Spieckerman Speaks Retail
Spieckerman Speaks Retail
Consumer Primacy and the Work Shop Shift: A Conversation with Joe Brady
In this episode of Spieckerman Speaks Retail, Carol Spieckerman sits down with Joe Brady, commercial real estate guru and author of "Work. Shop. The Consumer-Driven Transformation of Commercial Real Estate."
Joe unpacks how the concepts of "work" and "shop" have shape-shifted from nouns to verbs, driven by technology and changing consumer behaviors. From the rise of omnichannel retail to the tectonic shifts in work culture post-pandemic, Joe offers a fresh perspective on how these and other transformations are reshaping our physical spaces, leadership styles, and business processes.
Joe and Carol dive into the realities of consumer primacy and how retailers are balancing customer empowerment with behavior-shaping technologies. They explore the delicate dance between giving customers everything they want and nudging them towards mutually beneficial choices.
Key Takeaways:
- Why the office sector is having a “retail moment” (and it’s long overdue).
- How the recent wave of return-to-work mandates might backfire.
- Why effectiveness beats productivity in the conceptual economy.
- How "sick buildings" could drive more sustainable spaces.
If you’re curious about the future of work and shopping, this episode is packed with insights that'll have you seeing built environments in a whole new light.
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CAROL SPIECKERMAN
Joe, it's so great to have you on the show. Thanks for coming.
JOE BRADY
Thank you, Carol. It's great to be here with you.
CAROL
I think a really great place to start is the main title of the book Which is just two words “Work. Shop.” But when I got into the book, I realized those two words speak volumes about how work and retail have transformed over time.
And I think they're just a great way to encapsulate so many of the points that you made in the book about those evolutions. So can you tell me more about what inspired the title and the story behind it?
JOE
Yes. Over the last 10 to 15 years had a front row seat to see how retail expanded from simply brick and mortar stores to omnichannel. And really, all of that was driven by technology. The iPhone came out in 2007 and since that time, we've learned to vote with our wallets with agency, autonomy and optionality. The notion of shop, migrated from a noun, a physical place where you went, brick and mortar, to a verb.
It was a thing we did. You would shop either physically in a store or online, whether it was on a laptop or a cell phone. The work part really emerged through the pandemic when I was working for a company called The Instant Group, which is the Airbnb of flexible office spaces. And it really dawned on me that I had seen this movie –
that work was likewise going through a very similar metamorphosis. If I said, Carol, “I'm going to work” you would automatically assume I'm going to an office. But because the pandemic created this tectonic shift in how we behave and because technology was continuing to accelerate, it became evident to me that “work” likewise was going from a noun to a verb, from a place we went to a thing we did, irrespective of place. So that's where Work Shop came from.
CAROL
I love that. And the way that you explain how that happened which is driven by technology to where working and shopping can happen anywhere somebody wants it to happen. And I also love agency, autonomy, and optionality. How technology has ushered those in, and it's just been such a game changer for how we look at both, but what seems a little regressive right now in light of all that is, everybody learned how to work independently. They had that autonomy through COVID. And I think it worked pretty well for some companies, but now you've got some of these major guys out there, Walmart, Dell, and even Amazon wanting to turn “work” back into a noun as part of this return-to-office movement. And I also love a point that you make in the book, which is that the language that's used around this implies that people aren't working unless they are at a literal place of work.
There are rationales all over the place why they're doing this. They say it's about fostering culture and collaboration. What's your take on what's happening here? Why are they doing this? Is it a good thing? Is it a bad thing?
JOE
When you have mandates you have a problem. My whole thesis is that the commercial real estate industry has been upended by consumer primacy. The consumer really is in charge. We saw this in retail and I argue that employees are the new consumers. And so if you mandate them to come back to the office five days a week, you will have an equal and opposite reaction.
There's a concept called reactance. If you are an adult and you're being treated like a child, and if you feel like you're having your rights infringed upon in how you work, even though you've been productive and effective over the last two, three years, there's definitely a backlash and companies have seen that. Amazon tried three days a week and they weren't able to police it. Now they've gone to five days a week. There is a divide between hardware and software. Amazon has $50 billion worth of hardware, meaning real estate so they're forcing the software, the people, into the real estate that they have.
So, there can be a sunk cost bias. “We have it and therefore we better use it.” You know, it wasn't that long ago, Carol, that we saw the huge circus that was Amazon’s HQ2 and I think they only sent an RFP out to about 10 or 12 different cities and almost 300 municipalities. Saying, “Hey, you know, small town Alabama? We'll change our name to “Amazon, Alabama” if you put HQ 2 here, right? I mean, it was a complete circus. So, I think what's happening is you have a frequency imbalance because commercial real estate operates basically on a 10 year frequency, on a 10 year lease. And, because technology has accelerated, so many different businesses we're seeing the tenants that go into office real estate and we're also seeing this on the retail side but we're seeing those tenants by and large being dramatically impacted by their business, which is changing on a quarterly basis you know, every six months or so. So, it's becoming very difficult for some businesses to sign a 10 year lease when they don't know what their business is going to be in three years. That's why I say there's a hardware versus a software problem and where the future of work needs to focus on the workplace experience, which, by the way does sometimes involve an office. I'm by no means saying that this does not include a physical office. Offices are great if they're designed properly, if they're in the right locations, and if they're curated. Post-pandemic, there is a higher need for corporates to create experiences for employees coming back into the office. There's a phrase that we heard during the pandemic doing research that “Onsite is the new offsite” and thinking about it that way, thinking about the fact that if we're going to get a whole group of people together, to collaborate, to engage, or even just to spend time, well, let's give them plenty of space to do that.
Let's also have some other areas of purposeful presence. Let's have the right meetings, the right social events, and it will take more than just opening an office and expecting people to show up there. Because if you think about it, what we did after World War II is evolve the office building and office space in a very similar fashion to the factory. Why do we work Monday through Friday 9 to 5? We're in this conceptual age now that requires thoughts and engagement and we all have laptops and we're untethered. So does it make sense to be in an office five days a week? Maybe for some, but not necessarily for all. I make the argument that hybrid work is the flip side of the coin of omni channel retail. We know that e commerce represents somewhere between 16 and 20 percent of the total retail sales in the United States. Maybe hybrid work is going to represent similar number 20, 25 percent of time.
CAROL
In the book, when you say the office sector is having a retail moment, is that what you're talking about?
JOE
Yeah. We saw over 10 years ago, this notion that brick-and-mortar stores are dead. No one's ever going to go to a store and shop again. It was all this catastrophic thinking. All this click bait and none of it came to fruition. It just didn't. We started seeing quite a bit of the same thing around office as well. Everyone survived and did quite well working from home. So, we'll never have to go to an office again. It's not the case. We have to get away from this reductive thinking that there's a silver bullet and a simple answer, and we have to ask better questions. Leaders have to ask better questions of their team members. How can you best work? How can I get the most out of you both in our team and for our company? And frankly, what we saw during the pandemic and what we saw during this rise of work-from-home and increasingly, this hybrid business brought more women back into the workforce who right, wrong, or indifferent tend to be the primary caregivers. It was a godsend to have this flexibility and you could get tremendous people with great experience who weren't necessarily going to work nine to five sitting at the same time, in the same. seat at the same cubicle. But you could get people who focused on life work balance versus work life balance and have better outcomes.
CAROL
And I would think that, as competitive as recruiting has become, and now as retailers do become more technology oriented or we can even go so far as to say they are technology companies these days. They have to draw from a larger pool of talent limiting that proximity would seem to compromise that too.
JOE
That's right. But I would also say it's experiential, which is another connection point between shop and work. And we know that retailers that create a movement that really foster this connectedness thrive. Apple is a fantastic example. With every laptop or phone, you get a sticker and you see people putting Apple stickers on their cars, on their computers. People want to be part of that movement. They want to go to an Apple store. They'll wait in line overnight to get the latest release of an iPhone. We've never seen that before. And so likewise, it's no coincidence that Apple engaged the same architect, Foster and Associates out of London, to build their headquarters – the same group that builds their stores. It's beauty, it's simplicity, everything about their brand is consistent. You don't even need an owner's manual when you get an iPhone, right?
It's just intuitive. And that's part of the design. There are many businesses that aren't intuitive so I think there's some lessons to be learned from a design perspective.
CAROL
That's so interesting when you think about those intersections. You talked about workspaces and the potential evolution of workspaces and how perhaps they need to mirror the fast-paced evolution and innovation of the retail space. That is one of my favorite topics – retail spaces and brick-and-mortar and the prediction that brick and mortar was dead. And of course, nothing could have been further from the truth. I was pretty much a contrarian about that for many years. I just never bought into it, but now I see retailers being so gung ho about brick and mortar. Retailer and brands are truly excited about it. And I think one reason is because there are so many new technologies being developed. A lot of them by third parties that are promising to make in-store experience a lot better for customers. Also, to quantify all kinds of activity within stores. Retailers were very fond of saying, “Well, not everything that matters can be measured,” but now, just about everything can be.
That isn't to say that brick and mortar isn't without its challenges. But then again, you do have all this hope and promise and opportunity as all this new technology and this digital rethinking of physical retails takes place.
So I'd love to get your take on, the good, bad and ugly of physical retail spaces. Where do you see it going?
JOE
The good is that it's part of a retail ecosystem where having brick and mortar is essential for the consumer. We've seen that. We also know that Gen Z is behaving more like boomers and that they like to go into stores. They like to touch things. They like to try things on. They like that experience.
ICSC, the industry trade group, has done research and is now in the third iteration of what's called the Halo report. It's quite interesting. And it's based on credit card data of over 25, 000 credit card swipes. And what we've learned is that when a brick-and-mortar store opens in a trade area, the online sales in that trade area go up six to eight percent. And that makes sense. What's more interesting for me is that if a brick-and-mortar retailer closes a location in a trade area, online sales go down between 12 and 14%. So what that's telling you is the consumer wants to have the physical store in their trade area. There are times where they'll order a product to go to their home, but then return it to a store or they may want to order it and then go to the store and pick it up. The consumer wants to have, as I mentioned earlier, agency and autonomy and optionality, and how and where they spend their money or even how they return goods becomes very, very important,
CAROL
Yes, and it also becomes very complex. I got questions all the time in the media. “Hey, what are the options that retailers are going to settle on? This seems like it's kind of all over the place.” The answer is we're in an all-of-the above world where choice is everything and I think Walmart was probably the retailer that got that the earliest, and in a way that made the biggest impact, where they built up this huge arsenal of convenience options.
I think Walmart really understood that it was about providing all of those different options, working out the profitability later, and just making sure that shoppers didn't have any reason to jump off their platform and go shop with somebody else.
So yeah, I love that point about optionality and choice and how important that's become.
JOE
to your point, Carol and to use Walmart as the example. It was about testing and measuring and iterating and evolving. I talk about the ribbon cutting analogy in the book, and we have all been programmed to think that a ribbon cutting is the end of a process, but truly it's the beginning. Particularly if you're in a consumer centric world, you need to observe how the consumer is behaving and reacting in accordance with your changes and your offering. So what can you learn? and it's vital to be able to listen. You know, they say the consumer will tell you everything you want to hear. The question is, are you listening?
CAROL
Great point.
No conversation about retail is complete without talking about sustainability. It's just become table stakes for retailers now. But I've been saying that sustainability's entered a second act where consumers are watching and doing their research. The section on sustainability in your book is so great, because instead of treating it as sort of a dreaded subject and a box that everybody needs to check, you talk about how sustainability has such a positive impact on consumer experience, and you also bring some really eye popping statistics on how unsustainable some of these legacy buildings are, including, I'm sure, retail buildings.
So, where do you see sustainability sitting right now, Joe? Are we really going to be making any meaningful progress here? Or is it just going to always be about waiting until it's at a crisis point or waiting until it's a mandate or waiting until we get busted?
JOE
What I would say is that sustainability is not siloed anymore. It is integrated. And so sustainability makes sense and sense with a C and with an S. It makes money if done right and it makes good sense for the environment. We know that the consumer, as you said, is more educated, more focused and has done more research than ever. And so whether you're having to pay for bags or deciding to go without a bag as you're leaving a store, or whether you go to a Nike store and see reclaimed materials and feel a certain allegiance to that brand, that becomes compelling. And it's part of the connection that consumers have with brands.
When it comes to office space, we learned a really hard lesson. Most of us all became epidemiologists. Watching TV through the pandemic we started to understand Merv filters and clean air and so on and what became quite evident was that we had a lot of sick buildings. We had a lot of buildings that weren't designed. to have clean air intake at the rates that we need it which is upwards of five times an hour. Most were designed for one or two times an hour. And so this notion of sick buildings really emerged. In New York City alone, 75 percent of the office stock was built before the IBM mainframe. That's prior to 1964. It’s really difficult to retrofit those buildings and put new air handlers in and, and new filtration and so forth. It's very expensive. So, there's going to be some serious challenges, but we know as a part of attracting the consumer to a place that design is important. We know that the materials and biophilia are essential to have – living walls and plants and so forth and lots of sunlight and, and definitely having fresh air. I know some people who actually carry around small little measuring devices to understand whether they're in a safe place or not. But in a consumer centric world, it matters.
Whether you're spending your money at a store or you're making your money in and around an office whether it's the actual HQ or whether it's a satellite office or it's a flexible office space or wherever. I mean, these things are really important.
CAROL
Yes and definitely to new generations of shoppers and workers.
You said that it’s hard to retrofit these old buildings so do they need to be blown up or do you think the technology is going to catch up to a point to where it's feasible to turn them into shiny, new, healthy buildings?
JOE
That's a great question. And I think at some point we will see technology catching up. I think there will be some instances where new owners will be able to buy buildings at a low enough cost that it makes sense to put the capX in to then recycle it. Sort of that notion of creative destruction. You just have to look at the retail industry and what happened to those owners that owned B and C malls. We've seen those get reconstituted. The big movement, as you know, Carol, is this de-malling that's happening where there's more parks and green space and walkways and so forth. And frankly, more than half of the GLA (gross leasable area) is actually being converted into other uses that include either food and beverage or entertainment or multifamily or even flexible office space.
CAROL
Yeah, it's exciting. It really is. I didn't even really think about that, that a lot of these more open-air concepts are just healthier, or at least certainly perceived to be
In the book you touched on this idea of consumer primacy. In fact, it's kind of a handle for the book throughout. And I love that concept because it acknowledges the power shift between consumers and all these other entities, including retailers. To me, it really is a fancy version of saying the customer's in charge, which we've heard for a long time, but it does acknowledge, I think, that optionality that you talk about in all the choices that consumers have now, but at the same time as a counterbalance, retailers do have all these new tools and new technologies that they can bring to bear to shape consumer behavior. In fact, one of my top retail trajectories for years has been that “shaping is the new responding”. Retailers are in a position to shape consumer behavior. You brought up Apple. They're a perfect example. where Steve Jobs famously said, paraphrasing, that Apple makes things that we know consumers will want, not necessarily what they're telling us that they need.
Do you think those two concepts are at odds with one another where you've got consumer primacy on one hand where the customer has all these different options and then you've got retailers on the other side that can manipulate consumer behavior as never before, because they have all of these tools.
What do you think of that push and pull?
JOE
the push and pull exists, doesn't it? And I love your shaping concept. And it reminds me, and I talk about this quite a bit in the book, about the concept of the nudge. Nudge was coined by Richard Thaler from the University of Chicago. And Cass Sunstein from Harvard Law School.
They wrote a book called Nudge which is about creating choice architecture to allow consumers to make decisions, without any sort of financial incentive, but that will benefit them in the long run. Some examples of nudges are forced savings programs like a 401k. If you join a company and the company has it set up such that you have to actually opt out of a forced savings plan, what they're doing is creating a nudge for you to say, “Why don't you save 4% of your income? And by the way, not only will you save that, but we'll actually match it dollar for dollar up to 4%.” Another one is, if you're watching Netflix and you're binging your favorite show and all of a sudden the episode ends, but at the very bottom, you see that bar that says “Continue to the next episode.” If you do nothing, as in you opt out, all of a sudden you're watching yet another episode. These are examples of choice architecture Now, whether you're bingeing a whole bunch of shows or not, is that good or bad? I don't know, but it's good if you're Netflix.
CAROL
Guilty as charged.
JOE
Likewise, but, but essentially you have to opt out if you don't want to watch anymore, you turn the TV off. There are examples in retail but there need to be more examples in office, where choice architects create circumstances whereby people will benefit and the enterprise will benefit as well. There are nudges for work that come into, into play. Like I mentioned, onsite is the new offsite. Having an experience already designed, free time so people can interact, but curating those experiences becomes really, really important. We're seeing that in retail quite a bit. Some retailers like Patagonia will send out notices that say, don't buy our clothes, you know, reuse them, and they'll talk about some other nudge that they have for recycling items.
So, I see that the area of behavioral science and behavioral economics really exploding over the next five to 10 years, the traditional architecture industry is a $50 billion a year juggernaut in the United States, yet most people don't even know what choice architecture is. So I really see this as a an emerging field. If you believe that we're in this consumer centric moment, then the best thing we can do is think about how we can apply shaping and nudges to help drive better outcomes
CAROL
I love that. That really bridges the two concepts perfectly. Curated choice. Going back to what I was saying about Walmart and some other retailers, this perception that they're doing too many things at once. What they're really doing, Is testing and learning so that they can figure out how to curate choice, not how to take it away. I think that's sort of the old model is let's see what we can get away with not doing. And I think the new model is, “We have to provide that optionality and all of those choices so which ones are mutually beneficial. And it sounds like one of the tenants of choice architecture is that there has to be mutuality and mutual benefit. It's not about nudging people into things that they don't want to do.
JOE
And it becomes disingenuous if it's one sided another part of choice architecture is actually reducing the number of choices that a consumer has to make. And we know that when you walk in and you have seven or eight choices, it becomes really, really difficult. So getting it down to two or three, being able to buy an iPhone and have all of these defaults already programmed in... Apple has already thought about you. We have the agency to go in and change anything we want, but that's part of choice architecture. So let's narrow it down. Let's give people two or three choices. Anything more becomes overwhelming and problematic.
CAROL
Yes and creating the perception, if it's done right, that you're thinking ahead on behalf of your customers.
One of the ways that I think your book completely over delivers is you talk a lot about the future of leadership and management and skill building.
I think it's really great timing because right now retailers have made a big shift. They're providing education and pay raises and bonuses and, more flexible schedules.
And of course, they're doing it to stay competitive as they do find themselves competing with a much larger group of technology companies and others right now. The upskilling and retention part of it in particular is a really tough nut for retailers to crack. In fact, recently an HR lead for one of the top luxury brands out there told me, she said, “Carol, here's the dirty little secret. We don't even know what skills we're trying to train for and plan for the future.”
So how can companies get this right, Joe? And with all of the complexity now around hiring and retaining and training and engaging employees, and knowing that increasingly, when you talk about the retail space, that these folks aren't necessarily going to come from traditional retail backgrounds, nor do you want them to, you have to cast a much wider net.
JOE
It's true. I think though and I'm sure there's many retailers that you've talked to Carol, where you say “Show me a great manager of a store and I'll show you a great store” because that leader helps drive the purpose and meaning that creates this incentive for people to work harder. People don't work for a paycheck. They work more for the purpose and the collective. From a retail perspective, we know that the salesperson on the floor is really one of the most important people in the organization,
It's vital for our companies to be coaching and training, continuously training associates to make sure that they're representing the brand. That they understand the meaning and the purpose of the brand, and they're able to communicate that, in their own words because being authentic today is more important than ever. Our BS meters have become really fine-tuned and we can call it out when someone's dialing it in, and we really appreciate it when someone is genuine and authentic.
On the work side of things, we've all seen managers elevated to positions where they haven't had the training that they need, and then all of a sudden they become promoted and now they're in in “management” unfortunately in this day and age we need more leadership and leadership is a skill. It can be honed. It can be learned. Companies that have to make more time to focus on leadership over simply “management”.
In particular, in the conceptual economy and what Ginni Rometti from IBM called the new collar economy. And then the other thing is what are we measuring? And oftentimes you hear about productivity. Productivity is an industrial era construct. In the conceptual age, we should be focusing on effectiveness. Is what you're doing contributing to A. the mission of the organization and B., the bottom line of the organization? if you can do your work by coming to an office three hours in the morning and then in the afternoon, you're able to look after your children or after a parent but you're being effective, should you care? We should be asking different questions and not relying on the inertia of a pre pandemic world where just because Joe was in the office sitting at his cubicle at his assigned station, he was therefore being productive. Because we know that was a fallacy as well.
CAROL
Yeah, and that's so interesting how it ties together everything that we've talked about in terms of workspaces, return-to-work, how those mandates can backfire. And you brought up a concept that I really loved in the book in that vein. Where you talked about how the future is going to be about learning, unlearning and relearning.
Can you tell me some more about that?
JOE
Yeah, this whole notion that the rate of change of the rate of changes is off the charts. In April of 2023, NVIDIA had a market cap of $1 trillion. By July, it was at $2 trillion. And by September of 2023, it was at $3 trillion. That was the fastest any company has ever created that much value. We didn't even focus on GPUs before last year, even though they've been around forever. Artificial intelligence has been around since the fifties, but what we're seeing now is that technology has caught up.
So just because we did something a certain way yesterday, doesn't mean that we have to continue doing it that way tomorrow.
The amount of technology needed to drive all the AI activity requires more energy than we actually can produce. We need more energy and there's only so much that we can extract from fossil fuels. What else can and should we be doing in order to support the the technological acceleration? That's impacting both where we spend our money and how we make our money on both sides of the work and the shop.
CAROL
And I would think that ideally, that would positively impact new workspaces and even retail spaces where there would be spaces to learn, unlearn, and relearn. Wouldn't that impact physical spaces as well?
JOE
It really would. We see that most notably in Apple stores. You have the Genius bar where you can go and engage and inquire, the learning center where there are classes published online. You can go in anytime.
There's also an opportunity to remember that studying history is quite valuable so you don't repeat the mistakes.
CAROL
Definitely. One of the things I love the most about the book overall is your respect for history and the artful way that you synopsize a whole lot of history in a way that makes sense, in a way that really plugs into the concept of the book. That's just something personally and professionally that I always like to do because I think we’re always looking at these shiny objects ahead and there's really no context. for what came before. And I think that context is really important. You have a real gift for articulating it in a succinct and powerful way.
JOE
I appreciate you saying that.
CAROL
So I'll ask you the big loaded question what's next, Joe?
JOE
Oh, what's next? We'll get the crystal ball out! I've heard it described that right now the AI that we have in our pocket is akin to a study mate, but in about 6 to 12 months’ time you’re going to have a junior level professor. And within two years, we're going to have a Nobel laureate PhD at our disposal. So what does that mean? It brings great opportunity. Certainly there's a nefarious side of things, you know, the good, bad and ugly as we talked about earlier, but on the positive side of things, for those who can learn how to exploit AI bots as idea generators you will be more efficient in how you do what you do, whatever business you're in. The challenge that we've had is not that we don't have enough data. We have too much data. We just don't have enough insight.
And I think what we'll see here very shortly is greater clarity coming from the complexity of all the data that we have. And the last thing I'd mention is something that I took from a book called Leaders Make the Future written by a man named Bob Johansen and in the book, he talks about the notion that we're in a VUCA world. VUCA stands for Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous. And what he does so brilliantly is talk about how winners will ask the right questions to flip VUCA. So our challenge going forward is to flip VUCA. And what does that mean? if you're in volatile times, how do you create vision. So we need to go from volatile to vision. If you have uncertainty, how do you gain understanding? If you're in a complex environment in a complex industry, how do you drive clarity? And then my favorite is, in all of this ambiguity, how can you create agility, the ability to move quickly and easily?
That's my biggest tie back into the real estate world. How do we drive agility and resiliency into the physical place, the built environment? From a commercial real estate perspective, we're dealing with both a hardware and a software issue. The hardware is the real estate, the software are the consumers. We really need to focus on, on both sides of it.
CAROL
Just even Hearing that VUCA acronym and what it really means can put your teeth on edge, but instead of saying it's about trying to put your feet in the water and stop the movement, it's about moving toward a counter state. So I really love that concept and I really like the way that you explained it in the book too.
So thank you so much, Joe. I feel like I could talk to you for, 2 weeks and not get through everything that you covered in the book., It's a great book. I wish you every success as you hopefully go out and promote it. And I would love to know if you have any events or anything coming up or what your plans are
JOE
We're crafting some right now. I just got back from Latin America where I spoke at WorkTech in Santiago, Chile and Lima, Peru which was really exciting. And we have a whole campaign that's launching here in November. You can go to joebrady.ai, which is my website. You can get excerpts from the book there. There are also links to Amazon, Barnes Noble and other retailers to actually order the book.
CAROL
Yeah, you bet. Back to optionality, right?
JOE
exactly.
CAROL
Well, great speaking with you, Joe. I so look forward to following your progress and best of luck with the book. It's a great read. And I don't say that lightly.
JOE
Thank you so much, Carol. And thank you for your great work.
CAROL
You bet.