Transcript, E172 - Navigating the New Office: Working Less

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Intro: LinkedIn News.

Jessi Hempel: From the news team at LinkedIn, I'm Jessi Hempel and this is Hello Monday. It's the third week of our summer series, Navigating the New Office. And just as we've done for all of the episodes in this series, I'm bringing on a co-host. It's our producer, Sarah Storm. Hey, Sarah.

Sarah Storm: Hey, Jessi.?

Jessi Hempel: So Sarah, we're at the halfway point here with the series.

Sarah Storm: Already??

Jessi Hempel: Yeah. Already.

Sarah Storm: Wow.

Jessi Hempel: And the trend we're tackling this week? Well, it's that people are just interested in working less.?

Sarah Storm: Hello Monday is recorded and produced in the United States, where a lot of people have to work more than 40 hours and a lot of people have to work more than one job. But the pandemic caused many people to consider what's important to them, and where they could, they prioritized working less.

Jessi Hempel: And companies got into it here as well. They were trying really hard to avoid burnout, which has become such a huge problem, and so they introduced four-day work weeks, or frequent days off. It turns out that working less is not an American phenomenon. Not at all. On today's show, we have Gregory Warner, host of NPR's Rough Translation. Now, the show looks at work culture in other countries, and I have to say, I really love it, Sarah.?

Sarah Storm: We are going to talk about three of his episodes today, one about an American woman in France who could not believe that she was really supposed to take this very long lunch hour every day.

Jessi Hempel: (laughs) That's so American. I want my lunch to be shorter!

Sarah Storm: (laughs)

Jessi Hempel: Gregory's also going to tell us about this law in Portugal that makes it illegal for your boss to contact you after work.

Sarah Storm: And finally, we'll learn a little bit about slacker culture in China. Here's Gregory.

Gregory Warner: So we got a, a listener who wrote us, actually, while she's an American woman who's an English teacher at the University of Strasbourg, named Caitlin. And she ca, she called us, actually. She, she recorded this voicemail while she was at her desk eating a salad, essentially breaking the law. Because in France, it is forbidden to eat lunch at your work site. And that has been true for over 100 years. It's a very old law. And we were just so struck by the fact that, A, um, she's this American woman, she didn't want to go out for a, a long, leisurely lunch break. She wanted to get her to-do list done, but she felt like a criminal doing it. And she was in France for the long haul. So she had a French husband, and she wanted to live in France, but she wanted to figure out some way in which to be a productive American and not, essentially, break, break the law in France.

Jessi Hempel: What I got from her story was something that really resonated for me, which is that, that feeling that most people that I know have, that, um, your to-do list is expanding and never-ending, and, uh, no matter what your time looks like, if you have an hour and a half-long chunk in the middle of the day, it would make sense to you that you'd want to try to tackle some of it, and lack of doing it would create a sort of ... an anxiety. At least among the people that I know in America.

Gregory Warner: Yeah, and she, you know, she had been dealing with this, really, since, uh, since she moved to France and started working in France. Um, at, at her first job, she says her, her boss would tell her, "I don't think you're appreciating the full length of time that you're supposed to be taking for lunch," which we laughed about because it was so different (laughs) from ... not only is, does he point out the way bosses might talk to us in America, but the voice in our head, which tells us, "Hey, we need to get lunch over with quickly to get back to all the things we need to do." What, what we explored in that episode, though, is, is that, is that calculus actually accurate?

Jessi Hempel: What's interesting to me about that, right? Um, there are plenty of things and employment codes here in US, and I'm sure in France too, that go under-observed and are never called out. Um, what you're saying also, or what Caitlin is saying, is that this is a culture norm in that if you do something different than that culture norm, your peers will call you out on it. So it's, it's substantial. It is, it is, in effect, in culture, the way things work.

Gregory Warner: Oh, yeah. And there are all kinds of parallel codes that have emerged from this one code, which is that you don't talk about work at lunch. So Caitlin actually talks about this. She says, well, she tries to go out with her colleagues, and then she tries to mention some piece of work that they're both working on, and they say, "Well, no, no, no, you're not really supposed to talk about that. Let's talk about our vacations and the movies we saw, and, uh, you know, our families."?

Jessi Hempel: Right.

Gregory Warner: Uh, so that's enforced. That's not in the law, but that's a social code.?

Jessi Hempel: Um, so, what's the impact of this, according to Caitlin?

Gregory Warner: Well, for Cait- (laughs). I mean, for Caitlin, it's just a source of enormous stress because, um, she doesn't want to be the pariah at her company. Um, she wants to get to know her colleagues. She loves her colleagues. But she doesn't have time to spend in the middle of the day. Um, what we structured the episode, essentially, we go to all these experts and we find all this scientific data to, to support taking a lunch outside of work, and to support the idea of not speaking about work at lunch, and then we try to convince Caitlin, um, to (laughs), to do this. But I have to say, like, for me, um, presenting her with all these French arguments, I sort of felt like I was arguing with myself. Because every time Caitlin would knock down one of the, one of the, uh, arguments for having the French lunch, I, I kind of agreed we her.

Jessi Hempel: Yeah.

Gregory Warner: So, I was also trying to convince myself to, to, you know, to take more of a break.

Jessi Hempel: Well, when it came to the arguments for, the kinds of things-

Gregory Warner: Yeah.

Jessi Hempel: ... that ... And, by the way, our listeners are going to have to listen to the full episode to get the whole shebang, and you should.

Gregory Warner: I appreciate that (laughs).

Jessi Hempel: But, you know, the, the kinds of things that are being put forth, they made a lot of sense to me. Like the whole idea that you actually had a lot less conflict, work-oriented conflict, with people who you knew deeply across different planes.

Gregory Warner: Oh, I, I love this idea, the idea that, um, when you're not talking about work at work ... And, and French work spaces, as I understand, can be very formal, uh, when you're forced to not talk about work, you have to find out about each other. We ended up sending a reporter to various French bistros to ask them about their theory of lunch (laughs), which they found very odd.

Jessi Hempel: (laughs)

Gregory Warner: But what they told us was, you know, when you, when you talk to somebody not about the mutual project that you're both trying to get done, but about their life, you realize, oh, that's what's going on.

Jessi Hempel: Yeah.

Gregory Warner: That's why they're not as present, um, this week as they were last week. What's so different about the French model, and I'm not, I'm not, really not saying the French model is better or worse. I just think it gives us perspective about ourselves.

Jessi Hempel: Right.

Gregory Warner: Um, what's different is that is it a completely collective exercise. Meaning, Caitlin does not have to ... Caitlin, the American listener who wrote us, Caitlin does not have to, if she does go out to lunch, decide to schedule a lunch in, you know, a half-hour block or a, an hour-long block with a colleague to get to know them. She doesn't have to think, "Oh, is that person too busy? Will I be putting a burden on them?" Um, she doesn't have to vow to take more rest time or, or, you know, to do more of that in her life. She just goes out for lunch. It is built into the day. It's completely easy. I almost think of it as a ... almost like a public health model versus individual health. It's like, the infrastructure is there. You don't have to worry. You don't have to think about it.

Jessi Hempel: Yeah.?

Gregory Warner: Um, so that, yeah, that's, that's really what I took away from the, the French reporting.

Jessi Hempel: Well, the other thing that I just want to point out about Caitlin, and then well, uh, we'll move onto our next story, is that, um, Caitlin didn't want to not have lunch with her colleagues. She wanted to have her cake and eat it too. It seemed to be like her position was just like, lunch is too long. I got other things to do. Let me take half of this time and spend it with my colleagues and half of this time working through my to-do list.

Gregory Warner: (laughs) Yeah, no, I ... We didn't ... I mean, I don't want to give away the end of the story. We did not end up convincing Caitlin to take the ... to fully subscribe to the French lunch custom. But I think what, what ended up happening was she realized, she realized that she'd much prefer to live in a country with a custom of a shared lunch, and she said that if she were to go back to an American work environment, she would feel very frustrated that that, that river of time was not available to, to dip her toe into, that she, she could not just enter into that flow. Um, the irony of that, of course, is that it, that only exists, that shared lunch only exists if lots of people decide or lots of people agree to take part in it. So the fact that France is this place, where, yeah, at 12:00 you can get up from desk and nobody will say anything, you'll walk right to the bistro, you'll see all your friends, you'll have kind of a bunch of conversations, and then an hour and a half and possibly two hours later, you'll come back to work. Uh, doesn't take any extra thought.

Jessi Hempel: Yeah. Of course, there's a lot more to it than that. And, uh-

Gregory Warner: (laughs)

Jessi Hempel: That I hope our listeners will check it out. But, um, I want to move on to Portugal, where you learned something very different about productivity and the culture around productivity versus the laws around productivity. Um, how did that episode come to be?

Gregory Warner: Well, that episode came, came to be because we heard about this law in Portugal which now makes it illegal for bosses to contact their employees after work.?

Jessi Hempel: I'm just going to say, that's a fantastic new law, because-

Gregory Warner: (laughs)

Jessi Hempel: I am just the host listening to this story, and I'm like, "Okay, go Portugal."

Gregory Warner: Well, it's either a fantastic or it's fantasy, and that's kind of what we explore. An employer will be fined up to $10,000 for email or for a text, uh, for a call after working hours. And so this got a lot of coverage. People were very interested in this law. Uh, this was just passed at the end of 2021. And so, you know, six, seven months later, we were wondering, okay, how's it going? I mean, one of the things in Rough Translation, I should say, is, is that we're always working with local storytellers who are based in the place, so Catarina Fernandes Martins is a Portuguese, uh, reporter, and she ended up picking up this story, and, uh, and, and reporting it.?

Jessi Hempel: Well, I should say, the announcement coincided with Web Summit, and Web Summit was a place that I went, um, frequently. I did not usually visit with Portuguese entrepreneurs there. I usually visited with American entrepreneurs there, who are similarly other people from around the world. And it was definitely understood that part of the job of Web Summit was to bring all of these people to Portugal to entice and invite them, um, to, to spend more time there. Um, so it, it wasn't lost on me that is law was announced around that time. In fact, I think at the summit, on your show, it spoke, spoke about the summit.

Gregory Warner: Oh yes. So, absolutely. This was, this was a open invitation and advertisement to promote workers and digital nomads. And we should say, it's working. I mean, that, that appeal is totally working. I mean, I think, upwards of like 11,000 Americans have moved there just in the past two years. 100,000, almost 100,000 Brits in the last two years. And you can see-

Jessi Hempel: Gregory, I have a writing coach who just moved there. And so now we to, uh, off-time my, our, our sessions. Because she was like, "Portugal's the place to be. So much better than America."

Gregory Warner: Yeah. And be careful with, uh, emailing her on a Saturday or Sunday.

Jessi Hempel: Yeah, I know. Right??

Gregory Warner: You might get, you might get fined.

Jessi Hempel: (laughs) Well, so that might be true for people coming in from abroad, but it seems like maybe the reality might be very different for people living in Portugal, going to their day jobs.

Gregory Warner: Well, yes. And so that's why I, you know, I say the fine with a small, uh, a rueful smile. Because, uh, in fact, as we uncover, this law is not being enforced. And it, uh, it really is, on paper, this law, but for reasons that go deep into Portuguese history, and what I thought was so interesting about reporting this story was, I mean, you think about where workplace cultures come from, like, and how do they persist. And without ... we could, we could talk more about the ending of the story, but, but what we, what we realized is that that relationship between bosses and employees has been ... was rooted, really, in, in a kind of deviously-designed dictatorship that, um, that saw work as a way to control its citizens and to enforce loyalty. And those patterns of, uh, of behavior and expectations at work, combined with economic crisis and all kinds of other forces which have made young people in Portugal have very few choices, um, have resulted in this toxic work culture that is, that one law or 10 laws have not been able to, have not been able to change.

Jessi Hempel: So the dictatorship has fallen, but the culture that it engendered is something that we can't help but continue to pass along, and that-

Gregory Warner: Right.

Jessi Hempel: ... lives within us and dictates how we treat each other, regardless of the laws.

Gregory Warner: Right. And when we ran into this, I thought, okay, maybe this is like a, a generation story. Like, maybe the bosses are of the age that, they're close enough to the dictatorship that they were at least raised by people in that fascist dictatorship regime, and maybe they kind of bring that culture, and maybe the young, the young employees are subjected to that. But what we found was something sort of more sinister, which is that both generations carry with them the trauma of that, of that dictatorship. And, um, sort of the, the expectations of what's ... I think that what we're expected to do at work and how we're supposed to be gets programmed into us very young, and, um, can be triggered in this way, that yeah, in, in Portugal feels especially, um, especially sinister, especially, uh, manipulative, I'll, I'll say.?

Jessi Hempel: We're going to take a quick break here. When we come back, more with Gregory Warner, host of NPR's Rough Translation.?

(silence)

And we're back. Gregory has one more story to share with us today. It takes place in China. The cultural emphasis of work there is that it should take up as many hours of your awake time as possible. There's a shorthand for this that you might have heard of before: 9-9-6. Hustlers work nine to nine, six days a week. That's 72 hours a week. And it might cause you to fall asleep on the subway or take naps in public. Sleeping public is a badge of honor because China has a culture that promotes work, which is why this next story is so interesting.

Gregory Warner: So this was pitched by our, our Beijing correspondent, Emily Feng. She, she got really interested in this, um, particular guy who was a scooter thief, and in 2012 ... So scooters, electric scooters, are huge in China. And, and of course, where there's scooters, I guess there's scooter thieves. This guy, um, was arrested in, um, some years ago, and he was filmed by the local, by a local, um, TV news camera group, uh, sorry, a local TV news crew, who said, uh, "Why do you not have a job?" They actually asked him this on, on camera. And he said, "Working is impossible for me. I cannot work." And that phrase became an incredible sensation in China. It went so viral. And this guy who, I won't say looks like Che Guevara, but he does have some of the same kind of dark, uh, brooding good looks, um, he became known as [Tie 00:16:16] Guevara, Tie being the, uh, the Mandarin word for "to steal."?

And so he became this icon, this slacker icon, essentially, and people would, uh, quit their jobs in his name, or talk about how to quit their job. They created all kinds of memes, slacker-based memes. They e ... And so that's why he became under the attention of the Chinese authorities. And what, uh, our reporter was interested in was, what would happen when we got out of prison?

Jessi Hempel: Right.

Gregory Warner: Um, and so we followed his, his journey.

Jessi Hempel: Um, I just wanted to stick with this idea of what it might have meant to announce yourself publicly as someone who didn't value work in a culture and in particularly the Chinese culture-

Gregory Warner: Right.

Jessi Hempel: ... within the last few years. I mean, you're, you're asking for government involvement in doing that, no?

Gregory Warner: Yeah, no, absolutely. Because what you're doing is you're violating these two important, um, two important kind of, uh, codes, and one is, one is, one is a national one. I mean, you're supposed to work, uh, in order ... as your patriotic duty. You're supposed to help build China. We talked about that. But then you're also, uh, supposed to support family. And you have to understand that with the One Child Policy, make young Chinese are the only, um, are the only providers for their parents, their grandparents, and their lives are so different than ... and their opportunities are so different than their parents could have, could have imagined for themselves. It's like, in some sense it's kind of the opposite of the US story, in the sense that young people at least on paper have so many more opportunities than, than their parents, but-

Jessi Hempel: Gregory, I'm just going to stop you to say that, um-

Gregory Warner: Yeah?

Jessi Hempel: Even though I have lived a while in the world and written about China, when you first said, um, you have an obligation to support your family, I immediately just jumped to thinking about raising that child, when what you are talking about is thinking about that child supporting their parents.

Gregory Warner: No, thanks for that clarification. And it kind of goes both ways, because if you're the only child, ev ... all the hopes and dreams have been put on you.

Jessi Hempel: Right.?

Gregory Warner: Um, again, this was reported by Emily Feng. I'm just, I'm really just, uh, bringing her reporting. But one of the things that she talks about is the overwhelming amount of income that is spent by Chinese parents on their child's education. So you basically invest everything, in your kid. And then what? Your kid just comes and says, "I don't like my job now. I want to quit, explore myself"? I mean, that is, that is very, uh, that's very difficult to do. And, and you're not only, you're not only quitting your job, you're, you're giving up your responsibility to your family.

Jessi Hempel: Yeah. Right. And, um, without giving away, of course, the entire story, um, how do things go for the scooter thief who is publicly talking about being a slacker and becomes an internet star overnight??

Gregory Warner: Yeah, so the scooter thief, um, he ends up, uh, curiously (laughs) opening a barbecue restaurant, which we, uh, which Emily, our reporter, ended up visiting with her, uh, producer, Owen. And, um, the, her experience there is ... gets very dramatic very quickly. It seems that he's living, uh, the slacker dream. He is the boss of his own place. He can come and go as he pleases. He has this very, uh, fun barbecue restaurant. But, um, the first day she's there, and then the second day she's there, she realizes there are forces that are controlling what he says and who he can talk to.

Jessi Hempel: I'd love for you to just think for a second with me about where that idea of slacker culture may have even come from. Is it something that found its roots in the West and worked it, its way over?

Gregory Warner: No, it's, you know, it's interesting. Um, we didn't use this in the piece, but we end up, we ended up profiling this one, this high school teacher named, named [Aris 00:20:26], who, uh, we follow on this very quiet but, but verily very dramatic journey of figuring out whether she can quit her job, and what it will take to do that. Um, and for her, you know, the inspiration is actually the ancient Chinese, um, poets, who were hermits. And for, you know, and anti-materialist. And, um, this idea of saying no to the world and no to ambition, for her, is, is very, very Chinese. It has nothing to do with Western influence.

Jessi Hempel: You used the word ambition, and I think so much about productivity. And I'm wondering, in all the work that you do, just to step back a minute and think with me, what do you see as the connection between how people think about productivity and how people think about ambition?

Gregory Warner: I feel like in a lot of places in the world, ambition and productivity are not aligned, meaning it doesn't matter how productive you are, or how work ... how hard you work, you're not going to get ahead. You know? Unless you have certain other things, like, uh, it's a more nepotistic society, or you need to have influence, or you need to have gone to exactly the right school, um, or you need to be part of a certain sort of class or ethnic group. And, um, there, I think the flip side of that, though, is that there can be a kind of, um, mistake that we make in, in the, the US and other Western countries to think that productivity and that ambition are so perfectly aligned as promised.

Jessi Hempel: I love that. Uh, you're very thoughtful in that.

Gregory Warner: [inaudible 00:22:13]? Cool.

Jessi Hempel: As I would expect you to be as someone who swims in so many different cultural waters. You know, these are just three of the stories on your show. And I'm, I'm not just saying this because we're on the air. I, I love your show. I think your show is just a delight.

Gregory Warner: Oh, thanks.

Jessi Hempel: And it is also a gift to listen to the kind of resourced reported that goes into your show. I know the resources that takes. Um, if you could step back, what have you learned through doing the show about how work works in other places?

Gregory Warner: I feel like reporting on this series has helped me realize that, you know, well, we all want to improve ourselves. I mean, we, we're, we're told, okay, be more productive, uh, be smarter, work faster, work smart, you know, work, uh, uh, do this and this to, to, to, to work better. Um, but you, you know, that's looking at things through a very individualist lens. It's looking at this idea that I can change myself. And what you realize is that, especially when it comes to work, um, so much of it is outside our control. Like, we can say, um, "Oh, I want to rest more," but we're still going to get those emails and, and we'll still have that expectation that we're going to answer them. We have to contend with that. Now, there are strategies that we can, we can, um, we can figure out.

Uh, but, but I think that one of the things we, we try to do on Rough Translation is go to places where thi ... where the rules of the, the rules of the road, basically, are really different, and we're going to get perspective on the things that we don't see. Like, we're in conversation with ourselves, sorry, there ... there are forces we're in conversation with that, uh, have nothing to do with whether we're, um, deciding to be a better person, and have to do with our past or our, um, uh, our family, or what the, what the government wants or doesn't want from us. Um, and in some way, I feel like even if we're talking about a place that's far from listeners' experience, just the experience, just the act of getting that perspective, of seeing what we're talking about, what we're really talking about when we're talking about work and changing work culture and changing our work self, um, can be liberating.

Jessi Hempel: That was Gregory Warner, the host of NPR's Rough Translation. You can hear all these episodes we talk about by searching for Rough Translation wherever you listen. I hope you do. And now I'm bringing back Sarah, as we've done for all of our special series episodes, to talk about what we just learned. Hey Sarah. What did you think of that interview?

Sarah Storm: I loved listening to you and Gregory talk. I also, I loved every single story, but I think about that French lunch hour, and as much as I love my job, and we know I love my job, it would ... It sounds luxurious, and I was so curious that this, like, culturally, the whole, like, that's a place that France got to.

Jessi Hempel: What was most interesting to me about that particular French lunch hour was how when you are forced to spend that time every day with a group people talking about not work, whether you like them or not, you build up a deeper relationship with them that hallows you to trust them in a different way, I would think, and would maybe be more useful than a lot of the trust exercises we talk about in other episodes of the show, right? (laughs)

Sarah Storm: Organic rather than manufactured?

Jessi Hempel: Just an idea.

Sarah Storm: (laughs)

Jessi Hempel: But listen, Sarah. Here is the reason why I really wanted to have those three stories about how people are thinking about when and how to work in three other cultures. Because when you do that, then it becomes easier to, like, take a step back into American business culture and think, well, what around me is prescribed through culture rather than something I'm actually choosing into? Right?

Sarah Storm: Yeah. Yeah. I feel like we have to acknowledge that it's an uneven split how it plays out in the United States, right? There are a lot of people, as we said at the top of the episode, who have got to work hourly, who've got to do at least 40 hours or multiple jobs, and way more than that, who are maybe, like, more akin to what's happening in China. And then for a lot of us, especially, I think, knowledge workers, we're at this point where that push to reevaluate what really matters to us is huge and it's happening all over.

Jessi Hempel: Yeah.

Sarah Storm: Yeah.?

Jessi Hempel: That's entirely right. And, and of course, as inflation ticks up and the demands on our pocket book are so much more intensely felt, like, there is ... like, we should just say that there are a lot of people who feel they must work more than ever. But it's not just people who are making this decision. For knowledge workers in particular working at companies like, heck, like the company that we worked at, work at, LinkedIn, um, those companies are trying to figure out what to do to keep people motivated. And as we go to hybrid work forces to keep people, like, feeling their best on the job. And one of the things that they have come up with to avoid burnout is four-day work weeks. Or, in the case of LinkedIn, half days in the summer. We have a bunch of-

Sarah Storm: Half days on Friday.

Jessi Hempel: Friday half days. We have a bunch of Fridays, eight Fridays in a row this summer, where we are invited, as long as we finished our work, to leave.

Sarah Storm: And that, I think, is an important thing, along with the four-day work week. The way that companies are implementing this, I think, impacts the conversation.?

Jessi Hempel: Yeah, right??

Sarah Storm: Are you expected to cram 40 hours into four days? Or, uh, four and a half days? Or is it that you're meant to do the most you can do in the time you have allotted?

Jessi Hempel: It's the, it's the golden question, right?

Sarah Storm: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Jessi Hempel: And the answer to that question comes back to culture. So often, we have such a deep commitment to productivity culturally in the United States, it's hard to step out of that. That is really why I think Gregory's show is as cool as it is, why I wanted to feature it, because by looking at the culture of work in other countries, we can discern important things that help us make autonomous choices, choices for ourselves about how we're going to approach our work lives here in the US.

Sarah Storm: I love that. And I will say, I think that the conversations that, that people are having on the ground are actually, in come cases, really being paid attention to, and it feels like we, like the collective we of the workforce maybe have this important to impact where things go next. And that is very exciting and a little bit hopeful.

Jessi Hempel: It's where our work is now.

Sarah Storm: Yeah.

Jessi Hempel: So if you want to talk more about this with us, with me and Sarah, join us on Wednesday afternoon at 3:00 PM Eastern for our actual office hours, where we'll pick up this conversation with all of you who join. You can find us on the LinkedIn news page.

And as always, if you like the show, please follow and review it wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you. And now I'm going to turn it over to Sarah for the credits.

Sarah Storm:

All right. Hello Monday is a production of LinkedIn. I produce this show, with mixing by Joe DiGiorgi. Florencia Iriondo is head of original audio and video. David Pond is our head of new production. Michaela Greer and Victoria Taylor never slack us after hours. Our music was composed just for us by the Mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder. Dan Roth is the editor-in-chief of LinkedIn.?

Jessi Hempel: I'm Jessi Hempel. We'll be back next Monday with episode four of our special summer series, Navigating the New Office. Thanks for listening.

Gregory Warner: It's, it's not so much a room as a cubby that's created essentially by these two baffles that I built during the pandemic. But, uh, this is fabric from Nairobi, and, uh, there's insulation in here and there's two-by-fours. And so yeah, so our engineer, right, right before the, uh, or during the pandemic, he just instructed me how to build them. And, uh, they work really well. Like, I, I've been a foreign correspondent for quite a while, and, uh, I just didn't know that, um, yeah, big, big, a big amount of insulation behind you, and then in front of me I have a little bit of acoustic foam, um, would do so well. Like, that's, it's not an NPR studio at all, but-

Jessi Hempel: Gets you pretty close (laughs).