumble our way through. Commical examines this funny little thing called communication that can either tear us down or make us soar. Join me. I'm an amateur comedian and a communication expert. Join me and listen, learn and laugh through the experiences of my very talented guests. I've chosen Alistair Nicholas for my first ever episode of Commical. He is one of the most respected public affairs and government relations experts in the country, and he is also my former colleague. If we were still working together right now, I'd probably be in his office picking his brain as he patiently schools me on all things government affairs. Alistair is an Australia-based international business consultant specialising in government relations, corporate and public affairs, public relations, issues and crisis management, and international trade and investment. Stay tuned to hear our discussion on whether you can even plan for a crisis like COVID-19, and my feeble attempt to get some political gossip.

Marie 01:13
Welcome, Alistair.

Guest 01:15
Thank you, Marie. Glad to be here.

Marie 01:18
So glad to have you on my little show. And I have to tell you, I really miss our chats in your office where you would educate me on all things politics.

Guest 01:29
Oh, I'm pretty sure I wasn't really educating you, but there were great chats that we used to have.

Marie 01:35
No, you really were educating me. So I'm really looking forward to having something intelligent to say to my friends and my husband after our conversation.

Guest 01:43
Well, I hope I'll be able to say something intelligent that you can take back and share.

Marie 01:50
Oh, Alistair, please. You're the man when it comes to these kinds of things. Now, the first thing I wanted to ask you, first and foremost, is: why is ScoMo killing us in slow-mo?

Guest 02:04
Well, I think the issue really comes down to the fact that, possibly because this is so new and no one really knows how this virus is working and what to do, the approach that they're taking to it seems to change day by day, if not hour by hour. And that's a problem when you're dealing with a crisis. When you're in a crisis situation and you're the boss, people are looking to you for leadership. They're looking to you for answers. And if you're wavering and changing your mind and going in different directions, that isn't instilling a lot of confidence in the people that are looking to you for that confidence. And so that, I think, has been part of the problem: there hasn't been strong leadership, there hasn't been decisive action. Things have been changed piecemeal. Every couple of days, we have a new change to what we are allowed to do and not allowed to do. There's confused communication around it. There isn't a clear thing of, okay, this is what's in, this is what's out, so we actually know where we're standing. And then suddenly, because that communication hasn't been clear, they wake up one morning and suddenly realise it's a sunny day and everyone's gone to Bondi Beach, which is the last thing they want them to do. So you've got to have clear communication during a crisis, clear leadership. The other thing that strikes me with this, given that the coronavirus, yes, it's new, but we've already seen the experience of what happened in China. There was an outbreak in South Korea, in Singapore, in Taiwan, and these countries managed it very well by taking decisive action, by deciding they were going to lock it down pretty quickly. They were going to try to stop it, not just slow it down. And we saw what happened there, and we also saw the Italian experience, where they started to deal with it in a piecemeal way and it really started to get away from them. And for some reason, we didn't make that operational decision that, let's lock it down now. Let's tell everyone, go home, shut the door, shut the windows, stay in your houses, don't come out. We're going to get a handle on this. And it's just continued to grow and move in its own direction. And every day we've had to have a new thing come out. Jacinda Ardern, by comparison, in New Zealand, said, 'Nope. This isn't about flattening the curve. We're just going to stop this. Everyone go home.' And she ordered every New Zealander to go home to fix it. And they listened. They had a clear direction. They knew what to do. They did it. So I think that's why he's killing us in slow motion, to use the term you've just put forward. No, it's your term, not mine.

Marie 05:09
So do you think then, because one of the ways that leaders get or project or share mixed messages is when they actually really don't know what they're doing or what the situation is about, so it's not really a communication issue, first and foremost, it's an operational one, where they quite simply don't have a plan yet. Is that the case here? Do you think the plan just isn't in place and they're just not agreeing on what's right to do here?

Guest 05:37
I think there's possibly two things here. I think, yes, definitely, the plan hasn't been in place. And it's not just Australia. I think, if you look at the US, where you've got a massive disaster unfolding, there has not been a clear plan in place. And part of the reason for that is there have been far too many cooks in the kitchen. There are experts that need to be listened to, the health experts. I've had the sense that our health experts don't seem to know what they're doing, given that they're changing their minds almost on a daily basis and giving us a new direction. And all, we've got to do something new today because the curve isn't flattening. Things are continuing to move at a speed that we don't want it to move at. But also, I think partly because of our federal system, you've got the Prime Minister who's trying to lead the states, and the states are taking a different view of it. Some states seem to want to go into complete lockdown straight away, wanted to close their own borders quickly. There hasn't been a lot of coordination, is my sense. So just towards the end of last week, we had the Prime Minister announce that any Australians returning to the country from overseas would have to go into two weeks' quarantine at the port of entry. So if you are from Queensland, but the port of entry back into Australia is Melbourne, you go into quarantine for two weeks in Melbourne, but the Queenslanders didn't seem to get the memo, and so when you arrive in Queensland, you're going to have to do another two weeks of quarantine. By the end of four weeks of quarantine, you're going to be pretty sure you haven't got COVID-19.

Marie 07:19
So you will have cabin fever.

Guest 07:22
You will definitely have cabin fever, as we know. And if you look at the case in the US, you've got Donald Trump, who's saying, 'I'm very worried about the economy. We can't keep the economy shut down for much longer. We've got to get people back to work by Easter,' and then you've got state governors running around saying, 'My state is falling apart. People are dying. You can't have us back at work by Easter,' and his chief medical officer coming out and undermining and criticising him. Fortunately, he's done a backdown on that over the weekend. But this was the crazy sort of situation. You've got mixed messages coming out, you haven't got leadership, you haven't got coordination at the top, and people really don't seem to know what they're doing. Now China, and for all the flaws that China has as an authoritarian country, when they finally said there is a problem — and yes, they did screw this up at the very beginning by not admitting there's a problem, by trying to cover it up — but when they decided there is a problem, we have to deal with it, they dealt with it quickly, severely, and they locked up 60 million people, said, stay in your apartment, and they locked them up for six to eight weeks. And now they're letting them out again, because the virus is under control in China. The big fear they have now is it's coming back in from the Western countries that haven't taken the same sort of action that they did.

Marie 08:48
So why is it, then, that we can't get our act together?

Guest 08:52
I think it's probably a few things. I think one is that there was probably a degree of complacency with regard to the virus, and complacency in two ways. For decades, we have been getting told by the experts that there is a major pandemic on the way. We've been hearing about a superbug is going to come, the impact that superbug is going to have if we're not ready for it. Well, guess what? The superbug is here, and we aren't ready for it. We haven't listened to the experts over the last 50 or 60 years when they've been warning us. There have been warning signs just over the last 10 to 20 years. In 2002, when I lived in China, we had the SARS outbreak. In 2009, we had the swine flu outbreak. We've had several bird flu outbreaks. We've had MERS. All of these things have been warnings of a pandemic coming, and we were lucky that none of those were the pandemic. And I think people got very complacent about it. We got on top of those ones pretty quickly, so we didn't have to worry about that. The thing is, this one is very different, because this one really latches on to the human body, if you like, latches onto cells and really stays in there, whereas those other ones tended to move a little bit more slowly than this one is moving, and also the mortality rate of this one is higher than the mortality rate of those other ones. If you just want to think about Hollywood, we've had several movies about various outbreaks. Contagion with Matt Damon came out in 2011. Sit down and watch that if you've got nothing to do while you're currently locked up in your house. It's a real eye-opener. Why didn't people take notice of that? Why didn't they do the preparations for it at the time? The second thing is, again, I think it's then about the leadership not knowing what to do. And one of the things — and I've done a lot of crisis drills — when I do crisis drills for companies, I usually throw the whole thing at them. I throw the kitchen sink at them, and they might say, 'Well, why are you throwing the kitchen sink at me? That would never happen.' And I say, 'Well, in this world of the crisis drill, it is happening. It's happening right here, right now. You've got to deal with it.' And so they deal with a very extreme situation I've given them. So if you even look back to our bushfires of the last summer that we had, again, we saw some pretty poor coordination amongst the states and the federal government in terms of dealing with it, and it took them a little while to get their act together. And that was a problem with the leadership at the top. And again, I was thinking, this is because they've never really done a crisis management drill of a worst-case-scenario fire. They've probably done fire drills of several fires in the state. How are we going to handle them? Handling them at the same time? What do we do? You put the fires out. They had never thought about a fire on the scale that we saw during the summer, where the whole of the East Coast was burning, and there was no thinking about how to deal with that, no thinking about coordination between states other than if there was a fire just running across state borders. But this was much more massive and needed a lot more resources. So there is a need to do those drills, to think about what might happen, what might you face. In the current coronavirus crisis, my sense is that no one has done a drill at the federal and state levels coordinating all of the resources of the federal government and the states in a fast-moving pandemic situation like we're facing right now.

Marie 12:49
Yeah, yeah. And what about the investment in the development of key relationships? When something like this happens, you're suddenly having to depend upon and trust people that you may not have had to do so with before. Are they developing relationships on the fly here? What happens when you're having to deal with people that you've never actually spent time getting to know?

Guest 13:15
That's exactly the sort of situation where you don't want to be developing the relationships. You want to have them before you're going into a crisis. And the signs of that are pretty obvious if you think about the fires again back during the summer. There was the situation where an announcement was made by the Prime Minister that he was mobilising the military and the reserves to support the fire brigades. And the New South Wales Fire Chief said that was the first he'd heard of it, when he heard it on the radio that morning. So obviously there was no relationship there. There was no communication. Maybe the Prime Minister told the Premier of New South Wales he was doing that, but you had that situation where the chief of the New South Wales Rural Fire Brigade was saying, 'Well, no one spoke to me about this. Glad to have the resources coming in, but there should have been a little bit of communication.' Again, if you do the types of drills and you do them properly, and you think about, well, who should we have relationships with — and I'm not suggesting that the Prime Minister knows every fire chief in the country — but the Prime Minister has people who work for him who should have those relationships. So when the message cascades down, this is what we're doing, this is the decision that we've taken, they're calling up their counterparts and saying, 'Okay, we're going to give you these resources. We're coming in to help in this way,' whatever it is. You think about a war situation. Could you imagine if Australian troops are going into Afghanistan and we're not talking to our American counterparts? You'd have a disaster in the making. Well, it's the same sort of situation, and we've got to have those conversations early, build the relationships before the crisis, so you actually have them when you need to call on them.

Marie 15:08
And in this whole coronavirus situation, as you said, it changes every hour and every day there's something new now. Is it necessary to communicate? I mean, I know in a crisis it's important to communicate early, but what if what you're communicating may be completely irrelevant in an hour's time? Is it better to say nothing at all?

Guest 15:29
I think it's probably better to say clearly — and I think some of this is starting to come out now — that we are dealing with a virus we don't really understand. It's only been around for three months. We're starting to come to understand it, where modern science and technology is helping us to understand it far faster than would have been the case 20 years ago. But there's still a lot about it we don't understand. What we understand today suggests that we need to do this. If we find out something different in two days' time, we will change our approach on it. And one of the things that I want to reference in that: very early in this crisis, we were being told that it's not going to have much of an impact on young people. Kids won't get it. And just in the last week, we've seen cases of, I think, a 10-year-old getting it, a baby getting it, a two-year-old getting it. We've seen young people get it. Young people have had to be put into ICUs and on breathing apparatuses. And I'm aware of at least one case of a 21-year-old with no underlying health issues dying from it in the UK. These are things that we've only started to learn recently. So we need to say, well, we've just found that actually young people do get it — maybe not as easily as the elderly, young people who die maybe not as easily as the elderly — but it does happen. So we have to be aware of this, and that's why we need young people to also take notice of the messages around social distancing, apart from the fact that they also don't want to kill Grandma.

Marie 17:20
Yeah, but even that — look, if I'm to be completely honest, I think I was pretty late to the party. I was doing a stand-up comedy night, I reckon, about three weeks ago. Someone said to me, 'Do you really want to be sharing mics with people in the middle of the coronavirus?' And I said, 'I'd love to go viral.' My opening joke was about, 'Haha, yeah, of course I want to be here. I've always wanted to go viral.' And now I look back and think, great joke, but what an idiot — you should have stayed home. But I didn't fully understand. We had a packed room. I don't think anybody fully understood at that point just how quickly this thing was spreading and that anybody could be carrying it without knowing.

Guest 18:09
Absolutely — anybody. And I'll tell you, when it was starting out in January and February, my wife and I were travelling around Southeast Asia. We were in Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand — excuse me, I don't have it, I'm just getting...

Marie 18:25
Don't give me a computer virus, Alistair.

Guest 18:30
That's right. And Thailand. And we came back and, because when we were travelling around that part of the world, we kept hearing the news about how bad things were getting in China and the lockdown in Hubei province, et cetera, and we kept running into lots of Chinese tourists everywhere we went. So we'd go to theatre shows, and we'd be packed in like sardines with Chinese tourists around us. And so we got back and my wife and I were talking, and we said, 'Oh, we better not go and see her father or my mother, because if we did pick it up and maybe we're asymptomatic and we gave it to them, the consequences are going to be huge.' And then we said, 'Well, hang on, if we wouldn't go and see them, why would we go and see anyone else? Shouldn't we just lock ourselves up at home for two weeks?' And we did. But I had a whole lot of friends who were just saying, 'Come on, you're being ridiculous. You weren't even in China. You were in these other countries.' I was trying to explain to them, but there were Chinese tourists who had come out of China, and I was shoulder to shoulder with them. Suppose I was asymptomatic.

Marie 19:36
Yeah, but that was a decision that you and your wife took. What were the guidelines from our government at the time?

Guest 19:43
Oh, there were none. At the time, when we came back, no one was saying we needed to be in quarantine. The view was that if you hadn't been in contact with someone who had already been tested and diagnosed, there was no need to go into self-quarantine. We made the decision ourselves.

Marie 20:08
Yeah, and I find that's what's happening with a lot of parents in this whole situation: do I take my kid to school, or do I not take my kid to school? Because the guidelines have been loose. You know, school's fine, but if you're a teacher over 60, actually maybe don't go. And actually, you know what, maybe it's best if you stay home unless your job is an essential service — like you're a hairdresser. It's just so confusing. This is why I think people are coming up with their own versions of what's the best thing to do.

Guest 20:43
Yeah. Well, when you get conflicting messages, you don't know what to do, you're confused, and then you start to think about, what will I do? What should I do? Where's the real guideline? So young people decide it's okay to go to the beach because they're letting kids go to school. Why is it okay for kids to go to school and then, okay, you're saying we're going to keep your kids away from the grandparents? What happens if the kids pass something to their parents and the parents go to visit their grandparents? So right now, my situation: I have a daughter who's just returned from Central America staying with us in quarantine, but she only arrived last week. Should I go and see my mother at the moment? I think I shouldn't. My daughter could pick it up, and then I take it to my mother. It's crazy, and the directions aren't that clear. Why do you let kids go to school if kids are likely to become the super-spreaders of it? And you know, you've got little kids, I've been through it. You know that every bug you get in the house has come back from school with them. And the fact that we now have a 10-year-old and the two-year-old and the baby in Australia who have got it suggests that, well, they do get it. So why would you continue to take the risk of having them go to school?

Marie 22:09
Alistair, explain this to me, right? So the guidelines are national guidelines, and even the states are expected to follow those guidelines. Is that correct?

Guest 22:18
That's correct, and the states can go beyond the federal government's guidelines as well. So they have to follow the federal government's guidelines, but they can go beyond it at the state level.

Marie 22:30
So if they're pretty much following the same guidelines that are coming from a federal level, then I find it interesting that the premiers are doing a better job of communicating with Australians than the Prime Minister is. I find Daniel Andrews is being quite clear when he's communicating, and I think Gladys Berejiklian has been too — much better than ScoMo, anyway. Would you agree with that?

Guest 22:56
I would agree that the state leaders are doing a much better job of communicating. I've been watching the news all day, every day, and every time a premier comes on, I've tuned in a bit to see what they're saying. And I think almost without exception — I can't think of anyone that has been an exception, even Tasmania's Premier, the Chief Minister of the Northern Territory — they've all been on TV and communicating what they're doing. And interestingly, all of these premiers have gone a little bit further than the federal government requirements and things that the federal government said are not necessarily necessary. They've gone that extra step, and they've communicated it very well. They've come out, they've been very clear. And one of the interesting things, I think, with the state leaders is they haven't come out and contradicted themselves a day later. You haven't had Gladys saying, 'I'm going to the opera tonight. No, no, I've changed my mind. No one should be going to the opera.' I assume Gladys doesn't go to the footy.

Marie 24:08
But this is the thing I'm trying to understand: is it because the state leaders are better communicators as individuals, or is it because they are better prepared? They have better teams around them, from a PR and a communication point of view?

Guest 24:26
Standing on the outside looking in, that's a little bit hard to say. You would think that Scotty from marketing would be pretty good at communicating, but I do think it's probably a little bit of their own personalities in it. But, you know, who would have thought that Daniel Andrews would be a great communicator? He just looks too dorky, but he is doing a brilliant job of communicating and getting across the messages that he wants to about what the state is doing. And this is, I think, one of the things about a crisis situation: it presents an opportunity for true leaders to rise to the occasion. And you may have looked at a Daniel Andrews previously and thought, okay, he's a good administrator. He's managing the state. It's running all right. It's doing okay. Maybe even Gladys. But in this sort of occasion, you see them rise and come to the fore and really communicate well, really demonstrate their leadership abilities. And that's where you really see it. And also, looking across at the US, looking at someone like Donald Trump and the mixed messages that he's giving, you know, the guy started out by calling this virus a hoax of his political enemies, that it wasn't real, there was nothing worse than the flu, they didn't need to worry. He always delivers, doesn't he? He always delivers. He's the smartest president they've ever had. He's a genius. That's what the J — and that's what the initial J is in his name — the genius. But then you look at someone like Governor Cuomo of New York, and he has really risen to the occasion. And I heard a commentator the other day saying he is having a Rudy Giuliani moment. And if you remember 9/11, and Rudy coming out, and the leadership he demonstrated, you're now seeing that from Cuomo, and it gives me the impression that Cuomo is a potential candidate for president down the track.

Marie 26:33
What did you think of, just speaking of rising to the occasion — and it has nothing to do with the coronavirus, but it does have everything to do with the bushfires — I thought that Andrew Constance really rose to the occasion as far as leadership is concerned.

Guest 26:45
Yeah, I think Constance did. I think he was very good. He was out there. The fact that his electorate was one of the worst impacted in the state of New South Wales may have been a factor in that. But he was very good. He was out there. He was communicating. And Marie, we would expect nothing less, as he used to work for Weber Shandwick.

Marie 27:12
No, he didn't.

Guest 27:13
Yes, he did. Back in the day, Constance was an employee of Weber Shandwick.

Marie 27:18
Well, do you want to hear something really funny? I used to work with him at another agency called August One, right? Which is how I came to know him. But what I really loved about seeing him step up was the change in him from being transport minister to being a real human who cared about the community and just being so open and disclosing so openly what he was going through and what his electorate was going through and what he truly felt was required to help his community recover. And it felt like he dropped all of that kind of rehearsed facade, if you will, and just showed us who he really was.

Guest 27:57
And isn't that one of the key things to leadership and communication: to be able to really connect with people, to be able to speak to them as an equal, to empathise with them, to demonstrate that you actually care about personal situations? And if you're just doing the comparison again with the fires, you had the situation where the Prime Minister — and who knows what are the real details of what happened there — but he was on holidays in Hawaii. It was almost denied by his office that he was actually on holidays in Hawaii, and he finally had to come back. And there was the sense that he wasn't really of the people. He wasn't really connected. He wasn't feeling any of the pain that they were, to the extent that he was walking through an affected area, went to shake someone's hand, and she pulled her hand away and refused to shake his hand. I wonder if that would be the same now. I get a better sense now that he is with us. He is trying to be part of the community that is affected by this. The problem here is that disconnect and lack of coordination and communication and decisiveness on how we're going to handle this.

Marie 29:24
If I'm a business owner or a senior business leader listening to this right now, and there's something that's always been niggling in the back of my head — and we always tell our clients, you've got to be prepared for that one thing that keeps you up at night, even though you think it may never come — what's your advice to them?

Guest 29:41
My advice to them is: if there is that one thing that does keep them up at night, even if they think it's never going to come, assume the worst. Assume it will come, and figure out how you're going to deal with it. And that means start to pull your best people together, bring in some good consultants who know what they're doing, sit down, have the conversation of, you know, here's my worst nightmare. Ask them to come up with the type of strategy and plans you need to be able to manage that situation, and then they've really got to test what they've come up with. And you can only do that through a realistic live scenario drill where you bring in the experts, you bring in your team, and they throw everything at you, and you've got to deal with it in real time so they can see where the holes are, and how do you then start to plug those holes and improve the plan. And I think the one thing that these business owners or business leaders need to remember is how hard they work and their teams work to build a brand and build a company, and just how quickly a serious crisis can bring it all crashing down. Absolutely. And that is the one thing that can totally destroy a reputation overnight. If you just think about this particular case, China has massive reputational damage from it, and it is going to take China a long time to rebuild that. China's other problems aside, and whatever people think about China and its authoritarian system of government, the fact that this crisis happened after they should have learned a lesson with SARS in 2002, 2003 — for this to recur, for them to have tried to cover it up — has really done huge reputational damage, and China is going to have to work very hard to rebuild that in the future. I think they're going to do it. I saw the other day that they've outlawed the wet markets that are thought to be the cause of this. They've introduced an app so people can report any wet markets or trade in wildlife, so that the authorities can start to crack down on it. And that's the first thing that they've really got to start to do. They're on the way to doing that, but it's going to be a long, hard road for them to do. But I'm pretty sure there is no way any Chinese leader wants a recurrence of this again. They are going to try to really lock the economy down so it doesn't happen.

Marie 32:17
Well, it's interesting to watch and see how that plays out.

Guest 32:20
Absolutely. And for all of our sakes, let's hope that it does play out well. The other lesson from this — and this is a lesson for Western governments — this will not be the last pandemic the world is going to experience. There are going to be others. We've been warned about it by all the experts for a long time. This really needs to be taken as a lesson, and we need to start preparing for the next one. And it's not going to be, you know, this one, you can say, was 100 years after the Spanish Flu of 1917. The next one's not going to be 100 years. It's going to be 10 or 20 years, because of globalisation, because of modern transport connections, the fact that we all fly everywhere in the world. It's going to move very quickly, and we need to be ready for the next one.

Marie 33:11
Alistair, there's got to be some gossip flying around in the political world right now. Is there anything you want to share with us? Well, anything that you're able to share.

Guest 33:23
Well, able to share and want to share may be two different things. That's a very important distinction. But one, as you know, I'm not one for the water cooler gossip around the place. But secondly, I think everyone is in the bunker at the moment, at the state political level, also at the federal political level. There's no time for them to be gossiping. They're all working pretty damn hard to fix this. And that's something I think that's important that we do finish on. While we can be very cynical and sceptical of our political leaders, I know for a fact they're all working pretty hard, pretty much around the clock. I know staffers who are working for key ministers involved in this. Many of them are getting three, four, or maybe, if they're lucky, five hours' sleep a night. They are working around the clock. And I think the one thing we should do — well, we can joke and be critical of them — we need to respect the fact that they do put Australia first, and they are working very hard to try to solve this problem.

Marie 34:31
All right, fine, I'm happy.

Guest 34:35
I'll save the gossip for when we can meet in person.

Marie 34:45
Yeah, yeah. I've created a little studio in my spare room at the moment because my office is incomplete, yeah? And honestly, I've had to lay out towels on the floor to try to reduce the echo because it's not a carpeted room. So I'm also working hard to get through this crisis, Alistair.

Guest 35:07
Yes. Well, I was interested in finding out today that Zoom has some sort of feature where you can change the background when you're on a video call. I'm going to have to look into that for next time I'm on a client call.

Marie 35:20
Well, let me know how you go with that. I haven't figured out Zoom as yet, yeah.

Guest 35:24
Neither have I, but that feature sounds very attractive if you could see the room I'm sitting in, with boxes piled up behind me.

Marie 35:32
Yeah, that's true. Well, maybe that's something we can work on together while we're in lockdown.

Guest 35:37
Absolutely. Deal.

Marie 35:39
Thanks so much, Alistair. As always, so interesting and fun to speak to.

Guest 35:45
Likewise. Always enjoyable to talk to you. And I can't wait till we're out of lockdown and we can actually meet in person for a coffee or something.

Marie 35:55
Amen, my friend. Okay, you take care. Bye, Alistair. Thanks again.

Marie 36:05
That's Commical for this week. If you'd like to join the show, suggest a topic or ask me a question, hit me up on Instagram at Marie D'Agostino, or email me at comicalpodcast@gmail.com. Thanks so much for listening. See you.