What are the questions we should be asking about reading?

Why do you read? And what biases are sitting on your bookshelf?

The hosts center their careers on innovation which means that they ask questions for a living. So when hosts Dr. Patti Fletcher, Lynne Cuppernull, and Dan Ward tackle reading, they don't ask what you're reading, they ask why.

This episode starts with the personal: reading as escape, ritual, education, connection, a cuddle for the brain. Then it gets harder. How diverse are the authors on your shelf? Did you know men make up only 19% of readers of books written by women, while women are 65% of readers of books written by men? What does that say about cultural conditioning?

The hosts dig into who reads, who writes, and who gets read. They examine economic dimensions: people with higher incomes read more, and people who read more earn more. They talk about creating reading cultures in organizations, the politics of whose books get attention, and whether it's okay to not finish a book (or write in one).

Then they take on AI. Would you read a book written by AI? What if you didn't know it was AI-generated until after? And what does it mean when AI reads our books without permission: Can we even call that reading?

Dan shares his experiment reading only books by women, people of color, and international authors for a year. Patti talks about intentionally seeking out authors of color after Black Lives Matter and forgetting she'd even made that choice because it became a natural, intentional part of her selection process. Lynne asks if reading is where avoided questions first whisper to us.

They close with a lightning round: Fiction or nonfiction? Long or short? Library or bookstore? Paper or screen?

Key Themes:

• Why we read versus what we read
• Gender and cultural biases in reading habits
• Economic dimensions of literacy and access
• Building reading cultures in teams and organizations
• Writing in books, not finishing books, buying books we never read
• AI-generated content and what AI owes to authors whose work it trains on
• Reading as anti-fascist practice and connection across difference

Resources We Found Helpful

Research & Data:

• U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reading data
• U.S. Department of Education literacy research  
• National Endowment for the Arts reading trends
• Pew Research: 23% of American adults haven't read a book in the past year
• Global readership data on gender disparities in reading

Referenced Authors & Works:

•  C.S. Lewis: "We read to know we're not alone"
• Toni Morrison's *Beloved*
• The Brontë sisters (published under pseudonyms like Currer Bell)

People & Organizations Mentioned:

• Reed Hoffman (LinkedIn co-founder, Greylock partner) - early ChatGPT user for book writing
• Tara McDonald - Natick, Massachusetts library system
• Anthropic legal settlement regarding AI training on books

Mentioned in Passing:

• Dan Ward's LinkedIn post on AI writing tells (especially the M-dash)
• B. Dalton bookstores
• National Reading Month (March)
• Read Across America Day (March 2nd)

Listening for the Questions is where curiosity is our compass.

Transcript

Dan 0:13

Hey everybody, welcome back to Listening for the Questions. I'm Dan Ward. I'm an engineer and military technologist. I'm also an author, a juggler, and a punk. And did I mention I'm an author? I've written four books. Number five is in the works, so I have a really close connection with today's topic.

Patti 0:29

Dan, I love that you said you're an author twice. It's kind of like when you meet people from Harvard and they tell you within the first sentence they went to Harvard. But let me introduce myself. I'm Dr. Patty Fletcher. I'm a recovering C-suite executive from Big Tech. I'm a leadership futurist who has been working at the intersection of people, business, technology, and data for maybe longer than some of our listeners have been alive. And yes, I'm a best-selling author just like Dan. And like any good writer, I'm an avid reader. So even though I love every topic we pick for this podcast, today's topic is very, very important and interesting to me too.

Lynne 1:05

And I'm Lynn Cuppernal. I'm not an author. I'm a leadership coach and a healthcare consultant. And in college, I basically double majored in English. I took so many literature classes, it was enough to get two majors. I also managed bookstores for a number number of years in my early 20s. Does anyone remember B. Dalton? And I am in a book club that's been meeting regularly for at least 20 years. And March is National Reading Month. March 2nd was Read Across America Day. So we all have lots of exciting connections to today's topic.

Dan 1:43

Reading. I'm so excited to dive in. And I would love to start by asking you both, what are you reading and what do you like to read? But I'm actually not going to do that. I don't want to use that as our opening question because it feels like a dead end question, and that's not what this podcast is about. So instead, let's start by asking, why do you read? What is it about reading that feels important to you? And I think it's okay to answer that one.

Lynne 2:06

I'm not even sure why I read, Dan. For me, it's like breathing. And why do I breathe to stay alive? This question, though, makes me think of another one, which is what do we love about reading?

Patti 2:20

I love the why questions, right? I love the why questions. And Len, I just want to go back to your intro about yourself. You may not be the author of books, but you are the author of your own life, aren't you? Yeah, you're welcome. Um, okay, so you know I read for many different reasons. I read to escape, I read um as a ritual to help me go to sleep. I read to educate myself. And yes, I read to help myself be a better writer. And what I love about reading is um things that help me be a better leader, right? Things that, yes, help me be better able to convey things on a stage and in the written word. And what happens, I don't know about you two, but I take bits and pieces. I could be reading something nonfiction and it becomes like dot to something else incredible that I might be working on in business. But enough about me, Dan. Thanks for letting me answer a question. Um, Dan, what about you?

Dan 3:17

Oh, I read for so many reasons, like you all touched on as well. I read novels at night as part of my bedtime routine, and I genuinely think that's one of the reasons I sleep so well. I read to learn, I read to challenge myself, to relax, for fun. And my mom tells me that when my siblings and I were little, she and my dad would cuddle us and read to us. So we all grew up associating reading with warmth and security and love. And Kim and I did the same thing with our two kids for the same reason. So I probably love reading because it's like a cuddle for my brain. How about you, Lynn? What do you why do you love to read?

Lynne 3:51

I love a cuddle for my brain. Oh, I'm gonna sit with that for a second. Like the two of you, I read to learn too. I love reading to learn. And then I also read to do, I think, maybe the opposite of learn, which is to just check out and relax. Uh, and I read to connect. Uh, I read to connect not only with the people in my 20 years in counting book club, but just with other worlds, other ideas. Um, I think those are the reasons I I like to read. I love to read. You know, when I think about reading, what are we talking about? Are we talking about reading books? I think the three of us maybe have a bias towards books, not just because two-thirds of us are authors. Um, but reading is more than just books, right? It's articles, it's newspapers. And that got me thinking: what biases do we bring to the topic of reading? Generational biases, cultural biases, gender biases?

Dan 4:52

Yes, let's jump into the bias questions. Thank you. That's one of my favorite parts of this podcast every single time. So, one of the questions that comes to mind is how much diversity is represented on our bookshelves? And yes, that is a question with a recommendation baked in. You can probably guess what it is. But if the authors we read are homogenous in any way, if if we are reading only authors who look or sound or come from a certain part of the world, are we missing out on important perspectives? Are we missing out on important ideas? And then critically, what might change if we read books from a more diverse set of authors?

Patti 5:29

Dan, I'm just gonna sit with that for a little bit and ask you a very provocative question. Anyway, everybody sit down for this one. Dan, are you saying that boys are allowed to read books written by girls?

Dan 5:44

What? What a provocative idea. You know, Patty, I'm gonna go way out on a limb and I'm gonna actually no wait, I was gonna make a joke about this being a controversial take. But doggone it, it is a controversial take, isn't it? To say that boys can read books written by girls and men can read books written by women? I mean, how many books are written by women and then treated as if they should only be read by women and are only marketed to women? And how many men look at a book written by a woman and think, oh, that's not for me? And let me put in a plug real quick. Patty's book is terrific. It's called Disruptors. Y'all should read it.

Patti 6:17

Damn straight, Dan. Um, and of course, I read all of your books. And by the way, listeners, um, half of my readers are now men. And I like short form, long form, right? I'll write and I'll read pretty much anything, including Instagram posts. But when I think about the female authors we did read in school, those tended to be the romance kind of things, right? You know, the Wuthering Heights kind of kind of books, whereas the male ones were abroad scope. So that might be something that's conditioned. But I did look up the data. When we look at readership, men are only about 19% of readers of books that are written by women. And this compares to women who are 65% of readers of books written by men. So of course, the question is what does that say about our cultural conditioning? By the way, these are global numbers, not just US numbers. So, what does this say about our cultural conditioning? And, you know, is it because we're conditioned in a male-friendly system, right? We're always gonna go back to that stuff, right? And and it's like women have to stretch so much to fit into that system, and you know, men don't because the system's made for them. It brings up all sorts of questions beyond reading.

Lynne 7:32

Yes, and like and one that that's not even really a good question, but that's top of mind is why do we have chick lit, but we don't have bro books? I feel like this is one of those questions that our our little kid friends would be asking. Why don't we? And Patty, as I as I I sort of think about your your stats and the data that you shared, which was super helpful. I'm wondering, is that true for other things written by women, or is it just books?

Dan 8:04

Yeah, it does make me wonder if the gender of the author is more visible in a book because you see it on the cover, and is it maybe less visible in a magazine article or a newspaper because the byline is smaller and easier for people to not notice, maybe? That'd be an interesting thing to investigate. Like, is it about books primarily, or does this happen in other places as well?

Lynne 8:24

Well, and back in the day, women would write books under different names, either names that you couldn't tell if they were a man or a woman, or male. I think one of the Bronte's originally published under the name Kerr Bell. There you go, double English major right there.

Dan 8:44

Lynn, bring in the double English major. I love it. And I know a lot of uh female authors have published with just their initials instead of revealing what their first name is. That's another way to kind of mask that. So interestingly, this this reminds me of an experiment I did back in 2022. Uh I knew that most of the books I'd read were written by white American men. So for about a year, for all of 2022, I made an effort as much as I could to only read books by women, by people of color, and by people from countries other than my own. And that wasn't hard to find these books, but it did take some effort. Like I had to pay attention. And if the author is just two initials, I had to go look up. Like, tell me more about this author. I've got to say, the authors I read that year are now some of my favorites. And it really began by asking the question: how diverse is my bookshelf?

Patti 9:32

I love your intention, Dan. And I think it's it's so important. And you're intentional in everything you do. You're the male, Mother Teresa. Um, I am the antithesis. So um I'm neither male nor Mother Teresa. But, you know, I did the same thing, Dan, and and as we were prepping for this call, I realized, you know, of I started out by seeking out books that were written by women of color and men of color. And I really started um when the Black Lives Matter movement um started because I realized I'm reading like white people, right? Of course there were folks who weren't white, but the majority was white. And it's become such a part of my reading now that I forgot I did it. It's it's really interesting. And, you know, sometimes I will say, folks, diversity is difficult. Um, and for me, like reading beloved as an example was really, really hard, or beloved, however you pronounce it, really hard because I I had a hard time with the language. So guess what I did? I freaking took my time, right? I tried to figure it out. That's the point, you know. So maybe that's part of the beauty, right? It gives us that chance to escape, like Lynn, like you were talking about, right, into another world. And, you know, it makes me wonder as I was reading those books, and instead of saying, this is too hard or this doesn't relate to me, it made me start to understand culture. And maybe that's what this might be about, right? Are books a way for us to have people change their minds about what they thought to be true about a culture or, you know, something back in history? And I'm wondering how many people have gone from judging to wanting to understand more.

Lynne 11:11

Now that's research I would like to see. That's a really interesting question. And I think that's bringing up for me that there's an economic dimension to this topic of reading and equity. Research also shows that people with higher household incomes tend to read more. And actually, it works the other way around. People who read more tend to earn more. And other research shows that kids who go up surrounded by books tend to earn more as an as adults. I hope both my sons are listening. That doesn't mean you should stop reading when you're an adult. And now maybe that's because having a lot of books helps with performance of schools. Maybe it's because having a lot of books indicates your family already has some advantages. I don't even know what my question is. I guess is it what might we do to address this dimension around reading and equity?

Patti 12:07

It's really interesting, Lynn, as I'm listening to you because you're talking a lot about the social aspects of books. And you know, you've shared with us before that you are part of our raging book club. So I absolutely love that. And it made me think about my friend Tara McDonald, who runs the library system in the Natick, Massachusetts, and she's created the libraries as a community for students, right? So they're among the books. What if we looked at reading as a way to connect with other people, right? Instead of it being a solitary act. And what if we read more books together and talked about them?

Dan 12:44

This makes me wonder: is our family our first book club? Having your parents read books to you as a kid, does that kind of constitutes the very first book club? In which case I guess I've been in the same book club for 53 years now. Um, and if we do read more books together and we do talk about them together, do we learn more from the books and from each other? Do we understand the books more? Do we enjoy the books more? And really, is there any downside at all to reading books together?

Lynne 13:13

I'm not answering that. I'm not answering that. I can't think of one though, I can't think of a downside. And this got me thinking about sometimes what happens in organizations, listeners, maybe this has never happened to you, but I have occasionally been on a team where a leader reads a book and they love the book so much that they go out and they get it for everybody else on the team. And then all that like we now all have to read this book, and there's a lot of pressure to read the book because it's your boss telling you to read it. What if instead of everybody reading the same book that the leader loved, everyone on the team read a different business book and brought that to discuss? And so you're not just talking about one person's book, you've got 10 different books. And what are we learning from these 10 different books that we can bring to the team? I want to try that.

Dan 14:04

Yeah, what would happen to our organization, to our organizational culture if we really built a culture of book reading and book sharing, where people read a book and they share it with everybody else, not as an obligation, but as an invitation. How do we build more of that into our teams and groups and gatherings?

Lynne 14:21

Which leads us, I guess, to the question of how do you pick a book? We've been trying to sort of make sure we talk about reading, but I'm gonna hone in now on a book. How do we pick books? There are so many books in the world. Let's say it's not, you know, the leader saying, read this book. Where do you start? Can you judge a book by its cover? I will tell you from my bookstore days, there were a lot of times when somebody would come in looking for a book and all they knew was that the cover was red. So I think sometimes people do, if not, pick a book by its cover, relate to a book by its cover.

Dan 14:58

So to piggyback on that question of how do you pick a book, if you do have a typical approach to picking your next book, what happens if you change that up? Maybe you always read books with red covers. Now you're going to read a book with a blue cover. So what if you make your selection in some other way? How does that change the experience of reading?

Patti 15:15

Gee, Dan, it reminds me of our What Makes a Great Sandwich um podcast episode where I said I never order something different once I find something I like. And I'm always like, what else what's on the New York Times bestseller list? You know, what is Oprah reading? Do I go for the books that everybody else recommends? Do I go for the books that won whatever awards? Or do I go for an author nobody's ever heard of, right? And that nobody's talking about.

Dan 15:40

And are you looking at me, Patty? Am I the obscure author no one's ever heard of? I mean, yes, I am 100% in a very real sense. Aren't all books obscure? So pardon me if I put on my math hat for a minute. I am an engineer after all. There are over 340 million people in the US alone. So if a book sells a million copies, which is a lot, and if all 1 million copies get read, which is unlikely, that means less than one-third of 1% of just the US population has read that million-seller book. So maybe it's not so bad to be an obscure author because we pretty much all are.

Lynne 16:17

It does get me wondering about why people write books in the first place. Uh, I mean, maybe some people, lots of people hope to be that million seller, um, but there's probably lots of other reasons people decide to write a book. I'm just curious about what they are.

Patti 16:32

Oh, I want to answer that one and biting the insides of my cheeks.

Dan 16:35

I will give a brief answer. I just write each of my books for different reasons. Some professional, some financial, some personal. And I know our topic again is reading, but this sparks the question that I want to ask our listeners: what would be a good reason for you to write a book?

Lynne 16:51

I'm letting the silence hang while the listeners think about their answer to that question. Uh, but I'm going to pivot us a little bit. So when we talk about reading, a lot of people ask if listening to audiobooks, podcasts, does that count as reading? That's fair. Does listening count as reading? And how is the experience different?

Dan 17:14

You know, I've heard a lot of people ask that question. Do audiobooks count? And I always want to ask, oh, what do we mean by count? Like count for what? I know a lot of people like to track how many books they read in a year. I do that too. But it's not really a competition, is it? And also, do graphic novels count? Because I read a lot of those and I want to win the competition.

Patti 17:32

No, they don't count, Dan. You have to take them off your list. Um, let me answer that question for you. Um, and by the way, just Dan, you had mentioned selling selling a million books. I just want listeners to know that, you know, most books sell about a thousand copies and they're considered fine, right? If you sell 10,000 or more, it's considered really freaking awesome. And Disruptors has passed that, well beyond that. Um, it's really when you get into those upper, you know, six, six figures that that things change, but just know it takes a lot of money and marketing to make that happen. So, you know what's really interesting, you guys? I have like the smell of textbooks in my in my person now that I'm thinking about this, and I'm thinking about how fun it was in the beginning of the year to get the the paper grocery bag and cut it out and and and wrap the books. And then it leads me to the fact that I tend to write in the pages of my books, which is one of the challenges I have with library books or audiobooks. I can't write right in in the margins. And, you know, we were trained in school that we should not be doing that, trained in college. If we wanted to resell our books, we probably shouldn't be doing that. But I'm a highlighter girl, a right girl. So do we think it's okay? There are some folks that won't write in a book, like it's a purity thing or something, really strange. Um, but you know, I wonder, is it okay to write in a book or not? And if it's wrong, I don't want to be right.

Lynne 18:49

It's whatever, right? For some people, no. For some people, yes. And Patty, I so am with you on the smell. I can I can close my eyes and be back opening the bookstore, you know, for the first time that day and walking in and smelling the smell of all those new books. I mean, there is no perfume like it in the world. This has nothing to do with that. But I'm now thinking about finishing books. Because we're talking about is it okay to write in them? What about not finishing them? Is it okay to start reading something and not finish it? I am totally cool with not finishing it. But Patty, like you said, there's some people who won't write in a book. There's some people who feel like they must finish a book once they start. What's that about? Um, and what makes us put it down uh when we're reading it?

Dan 19:41

And then to flip to the other side of that equation, how about not even starting a book? Like, why do so many of us buy books that we end up not reading, not even starting to read? Or why do we keep buying books if we haven't even read the ones that are on our shelves already?

Lynne 19:56

Patty and I are raising our hands. We're raising both our hands. Buying so many books. I'm wondering, is buying books about hope? Do we hope to get to that book? Is it about comfort? Is it about, you know, I really I love to read, I'm gonna buy this book. I like to be surrounded by books. I don't know what that what it's about. Those are the questions that come up.

Patti 20:20

It's so interesting. And I'm also going, not everyone's a reader, and I just want the parents out there to know my girls are in their 20s, I'm an author, I read. I was a late reader and I didn't enjoy reading until I got maybe to junior high, and it became kind of an escape, an expression of creativity. Back then, I did not know that writing was an art. So, you know, once I understood that, it was easier to read books. And then both of my girls, avid readers, the younger one like me, came late to it. So do not worry, there is hope. So look, you know, Dan's the engineer, um, I'm the research scientist, and Lynn is basically the god over all of us. Um, so the the research scientist to me can't help but to look at data. And so I found some survey results from three different sources about this readership topic. It from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, the U.S. Department of Education, and the National Endowment for the Arts. And I believe this is about people reading books, not people listening to books. Those are tend to be in two different categories. What they do show though is a trend to fewer Americans reading for pleasure. People are just reading less. And, you know, I want to know why is that? Is it because we work so much that when we do read, we have to do it to educate ourselves and we don't have room for anything else? Is it because we're watching too much TV? Is it because we're listening to audiobooks in our commute? Like, why are we reading less?

Lynne 21:43

I love that so many organizations track that information. What does it say about us as a country when our government is so invested in measuring for decades how much time Americans spend reading? And what does that say about how important reading is?

Dan 22:00

Yeah, that the government invests in tracking that seems to imply that there's some value there. And the data does make me wonder too, with things trending downward, kind of like Patty was asking, what's getting in the way of the reading? So there's this Pew Research report, and we'll put a link to all of this research in the show notes. Pew Research Reports show that 23% of American adults haven't read a book in the last year. Yikes, and why not? Is it about screens? Is it about smartphones? Is it about other things that compete for our attention? Or is it about our attention itself? Are just more people finding it harder to concentrate in the year 2026, finding it harder to concentrate long enough to even read a book?

Lynne 22:41

Well, and I can go on a whole riff about subtitles and why different generations like to have the subtitles up on their Netflix shows. And I'm thinking though, too, so many people say, I don't have time to read. And what aren't we reading right now? And why aren't we reading it?

Patti 23:11

You know, Lynn, as I'm listening to your questions, it's making me wonder like, am I reading because I want to confirm what I already believe, or because I want to encounter some gen, like real true challenges to the way that I see something or think about something? And then what happens, like, for example, right, when a leader reads a book and then makes everyone on their team read it? Like what you were talking about, Lynn. And by the way, I've been that leader and I've been the recipient of that as well, right? Because look, it comes with good intentions. But I'm wondering that whole thing about diverse thinking, how could we bring that into this topic around everyone read the same book in order to know the same thing, conformity? Um, and by the way, that might be right if we're talking about, you know, the way we're going to operationalize a business or whatever, we all read it and learn at the same time. It goes back to am I seeking to validate, seeking to learn something new, or is it a mix of the both?

Dan 24:11

Ooh, and what about reading the thing that people not like us are reading? So, like, what would it mean to read something from our opponent's reading list or our rival's reading list? How would we even know what's on that list?

Lynne 24:24

Hmm. And that just gave me this thought. Is reading where those avoided questions first whisper to us if we're listening, or in this case, reading for them?

Patti 24:38

I wish there was a bell I could ring right now, you guys. You know, kind of like in a sales uh like building when people ring the bell when they close a client because ding ding ding, it's AI time. Um, so let's go ahead and switch to that. You knew it was coming, but let's start with the obvious. Would you want to read a book that was written by AI?

Lynne 25:01

Oh, and what if you don't know the thing you're reading was written by AI, but then you find out it is? Does that change your experience of reading it? Does it change your opinion of it? Do you like it less?

Patti 25:13

When ChatGPT first came out, Reed Hoffman, who many of us know in the tech world, he's one of the co-founders of LinkedIn. He's a partner at BC firm Greylock, which is like, you know, this huge investment fund for tech startups. And he was very open from as an early user, like showing us Chat GPT before it came out to the public, that he was using it to help him write books. And when I say help him, I mean it would furnish the first few drafts. He will ask it a specific question and then you know we'll push it out. And then me as a marketer, someone who employs agencies, who employs um people who are using AI sometimes to replace that creative copy work, other times to augment it. Do we know what's written by AI? I think there are some telltale signs, right? We've lost our our um ownership of the M-dash as humans, and that's a challenge. Dan has a really good um post on LinkedIn, I believe. Um so check out Dan's post, and Dan, I'll I'll put that in the reference notes for folks. But um, would you want to read an article written by AI? I probably have, right? Would I want to read a book written by AI, right? And, you know, the world we're living in, whether we like it or not, is augmented and sometimes replaced from machines and with over, God, I can't remember what, thousands of books, you know, published every single year. How does that change what gets published and what does not get published? How does it change from an editorial staff perspective on online publications, on print publications, what gets um put in the um publication and what does not?

Dan 26:48

Yeah, so C.S. Lewis is one of my favorite authors, and he said, we read to know we're not alone. And so when we read, we discover that other people have similar experiences and feelings and all of that. But if the book we're reading was produced by AI instead of a human, then I wonder if reading that kind of book has the same meaning as books written by people, the same meaning that C. S. Lewis was writing about. One of the questions that I'm thinking of here is not just do we want to read a book written by an AI, but do we want AI to read our books? So yeah, Patty and I both have some money coming in from Anthropic, from that legal sediment, whenever that gets paid out. Because AI did read our books without paying for them. And that's an important part of this. So I think we as a society are still working through that really important question. Is it okay for AI to read my books? How should AI use the books that it reads? And then what does an AI company owe to the authors of the books that it reads?

Lynne 27:42

I wonder if read is even the right word for what AI is doing. It's getting trained on books, it's deconstructing books, it's taking them apart and using the pieces. Can we even call that reading?

Patti 27:53

Okay, so we're about at the end of our conversation, which I never want to end. And before we wrap up, let's have, and this will be a challenge for me, a quick lightning round. So when it comes to reading, what do you prefer? Fiction or nonfiction?

Lynne 28:11

Long books or short books? New books or old books?

Patti 28:15

Borrow from the library or purchase from a shop.

Lynne 28:18

Books, magazines, substack, or newspapers?

Dan 28:23

Reading on a screen or on paper or audio versions.

Patti 28:26

Ooh, and reading one book at a time or several at once. Woo!

Lynne 28:32

That was a fun lightning round. It was really hard not to answer those questions. And that is our time for today. I don't know about you two, but I am ready to go read something.

Dan 28:41

Same here. So here's to reading fiction or nonfiction, digital or paper, long or short, and whatever you read, here's to asking questions along the way.

Lynne 28:50

So thanks for listening. Today's episode was sponsored by Words. Words, they make books and articles and papers. Our music was composed by Jake Covernal. Our cover art was created by Mads Graham.

Patti 29:04

Catch y'all next time.