 Welcome to The Boundary Spanners, a podcast on residential decarbonization with me, Nate, the blue-collar CEO of Atrack 2.0. And I'm Abhi, a white-collar policy researcher based in Canada. In this podcast, we're taking tacit, unspoken, and hands-on knowledge from the white and blue-collar worlds and turning it into explicit and actionable out loud insights for residential decarbonization. The views expressed in this show are entirely personal. You can follow the Boundary Spanners podcast on YouTube or wherever you get your favorite podcast from. Thank you for listening. Welcome to the first episode of Boundary Spanners. Nate is going to make the case for why the road to successful electrification in the residential space or to get to any of our future energy goals with regards to climate or a resilient grid or a more efficient energy system. The roads to success on each of these destinations has to go through HVAC contractors. So why do you say that, Nate? Well, the most important piece of it is that almost all residential HVAC replacements happen on an emergency basis. So when your furnace goes out, it usually ain't warm outside. When your air conditioner goes out, it's usually not cold outside. So 85% of residential HVAC, give or take, you could argue plus or minus 5%, but let's call it 85, it's replaced on an emergency basis. So when your furnace goes out, do you call the insulation guy? No. How about the plumber? No. Ruffer? No, and not ghost buses either. Oh, dang it. Who are you going to call? The HVAC guys. Yes. So they are the ones that are like when it comes to replacement and with, I mean, culturally, we are, as Americans, typically pretty bad about deferred maintenance. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. I mean, that's a cultural maxim. I'm sure it happens in plenty of other cultures as well. But if you wait until something fails and it's a very expensive thing, and particularly in the wintertime, if it's below freezing and your furnace is out, are you going to be freaked out? You're better. So are you likely to make a good decision? Not under the best of circumstances, but especially on a cold night. So I'm trying to put myself in the situation, right? So it's a cold night and two in the morning, my heating has suddenly stopped working. I've got a cold apartment that's probably leaking heat every second. I've got angry pets, slash kids, perhaps. This is a purchase or a budget decision that is likely going to be the most expensive, unplanned budget decision of the entire year, and it's probably going to be the most stressful night of my entire year. Does that about sum it up? Yeah. That's dead on, but I gave one presentation and found a gif of someone from a sitcom catching their hair on fire, and underneath it I put the caption, actual footage of a homeowner with a broken furnace. Yeah, this is something people freak out about. So you're telling me in North America, let's say US and Canada, 85% of HVAC replacements happen under water heaters. So one day it suddenly breaks, and that day you didn't plan for it, you've got 800 different things going on with your life, and you just want someone to come in quickly and cheaply to solve the problem for you. Yeah, you want heat, you don't necessarily care about all of the other little niceties of it. Like, do you want a variable speed piece of equipment? Probably not. So also, the numbers I'm probably off by a percent or two, but it's also right in the 85% range of residential HVAC is single stage, which means it's on or it's off. And in the chapter that we give out for free to anybody who will read it, HVAC 101 from my book, The Home Comfort Book, it compares the HVAC system in your car to that in your house, and cars have really good HVAC systems. There's six things that every HVAC system should do. Every car does five, most houses do none. And the first and most important one for comfort is load matching, which is it puts out exactly as much heating or cooling as the house needs at that moment. And that varies through the year, moment by moment, day by day, season by season. It's never the same. You look at two days and it'll be different because the sun's out hard one day and it's not the next. Heat loads or cooling loads. So being able to match that is the easiest way to think of it is if you had 10 gallons to take a shower and I'm going to give you two choices, I can either dump a 10 gallon bucket over your head or you can go take a five minute shower. Which one do you want? So single speed equipment is like that bucket. It's the same amount of energy, the same amount of heat that's delivered, but it's delivered too quickly and what that does is it spikes your temperature up and then it slides and then it spikes it up and then it slides where what you want is a constant stream of a little bit of heat or a little bit of cool. So it keeps your temperature like almost dead even. But when you're under dress, you are thinking who is the first person who can get to my house with the first piece of equipment they can get their hands on so that I have heat. We as humans make really bad decisions under duress, unless we have trained. I mean, this is why the military trains so that when you find yourself under duress, it is instinct to react the correct way. I mean, sports is the same way like all disciplines ultimately, well, they're called disciplines because it helps you be disciplined to react in a non-emotional way to emotional circumstances. So you're building that muscle memory to take a certain action in response to a stimulus, whereas if you're a homeowner, you don't have that the same trigger discipline, right? And you're trying to default to I need someone to solve this plane as quickly as possible and preferably as I was about to say as inexpensive as possible. But that's not entirely true, is it? Because it's not inexpensive in the long run. No one is doing a life cycle cost assessment at point of purchase. You just want the cheapest equipment at that moment, someone who can get it in fast. And then now you've locked in a natural gas system, let's say, for what, 15, 20 years? Yep, in that ballpark. I mean, at least a decade and probably more like two. So you've lost the opportunity to decarbonize a home for about a decade or so, two decades. And so across America, let's say United States of America, given that we know, you know, like median fail, you know, like these equipment fail in about 15 years, roughly give or take. How often it does an opportunity to decarbonize? How often are we letting go of a perfect opportunity to replace a gas furnace with maybe electric or a cleaner alternative? Is it like a couple of expect systems a day, a couple of households a day? Yeah, so it's closer to a couple of second. No way. Well, it's not quite that often, but so let's just for sake of argument, say there's 100 million existing homes in the United States. It's something like 114, but round numbers will just call it 100. And if we assume a 20 year replacement, that means five million a year being replaced. There's eight million heat pumps and furnaces sold every year. So I know that number is low in the United States. Well, let's just say it's five. Five million systems per year works out to a new system started up every six seconds. Wow. So every six seconds, we have the opportunity to electrify a home and we're letting it go because of how the circumstances in the market are structured. So you talk about the lack of deferred maintenance and that's a broader cultural problem, right? We don't fix things anymore. We use it until it breaks and then we get new things. There's a decline in like sharp class. We can spend an entire episode talking about those aspects across culture, like how we don't fix things anymore. But specifically, we're talking about how because deferred maintenance is not really a thing. We have this problem where... Preventative maintenance actually is not usually a thing. Right, preventative maintenance. So it creates an incentive structure where both the homeowner and HVAC contractors are trying to put in the quickest, cheapest bid to get the project. Does home ownership play into this? Like, because I know people don't... Not many people live in their forever homes anymore. I think people used to live 17, 18 years in the home, the average median number of years the home owner lived in the house is shrinking across North America and that's how you can get another episode about the acidization of homes and what it means for decarbonization. So if you're a homeowner and you don't expect to live there for long, how would you make a decision under duress like that? What happens? Cheapest piece of crap I can get in there. I mean, personally, until this house that I'm sitting in, because there's a heat pump sitting in my barn to be installed in a couple of weeks. This is our fifth house in 15 years of marriage. One of them, we lived in for nine, thought it was going to be our forever house and then learned the principles of financial independence and decided we were going to sell that, put half the money in the market and buy a house that costs half as much. And that's what we did and it actually worked out really well. So assets went up enough that we bought another house with the same money because we bought on the way down on COVID. So it was lucky. But my point is in 15 years of marriage, five houses, we bought one piece of equipment and it was a furnace for our second house. And it was while we were selling the house and the fellow who was buying it from from us, it was a first time homebuyer. It was 2010, so it was difficult to sell anything. And the guy kept moving the needle like, well, if you do this, this and this were good. And then we'd get another letter from his realtor. You need to fix this, this and this. And I'm like, what part of we had a deal? Don't you understand? And it turned out the heat exchanger was cracked on the furnace. So I had to replace one. So I remember calling because it's not easy to buy a furnace without an HVAC license, but there's a lumberyard by me that would do it. And I called him like, what is the cheapest piece of crap furnace you have that I can put it? And so I mean, I replaced that furnace out of anger. It would have been smarter for him to ask me for the money, like ask for a grand off or 1500 off or whatever it would be, because I bought the furnace for 600 bucks. And then I found an HVAC tech to install it on a Saturday for another six or 800 bucks. But I mean, I didn't have any money at that point. Like that was that was annoying. But I think that is going to be fairly typical of it, because if you buy a piece of HVAC equipment, you don't expect to be there for the life of it. I mean, five houses in, I bought one. Right. And so a lot of families, their experience, you know, with home ownership might not take the same path as yours, but there's some similarities, right? Because, you know, uprootedness is very much a characteristic of modern life. And people move homes, move communities, move countries. I did. I went from India to Michigan to now Canada, seeking better opportunities and better life of themselves and seeking to belong to different places. And and as a consequence, not a lot of people get to live in a forever home anymore. Not a lot of people get to plant deep roots anymore. And so when you're making a. Budgetary decision under duress. Are you thinking at all as a homeowner? Do you find that homeowners are thinking at all about. Like the cost recovery aspect of this. So as an example, like it, you know, if I took if I took ten thousand dollars and put it in a new kitchen countertops. At the back of my mind, I'm always thinking, yes, I mean, there's aesthetic value on this increase in quality of my life. But I also know that is the significant percentage of the cost I can recover when I sell my house and move to a different place. But these factors don't play into it's not an investment. Can you expand on that? We've talked about this before, but can you expand on that? Yeah, so I mean, to the to the countertop thing, I mean, there's I've read a bunch of articles about this sort of thing. Was it I think a new front door was like the best payback of anything that you could get because it could substantially change how the house looks. As the first people walk through in a house. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So it's you want to make a good impression. So a new front door for a grand or fifteen hundred bucks can be really helpful. Although those numbers always seem too low to me because I've got a client that recently paid seven thousand dollars for a new front door, just the door like a dang. But the countertops, you can probably expect half or three quarters of your money back because it's the house is going to be a lot nicer. It's probably going to be part of a renovation of the kitchen. But yeah, when it comes to infrastructure, if you have a new roof on a house, is that house worth anything more than a house of the five year old roof or a ten year old roof or even a 20 year old roof? Probably not. I mean, it might be a point of negotiation. It was on our now third house. It had a twenty five year old roof and it was getting to be due. So one of the points of negotiation on that was how much will it cost to do the roof? And I was like, I'm probably going to be somewhere between ten and fourteen thousand. And these people were coming in from Connecticut and they're like, I think that's at least 20 or 25. It's a market specific thing. I got a bid for ninety five hundred. And they said yes, because now it was there. But, you know, a house is expected to have a roof. It's expected to have a heating or cooling system. And it just it doesn't matter. And my mom sold her house is the house that I grew up in as a teenager. It had two furnaces in it. And both of them cracked it. Actually, they damn near killed her. She she had bad carbon monoxide poisoning. If she hadn't left to go to a friend's house, she'd probably be dead. Wow. And so that's another another piece of of combustion appliances. That's pretty interesting. But in selling the house, they're like, we demand that you replace these furnaces, which I understand. But that was just a hit out of it. And but that's not a good decision. You generally don't want to have the seller do something for you because they're going to find the cheapest, crappiest way to check that box. It's the same problem with new construction. Oh, it's a new house. It's built. Well, no, it's built to code, which is the crappiest house that you're allowed to sell by law. And they're often not that great. Talking about code will be, I mean, it'll be an entire season. We've got a season's worth of content to mine about the challenges of decarbonizing when when the code really means that you're trying to do the bare minimum to skate by regulations. Right. So we'll talk about that in a different time. Yeah, we'll set that aside. Yeah. So let me circle back then to summarize. Every six seconds, roughly. An opportunity to decarbonize a home for 15 years goes missing because 85 percent of people are making budgetary decisions under duress and that the budgetary decisions that they're making. The cost of that investment is not reflected in how in resale value for the home. It's is that right? So you're not going to get a penny extra. It doesn't have a furnace. OK. Yeah, good. Does it have an air conditioner? OK. And so and and so because of this, roughly every household's path to decarbonization goes through an H.Y. contract. Yep. Yep. So if I'm a policymaker, right, let's say I'm the governor of the 51st state of America and I have a goal of decarbonizing households by 2050. And I come to you and say, Nate, this is my bold and ambitious climate target. We have, let's say, a million households in our state over the next, you know, 2050. That's like, I mean, it's not too far from here. 30 years, less than 30 years from now. Why should I bring H.Y. contractors on site? Help me understand. So can you make the case? Like, why is it important for me to to work with H.Y. contractors? Why can't I work with utilities, municipalities, transmission companies, X, Y and Z? I have relationships with all these institutions, but H.Y. contractors, largely because they're a private enterprise, you know, not quasi public institutions like utilities and municipalities and so on. I do not have a lot of regulatory levers or policy levers that I can pull to. So why do I need to bring H.Y. contractors on site? Help me understand. Well, the first one we've already covered pretty hard, which is that 85 percent of systems are replaced under duress. So the H.Y. contractors are the only ones that are likely to get that call. And when it comes to home decarbonization, you are looking at the furnace, the water heater, the dryer and the stove. Those are the big four. Sometimes there's a fireplace. But the the HVAC, particularly in cold climates, is by far your big guy. Cold climate like both of us live in. You know, Cleveland, Denver, Toronto, you know, any of these colder climates now water heats about 10 percent of the gas usage of a house, maybe 15, maybe five, you know, depending on a bunch of things, but it's 10 percent give or take usually. So space heating is by far the elephant of the room. Who changes the space heating in a house? The HVAC, the contractors, I mean, it just is. And when it comes to changing heating and cooling systems, I don't know that a lot of policymakers probably understand how complex the HVAC trade is. So you expand on that? Absolutely. I mean, it's it's three trades minimum required to do HVAC work if you're talking heating and cooling. And I mean, that's, you know, I could be Adam's heating and air. It's just a common thing. So you need to know refrigeration. So there's three trades, refrigeration, which is dealing with the refrigerant. And that's going to be your air conditioning or it can be a heat pump as well, because a heat pump is the same piece of equipment as an air conditioner. It just has a couple of extra parts so it can run backwards. So it heats and cools. So refrigeration is there and then plumbing and then electrical. And so you have to know those three to do it. And boy, are they like systems are complicated. I'm decent at electric work. I just added a bunch of outlets to this house. Not a big deal. Three wires, hot, neutral ground. You just keep them going to the right place through everything. And it just freaking works. Sometimes somebody wire something different, which I had and I wired switches like five ways before I finally went and got my tester to figure out what was hot. And the line that came in that was hot was red. And that's supposed to be a jumper for a two way or three way switch. So I didn't think that was going to be what it was, but it wasn't working. So I had to go figure it out. But that was a relatively simple troubleshooting affair where when you think about what an HVAC contractor needs to be able to do to go do service, service techs. I mean, we should call them sir or ma'am because they have to know so much, pull up to any house with any random system installed in various poor ways and quickly figure out what it is, figure out what part it is, see if they have it on their truck. If they do replace it, if they don't order it, charge a customer, get out of there and they'll do 10 of those a day. So it's plumbing, refrigeration, electrical, the sheet metal too, right? Sheet metal and I mean, carpentry sometimes. I mean, in lots of parts of the country where it's in a closet, they're going to have to make changes. It's it's a multi trade trade, if you will. And this is for the for the men and women who are just the techs, for the industry itself, you need salespeople, project managers, yeah, marketing people, admin, the whole nine yards. Yeah. Yeah, it's it's immensely complicated as a trade. And each HVAC system is unique in a way, right? Because because so even in the same like a neighborhood where two houses might be identical, the installation of two HVAC system might be identical to diagnose the problems that the homeowner might be having. It might it might be. Can you expand on that? Because we've talked about this before, how two houses, two systems in the same neighborhood might end up having different, you know, comfort outcomes or home energy outcomes for homeowners because of all the variables involved. Yeah, there's so many pieces. I mean, two houses right next to each other, what are the odds that the same crews work through both houses all the way? If it's the same companies that did it, it was different crews. So, you know, one house might be leakier than the other. One may be in a different site that has more of a moisture problem than the other one. So there's more dehumidification load to deal with. Like my friend, T Grownes, who had this energy star home built that was a train wreck, he had a spring running underneath the basement floor. And so he had all these humidity issues that they're just like, what's going on? And there was actually a spring that was coming up right underneath the house was part of it, and then they they misapplied a piece of a track in there. It was single stage. It was oversized and it was zoned for one of the zones is only 10 percent of the flow of the system, which you are not supposed to do. It's supposed to be pretty even on zones, you know, maybe 40, 60, but not further out than that. So there are all these different things that were wrong. So if you look at two houses, who construct them is going to be different. The the site conditions are going to be different. They may have gotten a different piece of equipment. The equipment may have been commissioned differently and oftentimes incorrectly. You know, it's so you know, we were a little bit low on refrigerant, whatever, ship it or one didn't get vacuumed down. And the thing burns itself out in a couple of years. Like there's all of these different factors. And the people who live in those households are different. Yeah. And they behave the number of people and how they interact with the system. So you've got multiple systems embedded within systems. So you've got the age. So it's not like taking your light, your your incandescent light bulb out and putting an LED thing in. You have to integrate a system. A complicated machinery with your system, which is the house that interacts with the whole other variable, which is people in the house and to deal with this one system, the HVAC system, you need people who have skills and at least three trades, if not five trades. And we expect these people to. And so the future of being able to decarbonize our households rests on the ability of these. I mean, these men and women. Who are because of the size of the market and labor force are already overworked. Yes. And they're doing 10 of these a day. Yep. Yeah. 10 service calls a day is pretty common. Yeah. So I mean, it's. It all starts and ends with HVAC, so HVAC could add solar. HVAC could add batteries and like that. That would be in their wheelhouse because they're already electrical contractors. You know, either they have an electrician on staff or they routinely work with an electrician is usually how it works. They're used to doing all of this stuff. But the like solar. It's simple. I mean, it just isn't that hard. It's a few appliances that you plug together. I mean, it's not like it's crazy simple, but it's just not that hard. I mean, I've got a solar system for our camper. So I had to figure out how is the inverter work? How does the battery work? How do the panels work? And I was like, Oh, this like it was a little bit of a learning curve, but it wasn't that bad. And so it's so you're saying solar is easier in reference to HVAC because you can kind of it's one trade is one trade is modular systems. And you can design from afar and then you can deploy just in a distributed way. And these kind of like Lego blocks, they kind of plug into each other and you need some local crew to go high and up. But it's not like you're not working with four trades. You're not diagnosing anything. Right. Yeah. So it's a new install. You're not changing something out. OK, so number one thing that you said your policymakers might not understand is just how how how many skills we expect out of HVAC contractors to be able to respond to the emergency duress situation, leave alone, decarbonization and all these other objectives. Yeah. So when policymakers try to respond to those goals by, for example, giving incentives for replacing, giving an incentive for replacing to a more efficient furnace or giving you like a five hundred dollar rebate for switching to a heat pump or something like that. How does how does the HVAC contractor react to incentive programs like this? Does it help? Does it hinder like? Yeah. Well, what was it? Jed Trott just replied this beautiful reply if I can try and stick with it about the about programs that touch the kitchen table transaction. It was if it's difficult to explain and you have to explain it, it's not helping. Got it. So just the act of so I'll take the gas company one that I worked with, they would give you four hundred bucks to go from like a 90 to a 94 percent furnace or maybe it was an 85 to a 94, whatever it was. It was taking a step up. It wasn't it didn't actually cover the cost difference between the two. But just by bringing that up, you just slowed down the process of the sales process. So it and I mean, this is one where I hear a lot of talk about. So we should just add that to the real estate transaction. Like, good God, they're complicated anyway. Like realtors do not want to add anything that could cause more drama into the transaction because having bought and sold a whole bunch of houses, every transaction has drama, every single one. And so there's always something going on, something unexpected. You don't want to throw anything more into an already complex sale, and that's true with HVAC, too. So don't mess with the kitchen table transaction for the love of God. I mean, just don't it. You are hurting closing ratios and usually hurting job sizes, which means you're hurting profitability. And if we want to talk about sustainability, losing money is not sustainable. I I think that that will be a whole nother episode for us to talk about the as you call it, the church of the kitchen table. Yeah. And what happens to contractors when they have to pivot to incorporate a funding program or an incentive model that doesn't really have long legs. A lot of contractors business there. I mean, a lot of many of them are family run businesses. So people have been second generation, third generation contractor generation. Yeah. And in order to and now they're pivoting to to work around or work with a funding stream that may or may not exist. And if it gets yanked away, then they have to again, you're just making it difficult for them to have a sustainable business model. Yeah. In the future. So that's that's that's a whole other episode for us to begin to feed the bears. We can call that one. Don't feed the bears because it's it's in varying degrees. You're feeding the bears. Sometimes you just give them a snack and they just come back. But sometimes they are entirely dependent on you. And then when you take the program away, they die, which I've seen again and again. Right. And so I want to pick up on what you said earlier, which is the men and women that come to your home as HVAC contractors. We need to call them like you said, sirs, because they're like a dog. They're a home doctor. Right. Yeah. And they're there to help diagnose or at least an HVAC doctor. Home and we're trying to turn them into home doctors. But yeah, for now, yeah, home energy. Yeah, it's a HVAC doctors, definitely. So no other trade or industry has such a critical touch point with the residential sectors like HVAC contractors. Is that your pitch? Yeah, there is no other vertical, no other path to do this. We would have to create an entire new contractor army, an entire new vertical. If we want to do this quickly, forget about it. There is there is no path. All paths lead through HVAC, period. And there is no other viable path that I can see. And we've looked. So from your vantage point, within the HVAC industry, is the HVAC industry ready to take on this challenge? And try not to swear. So I'll say hell, no. I mean, we were talking to someone, you know, pretty high up in the Canadian system, so the Canadian HVAC industry. And he said, so here I am leading the army of decarbonization warriors. Who's with me? Thinking that all the HVAC contractors are behind me, turns around. He's like, nobody's there. Guys, girls, yeah. Hello, Bueller. I mean, that that is where we are right now. There's there's a few people. But even if you are really gung-ho electrification as a contractor, you still have to talk to the customer into it. They need to understand. They need to buy it. I mean, you've heard me say this a bunch of times. Treatment plans that aren't executed. And then the dead patients that result are stupid. So we need to be creating treatment plans that people actually follow. And if consumers don't understand the benefits to better equipment, you know, like HVAC 101 compares home and car HVAC, if people don't understand what the differences are and see the value, they're not going to do it. And then if they are under duress, even if you try to explain something to them, they're going to be like, just do it, just do it, just get it in. What's the cheapest? So we have to solve that emergency problem and we have to solve a contractor education problem and we have to solve a consumer education problem. Consumer awareness, consumer demand. Yep. And resale, like you were mentioning, like if we don't solve resale to some degree, we're in a lot of trouble as far as scale goes to. So it's a wicked problem. There's all of these different pieces. And then like the manufacturers, every major manufacturer, at least I mean, if they make air conditioners, which is most of them, they may keep pumps. They just do. Because it's the same piece of equipment. But most manufacturers are nervous about this. And it's like, guys, we're going to solve more of your high end stuff. Like you should be happy. This should be more profitable stuff. But everyone is nervous about this because there is a lot of risk, particularly with full decarbonization, there's a lot of risk of failure. So yeah, it's just a little complicated, you know, no big deal. We just have to take a multi-billion dollar 100 year old industry and turn it on its head. Not a problem. Sounds good. When do I start? How's last week for you? Can we have this accomplished, you know, like now, give or take? Is there does it pay well, is there money in that? Currently, no, which is another problem. Yes, let's let's let's go sell equipment that has higher likelihood of failure and callback and unhappy customers, which is another problem that comes with this. So yeah, this is it is it's quite the knot. It really is. So so we'll we'll we'll talk about that more next time, right? Looking forward to. Thank you for listening to the Boundary Spanners podcast. In this episode, we learned that the road to decarbonizing every single home goes through an HVAC contractor. We also learned that 85 percent of furnace or HVAC replacements happen under duress. When equipment breaks down during the warmest or the coldest months of the year, homeowners making large budget redecisions default to picking the contractor offering the cheapest quote. This sets up a race to the bottom for contractors who are looking to make the fastest sale and the easiest like for like system replacements. All in all, this means that we end up locking in carbon infrastructure in your home for another 15 to 20 years. So if you're a policymaker listening to this, you might want to ask yourself, how can I leverage this army of HVAC contractors that are always the first point of contact for homeowners when the furnace or air conditioner or water heater breaks down? How can I design policy that is boots on the ground with HVAC contractors rather than design programs for them from afar? Would such partnerships help pave the way for enlisting the support and the experience and the expertise of HVAC contractors? Would it help them throw their shoulder to the yolk towards decarbonizing homes? You might also want to ask yourself, what happens when I layer on decarbonization as a goal on top of an industry that is struggling with this kind of race to the bottom system replacement under duress dynamics? Are my policies accounting for these dynamics? Are my policies making an active effort to address this race to the bottom problem? And if my policies aren't doing that, then you might actually want to ask yourself, is it possible that my policy is actively feeding into this problem and making it worse? We will address some of these questions in the next and subsequent episodes of Boundary Spanners. Thanks for listening.