 Well, welcome to the show, Richard. Great to have you. Yeah. Thanks for having me on. I appreciate it. We're excited to talk about this topic, especially with all the work that Johnny and I have done over the years with young men, this crisis of masculinity, and really the book brings in a lot of great science. But we'd love to just start with your fascination with this subject and how the book came together for you. Sure. I mean, I would say it's not the book I expected to be writing at this point, partly because it is a delicate topic for sure when you start talking about the problems of boys and men, a Brookings Institution scholar, social scientist. Most of my work has been on inequality and class and race. And I guess if you were to predict that I was going to write a book on gender, it wouldn't necessarily be in this one. And so the reason for it is it's a combination of personal and professional. So personally, I've raised three boys, then I will, then I will adults and just six in the UK and the US. And so experiencing some of their challenges and disorientation at various points and the culture that they're growing up in has given me a lot of concern about as much of sometimes the rhetoric around this subject as the substance. And then as a scholar, I just I've just seen these trends getting worse, very often not acknowledged in a way that I think is appropriate. And so just study after study that crosses your desk. And eventually I just came to believe actually I knew some of the headlines, but it's one of the things where the deeper you dig, the more concerned you get. And once you start digging, I think you have a responsibility to keep going. And that's the result of I guess that personal experience combined with that professional experience. It used to be that I would worry about something else during the day and young boys and young men at the evening in the evenings and the weekend, I started worrying about them 24 seven. And the book is the result of that set of anxieties. Well, Johnny and I can definitely attest to the worry that young men face when they join our programs and look for coaching to help them build better relationships, grow in their dating life and certainly get ahead in their career. And of course, this topic has a lot of stats and a lot of misnomers and research that's cherry picked. So I'd love to, before we begin this discussion, really break down the two biases that really do not allow us to see the full picture of the research your book covers. I know that in the book, you bring up the straight line instinct and then the negativity instinct, which I think really impact the way we view some of the numbers and stats that get thrown around when we talk about the differences in genders, when we talk about this crisis of young men. Yeah. So the straight line instinct is, this is from Hans Rosling's work largely, just the sense that whatever a line is doing, it's going to continue doing that into the future, whether it's global population or crime rates or fertility rates or whatever. It's almost always wrong. That's not how social change happens. And so anybody that projects a line forward, certainly if they're projecting far into the future is really engaged in some pretty dodgy social science. They can make some great headlines. You can say we're 100 years away from X or whatever, but you can be sure that if you scratch the surface, it's really, it's really bad. And also it's very fatalistic as well. I think the other thing about the straight line instinct is it sort of presumes that we're all like hostages on this line and that we can't change the line. The line isn't anything to do with our own agency. And so there's incredibly pessimistic underpinning of that whole line. It's like, look at that trend. And then sometimes we act as if we're not part of the trend, as if we're not agents somehow bringing this thing about, that the world is happening to us rather than we're engaged in the world. And then you're right. Also, the negativity instinct is inevitably to be drawn to bad news stories, like everything's terrible. And it's actually, that's a difficult line to thread when you write a book like this, where I think there are some real problems facing many boys and men. And I hope that I set them out fairly and authoritatively. But I tend not to use words like crisis, because those words are so overused in our debate. There's so many crises, you can't keep up with them. At some point, we're going to have to have a crisis of crisis, I think. Because we've surely reached the tipping point. How many crises can we have at the same time? And in a way, what that does is it gives you a choice between nothing to see here or Armageddon. And that's not how most people experience the world. The world is messy and it's complicated. Sometimes you take a couple of steps forward and then a step back. Some people are doing well. Other people are struggling. You're having a good year this year. You're having a bad year next year. Life is really messy and complicated. And unfortunately, we're even more so now than probably other times in human history. We're just after the kind of binaries. We're after zero-sum games. If they're winning, I must be losing. And we're after binaries. Yes, no. And of course, almost nothing in life is like that. And so I've attempted to steer a course between those competing instincts. I think you have just summed up the news cycles for the last decade. Yeah, I try not to watch the news very much partly for that reason, Johnny. Yeah, it's a little tough to keep up with all of the outrage that is generated by the media. I think in this case, a lot of these numbers get thrown around the difference in pay between genders, education levels, your ability to earn. And again, these are snapshots in time. And it's very easy to take that snapshot and that data and fit whatever narrative you want to move forward. And we've talked about this in the past, that there are these competing narratives that we're trying to make sense of. And I'm almost 20 years out of college. I know that my college experience as well as probably many in our audience is quite different than what's happening currently. And you start the book by talking about what's going on in education. So what are the trends in education right now? And how are they impacting the genders? Yeah, I'd just like to pick up on that example you gave if it's okay of the gender pay gap as a just a great example of what we're just talking about because that's one of those issues where the gender pay gap is either a complete myth. If you listen to some like conservative writers and well, it's a myth, pay gap is a myth. And you see that headline everywhere. And then on the other hand, you see huge pay gap hasn't improved patriarchal society. And of course, the truth is that there is a pay gap. That's not a myth. That's math. What's difficult is getting out why there's a pay gap. It doesn't appear to be largely resolved direct discrimination against women and men. It's not women earning less than men for the same jobs. It's because of a whole other set of complicated reasons, not least to do with family responsibilities. That raises another really big question, which is like, well, why are there such big differences between men and women and how much family responsibility they take? But that's the real question. And that question doesn't even, we don't even get within spitting distance of that question. If it's framed as pay gap, patriarchy or myth. So it's a great example of what you were just talking about. I do start with education because in some senses, I think that's some of the most dramatic changes we've seen in recent decades. The top line story is that over the last few decades, essentially across around the world, and at every level of education, girls and women have not just caught up with men, but have blown way past them. So in the US context, for example, when Title IX was passed in 1972, which was a landmark piece of legislation to promote gender equality in higher education, there was about a 13 percentage point gap in favor of men in those people getting college degrees. So if you just take everyone getting college degrees, 13 percentage point gap in favor of men. So a big gender gap. Now it's 15 percentage points, but the other way around. So within about 20 years of Title IX, women are caught up with men in associates degrees, bachelor's degrees, and then master's degrees, and then just kept going. And so what we're now seeing is on college campuses for every three women, there's only about two men. And you're seeing these huge gender gaps, particularly in post-secondary education, which could have implications for the future. And the thing is no one predicted that. Like if you go back and I've done this and talked to some of the people who are around who are writing about this in the system, nobody predicted that it would be this great overtaking. And I think that's for all kinds of reasons we can get into. But the headline is it's because the education system actually favors girls and women. But you couldn't see that in a world of sexism, because girls and women weren't encouraged to use their education to succeed. But now that we've leveled the playing field by and large, you are seeing some real structural disadvantages that face boys and men in the education system. Just high schools the same. If you take the people getting their highest GPAs, two-thirds of them are girls, lowest GPAs, two-thirds of them are boys, and so on and so on. So all the way through the education system, there's now a very stark gender gap. It's just not the one we're used to talking about. What seems to me to be one of the lenses that is clouding a lot of these viewpoints is just culturally speaking some of the preconceived notions we have around men, boys, and girls and their differences, and the way that they learn, the way that we approach educating them. So I'd love for you to unpack a little bit of what's going on behind the scenes that we couldn't foresee culturally speaking when this was passed and when we thought we were doing something to enhance women moving forward in the education system. And in fact, we may have been holding men back along the way. Sure. I think it's again, I've got the shadow of zero-sum thinking kind of lurking here, which is if there's a gap just because women are doing so well, then that's a different kind of gap to if men are struggling, but many men are really struggling. And so the difference between a relative gap and an absolute gap, and it's very important I think to be able to hold two thoughts at once. One is amazing progress for girls and women, nothing but celebration there, and there are still some challenges that face women in our society. Just look at our politics, look at our boardrooms, and so on. But at the same time, it's very clear that boys are struggling more. I think that what wasn't easily anticipated was two things. One, the extent to which because girls and women mature earlier than boys and men, they're just at an intrinsic advantage in the classroom. And I really think that just that basic structural difference was clouded by sexism. I mean, I think one of the ironies is that it took feminism to uncover those structural disadvantages that boys face in the classroom. But now that they've been uncovered, we should face them. And so put it bluntly, a 15-year-old boy, and I've had three 15-year-old boys at various points, they are not the same as 15-year-old girls. And there isn't a single parent in the world that doesn't know that. And then now we've got neuroscience to prove it, particularly in things like organizational skills, deferring, gratification, risk-taking, and so on. There's just this huge gap in adolescence. And then largely the gap closes, not completely, but closes. So I think we're seeing that really. We couldn't perhaps anticipate that. And I think the other thing that's really hard to get at is just this sense that previously, I think to some extent, the script for masculinity was pretty easy to follow. Get educated, get a job, have a family, take care of your family. And the reason to get educated more was to get a better job so you could take better care of your family. And so it was relatively straightforward. And now I think it's much less straightforward. And so I think there's a lot of disorientation and dislocation among young men because the old script has been largely torn up and for mostly good reasons. But we haven't really got a new one yet. And so what does it mean? Where is the motivation? Where are the incentives? Where are the signposts from boy to man? And I think that as a society, we've successfully dismantled some of the old models, but we have completely failed to replace them. Or even sometimes to take seriously the challenges that come with such radical changes in models of masculinity and femininity. And so I think the feminist movement's done a terrific job of really, really thinking what it means to be a woman. But we are decades behind in terms of what it means to be a man. And there's a gap is created there. And that's the gap that many of our young men are falling into. I think that is why so many, there's been so many people on the internet who it's rose who have taken this name as Internet dads. And there is there is a lot of going on with this right now. And so Jordan Peterson being one of those fellows, Mike Sernovich being one of them, there, there's a lot, there's a there's a handful that I can think of. And people were questioning the rise of the fame of why are so many young men turning to these guys? And it was like, these were the only guys who were speaking to them of giving them the advice that they were looking for. Because as you were saying, the old systems were dismantled, but nothing ever placed it. So they're all looking around going, well, what do I do? The one thing that they do know, and this is what AJ and I hear every day, which is they're not fulfilled. They're looking for that. They're looking for where is my place and how do I become fulfilled? And for a lot of these young men, they're either in careers or jobs that they're not even interested in. And if that career and job was the thing that they thought and they were told that's what they needed to do, that would make them feel fulfilled. And of course, because they're not, they're they're they're looking for something. It's so interesting you say that, because I think it does, it sharpens this point about role, because I think in the old world, that if you were a man, and you were doing a job that maybe wasn't in and of itself usually fulfilling it, you still got fulfillment from it because it was the way you were looking after your family. And so the fulfillment was secondary in that sense, but you could take pride and purpose from the fact that this was a bread winning role. And without this, you doing this job, whether you love it or hate it, that your family wouldn't be able to eat or have a roof over their heads. But that's of course, not so true anymore. And it's interesting. I got very interested in this research on self complexity, which I kind of flick out a little bit in the book. And I think it could be up your street, because what it talks about is the different ways that yourself can get meaning and identity. And the more ways there are, the more complex yourself is. And what we see is quite a big gender gap. And so there's much more self complexity for women, especially now, because they're actually they can get sources of identity from different domains. Right. So women have expanded the range of roles they can kind of fill. And what it means is that if you're unfulfilled in one domain, then maybe there's compensating fulfillment in another domain, right. So put it at its bluntest, you're a terrible day at work, but you're still a good mom or vice versa. And actually men have much less self complexity. And again, it's this cultural lag thing, which is like, okay, where are you getting your sense of fulfillment? Where are you getting your sense of self from? And there is this rise of what some scholars have called the haphazard self, which is mental DIYing their self. And of course, that sounds great in theory, but in practice is incredibly hard to DIY yourself without signposts, without cultural institutions around you. And that's why Jordan Peterson and others are doing so well because there's a hunger for purpose, fulfillment and structure. The danger is that we get dragged backwards. The danger is that some of the climax from those sorts of quarters are essentially saying, it's the fall of feminism, we need to go back to back when men were real men, we warned you this would happen. And so as a bring backery to some of their rhetoric, and that seems to me to be entirely immoral and impractical. So we got to do better. Yeah. And it speaks from a place of more competition between men and women, right? It's putting us back now exactly in a zero sum mindset. And I think that's really hard for a lot of men to wrap their head around is, well, I don't really feel like that's a great answer to what's going on either, but I'm aware that there's a problem. What we're seeing also is this idea of the bread winner now being shared. So in a family setting, you may have a spouse who earns the same, if not more than you. And as you talk about in the book for a lot of men, their roles are actually more likely to be replaced by automation and immigrants and workforce replacement and offshoring of these jobs that men typically fulfilled. So we're now competing for a subset of jobs with a workplace environment that's bringing and welcoming more and more women into it. And yet men culturally are taught to be the provider protector. And when you can't fulfill that role, and you have a lack of self-complexity, you don't find fulfillment in other areas, well, then you can be radicalized by some of these elements that are preaching, go backwards and take a very dim view of the opposite sex and B zero sum game, which is also very worrisome. And we hear this from some of our potential clients as well of like, oh, I wish it was how it was 30, 40 years ago, right? And they want to undo all of the progress that's been made because they think, well, back then things were easier. Of course, there's a whole other host of challenges there. But I think we're now getting on this workplace. So we talked a little bit about education and what's going on developmentally there that might be holding men back from developing and being educated at the same pace. But let's talk now about the workforce because I think there's been huge changes in the labor market. And we're also seeing it impact marriage rates. And then we can talk about fatherhood and mental health. But we're seeing certainly amongst our clients that they're getting older and older and less likely to even marry and less likely to even invest in a relationship because they don't really see from the other side of the equation women as willing to invest in these relationships. So we've seen that marriage rates have shifted the average age of marriage is shifting because of more and more women joining the workforce. And I think many people didn't anticipate this and we're still trying to figure out how to make this work. Well, I think that there's a lot in there, of course. So let me try a couple of things. One is it's certainly true that people didn't anticipate such a big class gap emerging in marriage. And I think this is an opportunity for me to really emphasize that point about these class distinctions and race distinctions. Because that really cuts across a lot of these problems that different boys and men are having at different points in the income distribution or on the social ladder, if you like. And so actually marriage rates are holding up pretty well among the most educated men and the most affluent men. They've dropped but they haven't dropped anything like as much. Whereas among men with say a high school graduation men in their early 40s or the high school graduation 20 percentage point drop in marriage rates. And just in recent years, one in three men at that lowest level of education are out of the labor force altogether. And those facts, of course, are connected in various ways. And so what we're seeing is this real hollowing out of the opportunity particularly of less educated men, working class men, to be able to earn a living at all and certainly to earn a decent living. Most men today earn less than most men did in 1979. Men at the top have seen a pay rise, but men generally are poorer in individual terms than they were before. And that's because of some of the things that you were just mentioning around automation, industrialization, globalization, etc. And whatever we think about those as public policies, it's quite clear that they have had this disproportionate impact, particularly on working class men. There's been a dislocation and a very rapid one of some of those traditionally male jobs. And what we haven't seen is men being able to or perhaps willing to move into some of the new jobs, which tend to be more in service sector, health, etc. Which is where I think a lot of the need is. And when it comes to education, two of my policy areas really overlap because we need more teachers. We also need more male teachers, because there are fewer male teachers in our classrooms every year. And that strikes me as that does strike me as a bit of a slow burn crisis, if I can use the C word just in this context. So there's a lot to do here. And I think we've got to start with helping those men who need the most help to get into the labor market, stay in the labor market and do and do really well. It's interesting that you said that I just I just moved to Florida and the Santas has just put it together an initiative to bring veterans into the classroom and giving some incentives for these men to get into education, perhaps there's something there. Whatever you think about Rhonda Santas, he has very good instincts for kind of where some of the pressure points are and for what people and what people are worried about. And so I think that that's probably speaking to various kind of various anxieties that people have. But one of them, I think is the fact that there are lots of elementary schools with no men in them and fewer than one in 10 elementary school teachers now are men. And so and there are in terms of early years education where we want to see more, we're likely to see more investment. There are essentially no men. By my calculations, there are as a percentage of the occupation, twice as many women flying US military jets as there are men teaching pre-k. And why is that? What's going on with this trend? Well, which one, the women flying fighter jets or the men not teaching? The men not teaching. And maybe some people are doing both. That would be a fun thing to sort of just like teach in the evenings and fly jets in the daytime. Well, for men working with young children, there are huge stigmas attached to it. It's actually just the stigma that gets attached to them. In fact, my own son, my middle son, works in the childcare profession quite a lot of the time. And particularly with younger children, you get comments, you get stigmas, you get parents worrying about it, et cetera. You get sort of the pedophile fear, et cetera, et cetera. You get people like, why do you want to work with young kids? Ha ha. And so there are these very strong social stigmas about it. But it's also just because at a certain point, if any occupation is 98 percent female or 98 percent or 99 percent male, then it's unlikely that your typical young man or young woman or boy or girl is going to think, oh, that's something I want to do. Once an occupation is so strongly gendered, it comes very, very difficult to get people of the opposite gender to go into it. So some of it is just a self-fulfilling prophecy, honestly. And reading that section of the book, it just made me think about what were the teachers that had the biggest impact on me? And of course, as a young man, it was the men teachers who rattled me, who got in my face, who made sure that I was paying attention and who specifically challenged me. I may have not liked them in that moment, but when I look back, I remember, oh, I did really good in that class. And the only reason why was because I was directly challenged by that male authority figure. Yeah. Now, I'm thinking about this and thinking that maybe my hardest teacher of all was a math teacher who was a woman. And so it's an opportunity to point out the distributions overlap. We're talking averages here, et cetera. But I have a similar experience for a couple of male teachers that really had a big impression on me, especially in English, actually. And it turns out that English teachers are particularly important for boys, if they're male, because that's a subject that boys are weaker in. And I honestly don't know if I would have ended up writing in the way that I have if I hadn't had a high school English teacher who was not only terrific, but also because he was male, I think it did just it changed some of the relationship a little bit. And also, there's some evidence that male teachers just get boys a little bit more easily. And in the same way that female teachers are going to get girls. And I don't think there's any mystery mystery to that. And it's one of the reasons why we wanted so many more women and one of the reasons we're now basically at 50% women teaching in universities, because we want women teaching girls and women, but we also want men. We need a mix. And in so many of our schools now, as I said, there are no male teachers. You can go all the way through to high school in lots of parts of the country without ever encountering a male teacher. I think this is a good place to bring up former President Obama's speech around fathers, the role of fathers and missing fathers. And I think that dovetails nicely with what's also going on in the classroom. So we're seeing that fathers are less and less involved with Ken work. Rates of wedlock birth are increasing. So fathers are less involved in those couples situations. And then we're also seeing this lack of male influence in the classroom that is leading to this disillusion amongst young men, searching out for passions, meanings, purpose. And unfortunately, finding it in offshoots that might not be healthy for them or healthy for us as a society. So he had talked about this, but I think your book does a great job uncovering a little bit more is what's going on with this crisis of fatherhood and the role that fathers are playing or not playing currently in the trends there. Yeah, that's right. I thought it was a great speech and a great shame that he didn't do more on this subject when he was president. In fact, I think he had more of an opportunity to do more on that. So the headline stats are that one in five fathers aren't living with their children. Behind that, it gets more complicated because what does that mean? Because we obviously see many more complex families now and you see separate and divorced couples. But we can maybe get into some of those statistics. But the bigger point here, I think, is we have to come up with a positive model of fatherhood that does not rely on the traditional economic relationship between men and women. Husband and father used to be almost like a redundancy in the sense that it went together. And the problem with that is in an era where the women's movement has largely successfully achieved its principal goal of economic independence for women, which the risk of repeating in a way that sounds defensive is a great thing. What does that mean? Fathers. And my argument is that we have to ensure that fatherhood matters in and of itself. Dads matter, period. Not dads matter because they bring bread into the family. Dads matter as husbands. Dads matter because they can help mom. Dads matter, period. Dads matter whether they live with the kid or without the kid. They matter whether they're married or unmarried, whether they're divorced or not divorced. And the problem here is that on the conservative side of this argument, there's a view that the only way to resuscitate fatherhood is to bring back marriage on its old terms. No chance. No one wants it and there's no way to bring it back anyway. There's no way back where we can't steer this car using the rear view mirror. But on the other hand, there's a kind of view on the left, which is like, well, do dads really matter anyway? I mean, mums can do just a good job on their own. Are there aren't they a bit surplus to requirements once they've done the fertilization bit? And not taking fatherhood seriously because, quote, father's rights is now seen as this sort of alt-right toxic thing that feminists need to be against. Whereas in fact, of course, feminists should be at the forefront of helping fathers to be more equal partners because that will be good for women as well as good for children. And so we need to re-found fatherhood just as this independent social institution because otherwise, the message to dads is, well, you didn't make it as a breadwinner. You didn't make it as a husband. So see ya. And that's a very, very negative message. And I honestly think it's how a lot of men feel today. And it's a classic example of this gap that they're falling into. And so the message has to be dads matter in and of themselves. So among my proposals are equal custody in the event of separation, especially for unmarried fathers. Unmarried fathers have terrible legal rights right now in the US. In every US state, if the parents aren't married, the default is full custody for mom. The father has to go to court. Whereas if you're married, then you have some rights built into the marriage contract. But as we just discussed, there's a huge class gradient in marriage. So the most vulnerable men are the ones that are going to struggle with this the most. And then secondly, if we're going to have paid leave, which I think we should in this country, we should really give more support to families that should be on equal basis for fathers and mothers. We need to send the message in practice and in a rhetoric. Dads matter as much as moms. And they matter whether they're with the mom or not. And regardless of what the paycheck is. Now that isn't to say that it's not good to be committed parents together. And it isn't to say that fathers don't still have a providing responsibility. It's just to say that they share that responsibility now in a world where 40% of our families breadwinners are women. We ain't turning back the clock to the world where it was all men. And so let's not try and turn back the clock, but that's the alternative of turning our back on men is which is so the right one to turn back the clock and the left one to turn their back. And then we wonder why men are being drawn off into some uncomfortable places for us. It feels like there's this perverse incentive that's happening societal where you touched on this earlier that men on average are earning less now than they did in the past. But we still want to be the breadwinner. So that forces us to stay longer hours, pick up the side hustle, take on more work, and of course, alleviate ourselves of the responsibility of the kin work. And it's really the kin work that we're arguing for as fathers that has a huge influence on the child's development, their ability to understand how to communicate with both genders, how to reason, how to solve conflict. We had Warren Farrell on the show a few years ago to talk about this role that again, many people don't realize that fathers actually play in a child's development. Intuitively speaking, we view women as nurturing. We can very clearly see the motherly role and the influence that a mom has on children. But classically speaking, societally speaking, culturally speaking, we do just put dads in the breadwinner category. And if they're falling behind and they're unable to earn at the same rate, well, that just further incentivizes them to find a second job to be the Uber driver to take on the side hustle and put the kin work either onto the woman or outsource it completely. And what we've seen with the rise in childcare costs, that becomes a very toxic brew where the dad really has no incentive to be further involved in these relationships because he can't possibly keep up economically. I want to be careful here not to give the impression that we think that those dads who are still the main breadwinner aren't doing a great job. I think it's just more about the choices that families are making now. So I'm just, as you were talking then, AJ, I was thinking about a friend of mine who drives the UPS truck and who worked every Saturday while his kids were growing up. And all of the earnings he got from the Saturday went into their college account. So they could go to college without having to get into debt. So it's six days a week to fund this kid's education. And his wife was mostly the carer. Great. I'm not going to criticize. So he did less of the kin work. That's great. But it should be great the other way around too. And we shouldn't expect that as a sort of box you have to tick. I think the problem is it's almost like the breadwinning box is when you have to tick first. You know, like a drop down menu, you have to tick that before you can get to the next bit. That's the problem. And of course, it's absolutely not necessary to be a breadwinner to matter. And I'm also very interested. So I know I agree with Warren Farrell on this point that there's strong evidence that fathers matter independently to their kids development. Very strong evidence in my view. But interestingly, also it slightly depends on the age of the kid. I'm quite intrigued by the evidence. And I talk a bit about this in the book that adolescence is a period where fathers particularly seem to come into their own rather than those kind of very early years. And again, distributions overlap. It's all on average, blah, blah, blah. Could we just take that for granted? I've just attached that to everything I say. Edit it in later. Can you just edit it in later on average? That means don't make life my life much easier if you can just because otherwise, you know, you can take a clip to eyes. So with that caveat, it does look as if actually for really young kids, there is a bit of a preference on the part of most mums. And some obviously when they're very young, some obvious biological advantages, not least around breastfeeding and so on too. But when you get to adolescence, it's quite interesting because the dad seems to be a bit better at a little bit of pushing, organized risk taking, better at pushing them out into the outside world a little bit than mums. And again, complementarities I think are important here. And again, it's on average, et cetera. I looked after my own kids mostly full time when they were pretty young, for example. But I do think that's intriguing. And it speaks to the fact that it takes a lot of people to raise kids well, including dads. And maybe especially in those teenage years, yeah, it takes a big village. Again, going back to then what are the influences in school, whether it's through sports and whether it's through more male presence in the classroom. Again, I feel that we're failing our children if we're removing the role of men in the child ring completely and assuming that eventually that they're going to figure out this not only development, but then also the communication piece. And as Warren Farrell touched on, the play fighting, the conflict resolution that gets solved oftentimes is role played first with the father. And we see this in adolescence with the way adolescents interact with men versus interact with women. I don't see too many kids adolescents putting their mom in a headlock and wrestling around and doing all the physical things that a lot of young boys aggressively playing do engage in. What do we see? We haven't really touched on the lower socioeconomic rung of the ladder is we see this rise in gang violence. We see them seeking these male influences from unsavory figures and criminal activity, which probably isn't the healthiest way to get that male influence in their child development. I'm not the first one to say this by any means. A lot of anthropologists, including people like Margaret Mead, have said for a long time that actually the development of mature masculinity is the central cultural task of many societies, something along those lines. Because masculinity is somewhat more socially defined than femininity, because it's a little bit less biologically defined. And so the question is, what does mature masculinity look like? I'm very critical of the term toxic masculinity in the book. And I think that mature masculinity is a much better and more positive way to think about this. And mature masculinity is partly about recognizing some of the differences that there are between men and women and boys and girls working through them, learning how to work with them and to some extent constrain them. And that could include things like physicality, which you've just described, AJ, but it also things around sexual desire, for example, aggression, risk taking. And so then the difference really is how do you become mature? And that maturation process, I think, is hugely influenced by role models. We learn with our eyes, not with our ears. It doesn't matter how many books you read, how many you're told what's really like, it's our eyes that do the teaching. And so you need to see it in your own father, or your coaches, or your teachers, etc. It's like, oh, that's what it's like to be male, but to be grown up. And that growing up process is like that many, in all human societies, there have been rituals and processes by which that's taken place. And I think we have to take those those that task of developing mature masculinity very, very seriously. There's a headmaster of Stowe School back in UK, where I come from, said, he wanted young men who would be acceptable at a dance and invaluable in a shipwreck. I thought I was back in the turn, you know, 200 years ago, he said that. Not know how many of you have been in a shipwreck lately. But I think the basic message is still there, which is, look, you've learned to be social, you've learned to engage socially and respectfully with other people, including women. But actually, when it comes to it, there's also if called upon to put your life on the line for others, that's part of the package too. And that's okay. And to be encouraged. And so that's the sort of, that's the spirit, I think we need around the debates around masculinity today. The aspects of masculinity that is heralded and celebrated, certainly in movies and is destruction, all the attributes that would make a man a very valuable and a shipwreck. But what they're missing is the other side of restraint and discipline, which are incredibly important. Those things tend to define masculinity more than anything. Because without that, you just have this wild, feral animal that you cannot take to a dance. That you cannot build a home and a civilization, a society around, because it is too loud. It's too unpredictable. That restraint and discipline and camaraderie between men of establishing that together is what builds that society and makes it stable. Yeah. And I think that's that art of raising boys and men to do everything you've just said, Johnny, is like, that's, that's the art of building a successful culture to a non-trivial extent. Because the danger, I think, right now is that we're caught between, as you said, a sort of Hollywood celebration of some of those masculine virtues. I think it's sometimes almost in reaction to what they see happening in the broader culture, right? And you're seeing this even in political figures, like Josh Hawley has a book coming out on men later than mine. Maybe you'll have him on, but I think it'll be a different conversation. But he knows what he's doing. He knows what he's doing in the sense of like, he knows that there's some anxiety around this. But also, it requires us to recognize that there are some real differences between boys and girls and men and women that do require different treatment. And I think we've mentioned most of them just in the course of this conversation around physicality, the potential for aggression, also sex drive and so on too. These are not imagined differences. We're not blank slates. But that doesn't mean that culture is not important. It means that culture is even more important, right? This whole nature nurture debate drives me crazy because it's like, is it nature or nurture? It's like, because there's quite a bit of nature, we need a whole hell of a lot of nurture to learn. I want to touch on this toxic masculinity because this term has now become a bit of a blanket statement for almost all expression of masculinity, culturally speaking. And it's put, I know, a lot of our clients in a headspace of wanting to just completely avoid being masculine at all because we don't know what is considered mature masculinity versus what's toxic masculinity. And I think that's a big problem with these labels. And to your point earlier, the politicization of these terms and these gender differences. You have one side of the political spectrum wants to constantly highlight the differences. The other part wants to completely ignore them. You're forced to choose sides. We're forced to label one another. And unfortunately, we're now raising a society of boys and men who aren't even clear what mature masculinity really looks like, feels like, should be. And they hear themselves being potentially labeled as toxically masculine. And they don't want to express any masculinity. They want to hold back. And unfortunately, in that complete restraint of who you are, that inauthenticity, well, that leads to your relationship suffering, that leads to a lack of emotional connection with your spouse, with your partner, potentially the mother of your children. That leads to a loss in friendship and camaraderie and a support network for dealing with some of these emotional challenges that we face as men. And it's worrisome to me, and I know it's worrisome to Johnny, that many of our clients are feeling that they have to be inauthentic. They've lost how to express their thoughts and feelings because of this exact label being used. And I want to add to that point, AJ, I think this is why we're seeing an elongated childhood state, right? Men are now behaving as children and well into their adult years due to not having those paths and not wanting to have to showcase something that they're going to be disciplined for or ashamed about. It's just easier to stay in this childhood cocoon. And you see these stats of men being much more likely to be still living at home into their late 20s and so on, too more likely to be living at home than with a partner or spouse in many cases. And I think that's right. And I think this question of how we go about the construction of mature masculinity is really one of the themes that runs all the way through my book and the thing that concerns me because it does require us to accept that there is such a thing as masculinity. And the problem with the label toxic masculinity, so people apply it and they'll say, okay, so I just mean the bad bits. Okay, so define the bad bits and you can do that relatively relatively easily and watch out not to just blame everything on it. I came up with a list somewhere in the book of all the things that are the result of toxic masculinity. Climate change, COVID, inequality, you name it. And then we say, okay, so define non-toxic masculinity formula. And then they might, if they push things like maybe like strength and leadership, resilience, maybe some physical courage. And then you say, okay, so you're saying that men have that more than women. You're saying those are intrinsically masculine traits. Oh, no, no, no, no, no. Women can be all those things too. Okay. All right. So we've just come full circle then. So what you've just, if there are no identifiable non-toxic elements of masculinity, then it's a reasonable conclusion to draw the masculinity itself is somehow suspect. And that's clearly the message that a lot of boys and men get. They then react against it because as you say, the dangers are all, what am I allowed to do? What's good about being me? And if you have a lot of people asking what's good about being me or pathologizing things about the way they are that are natural. So pathologizing heterosexual sex drive, for example, which is much higher in men than in women. And you only have to ask people who've taken testosterone treatments to transition to know why. Is that a bad thing? It's a bad thing if it's not properly expressed and constrained, et cetera. But is it intrinsically a bad thing? No, no, no. But there's a real danger in the discourse around toxic masculinity. Somehow there's a kind of shame or stigma attached to it. Ironically, just decades after you could have said the same thing about girls and women. Well, just around all of this, I think the word games get out of hand and there's a recourse to that. And so on the other side, it starts to label everything that they're seeing as, okay, well, if there's all this toxic masculinity, here is all the toxic femininity. And now we're playing this game. Well, now we have these two sides. How can we have a conversation to figure out what we need for the past, for men to mature properly, for women to be happy to be able to have the choices that they now have due to all the advancements made? We can't have that if we have these two direct opposite sides pointing out everything terrible about each other. Yes. I think that's right. And you get into this tip-for-tap kind of conversation, and you can see how that happens. You get people get frustrated by what they see as the sort of blindness of the other side. And so they up the ante, and then the other side ups the ante. And it's just this sort of, everyone pings off each other. And what happens actually is that these differences become more salient, rather than less, because we are so obsessed with them, whereas a successful culture is one in which it deals productively with these differences, finds ways to all live together, and then we all get on with our lives. And we're able to be in the end who we are. We're able to be AJ and Johnny and Richard, not three guys. And so our sex or gender doesn't become the single most important thing about us. But in a world where that's being questioned, you get obvious reactions. And so I quote some polling in the book. So in a really high proportion of Americans now who agree with the statement that in our country, men are sometimes punished just for acting like men. To get in the heads of the people who are interviewed, what does that mean? But surprisingly high proportion. But I know why they're saying that, it's because they do get this sort of sense of just this squashing out of this idea of masculinity is somehow just inherently toxic. It creates a backlash, the backlash leans into you know, a masculinist politics, which we're seeing quite a lot of on the right now, and a reaction against feminism, which then creates a reaction among feminists, which is look at all this misogynist backlash to our gains. And the men just say that's not true. Right. And really breaking that cycle is one of the reasons I wrote the book, because I'm really, really just trying to come in the middle here and say, there are real problems. They are not the fault of women or feminism, but we can deal with them and we can all then have better and happier lives. But this is a really tough part of the culture war honestly right now. Another through line in all of this that I'm curious about is the role of religion and culture moving in a non secular direction. So when I think of my Catholic upbringing, do you mean in a secular direction or non secular direction? Correct. Sorry. In a secular direction. So when I think of my upbringing as a Catholic, I think of these rites of passage within my religious background that became sort of signposts for my development. I'm now seeing as much as Johnny was saying earlier that many of the men that we're encountering are just staying in this state of boyhood, this Peter Pan-esque syndrome of not really having these ritualistic seminal moments or signposts in their life to sort of guide this maturation and this development into adulthood as a strong male signal. And I wonder if that is playing a role in any of this outside of what we talked about with the education factor and the socioeconomic factor that's at play. Yeah. It's a really good question actually. I don't really address it directly in the book, but you're right that the trend is somewhat towards more secularization. Of course, the U.S. remains much more religious than any other comparably advanced economy. It's still one in three people going to some religious service a weekly, which is just incredibly high by comparison. It's higher than it was in the middle of the 19th century in the U.K. So there's still a high level of religiosity in the U.S. I think that's an important point to put on the table. I also do think you're right that the religions as social institutions were pretty good at having these forms of progress, these rights of passage, et cetera. I also think it's true of things like quasi-religious institutions like the Boy Scouts. And I think it's not trivial that the Boy Scouts are now allowing girls. It's a co-ed institution now. Boy Scouts of America is a co-ed institution. They had a big lawsuit against Girl Scouts of America, which was fascinating in terms of the Scouts promise to watch them slinging out. Having done some work with them, even their numbers are starting to dwindle. Their popularity peaked middle of last century and they've seen waning numbers and waning engagement. And we're also seeing the same with organized sports. A lot of these non-religious rights of passage too are fading. They're not as relevant or interesting anymore as an overall trend for young boys. And I worry in a lot of ways that these moments that made clear this progression into adulthood and gave you clear signs of what is mature masculinity, what it looked like, what it felt like, instead of this modern media message of labeling and cynicizing and shaming and embarrassing any signs or signals of masculinity. And many in our audience come to us completely turned around, feeling uncomfortable even expressing sexual interest in the opposite sex or saying certain things in a work environment because this label has been strewn about. This competing interest to your point earlier, this politicization of it has really led to just a lack of clear examples of how to move forward. So with all the work and research that you've done, I know many in our audience are raising young boys or they're going through this process themselves, trying to figure it out. From the male perspective, what can we do to start to deal with what we've talked about this entire episode in this masculinity? I hate to use the word crisis, but this viewpoint that masculinity is wrong, negative to be avoided. I mean, the first thing I would say is don't panic in the words of Douglas Adams because I honestly think that the tide is turning somewhat. And I also think the marketplace is going to speak. Actually, it turns out that a lot of women and here I'm talking about straight women or bisexual women actually kind of don't mind men being a little bit male in constrained and mature ways. And so I'm seeing that start to play out a little bit just like in my own son's life because actually the market will start to clear a little bit around this, I think. So we shouldn't panic. Second thing is we shouldn't kowtow to some of the extremes of left or right like toxic masculinity or toxic femininity or feminisms to blame and so on. We don't have to, we can just, just don't play the game. Again, I've learned a lot from my own sons here. They're just like, they'll watch me, watching some YouTube video from somebody that said, Dad, just don't watch it. Come play some video game with me or come out and throw a frisbee with me. And I'm like, wait, why is it my son's teaching me how to avoid polarization? But I think that generation are really getting quite good at it. They're getting quite good at this is just BS. Why are you falling for this stuff, Dad? And they very often go through a kind of Ben Shapiro fray phase or whatever. And then they usually come out of it. In fact, I've come to believe that Ben Shapiro phase is virtually a rite of passage in and of itself for American young American men, but they always almost always come out of it and they realize who he is and what he's doing and they learn. And I think this last point about institutions is super important. So institutions that signal how to mature, how to be as men and women and just as good citizens are hugely important. And clearly, religions can play a bit of a one-stop-shot role around that, right? But a couple, and at least actually some new work out from Brad Shetty showing that religious institutions are the only places where people are most more likely to make friendships across social class lines than within their own class. Everywhere else, it's within class lines. But every church denomination in the US with one exception has what they call a man gap. In other words, there are many more women going to those churches under our men. So even in church, you're seeing something of a retreat from men and there are fewer men in some cases, dramatically fewer men. Part of this is an aging thing in those places. And so whether it's church or synagogue or Boy Scouts or after school clubs or whatever, it's like one of my main messages to men in particular is get in there, do it, be involved, actually be a role model for those young men and boys. I was a scout leader myself for a few years. So it's like, just do it. And the hunger and the need for it is huge. We do need our fathers, we do need our men, and we do need our boys. We need them to have a good life and a good society. And so it's like, really, we need you. It's like that old war poster, isn't it? Like, you know, you're needed. I mean, it's absolutely true. You are needed and can step in because to some extent it ain't going to happen on its own. And some of the sort of semi-automatic rituals and semi-automatic scripts that used to be in existence aren't there anymore. So I guess my main conclusion from this is that it's going to take work. We have to work on this and we have to work on it together. So we have to do it. It is not going to fall into our laps. Richard, I tend to think there I mean, there's going to be many reasons for why there is this retreat from all these institutions. It's never just one thing. It's complicated. There's there's many reasons. However, I do think one of those reasons is because people are the women are finding their way into some of these organizations, as we were mentioning with the Boy Scouts. And because they're new to these organizations, the red carpet has rolled out for them and those boys feel discarded and ignored. And I can understand why they would retreat from that. And one of the things that that we had discussed with Warren is that young boys need a place to be boys so that they with the strong leader to learn to be men. And are we going to be able to find a place in today's society where that can happen, where we can have this place for young men to learn to be men without that interference to learn to that maturity, they're going to have to make a lot of terrible mistakes. That just comes with becoming a man. That's impossible for them to do if the ladies are around. And in fact, for the longest time, our live programs were men only for for years. Now that they're online, they're co-ed now and it's a little bit easier to speak to men one on one when we need to and then take care of some things. But in those live programs, we certainly saw a shift from how men showed up in those classrooms when there was a lady present whether and and they become incredibly reserved there. They were unwilling to participate as much as they have because they were afraid of looking silly or to make those mistakes in the present. To repeat something I said a little while ago, but I think it's sharpened by example is if my sons face those sorts of dilemmas and they say I've come to me, I've said go for it. Because actually what you're going to find is that most of the women in the room are going to appreciate you being honest, taking risks, making mistakes and having some oomph about you. Passivity is not a particularly attractive trait. And so like, yeah, you might even get it wrong and maybe a couple of people are going to take offense. But you know, for every one person that takes offense, if you do get it wrong, they're probably going to tend saying good for you. Like have a go, right? Like agency is attractive, I think generally across sex. So that's what I say. Go for it. And I really think that you're more likely like if your goal is to get a date, which to be honest, at certain ages, that is one of the primary certainly I've had at least one kid for him that seemed seemed to be the sole objective for many years of his life. Actually, I don't think you're going to get it by sitting there mutely and being afraid to say anything. The other thing about this sort of and I've really thought hard about this being in scouts and just more generally around male only spaces. I agree that there is a place for them, particularly for boys, I think I've been thinking about boys. And then in voluntary ways, it might be that men will do it too. But I think that's incredibly hard conversation because the speed of the change that we've just been through means that it is the blink of an eye between all male spaces being a way to exclude women and promote inequality, you know, boys, clubs, et cetera, especially in the workplace, right? To be really honest about that. And so and that's like a lot of women you talked about this, they're correctly very sensitive about these ideas. But that's because it's happened so fast. And I think that in the space of probably two or three decades, we've gone from being correctly against all male environments, because they're inhibiting women's progress to being in favor of them, because they're helpful to boys and men, but you can also understand the resistance to them because it's and I think it's one of its run through this whole conversation. Honestly, I honestly think there's some whiplash here. Because the pace of these social and economic changes, cultural changes have been so astonishingly fast against any metric human history that is no wonder that we're trying to catch up. And one of the challenges I think of getting people to say, look, there are lots of ways in which boys and men are struggling, they go really? Because it was literally yesterday that women were struggling to get their foot in the door, literally yesterday in cultural terms. And so it's very, very hard to reorient. It's very hard to update our priors when the world has just shifted so, so quickly. So another stat, 40% of women today earn more than the average man. I'm talking about the median man, 40%. Because the distribution is now overlapped in 79 was 13% of women. So it's now very now, just think about what that means for the economic relationships between men and women. That is a fantastic achievement. I mean, in terms of social revolutions, the women's movement has just been so incredibly powerful. But the idea that it hasn't had some unintended consequences, it doesn't mean we have to ask some new and hard questions about men and breadwinners and families is absurd. But for various reasons that we've touched on here, largely the desecrated nature of our political discourse, we're not even having the conversation in a way that is serious. And my biggest hope for the book is that it could contribute to a better conversation about what are some real challenges facing boys and men? Yeah, I think the other piece that we didn't really touch on that I'd love to sort of end with, because I hear from a lot of the women that we work with, and I'm certainly seeing it in my wife and her friends that we're seeing now that many women as they come out highly educated and they're joining the workforce, they still have this strong pull into motherhood. And they want to take a step back and be more active in the role of raising children. And you talk about in the book, what ends up happening in these situations is that the men generally earn more because they're, well, one, trying to fulfill that breadwinner role, more willing to take on the overtime to lean more into work in that setting, because that makes sense from a cultural perspective. And women are feeling this pull to lean out in this setting. So naturally they're going to earn less. But those phenomenons get lumped into this gender gap in pay that is the top line number that everyone talks about. And we're not really talking about this basic instinct that's going on when couples actually have children. So if you could just unpack a little bit around what's going on there, statistically speaking, that might be influencing this number that gets thrown around in the media around this pay gap. So I thought that was really fascinating. And it's a phenomenon that I'm witnessing myself amongst my wife's friends. And as we're thinking about starting a family, it comes back to this, how do you think about these factors that are myth and so on around the gender pay gap? And you're quite right, AJ, that the gender pay gap is to a very large extent now a parenting gap. Until they have kids, women are tracking men. And women who don't have kids track men very well once you control for occupation and working hours and so on. And so what really happens is if you kind of look at the chart, if you look at the chart of what happens to male learnings go like that, female learnings also go like that until boom, about the age late 20s, 30, and then they go kaboom. What happens then they have kids. And so what happens is the impact of having children has this hugely disproportionate impact on the earnings and work of men and women. And that's really why there's a pay gap. Because it's then hard, you can't necessarily catch up. And that's the conservative argument for why the pay gap is a myth. And it's true. That is true. Now, a response to that might be to say, well, are we sure it's an instinct? You just would use the word instinct. It's a natural instinct. Well, we'd want evidence for that. I actually think there is some quite good evidence for that. But it typically is around young children. And so there are two again, it's again, the problem here is that on the one side, you'll get sort of people saying denying that there's any natural differences at all. And if women do want to stay at home to look after the young children, it's because they've been brainwashed into wanting that by patriarchal society, which at a certain point become quite disrespectful. And it's also interesting that is the most educated women who most likely to take time off. You look at women in Harvard MBAs, they're taking time off. So it's really, really hard to argue if women from the most elite institution in the most affluent country in the history of the world are still so brainwashed by patriarchy, that that's why they want to be with their babies. I don't know how we're ever going to get to a world where they're in trouble. I don't know in another experiment you could control. And so I have to take that seriously. I have to say, I have to believe them when they say that's their preference. And if they are able to do so, if their husband is able to do so, that's great. My own wife and I have been able to both do it at various times because we've each had decently successful careers. So we've been able to do the relay thing, right? We've been able to take it a little bit in terms. That's great. That's a great privilege. So on the one hand, you've got a bunch of people denying there's anything here to see around natural instincts. But then you get the other side. This is the conservative side saying biological duty of women is to stay at home and raise the kids from zero to when 18, 21, right? So they then overweight what might well be on average natural difference around the early years and say that a one year old is the same as an 11 year old or a 15 year old. And that's not true. And a lot of women, as you say, do you want to work part time or work less when the kids are very young? That does not mean that they want to be stuck in that role for the next 20 years, which is how long it takes to raise kids. And so both sides are making a horrible mistake there. And what we need to do is construct a public policy in a system which allows them to choose, but doesn't lock either men or women into fixed roles for decades at a time. And so I really agree with you that there's some natural stuff here, but let's not take that initial difference and say that that should somehow entrench people in roles. But right now that is what partly because of the way the labor market works, honestly. Exactly. I feel that's the situation where the incentives in the system work against those mothers who want to rejoin the workforce, but they've lost out in those really high earning potential years where there's massive jumps in your salary or ability to be promoted into leadership role. That's typically happening around that age range. Like we're seeing it with our own clients, they're taking our program, they're joining X Factor Accelerator because well, they've hit their 30s and now they're in a leadership role and they're managing a team. Well, that also happens for both men and women. But if women are now having their children at that point in their career and they're taking time off to start to raise that young child and then they want to rejoin the workforce, well, they have in a lot of ways been left behind with the way incentives work in the workplace. Well, they missed some of those crucial years, but it's important to recognize it doesn't have to be that way. And I talk a little bit about this in the book. I drew on Claudia Goldin's work, especially here. The difference between pharmacy and law, for example, is just huge. So there's almost no gender pay gap in pharmacy now, whereas there's a huge one in law and it's because in law, there are these critical years, do you make partner or not basically? Are you willing to pull 80-hour weeks and get on planes? And so you get these non-linear trends, particularly in your 30s, which are like a make or break, winner takes all kind of professions. And then there are others like pharmacy that have been redesigned such that you can go part time for a few years and you'll earn less, but you'll only learn less to the extent that you're working less. And then you can go full time again. Part of it is just the way we structure these jobs in consult consultancy, financial services and law, especially are the worst. Interestingly, tech is not too bad. Science is not too bad because the work is designed in a way that allows people to take a bit of a step back without meaning that they're stepping off, right? You don't have to step off just because you've stepped back. And I honestly think there's a lot more we could do. And if these companies are serious about it, we could redesign work so that it's a bit less greedy and therefore wouldn't have such big impacts. And it also means that the gap between the, like you have one partner that's earning more and more and more, getting more labor market power gets harder and harder to then switch roles, right? If one of you is earning five times as much as the other, like if you're earning five times as much as your wife in five years, it'll be really hard for you to take a step back if you've got young kids, right? Now, is this an area that you feel that government intervention, public policy could hold some sway? And are there other cultural or societal examples where governments have stepped in to help in this situation? Obviously, we've talked a lot about the US in particular. I have already talked about the importance of paid leave, but I honestly think that this is largely something that to come back to an earlier theme we have to do. I don't think it's, you certainly can't easily regulate occupations into just constructing their career tracks differently. And even when you do offer things like paternity leave, people don't necessarily take it. So to give you a famous example, Japan has one of, if not the most generous paternity leave schemes in the world, but also the lowest take up. So you can have these great, shiny policies as a set on the shelf if you haven't changed the culture around them. And I think within institutions in particular, that's really important. And so what I say to young men and to young women is like, you've got to use your labor market power. If you have it, if you're fortunate to have it, you've got to use it to help change these institutions. They're not going to change by themselves by and large. And so you're going to have to change them. And that particularly requires men, actually, to use some of their power to just step up. You know, when women have to leave early, they feel much more comfortable saying, I've got to go, my kids sick. Whereas dads, they've got to go a client called. And so just changing some of the ways we engage in it and owning our responsibilities as fathers in the workplace. And maybe even being wanting to take a little bit of a hit in terms of our career. And the truth is there is a price to be paid, but we live a long time and our kids aren't here forever. And there's no question that the time I took out raising my kids slowed my career trajectory, but it didn't kill it. And so, so I made Brookings Senior Fellow at 45 rather than 38, like who cares? I mean, really? And so it's also just having a little bit more strategic patience with yourself and recognizing it's a long game raising kids is a long game careers or a long game. And being willing to take, you know, take a little bit of a slowdown. If you need to get something else done, your career will still be there. You'll still be there. Be sensible about it, of course. But, but yeah, do you just, again, back to the sort of, I sound like Nike at this point, but just do it. Well, thank you for waiting into these difficult topics, nuanced views and bringing the science. And we love asking every guest what their X factor is. What do you believe makes you unique and extraordinary? A frequently annoying inability to do anything other than to call it as I see it, especially in the most sense, especially in the most sensitive areas, even though I'm sufficiently thin skinned that I didn't get upset when people don't like it. I am a thin skinned polemicist in many cases is the worst thing of all to be. But I just can't help myself. I am attracted to the areas that other people are repelled from. And I feel I just have to call it as I see it and ignore the monkeys in my back saying, well, they won't like that. They won't like that. He won't like that. You'll get, and for good or ill, that's, and I think I can communicate, I think I can communicate complex stuff pretty well and pretty fearlessly. So that would be the short version of it. Definitely agree. And we know you made some enemies during this discussion even, but in large part, that's just due to people being a little unwilling to just between the three of us. Yeah. Well, we've certainly heard it from our audience in the past. Maybe I've made some friends too, though, AJ. Let's just say you've made some friends with me and Johnny in the process. But these are always difficult topics and easy to just listen to a soundbite that doesn't fit your narrative and tune out. And we talked about some things that people hold to be dear and true to themselves, but often the science and the stats and the data don't really back that up. So I appreciate you pointing out all those nuances. Thank you for that sort of chilling end about the loss of friends. But seriously, though, I do think we're maybe overstating some of these fears. I think it's a bit of a tendency now to people say, look how brave you are because you're tackling the subject. My experience is among people all political persuasions, there is a real hunger for a serious conversation about this issue. And even if you agree or disagree with me, I honestly think there are very few people that don't want to have a serious conversation about it. They are sick of the soundbites. They are sick of the polemics. They are sick of people just grifting and they're sick of it. And so I honestly think that we're understating the degree to which people of all backgrounds and all political, just want to have a proper conversation about some real stuff and bring some data to bear on it. So I don't think I'm being as brave as you think I'm being, at least I hope I'm not. We have children to raise and that's an incredibly important topic and people are sick of all the bullshit that comes around it. They want to raise them children. They do. They want to raise them well, whether they're boys or girls. Period.