Finding Silence in a Noisy World with Justin Talbot Zorn

Look at this idea of clarity of sense perception, how we often have a kind of informational overlay over our perception of a flower, of a tree, of a garden, and this capacity to come to a deeper level of internal silence allows us to perceive more. This internal silence will also allow you to perceive a problem at work, a professional challenge, a personal challenge, a deeper level of feeling, listening, bringing more sense perception to the work we need to do. Foreign.

Welcome to the Happiness Squad Podcast. Your weekly dose of practical tips and inspiration to help you operate at your fullest potential integrating the science of flourishing into how you live, work and lead. I'm your host Ashish Kothari, the founder and CEO of Happiness Squad and author of the bestselling book Hardwired for Happiness. I will be your personal guide on your journey to explore the many facets of happiness where you well being and flourishing, from personal growth to building more positive environments at work. In each episode we will share powerful insight tips and stories from our guests who are leading experts, company executives and flourishing solution providers that you can implement right away to make happiness your competitive edge. Whether you're looking to overcome life's challenges, to go from good to great, or to enhance your team's performance through flourishing, this podcast is the place for you to find more joy, health, love and meaning in everything you do. Join us every week as we rewire for Happiness Together. Want to learn how to tap into the greatest source of insight and creativity? In today's episode of the Happiness Squad podcast, we we have the pleasure of hosting Justin Talbot Zorn, a seasoned policymaker, meditation teacher, and author of the acclaimed book the Power of Silence in a World of Noise. Justin has served as a legislative Director in the US Congress and has been a key figure in bringing mindfulness practices to Capitol Hill. In this episode, we dive into the profound impact of silence on our lives and and work. We discuss how cultivating moments of silence can enhance creativity, improve decision making, and foster deeper connections. Justin shares his experiences of the deepest silence he has ever known and how this connection with silence has transformed his life and his work. We will discuss several practical ways that leaders can integrate silence into their daily routines and foster a more collaborative and productive work environment. Wait till the end when Justin shares a powerful yet simple practice that he can start today to tune into this power of silence no matter how noisy your surroundings may be. This conversation was filled with insights that will inspire you to embrace the silence within and unlock new levels of clarity and intention. Hi Justin, it is so nice to have you with us. Thank you for joining us on our Happiness Squad podcast and sharing the beautiful work that you and Lee are doing in the world.

Ashish, it's really good to be here with you and grateful for the work you're doing, which feels very aligned with the message of this book.

Thank you for those who are listening. Justin and Lei wrote this beautiful book. It's called golden the Power of Silence In a world of noise. It can't be more needed in a world which is becoming more busier and louder than ever before. So my question to you, Justin, is what inspired the two of you to write this book?

You know, Ashish, it's probably something, a sensation that's familiar to you in these times, which is just despondence. This feeling like, what are we going to do to bring some help and healing to the state of this. This crazy world where we're living? It was late 2016, early 2017, time of a lot of upheaval and work and life and the world abroad. I had a young baby at home, first of my three kids, my wife and I. Lee was engaged in a whole lot of important work in terms of environmental policy. I was just coming out of some time working on Capitol Hill, and this feeling like, ashish, what are we going to do that is going to bring some positive change, not just one step forward, two steps back, but real and meaningful change that is going to help our communities, help our families, help society in these. In these times. And I had an intuition and had a conversation with Lee and found that she had the same intuition, this feeling in our meditation practices that maybe the answer was to take a step back and not look for the answers in more and more data and conversations and news and analysis, but to look for the answers within silence. And this wasn't the same thing as a feeling like, oh, we should go and meditate more. We were both pretty experienced meditators at that point. But it wasn't just a feeling like, oh, we need to go off on a retreat. Just simply a feeling like, we need to tune into the silence in our everyday lives and stop looking to fill the space. So we decided to do some writing, some investigating about this. Lee and I were doing some writing together for Harvard Business Review. So we decided to write an article about the psychology of silence, the neuroscience of silence, why it matters for creativity, why it matters for the management of energy, for inspiration, and also for our ability to discern what's true. And we were surprised when our editor at HBR said they wanted to see a piece she wanted to see A piece on this. And the piece went on to really resonate with people and open the door to, to a book deal and the opportunity to do some research so I can talk a little bit more about that process. But it was a really, really fruitful experience and just a joy to get to work with Lee Mars, my collaborator.

It's beautiful. I mean, it's a beautiful article. We'll dig into a bit and of course, in your book. But it's so resonant, you know, Justin, with me. So when Lizzie kind of forwarded that article and the podcast with you, you know, it is so true what you intuned into and created, right? Which is we've spent so much time, everybody, we have spent so much time trying to fix the outside world. We're looking for answers out there. And I mean, you know, we're trying to manage through everything, right? Like, we are busier than ever before, and yet we are more anxious. We don't have more control. We actually feel less, you know, even less in control. There's a level of hopelessness. There's just a level of anxiety that I think people are living in. And, you know, that was kind of a lot of the basis of our work as well, where I said, listen, instead of trying to master the outside world, why don't we tune inwards and start to master our inner worlds? Let's start to mine what we already know. Let's step back and look at where we are in the context of everything. So it was just so, so, so resonant with me, your message.

Glad to hear that.

Yeah. So listen, you know, you wrote, and I love this question, this question stuck with me. This is the most beautiful question. So I'm going to ask you and I'm going to play this back. You posed this question in the HBR article. What is the deepest silence you have ever known? And talk to us a little bit about that question and talk a little bit about, you know, that moment for you.

Well, the question grew out of the start of this book writing journey. You know, I mentioned we wrote this article and we really wanted to, you know, not just write about why silence matters in terms of the neuroscience and psychology, but really offer people an invitation to tune into silence as they experience it. You know, to take break from one of life's most common pervasive responsibilities, which is taking a break from having to think of what to say, you know, resting those mental reflexes that have to constantly, you know, protect your reputation, promote your point of view. So we realized, you know, there's no such thing as an expert in this kind of silence. We realized that there was no scientific definition that was going to satisfy the meaning of this pristine attention as we're talking about at Ashish. So we turn toward asking this really unique range of people. The poets, artists, neuroscientists, academic psychologists, sound engineers, national politicians, a Sufi whirling dervish, someone who'd been incarcerated on death row for more than 30 years for a crime that the preponderance of evidence showed he didn't commit. We wanted to ask all these people about their experience of silence, about this most profound silence. So we asked them this question. What's the deepest silence you've ever known? And the answers were so surprising, Ashish, because oftentimes people weren't describing what we thought would be auditorially quiet. Sometimes it was, you know, running the perfect line through roaring rapids, or it might have even been at a heavy metal concert. But they were describing these. These places of pristine attention where there was nothing making claims on their consciousness. These states of attention where people could move into a more pure state of consciousness where they were aligned with intention. So this question, as we explored it, what's the deepest silence you've ever known? It showed us a lot when we combined it with the academic literature and combined it with the science we were studying. It showed us a lot about the nature of noise. Noise as unwanted distraction at different levels, and silence as this place where nothing is interfering with your perception or your intention. So I've had, you know, I've had some experiences. Certainly in nature you have these cool mornings looking at a placid ocean, you know, and. And these kinds of experiences of breathing this pure air, waking up when camping, and feeling all the world still. But the deepest silence I've ever known that I write about in the book is being in the newborn intensive care unit after my wife and I had our twins born. And we were there at the start of COVID and the stress and the noise, the auditory noise, the beeping alarms and the informational noise of all the news of the COVID lockdown, starting and thinking about our kids health and all of that. Thankfully they were healthy. But the informational noise of all that was overwhelming. And the internal noise of the. The fear of the anxiety like you were just talking about was overwhelming. And then I just had this moment where for the first time I was able to hold both of my twins who were born, they were still before their due date, but hold them on my bare chest, just skin to skin and breathe for A while. And all of a sudden all of those noises, the auditory noise, the informational noise, the internal noise, it all just parted to the side. And I just had this moment of pure connection. And it was like, this is the silence I seek. This is the pure connection that I seek.

As I listen to you, Justin, in that moment, I can feel, I almost feel like I'm there with you. And I can feel that level of, you know, the peace and presence and how special that would have been.

Wow, Ashish, can I put the question back at you? What's the deepest silence you've ever known?

Yeah, for me, actually there have been tons of moments of deep silence that I've experienced in terms of where I've been in flow, where I've been working on something and everything just disappears. But I'll tell you, I actually, you know, two years ago, took myself to a vipassana, 10 day silent meditation. And what was magical, you know, 10 days I was in California at the Dhamma center there. And it was so magical, Justin. And I still don't have a complete, explicit understanding of this, right, Because I am one of the most active. I'm always talking. My wife was actually quite worried that I was gonna go spend 10 days not talking to anybody and meditating 12, 14 hours a day. So was my mother. She was like, I don't think how this is gonna work. And you know, I was literally. I had drove, I had driven to the center from Colorado, so It was a 16 hour journey. And I talked a big chunk of it other than the night when I had slept. And Justin, I got to the center, we turned in our devices and before we took the silent vow, my brain, I think for probably the first time ever, just went silent. This was before we actually even started the practice of Vipassana. And it was, it was the most magical. And I'll always remember it because it's a moment where the only thought in my thoughts was that I don't have thoughts. And this was. I was leaving. So you can imagine, I'll give this context right, We. I was leaving McKinsey. I was leaving a career of 17 years to start an entrepreneurship journey and to start a journey around doing more of this work around the book that I'd written in the world. So there was so much, you know, out there, there was so much in here of excitement, but also worry and fear. And in that moment, it. Everything just went away. And I cannot describe how beautiful it was. You called it pristine attention. I cannot describe how soothing it was. You Know, and all of. And that I was in that state for three or four days. And then funnily enough, you know, I started to kind of get thoughts back and I started to kind of experience. But it was. It was. It was beautiful. I find those moments now quite often, and I create them consciously in my life around. We had my parents visiting for four weeks. They were staying with us in May. And I have a 14 year old and my wife and we were all together in a house. It's a big house, but still it's a lot of people all the time. Right. And so when they left towards the first week in June and my wife and son left with them, I spent six hours, Justin, on that Sunday, I turned my phones off and I just spent six hours sitting in our garden. And you know what was amazing? I noticed the tree we have. I was sitting in a different place in the garden. We've lived here for 10 years, Justin. And I noticed this tree from a very different angle. And it was like I was seeing this tree for the first time. That was magical too.

That's beautiful. That's beautiful. This is a theme that we explored from some different angles of different academic silos. Look at this idea of clarity, of sense perception, how we often have a kind of informational overlay over our perception.

Oh my God.

Of a flower, of a tree, of a garden. And this capacity to come to a deeper level of internal silence allows us to perceive more. And if it allows you to perceive a garden more, a tree, a leaf, a flower more, the smell of the air more, this internal silence will also allow you to perceive a problem at work in a different way. A professional challenge, a personal challenge, a deeper level of feeling, listening, bringing more sense perception to the work we need to do in the world.

Yeah. And truly a practice of cultivating it. Right. And I love how you differentiate, Justin, also right. In the book and in all of your work, you know, there are two ways we can talk about auditory silence, which is silencing from the outside and taking ourselves away. But really the deeper work and the deeper invitation is to silence the constant noise within to allow you to get to that place you mentioned. And you made this connection to how when we practice silence, we get access to so much beyond, even in terms of problem solving, creativity, ideas, solutions. Talk to us a little bit around how leaders in organizations, what advice do you have for leaders to really use this silence as a tool that they can use for better decision making and really fostering a more collaborative and a productive work environment?

It's a really important question. I think of my friend Cyrus Habib, who went blind when he was a young man, overcame what was thought to be a life threatening illness. He survived. He went on to learn braille and make it through Columbia, Oxford as a Rhodes scholar, Yale Law School, and then on to become the Lieutenant Governor of Washington State. When he was really quite young, in his 30s, and everyone thought he was going to run for governor or a U.S. senator. And he had a press conference to make an announcement about his future. And he announced that he was taking a vow of poverty, chastity and obedience as a Jesuit priest, novice priest, essentially a monk, to go live in silence for a time and study the rudiments of this contemplative tradition. And people were shocked. And a lot of people said to him this, this really sounds like a. Like a cop out. Cyrus, what do you. What are you doing here? You're just running away from the world. And it's just what he said was that, you know, he told us that he was not running away from the world, not running away from his work in any sense. He had made this decision so he could do his work from a place of more intentionality, which to a lot of people, as you can imagine, you know, coming from the world's. Of the professional world you come from, you know, would just seem totally like an outrageous thing to say. But he decided that he wanted to continue to work on addressing issues of poverty, for example, and violence prevention and the exact types of issues he was dealing with as lieutenant governor of a major state. But he wanted to do it from a place of not needing to look out for his own ego. And he wanted to do it from a place of being within silence as his default. And the way he described it is, you know, he's a. He's a cook, he's really into cooking. And he's not a vegetarian, although he appreciates vegetarian food. But he told us he decided to learn how to cook really well vegetarian, so he wouldn't use all the meats and. And flavors that. That would come with heavy, rich cooking as a crutch. He would focus on how to bring out the essence of the vegetables and really get to this place where, as he described it, how to become a kind of connoisseur of creation. And he describes his whole life as spending more time in silence as his default, as a kind of work of how he could be a connoisseur of creation. Taste the taste, smell the scents. Really be present when he's washing dishes. Really be present when he's working on solving a public problem, an issue related to homelessness, for example, that he's really focused on putting himself in the shoes of the people he's trying to serve, rather than asking how is this going to look in a press release? So the way he talks about, I think, is really like, gets to the essence of what it means to be a servant leader. You know, often we hear about servant leadership and, you know, what it means to lead from a place of service. But in order to really put service first, we have to be really skillful about how we're putting ego in check, you know, and it's not just for, you know, those of us who feel like we're spending a lot of time on social media promotion. Oftentimes, Ashish, it's really subtle stuff, you know, thinking, how will this look at the most basic level, if not to the public, then maybe just to, you know, the board, maybe just to, you know, maybe just people I'm working with, as opposed to tuning into a higher ethical standard. And Cyrus, of course, you know, being a religious person puts this in. In terms of his faith of how to turn into a. How to tune into a higher level of connection as a kind of source of ethical guidance. But each one of us, regardless of our religious path or, you know, you know, where we. Where we stand in terms of our belief systems, you know, each one of us in leadership can do this work of connecting to this place of presence and silence and leading from a place of presence and silence and profound listening in our work.

We hope you're enjoying this episode and would love your help in spreading awareness and furthering our mission to help a billion people Rewire for happiness. Please consider leaving us a review and sharing this podcast with others in your personal and professional life who you feel could benefit from some of these very insights. It's a really simple way to extend and spread positivity. Also, check out Rewire, our proprietary offering to move you from knowing to doing on the Happiness Squad website, www.happinesssquad.com. rewire uses the science of habit formation and the power of community to help you build happier habits in five minutes or less daily. Now back to the episode. That is such a beautiful. Such a beautiful story, you know, and such a beautiful story as a reminder of the intentionality through which we lead. And the only way to connect to that intentionality, if it is not ego driven, is to drop into silence, right? To look within rather than try and look good out in the external world. And the good news, Justin, in all of this work, right. I'm starting to see more and more leaders starting to find, starting to find this space. So one of my dear friends at McKinsey, Manish Chopra, he wrote a book called the Equanimous Mind for the last, I think about now, 10 years, every year takes himself for a silent retreat. And for him it is this moment to really be able to tune in and take stock of everything and say, what else am I going to do? Emma Seplag, you probably know, has follows and we both are. We love the work of Sri Sri Ravi Shankar. Emma did all the research on sky and she does once a quarter, if not every six months, the silent retreat, where again, this moment of stopping and listening so we can do it. My question is the following, Justin, for you, so for those who are willing to take the time out to dip the toe, to go down that path of going and doing a retreat or formally learning meditation, I think these are pathways open. But what might be some other ways for leaders to cultivate silence and tune into what you call pristine attention in more day to day lives right till they get there. What might be some ways in which they can still harness this?

I'm glad you asked about this, Ashish, because we think of this book as a kind of non meditators guide to getting beyond the noise. You know, Lee and I have both brought meditation into our work and Capitol Hill and federal agencies and corporations around the world. And at the same time, you know, even as personal and professional practitioners of mindfulness, we sometimes look at the state of the world and say, you know, we've had 40 or 50 years of mindfulness out there and we're more distracted than ever. So we want to give people the license to look beyond the traditional rules and tools of mindfulness. And Joshua Smyth, professor at Penn State, professor of biobehavioral health and medicine, shared with us that through his studies of mindfulness, you know, the problem is just often if you don't take the medicine, the treatment won't work. And it's not a judgment of people who don't meditate, it's just recognizing that there's no perfect one size fits all approach that's going to deal with this huge problem of staying how we stay centered amidst this, you know, mass proliferation of mental stimulation in the world. So we want this book to be an opportunity to let go of questions like am I doing it right? Am I practicing mindfulness right? And give people license to explore the silence as they know the silence, because each one of us knows what pristine attention feels like for our own self. So we lay out in the book 33 different ways that we can find silence as individuals, as families, as workplaces, as society as a whole. And it really starts, Ashish, with the overriding premise, the overarching premise of finding appreciation for silence. This idea that goes back to the title of the book, that silence is golden, speech is silver, silence is golden, which is an ancient formulation. And the practices for leaders really start, I would say, where all the practices start, which is in our own lives personally, how to take time to just listen, just listen to silence. There's an ancient practice out of India called Nada Yoga, the, the yoga of sound, the yoga of simply listening to silence. And we found in our, our interviews and, and with academic researchers and some of our research on our own various studies that reinforce the idea that listening in silence actually regenerates neurons in the brain, that this is something that's edifying and healing for our minds. And it's such a counterintuitive thing, this idea of simply listening to silence. If you live in a quiet place where there's not a lot of sound or traffic taking a step outside and just listening to the sound of the wind, of the air, maybe the leaves rustling in the breeze, but nothing in particular, just listening in the silence. If you live in a noisy place, maybe go into the quietest room you could find, maybe it's, you know, nowhere fancy, just a hallway and just listening to the silence, bringing your active attention to the silence.

And Justin, it might even be. I'm just imagining if this is one of, one of the practices I'm just imagining. And let's say if you do live in a noisy place, maybe getting noise canceling headphones, putting those on and just listening to the sounds of our own body, breath going in and out, our heartbeat, you know, just tuning into how the, without all of that, the temperature feels on our skin.

For sure, Ashish. You know, sometimes people think about this idea of silence and say, oh well, I can't hear the total silence. Where is it? And there was a study from, there's a story in the book of John Cage, a composer who in the 1950s went into a anechoic chamber on the Harvard campus, which is a totally soundless room. And when he got there, he told the engineer in charge that he couldn't hear the silence. He heard two sounds, one high pitched, one low pitch. And the engineer said, no, this is perfectly, this is perfectly silent. The low pitched sound is the sound of your blood in circulation. The High pitched sound is the sound of your nervous system in operation.

Wow.

Which gets back to this idea that maybe there is no place of perfect absence of sound and stimulus in this buzzing, pulsating universe in which we live. And that's okay because again, silence is what each one of us conceives it to be. It's this space of pure perception and intention as we perceive it. So each one of us can find that, you know. So as you mentioned, putting on the noise canceling headphones, you know, doesn't need to be fancy technology, but if you got them for sure, use it. And if you hear the sound of your heartbeat, if you hear the. Maybe there's a little bit of ringing in your ears, but simply getting comfortable with that, listening, tuning into the most fundamental vibration of life that you can tune into.

And isn't it interesting, Justin, we run into this all the time, how afraid people are of turning off the noise. Talk to me a little bit about if that ever came up in your research, Ashish.

I wish I could say that I was beyond that fear, but you know, Nietzsche quite a while ago wrote of the horror of the vacuum that a human being is subject to experience. Silence is scary. There's a study out of the University of Virginia where Timothy Wilson, a researcher there, gave undergraduate students the chance to sit alone in silence or to push a button that would administer a very painful electric shock. And initially everyone said they'd rat, they would actually pay money to avoid this electric shock when they heard how painful it would be. But eventually, after about 15 minutes or so, 67% of the men and 25% of the women chose to shock themselves rather than enduring the silence. That's how much especially these days, we're afraid of silence. And some of this is, is understandable. You know, we, we seek information because information has not just entertainment value, but survival value.

And I think it's also, I find so many people would rather distract themselves because when we are silent, sometimes it requires us to process all those things that we are holding that we rather not face, but stuff deep into our unconscious. Right, Exactly. I mean, things about ourselves, things about others that we're just holding onto and we'd rather not. Rather not face. So why not just keep ourselves busy? But you know, in the end, there is no running away from it.

Exactly. The ancient philosopher mathematician Pythagoras, who we write about in the book, the originator of the famous theorem for finding the dimensions of a right triangle, was the leader of a, of a school, of a school, of a rigorous school of spiritual and scientific study in ancient Greece about 2,500 years ago. And the legend has it that he required any member of his inner circle of students to spend five years essentially in silence. Five years not talking. So we asked the question, the readers, you know, what would it feel like to go spend five years in silence? What's the first thought that comes to you if you find out you're going to spend five years in silence? Even if all the worldly considerations like your family's well being are taken care of? There's this fear that for me, pops up. Like you said, Ashish, what will I find? How can I face myself to that kind of depth? And what's on the other side? And Pythagoras, this extraordinary polymath, believed that this was a prerequisite to wisdom.

I wanted you. You touched on this briefly, Justin, around that you ran a mindfulness program in the House of Representatives. And I'm curious about that. And tell me a little bit about some of the things around that programs and what were some of the benefits that you saw that those who kind of practiced that gained?

You know, it's funny, it was a really extraordinary experience for me. But it wasn't so much that people practiced mindfulness and found this panacea and found their clarity about what they were looking for. You know, this group of Capitol Hill functionaries sitting together in silence, it was simply being present together. People of different ideological persuasions, people of different backgrounds, staffers for west coast members of Congress, Democrats who had, you know, experience doing yoga and meditation, and, you know, some Republican Finance Committee staffers who had gotten some introductions to mindfulness and meditation while working as attorneys on Wall street, people of very different backgrounds, people fighting for different objectives on Capitol Hill. And I felt that the silence, being together in a Capitol Hill office building on a day when Congress was in session for 25 or 30 minutes, the silence was this space where all of that nervous energy, that anxiety, that adversarial energy could dissipate, it could transmute, almost kind of alchemize. It was the beauty of not necessarily practicing a particular kind of meditation, but just being in this presence of silence.

I can imagine. In fact, you know, Justin, one of the, one of the things I'm inviting more and more of our leaders to do, you know, many companies in oil and gas have a safety moment where everybody, before they start a meeting, take a minute to go over safety, right? This is where you go for a fire, this is where you go for a hurricane. I'm Inviting more and more of the leaders who I work with to say, start your meetings with a mindful moment or a silent moment, six breaths, where we give the opportunity to just stop and cultivate that presence down, regulate our emotional nervous systems, our sympathetic nervous systems. Create space and see the power in this little micro mindful moment. But I'm going to start calling it the mindful, or maybe the. I'm going to call it the golden moment if I can. I like that golden moment.

Ashish. It really is a safety moment in a sense too. You know, it's a. It's a moment to check all those kinds of energies of opposition and outrage and, you know, kind of thinking about how to, how to dominate the other and win in the argument. You know, if we take that moment that brings us a kind of emotional, intellectual safety that we need in this day and age so people can meet each other in a. In a safe and clear and, and friendly way.

Yeah, no, exactly, exactly. A moment to empty our cups so we can really listen and fill in. Truly tune into it. Justin, this has been such an amazing conversation. I would love for us to chat again, even have Lee, hopefully as part of the conversation I'm going to use, we have a program called Rewire where many of these micro practices is how we are helping people go from knowing to doing. But as we run these programs, golden is definitely going to be one of the books that's going to be. I'm going to recommend to people to get a copy of because I think these 33 practices, we have 32 by the way. So it's quite funny how like, you know, very similar, very kind of similar places. But I'm going to invite them to check it out because, you know, there are about 30, 40% of the people who just for whatever reason are not open to mindfulness. They will not do it. They know all the science. But you know, this notion of. I love this invitation to cultivate silence that I think people can do and meditation is not the only way. So I love it. It's going to be one of the core things that we recommend. It goes into our recommended list. Thank you for spending the time with me and sharing all of the beautiful work and wisdom with Alice.

She's so grateful to you for this time. Really appreciate the presence and intention and goodness you bring to your interviews and all your work. And thank you for having me. It's an honor.

Thank you, my friend.

Take care.

That wraps up another episode of the Happiness Squad podcast. We hope you found the insights actionable to enhance your journey towards happiness and fill your life with more joy, health, love and meaning. Please consider leaving us. Review and share the podcast with anyone in your professional, professional or personal life who you feel will benefit from some of these very insights. It's a really simple way to extend support and spread positivity. Take care and remember, happiness is a choice that's available to you moment to moment in the here and now. Take care and see you next week.