#902 - Dr Tracy Vaillancourt - The Science Of Childhood Bullying & Adult Mental Health

29:29I don't know. I was going to say there are some minorities that like are more protected than others. So like in Canada, black youth are seen as more cool. Oh, wow. They're like a rare, shiny charizard in Canada, I imagine. Yeah. I'm not too sure. But I do know that like there's there's something going on there. I mean, we don't have the same history as the United States, right? We didn't have slavery in the like. Our immigrant profile looks different. But so in our studies, we don't see black youth being bullied as much, but we do see Asian students and South Asian students being bullied more than black students.

30:10But we always see white students in our studies being bullied the most and bullying others the most, but they represent the majority in our country. Right, so that's always gonna be the case. All right, what about the relationship between overweight and bullying? So, okay, so there has been a lot of research showing that kids who are overweight and obese are more likely to be bullied. And then we did the study that, like blew my mind because it was not at all what I thought was gonna be the case. So we follow kids prospectively for seven years. And what we found was that there was always an association between being bullied and being overweight But that kids gained weight as a consequence of being treated poorly and that's what was driving the association Primarily so it's not like they were big and then got bullied They got bullied and then became bigger and then got bullied and then it just kind of spiraled So really unfair, but it makes sense because they become depressed and depression is associated with either overeating or under -eating, so you're gonna go one way or the other.

31:16And so to me, it fits. Like, when I stood back and looked at it, I was like, oh yeah, this makes sense. But this study needs to be replicated. It's only one study. We are the first to show it. I'll be interesting to see if others show it as well. It seems like for both boys and girls, attractiveness is one of the protective mechanisms or one of the enabling mechanisms. You know, a very sort of obvious bestowed type of prestige, which you can then sort of transmute into dominance. And being obese is one of the things that's going to damage your attractiveness, whether you're fat coming in or get fatto as it goes on.

31:53But the last thing that you want to do when you're a teenage boy or girl and everybody is highly scrutinizing the way that everybody else looks and changes day to day, month to month to year to year, is to lose some attractiveness. And I suppose it's a vicious cycle that being bullied causes you to, I don't know how many people get bullied in school and become more attractive because of it. Yeah, I don't know how that would work. Now, there is a little bit, so can we talk about skinny kids a little bit? So skinny boys are vulnerable. And especially skinny boys who are adolescents are very vulnerable because that's not perceived as masculine, which kind of goes hand in hand with being vulnerable, which is unfortunate.

32:41And then thin girls get bullied, but because of intersexual competition. So like, even though like you're going to see it on both, like, so thin children and thin adolescents are at risk, but the mechanism is different for boys and girls. So interesting. So for the boys, it's insufficiently masculine. You don't have that dominance. You don't have that physical presence that would maybe say, hey, don't fuck with me. But for girls, it's because other girls see that as potential like, I guess, sexual competition for one of the better terms, for one talking about teenagers, but like, precocious sexual competition or whatever.

33:21a future rival in one way or another because of the way that they look. Exactly. Exactly. And then there was a study that just came out that showed this curve and it was looking at how weight status maps onto mental health. So this was published in JAMA. It just came out like a few months ago and you see both ends. So you see the really thin kids being overly represented on having poor mental health and and then the overweight kids also having poor mental health, more on the overweight side than the underweight side. But it really, I think that that could be explained through peer processes. Mm, talk to me about, you've kind of touched on it there, this difference between girl bullying and boy bullying.

34:07How do they differ? Boys are so obvious in their bullying. They're really like, they value dominance and submission. So they are gonna put you in your place, either physically or verbally and you're going to know where you stand. If you have any flaw, Chris, they are going to tell you what it is, right? And it's going to be immediate and everybody's going to mock you. With girls, it's more circuitous. Like, we value inclusion and exclusion a little bit more than boys. So we use our relationships as a vehicle to cause harm. So we're more likely to use indirect aggression, which is also called social or relational aggression.

34:46So we will spread rumors about you will exclude you from the peer group those sorts of things. We'll give you a once -over and give you a death stare and mock and laugh at you and and do that over and over again. We are friends with you but we're really just trying to list information from you to use it against you. So we are think are more instrumental and boys are more reactive. So we're proactive and boys are more reactive, although they can also be proactive voice. This episode is brought to you by Shopify. Look, you're not going into business to learn how to code or build a website or do back -end inventory management.

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36:14how much cross sex bullying happens? So there's a little bit of cross sex bullying. It mostly happens in elementary school. When they get to be in high school, they really just wanna date each other. So they don't do it as well. Right? Yeah, that's funny. They're interacting in one way or another, but it changes. Yeah, exactly. And also, I think we've done a pretty good job at really making it clear that, you know, good boys don't pick on girls. So I think if you're doing that when you're 17, there's something pretty wrong about you. So yeah, so you tend to not see it as much as they get older.

36:54But when there are little kids and they haven't got the script yet and they haven't, or the memo hasn't been received, yeah, little boys can be little shits to girls, but little girls can be little shits to boys. I suppose until puberty kicks in, little boys and little girls apart from one very specific part that are anatomy are basically the, like, physically, they're the same thing. So there's not much difference between them. So I imagine even physically, a eight -year -old girl could pick on an eight -year -old boy, but it's going to be very rare for a 16 -year -old girl to be able to pick on a 16 -year -old boy.

37:27Yeah. It's interesting, though. So the sex difference in the expression of bullying, so a lot of times people want to say that there's no gender difference when it comes to indirect aggression, but they have not looked at it in terms of proportions. So they look at it in terms of means and it's true, boys use it just as much as girls, but girls only use this. And they tend to focus on this form of bullying early on. So we can see it in three year olds, four year olds, five year olds, where you know, you can't sit with me during circle time. They spread little rumors, you know, Chris Peas' pants, that sort of thing.

38:05So they're pretty mean. We did a couple studies where we looked at toddlers and we did direct observations and these girls were nasty. What do you think that is? Is that just some really precocious version of the same dynamic, the venting, the intracexual competition, the sort of very manipulative ways that females are going to have to use sort of social networks and stuff. When they grow up, is this them just sandbox training grounding it very early on. I like that you that like how you described it. I think that really is what it is. They're practicing their honing and skill for the future. Kai Bjornquist proposed this heterotopic continuity.

38:53Heterotopic continuity. Yeah, of aggression. And basically he talked about how I mean everybody eventually moves towards indirect aggression because it's the thing that society tolerates. But they don't you know, we don't tolerate little girls punching little boys We tolerate boys punching boys up until a certain point But he also talked about how this happens and one of the things is that girls just have superior verbal and social skills Early in life and and it continues across the lifespan. I know a lot of people are Turned off by sex difference research, but you can't call yourself a a critical thinker if you don't think sex differences exist because they certainly exist.

39:36This is a safe space for you, Trace. Yeah, yeah. But yeah, it's such a robust finding. It's been shown like in so many labs around the world. So little girls started early. I had this conversation with Joyce Beninson probably 18 months ago, two years ago. And she was telling me it made so much sense. I know that even in three months old six, sorry, three to six month gestating humans, you can see sex differences in the brain already. Like you're a minus three months year old and we can already begin to see structural differences in the brain. And then I think by age 10, an FMRI is 93 or 95 % accurate at working out whether this is male or a female brain, which is about the same accuracy that adults have when just determining a human face.

40:28It's like that's the level of accuracy. However accurate you think you are at picking out whether that's a man or a woman, that's the same accuracy at 10 years old. And obviously the sex differences before birth kind of gets rid of the socialization, social roles theory thing. But what she taught me that I thought was just super interesting, kind of makes so much sense even when I think back to my time in school, she was saying that if you look at the sort of games that girls play, they're being veterinarians, they're being nurses, they're raising something, it's about caring for something else.

41:01It's sort of collective, but it's usually sort of outward focused toward an individual, whereas if you look at what boys are doing, it's warfare. It's their cowboys or aliens or their whatever, and we're going to take them down. And you know, it's practicing for, Well, ancestrally, I guess, what the most salient, most important roles would have been when we grew up to become adults, and no matter how much you sort of emancipate women from the kitchen and put them into the boardroom or tell men that they can be say at home fathers or whatever, it's going to take a very long time for a biology to catch up with that, especially when you're only three.

41:36And you haven't been exposed to second -wave feminism at three years old yet. You haven't been exposed to sort of the metrosexual movement for men. and holistic masculinity when you're five. So, yeah, we still get to see maybe in a sort of a more unencumbered, unmoleasted nature, like what that is like for humans when you're looking at kids. 100%. It's hard for some people to swallow it. As you know, I have a book coming out, and that's basically the topic. It's about how our brain today represents hundreds of thousands of years of selection pressure. We may want to say that it's all socialization, but there's just no way.

42:21There's no way that we are where we are today without evolutionary forces at play. We did the study that really speaks to this. So like we're talking a little bit about indirect aggression and we did a study where I was really interested in what the early origins of that were. And so we looked at two -year -olds And like so not very advanced in their language, not very sophisticated. And we looked at this thing called love withdrawal. So it's basically relational or indirect aggression, but a baby version where you are mad and you won't kiss your mom or you refuse to hug them, you turn your back, you know, give them a baby silent treatment.

43:03And we found that close to 80 % of toddlers did this as reported by parents and by their preschool teachers, their daycare teachers. So we're pretty sophisticated social animals. Have you ever seen that video of a golden retriever sat in the passenger seat of a car when the owner, it's a truck and in the back seat of the car is a like baby cow. So there's a baby cow sat in the back seat that the owner's just going to go and buy and there's a golden retriever sat in the passenger seat. And the owner's trying to reach over to sort of stroke the golden retriever and the golden retrievers just refusing to look, like it's just looking straight ahead.

43:44And the guy's next to him. And he keeps leaning back in as he gets touched, he sort of moves his arm away like this. I thought that's, yet that is, that love withdrawal thing. That's, you know, I'm mad at you, because the dog thought that he was being replaced by this baby cow that was sat behind him. And it's interesting because like in it, we talked about how there was also a relationship to how it's used between parents. And is it the case that parents think, well, I'm not hitting my spouse, I'm not yelling at my spouse, but I'm stonewalling them for two weeks straight. And that's like a better way of expressing it.

44:20And then the kids are picking that up. Or is like, what is the origin of this? And I don't know. Like, I'm not here to answer that at this point. It was the first study that was done. It needs to be replicated. Everything needs to be replicated now. As you know, Chris, you got a good idea. You're going to avoid the replication crisis. Yeah, I think it's fascinating. I think that's so interesting to consider how young this starts and what the, like if you're two, what can you really do? Especially what can you do to mom and dad? But that's something I've been thinking about in awful lot more recently, which is limestone or Brad Wilcox, or whoever you want from the Institute for Family Studies, both of them have been on the show, but they have an agenda.

45:07Like they have an agenda of keeping families together. They're very pro -marriage. You know, Melissa Carnie's work, the two -parent advantage or two -parent privilege. If you're looking at this stuff and you think, well, it's really important that parents stick together because we know that the outcomes from single -parent homes aren't fantastic. But the way that parents stick together, what are the lessons that your kids are learning about what love is and attachment and dealing with disagreement and regulating, uh, dysregulation, and how do people come back together? And what does that tell you about what you should expect from your friends?

45:41And from future relationships, is this really the best that you should hope for? Like this sort of, um, silent, objectively successful, but experientially miserable relationship? Like, is that really the pinnacle of what you're expecting in the rest of your life? Exactly. It's attachment theory, right? It's about, this is the prototype. And is this the prototype you want kids to have? There was some studies done. I think Sarah Jaffee is the one who did it, like, maybe 15, 20 years ago, showing that it's actually really dangerous for kids to be in a home with an anti -social dad. Their outcomes are better than not having that anti -social dad in the home.

46:25So like, yeah, so keep families together, but at what cost? I mean, it really, you know, it's like everything. There's always going to be variance. There's always heterogeneity. And we have to be thinking about these nuances because it's not going to be one size fits all. Yeah, having a dad who's, you know, modeling really inappropriate behavior. And I know people are going to say, well, what about moms? This is the study that looked at dads. But yeah, any of these role models being corrupt is a problem. And that's also the peers. Like having the leadership of your school be corrupt is not good for the health of your school.

47:04Yeah, it's, you're so right. And I think I pushed Brad on this point. And I think, I think he's, he arrives at the right place, which is basically, yes, there are, um, many cases in which a marriage would be better to break up than it would be to stay together, but it's his belief that the threshold for when you should break up has been lowered too much. that, you know, this person isn't helping me fulfill my highest ideal or, you know, I really hate the way that they slip their tea or whatever it may be because of a million, a million different reasons that we don't need to get into. But I think finding out and resetting where that barometer lies and looking at interventions for relationships to, okay, how can we come back together?

47:48How can we have a hard reset on this so that we can really restart and thinking about what is it that we're modeling for our kids? You know, my begrudgingly making my way through the next 18 years of this marriage so that my kids can leave a non -broken home. But, you know, how much are they taking from the way that we interact? There's this video that you might have seen that's been floating around on Twitter, which is the best thing the parents can do for their kids is show them how much they love each other, and it's this video of a child sat down on a couch, and it pans to the two parents salsa dancing out on a balcony together.

48:21It's a little bit kind of a meme, but definitely in that regard, I think, yeah, it's not just about sticking together for the kids. It's about sticking together in a good way. And I'll just add this because I think we'd be remiss if we didn't. One of the challenges about families breaking up is that oftentimes women and children are left in poverty. And poverty is a huge stressor. Poverty changes the brains of children. And so this is where like beyond the behavioral things that we're talking about and the socializing influence that we're talking about, if we could have kids and women not live in poverty, then I think we would see different outcomes.

49:01And if we were to hold that account for that statistically, I think that we would be making different decisions, but also we would hold a different viewpoint about this. Yeah, that's interesting. So a broken home isn't just a broken home a lot of the time it's a poor home and a poor home is a stressed home And you can't exactly separate those out Yeah, I think those variances need to be separated accounted for or their interactions need to be You know examine but at the end of the day we don't want kids to be hurt You know obviously that's never gonna be good for a kid's life and and living in a home where everything is about love withdrawal and control, social control and the light.

49:47That's also not healthy. What about bullying for LGBT youth? This is a topic that I keep saying online. Wearable. They are so on well and they're so poorly treated and especially right now with the current anti -trans movement. I mean, they are not living a good life at all. Let's separate just before we go any deeper, actually. Let's separate this to LGB and T, because even though they fly under the same flag, sometimes I don't think they're the same thing. Okay, so we'll talk about lesbian, gay, bisexual students are bullied at higher rates than heterosexual students. but again, the context matters.

50:35So if you're in, let's say, performing art school where there's an over -representation, you're not gonna be as bullied, it gets back to enumeration, that sort of thing, and also what the culture of the school is, but on average, they're not treated well. They're bullied at higher rates for sure, and trans youth are particularly vulnerable. And also their mental health is off the chart. Like their poor mental health is higher than anything I've seen in my career. So we have this really massive study where we're following hundreds of thousands of kids in Ontario and those who identify as trans are not doing well.

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52:26I think the temporal precedence has not been established because it's been so politically challenging to study this. And this is always a problem when politics get interfere with science and knowledge, then you can't get to truth. I think that, you know that, we both know that. This is a problem. Yeah, I mean, the significantly higher rates of OCD, of autism, of neurodivergence in these groups. And you're right, it's when you're just talking about the wellbeing of kids, and you just want somebody who can't really advocate for themselves who's still very much at the mercy of their parents or their school or their caregivers or the state, they don't have agency, and you shouldn't expect them to have that same kind of agency over this stuff.

53:10And I think it's one of the reasons why the discussion around trans -yudes becomes so fraught because you can very quickly go from biological man who wants to be creepy in woman's bathrooms to confused young girl who has really horrible mental health outcomes. And you go, well, you need to be able to hold these two worlds in the mind at the same time. You're saying that you're sort of being empathetic for women, but you're not being empathetic for this young girl, who is even more vulnerable than the women, the adult women that you're supposed to be protecting. So yeah, it's a really interesting one.

53:45And I don't know, I think I kind of hope, slash get the sense that the de -focusing on the trends discussion, which it could go either way with four more years of Trump. But by actually focusing on it less, might normalize it a little bit more. And I feel like there was a little bit of sort of, I don't know what you call it, like conceptual fatigue around people hearing these sort of stories all the time and maybe actually allowing them to take a back seat will help to sort of normalize the discussion and make it a little bit less fiery. I don't know. And also too, it's frustrating to see the exception always being hailed as truth, right?

54:34Like, these are, they are very sensational stories. They elicit a lot of reaction. They get circulated a lot. They get stuck in your brain because of how salient they are. And that then is weaponized against this group. That's quite diverse. And that's a problem because we're really causing harm to individuals who don't fit that minority that is hailed as being the bogeyman. And yeah, I feel for trans kids, I very much do. I think that they're in a really tough spot. And we really need to be thinking about this. These are young people. So ultimately, society should be judged on how well they care for their most vulnerable.

55:25And I don't think our report cards very good in this area. Yeah, I think that's a good point. So getting back to I guess the relationship between bullies and victims How do bullies see their victims that has to be some kind of moral disengagement some sort of disrupted Self -concept thing going on. What's happening here? That's precisely the mechanism They think they they think that what they're doing is justified that the person deserves their poor treatment And if they don't think it, they will convince themselves that they do. So they may have reacted impulsively and then justified it using moral disengagement principles or they had already said this person's last, they've already dehumanized the individual and then that has given them license to treat them poorly.

56:21Moral disengagement, I think, is the most important theory that explains how everyday people become bullies, how everyday people can treat others poorly and still sleep with a good conscience because really it's about making our egregious acts more palatable. What is the process of moral disengagement or the mechanism? A variety of different cognitive strategies, but basically you're trying to make your shitty behavior seem justified. Okay. So you may dehumanize the victim, you may blame the victim, you may diffuse responsibility, you may make advantageous comparisons. So like listen, I just called her stupid.

57:11Chris is the one who shoved her in the locker. Like, come on, not even comparable. So those are like, we use these mechanisms, these cognitive mechanisms to live with ourselves for the crummy behavior that we did. The other thing that people who bully others tend to do is they tend to not pick up on the cues of distress. But in fairness, part of it is because the power has corrupted them so they just don't see it. Their brain actually works differently. But the other part of it is that it's so embarrassing and humiliating to be bullied that a lot of times and it's done so publicly It really is typically a public event that kids then hide their distress So the one two that is needed for the public the bystanders to come in and support me Is what I'm suppressing and it's the one two that maybe will get that bully to be morally engaged instead of disengaged is the thing that I'm suppressing.

58:13So it's, you know, it gets really ugly. Yeah, I mean, the shame of being socially excluded of being picked on causes you to hide your sadness. And sadness is the very thing that might cause this bystander effect to cease or for teacher to notice or for parents to realize or for the bully themselves to actually breach this threshold of reduced empathy. Is that something actually, Have you seen as you're tracking longitude and lean do adult X -Bullies have less empathy? I think in the moment, so there is some evidence that yes, but I think in the moment is when they have an empathetic gap because that is when the moral disengagement is taking place and that's when they feel fully justified.

59:02So maybe when they look back at it with fresh eyes and none of the emotional valence attached to it, they're able to be a bit more objective. You pointed at one thing though, and I just wanted to say, because if I'm not plugging my studies, what's the point of even being here? That we did a study of 1700 teachers, and we asked them like, why would you intervene on behalf of a kid who's been bullied? Like, what are the cues? Like, what is it that's gonna, that's going to motivate you to do something. And they said distress. Distress was the number one reason that they would intervene on behalf of kids who are bullied and teens are bullied.

59:43And as I just said, they're suppressing distress. So we're counting on adults to lead in this area and they're not able to pick up the wine queue that they need to realize that something nefarious is going on. Yeah, that's so interesting. So why does it happen so much in school? Is there something special about the setup of the school environment? Is it something about the teenage and pubeteers that encourages bullying? What's going on? So first of all bullying goes down as kids get older. So it is a lot more atypical and high school students than it is in elementary and middle school students.

1:00:23It really has to do about, like there's so many different factors, but part of it is going to be social skills where their brain is, their brain development, social development, moral development, cognitive development, all those things interacting. And there's also like, they're vying for limited resources. So there's a little bit of resource scarcity, which I mispronounced as scarcity twice the last time I was on your show, didn't get bullied over that Chris. So that's okay. So there's also a bit of research scarcity that's involved. So all of these things interact. They're just not that socially skilled.

1:01:00In our intervention programs, we never talk about power. We never talk about how power corrupts. We never talk about how when you're afforded power or how it behoves you to be a good citizen to not abuse your power. So we're not expecting kids are going to have these lessons. At the end of the day, we're animals. right, where primates, this is what all primates do. So we're socializing kids out of this. They're not necessarily socialized into it. Some of it is maintained through socialization as we've spoken about. Like I've said this over and over again, but I also think that we're coming to the school with like these deficits to begin with.

1:01:44Yeah, yeah, you're having to fight against something that there's like a bullying entropy Which is always going to be there and you're permanently going to have to intervene and intervene But I guess one of the things that At least to me seems quite Hope -inducing is that if you can intervene and create kind of a circuit breaker In the school you can have this recursive culture thing work for you as opposed to a gains You can go from the 70 % school to the 15 % school and that seems quite reassuring. So I remember I was having this, when I had match out with Tony, and he said, there's something to do with the ossification of social hierarchies and the fact that you don't move out of them much for a very long time.

1:02:30What's the role that that's got to play with childhood bullying? Because there is like an obvious question, you get to university and it's not happening as much. And then you get to the workplace, and even in the workplace, You know, people are there for a while, not quite so long. So you think, what is it? Immaturity. Is it some hyper vigilance to social hierarchies that we have during puberty when we're trying to flee the nest and we're looking for who our partner might be and all the rest of it? What's the unmoving long term exposure to the same social hierarchies and social people? What's the role that that's got to play?

1:03:04It's precisely what you said, everything, all of the above. And you and I talked about it in the last time we spoke to is it really is like the hierarchies are pretty pronounced in elementary and high school They're maintaining their power holding position Corse of late but also using pro social means so it really has to do with that so You know how do you maintain power? Well you abuse those below you you scare them, but then you also So, charm them. So, like, it's complicated. It's, again, this blending of pro -social and anti -social behavior. But, and then there's lack of autonomy. You spoke a little bit about that before.

1:03:44And it really is that, like, they don't have the same autonomy that you and I have. You know, as friends in adulthood, you treat me poorly. I don't have to worry about seeing you again at school. So we're done. I can move on. Whereas in high school and elementary school, you are going to see them again. And you're going to have to manage that. And there's just some kids that are just more dominant than others, right? And they're imposing their will on others and not everybody's appreciating that, but not everybody has the same skill set to be able to impose their will on others. There's little primates put together in same age bands and then that same age band is then mixed with other age bands and we wonder why it happens.

1:04:33How does bullying impact victims? What does it do to them? It affects all aspects of their life. It affects everything in the immediate and then the long term. It affects their mental health, their physical health, their academic achievement, their sense of self. It changes who they are fundamentally. And not only that, it lasts a lifetime. So studies that have followed individuals 30, 50 years show that you can identify somebody who was bullied at 10 and they still have higher mental health rates at 50. And at 60, it's a scar that never heals. Now some of course will have it, will get by. But for the most part, you won't.

1:05:24And the reason why you won't is that it's so salient, it's so disruptive, it serves a function for you to never forget. So it's a social pain that's seared in your amygdala and you're never gonna get past it. You may be better, you may get better for sure, but if you think about it, so like if you and I did a thought experiment right now and I know you said you were bullied as a child and you think about those moments, you're probably going to still have a visceral reaction and that has an evolutionary significance. That not belonging is so salient. It's how God ahead is a human species. It's how we collaborate that the neural arm is massive when you don't.

1:06:15And so your brain is going to never forget it and neither will your body. Are there some biological or genetic vulnerabilities to the effects of bullying? So when we look at, you and I talked about this last time about 5HGT LPR, the serotonin transporter gene. So and obviously like genetics have advanced epigenetics is kind of like the new thing they're doing full scans, full gene scans and the like. So not so there's a few people looking at the genetic vulnerability and there is a little bit that exists. I can't tell you what specific genes are involved. I don't think that's the way to go. It doesn't make sense to me.

1:06:56I think that was the way to go 20 years ago. That's how we thought about it, but we don't think about it that way today. I do think that there are other things that obviously genes influence everything. So the way a person sees the world is going to also be attached to how they interpret events. Some people are just more sensitive to cues of belonging and not belonging. So they're high on rejection sensitivity. Some individuals are more anxious. So if you think about it from a biological perspective, their limbic system is more active, their prefrontal cortex in a sense gets hijacked by their limbic system and it won't let them calm down, it won't let them be rational, it won't let them see things as more nuanced.

1:07:46So all of these individual differences affect how a person deals with bullying. I think it's really important that's the bulk of my work is showing that this kind of heterogeneity because it's really important because some kids do better than others. And then the kids who do better are kind of seen as the poster child of like, this is what you should aspire to be. They worked really well. The fact that you're not doing as well as Becky is because there's something wrong with you, Chris, if you just weren't so whiny, if you just weren't so squeaky, whatever you want to call it, then you know, you could be okay.

1:08:22Just suck it up and you'll be okay. So I'm really trying to chronicle this. There's a lot of individual differences, but there really is a difference in how they see the world Sometimes but again back to that temporal priority Is it the case that they're treated poorly and then it changes their world view or do they have a world view? That's different that then Is them to be treated really pick up on and then it moves forward our studies typically show symptoms driven effects meaning that kids who have poor mental health are picked on, then that makes their mental health poorer. And if you've ever been around depressed people, you can kind of see what's happening.

1:09:03They seem aloof, they don't seem interested, they don't have a lot of motivation, they're not a lot of fun, I'm not expecting them to be. I'm not saying that at all, but the peer group doesn't quite like that, so then they pick up on those cues of being on well, and then pick on these kids and then make them even more and well. And then there's going to be some kids who arrive at school ready to get at her and then they're treated so poorly and then they become unwell. And then their worldview changes. I suppose the ruthless thing about that is that if you've got this predisposition to ruminating brain, to being a little bit more anxious, And then something happens to further activate that, like the very fear that you had about the world has sort of come to pass and the raw materials that you had that were there ready to be activated, whether it's from an epigenetic predisposition standpoint, whether it's from a worldview perspective, whether it's from the patents that you've learned from your parents at home or whatever.

1:10:08So yeah, you kind of got a 2x, 3x multiplier bonus that pushes you further into this sort of dysfunctional perspective. I love how you said that. And it's kind of like, okay, so if we think about it, so the biology has changed in some way, right? So we know, and I'll just pick on the hypothelamic pitudary adrenal access, the HPA access, which is our stress response system. I've done a lot of work on that. We've published longitudinal studies. we know what's happening when it comes to HPA dysfunction and bullying. So kids who are bullied tend to either overproduce or underproduce cortisol. And in time they underproduce cortisol.

1:10:50So in the when you're faced with an acute stressor, your HPA access reacts, right? Like you ramp up a flight or fight reaction. I mean Obviously, it's a little bit more complicated than that, but I'm just giving a basic mechanism. Then 20 minutes later, cortisol has spiked. That's what we're measuring. We're measuring cortisol and how it's coming up. Your first time you're getting bull -aid, Chris, your cortisol is going to be high, high, high. As I follow you for the next three years, eventually one thing I'm going to see is that your cortisol is going to be low. It's an adaptive process. So the body is set on for homeostasis.

1:11:33It's set to keep you doing well, surviving, thriving as best as you can, even in difficult environments. So bringing down your cortisol is a good way of doing it. And it could be brought down because your glucose -cordicord receptor sites are now damaged from your brain being bathed in cortisol. There's other mechanisms that also explain this. but the point of the matter is is now we have low cortisol. And so your reaction to future stressors looks different now. And not just the stressors of bullying, the stressors across your life. And so now we have changed the way a person is interacting and behaving in their world as a function of being terrible to them.

1:12:20And that bothers me. because these behavioral and biological changes set them up for future risk. So they're more likely to be at risk for a post -traumatic stress disorder. So now, Chris, you've been bullied as a kid, long -standing bullying issue. Now your HBA has down -regulated itself as a protective factor and you get into a horrific car accident when you're 22 years old and you end up with PTSD that's debilitating and it causes you significant harm for the next five years. If you hadn't had that experience, PTSD probably wouldn't have been in your future and that's the stuff that we're looking at and we're working on.

1:13:11So risk is exacerbated in the future because of the relationships that are great three children have or our 10th graders are having. So it really behooves us to step up on terms of intervention and prevention, right? Yeah, what about overcoming it, overcoming childhood bullying as an adult? Is there been much work done on how people after the fact can help. So I focused on not overcoming it, and I know that sounds horrible, but that's kind of like, because I'm trying to get people motivated to change this. So I've really focused on the ones who aren't doing well. I don't think we have a good grasp of those who have done well, just like we don't really understand the true positive leaders.

1:14:01So if I, you know, if you have young scientists that are listening and they're just starting their career, I want to know more about those who were bullied and seem to do okay. I want to, and maybe they had a protective gene. Maybe there was something about the way, like maybe the other protective, it might not even have been biological protective mechanism. It could have been, their family was so amazing. Older brother. You know, like there's going to be so many things in the, but that would be great because historically we haven't focused on positive side of things. and we've really focused on deficits and what's negative.

1:14:36So I want to know that. I think, you know, even the people that have got the deficits in the later life would be interested in knowing, okay, this thing happened to me and maybe I'm carrying it with me to varying degrees. How can I learn to overcome, or how can I move past that maybe reprogram some of that that worldview that you said? And I think that comes down to therapy, like cognitive behavioral therapy would be really good. Can I mention another thing that kind of makes me, so like in my book I really mentioned that, like at the end of the day we don't know what the long -term implications are, like well we have an idea that it's not gonna be good.

1:15:17We don't know if this can be fixed if we can change this how bullying gets under the skin to confer a risk. You know, I imagine we can, because we're quite plastic, there's a lot of plasticity. One of the things that we're doing is we're trying to reduce bullying and earnest. And what studies are showing and we just showed it, we still need to publish it, but it's just replicating what's been shown across Europe. There's this healthy context paradox where if you readies bullying, the few kids left in the school who are bullied have worse mental outcomes. So in a sense, we've now made some kids even more vulnerable by reducing bullying.

1:16:00So what do you think that's about? Because I know you're a smart guy and you usually have the answer. Look, if I was to totally grow science, let's pull it out of my ass, I would guess that what you're able to do is lower the threshold or increase the threshold basically for what but high status bullies think is acceptable behavior or who they think that they should be able to go after, but the problem being that they still need to maintain power and control in one form or another, which means that a smaller number of lower status victims are bullied more intensely because you're spreading the same or a similar amount of bullying across fewer victims.

1:16:44So I think there's gonna be a little bit of that And that part wasn't, hasn't, to my knowledge, hasn't been really looked at, but I love your answer. So I will tell you the answer to that because we have the data and I'll be able to know that. I think it comes back to also attributions. If there's a lot of us being picked on, the attribution is, these guys are just jerks. Like, it's not about me because I'm not the only one. But if I'm the only one, or there's only a few of us, We, there's something fundamentally wrong with us. That is, I think, the attribution error that occurs. So we are trying our best to reduce bullying, and in doing so, we're causing harm to a certain segment of the population.

1:17:29So now I am going to school after school to more and presenting to 170 principals in Quebec, but I do this all the time, and I present the data, and I say, here are the rates in your school. We've done a great job at reducing Bolinian your school. Can we get your school counselors to now Recognize that you have even the have kids that are even more vulnerable than they were before Isn't that a bit messed up? It's ruthless. It's I mean, I don't know what the I don't know what the solution to that is because it you're the suffering of the few, saving the suffering of the many, but then it's more on those few.

1:18:13So if you end up with worse mental health outcomes, I know. I feel like I'm on a... It's not what you would ever have expected, right? You would just think like, in a sense, we're doing God's work by reducing bullying and yet the precious few who are left behind are doing worse than we've ever seen. What do you say to people who push back I can say, well, bullying's good for developing resilience. So, you know, I was bullied as a kid and it made me a stronger person. And it prevents you from being too weak. I hate that. And I get asked that all the time. It triggers me. So I always think like, well, okay, so you think you've done well.

1:18:54But let's just say, I do a lot of stuff in sport because I'm a high performance soccer coach. I coach a team Ontario for the U 17 girls and our Canada games team. But in any event, the reason I mentioned that because it's a really easy way to explain this. So you are now an Olympian, Chris, right? You've won two Olympic gold medals in swimming and you say, you know, the reason I'm an Olympian is because I was bullied and made me stronger and made me more resilient. And I always say, what if you were supposed to win 15 medals? So you don't know what your top performance is. You don't know where you're supposed to be and where how far you can excel.

1:19:36You think that it didn't do anything to you, but there's going to be a biological component that definitely did that. Now, there are always exceptions to the rules. So I would be open -minded to maybe some people do better as a consequence of that. I'm struck by how often people don't want to change their experience. If they could go back, they don't want to change their experience because they think it's what made them who they are today. But you could never know what your life would look like without that because you've experienced it and can't be erased. Well, it's the difference between saying, I achieved this because of that and I achieved this in spite of that.

1:20:15Exactly. Yeah, yeah, fascinating. I mean, look, it's in many ways it's cope. It's a way for an adult who went through a tough thing as a kid to look back and say, Well, this wasn't so bad. I don't need to hold onto the grudges because without that, I wouldn't be who I am as opposed to without that, I would be more of who I am. And also too, it's about making meaning from really terrible circumstances. Like, we all want to be able to explain why that terrible thing happened to us. and makes sense of it. So it makes sense to me, the people that I work with, so I'm a professor of counseling psychology, I supervise counseling psychologists of the future, the clients that they are managing, which are numerous more than I would be able to do as a single clinician, these individuals are not doing well.

1:21:14My students are overwhelmingly seeing individuals who had poor interpersonal relationships, either with peers or with a caregiver. Most, a lot of people are not forgetting these experiences. How effective are most interventions at the moment? Give me the world's biggest events. 20 % reduction in bullying is what we're doing at our best. And we're doing it in younger kids and not in high school. It becomes entrenched as it gets. So it goes down, but the few victims that are left are in a sense lifetime victims. So it becomes entrenched. We're not doing a good job at all. When we use a whole school approach, we're better.

1:21:56When we have multiple components, we're better. When we involved, younger kids were better. I think that that group I told you that's not moving are the really high status popular kids who are creating the norms for your school. So really problematic. we can't figure this out quick enough. And I think it's because we have focused, in a way I think we have to bring it back in a sense, like strip it down to its essence. And its essence is, I think this is part of the human condition. And if you do that, then I think your interventions are gonna look a bit different. And so I came out of a lab as a postdoc, Richard Trumblay is like the highest -sighted Canadian psychologist, maybe one of the highest -sighted psychologists in the world.

1:22:49I was his postdoc student and he taught me about how kids are socialized out of aggression. They're not socialized into it. Of course, there's going to be some socialization component to it, for sure. You know, we're not saying that never exists. But the idea that most people hold is that kids are aggressive because they've been modeled. They've been influenced by aggressive models, right? Roll models. But the research that I did with Richard and has been replicated worldwide and has as long standing like we follow kids from birth all the way into long into adulthood is that most kids get socialized out of this.

1:23:35Now, I know it seems like I'm not being consistent because I really, really emphasized a lot about how popular bullies socialize the group, but they came men probably with this need for dominance. They came in with a Machiavellian worldview. They came in with the tools that were needed in order to be effective in what they're doing. And so if our intervention programs focused a little bit more on that, maybe would be more successful. Does that make sense? It does. What are the current most commonly used anti -bullying interventions? So there's one that's pretty popular. It's called the Kiva program.

1:24:18It comes out of Norway, sorry, not Norway, Finland. And Christina Salma Valley is the one who put this together. It has quite a bit of success in Finland, but Finland is a small country. It's roll out in a bigger place like the UK or Canada or the United States may not be, is not as successful in these contexts. What the preliminary data are suggesting. There's also the Olveas anti -bullying program, so Dan Olveas, we spoke about the Scandinavian who did most of the studies in Norway. way, he is early efforts had a 50 % reduction in bullying, but they implicated every aspect of society. So everywhere you turn, you had the same lesson.

1:25:05So quite successful there, not as successful in North America or in the UK. What's the principles behind it? The principles behind it. So Olvius is about creating awareness and involvement. and the Kiva component is really about engaging the bystanders, which is the way to go. So, because the source, you know, so bullying tends to happen in public, bullying tends to be used in order to achieve and maintain power. And so it's the peer group that's affording you that power. They're the ones who are either going to accept what you're doing or they're going to reject what you're doing. So if you could get the peer group to reject what Popular bullies are doing or even the Nelson type bullies are doing then you'd be in a better position Because you've removed you've removed the incentive to do exactly Okay, so how much or how effective is it to Make bullies realize how much of an impact that they're having you know you've given all this compelling evidence about what it's going to do in late to live from what it does to them at the time and their educational outcomes and they're going to gain weight and they're going to be blah blah blah blah.

1:26:20As adults, this is the entire way that campaigns for malaria nets and stuff like that are done. Here is a story of what your effort could have as a positive or a negative impact, how effective is it to say to bullies? Look at all of the downstream implications of doing this. This is what is that not an option? So there is a few programs that are designed to increase moral engagement. And so there are interventions, bullying interventions that specifically target moral disengagement and moral engagement. And they are, they're not, nothing is like very efficacious, but they're doing something. There's a bit of a reduction.

1:27:05So I think that that should be applauded and replicated. The issue is that schools invest in this when they have a bullying problem. But for the most part, they're not consistent in their investment. So whatever we're going to do, we're going to have to do it early and then maintain it over time. Social emotional learning is really efficacious at just reducing aggression, which is part of bullying, but there's a huge anti -social emotional learning movement in the United States. I don't know if you know about that. No. You know, because you can't socialize kids in schools. That's the purview, purview of the parents, like how dare you even try, you know, get that woke BS out of our schools.

1:27:58That sort of thing. And yet, the evidence is pretty strong when it comes to social emotional learning. So there's a bit of a backlash against it, but I guess it depends what direction sustaining our efforts. Yeah, it depends what direction the social and emotional learning is going toward whether it's going toward that there's no genders or That's what I think it is, but it's not Yeah, so you know, I saw this Last year There was a pivot in UK schools away from criticizing toxic masculinity and toward promoting positive masculinity. Now the campaigns were exactly the same. It was very much derogating lots of typical behavior that you would see from boys and young men.

1:28:39And done in the classic frame that everybody that isn't insane hates. But this is one of those times where maybe a rebrand could be useful and you might be able to, It's cool. It's called social emotional learning. Not anymore. Now it's called holistic interaction treatment or behavioral success or something like that. This is one of the times where a rebrand might be a good idea. Yeah. We're going to have to do something. Again, this derails individual's potential. Not all. I mean, I don't want your listeners to have been bullied and worried about what this is going to mean for their memory and their health and all of those things in the future.

1:29:24I mean, that's not, it's not a fat company. There's, there's a lot of heterogeneity as I keep saying and I, I think hope is really important. One of the things I think is the saddest part. So beyond the fact that we have some few remaining kids who are very vulnerable is that we could do a pretty good job at getting people to not actively bully others, but we can't get kids to include kids. And we started off talking about the need to belong, right? And how we didn't talk, we didn't use these words per se, but it's a fundamental human motivator. So at the end of the day, I can maybe get kids to not call you stupid or Chevy in the locker or whatever it is, right?

1:30:07But I can't get them to include you. I can't get them to invite them, invite you to their birthday, I can't get them to sit beside you at lunch. And so we still have isolated victims who are not actively victimized. And that breaks my heart. Yeah, I suppose it's the difference between getting somebody from sick to well and well to fit, that you can stop them from being, and you're right, that it's not even that. It's that we don't have a need to not be bullied. We have a need to be included. Exactly. It's not avoiding exclusion, it's creating inclusion. What you mentioned there about memory, what's the impact of bullying on memory, childhood memory, and then later life?

1:30:54So we, I think we might have been the first study to show this, but we did a study that was published in 2011 in Brain and Cognition, followed kids prospectively for three years. We looked at how memory was affected as a consequence of being bullied. vis -a -vis cortisol because too much cortisol is terrible for your brain, for your memory. And so we looked specifically at areas of the brain that are high in glucocorticoid receptor sites. So they have a campus of the prefrontal cortex. And we found that kids who were bullied increase their cortisol that in turn affected their memory in the areas that we would expect it to be.

1:31:33So that means it affects their memory. That means they have fewer recall. their verbal memory is not as good. Episodic memory can be still intact. There's still, but there is some issues also with episodic memory. Yeah, so it's just all of these things. We tend to think about kids not doing well at school as a function of them being bullied, so they disengage and then that influences their poor academic outcomes. But we argued in this paper and it's been replicated that kids who are bullied also legitimately have poor memory as a consequence of that poor treatment. Yeah, neurobiology is stepping into put a cap on your capacity.

1:32:14And again, this is the, you succeeded because versus you succeeded in spite. Yeah. Yeah, not nice. What about, I read something to do with increased supervision, restricting bullying, and something to do with spatial design, spatial planning, the way that schools, the physical environments are put together. So, this is my passion as telling schools that if they want to invest in anti -bullying efforts, they should invest in supervision because it's one of the best ways of reducing bullying. It's not a program. It's just getting teachers out of the classroom and managing what's going on on the playground and then the hallways and the like.

1:33:01So during the pandemic, we did a study where we did a random design and keep in mind, kids were still in school. So we're not saying, of course, bullying should go down if they're not in school, they're not face to face, they're not interacting as much. But anyhow, so when they were still in school, we did this, we randomized kids into, we looked at their bullying rates before the pandemic and during the pandemic and we found a 50 % reduction in bullying. I've never seen that reduction in my lifetime. So, another pandemic would be great. Yeah, exactly. No. Yeah, so, but so this reduction came vis -a -vis increased supervision, which is something I've always been arguing for because we did a paper, we published a paper in 2010 called Places to Avoid where we just chronicled all the places in the school where kids get bullied.

1:33:50And guess where the bully Chris where there's no school where there's no supervision so they get Corridor on the playground and the hallways and the stairwell you name it right so Anyhow so this 50 % reduction had to do with they were so Motivated to make sure kids had their masks on that they were washing their hands like they fully engaged in this You know virus mitigation strategies or these virus mitigation strategies that they inadvertently reduced bullying by 50%. So how about we raise kids? We used to have dinner ladies and they weren't teachers, but they were just adults. They were adults that were on the playground.

1:34:33You know, look, I don't mean to badmouth teachers. A lot of them, I was dating a teacher for a long time and she would get into school at some ungodly hour and she'd be there for two hours before the kids got in and then worked through and it's like, you've got this one 50 minute block to have some food and reset before you go again in the afternoon. I'm aware teachers get to leave at 3 .30 pm sometimes, but also it is the one break that they get during the day. All of that being said, paying somebody who is maybe a working mum for a couple of hours to help with a bit of supervision seems like a relatively low cost to improve the well -being of kids.

1:35:14Exactly. The issue is the unions are so strong. Teachers unions are so strong. So I'm a huge fan of teachers as well. They have very strong unions. Good for them. You know, nobody's going to fault them for advocating for themselves. But the unions just prohibit a lot of what we want to try and do. They just don't allow it. So I'll give you an example in Ontario, high school teachers do not need to go into the hallways during school classroom transitions. That's in their collective agreement. Where does bullying take place in high school? In the hallways, during classroom transitions. So, I mean, you need to get them out of the class, greeting them at the door, just those little things.

1:36:01There was this study, and I may have got this wrong, but I don't think I do. I remember this study from years ago, where they were looking at why this particular school had low bullying rates and it turns out that across the street, so it's an elementary school, across the street was a senior complex and there was a bench and they had the little lady sitting on the bench and so the kids in the playground thought they were being spied on by the little ladies and those ladies were never going to get across the street in time to intervene in any capacity. But just that was enough to reduce bullying rates.

1:36:41Wow. Make grandmothers great again. That's what I say. I love it. There you go. What about, so is that increased supervision, the spatial planning intervention? Is that the same thing? That would go hand in hand. So thinking about like, you know, areas that if you can't get supervision in, like we don't want scary spaces in a school, right? kids are afraid of the bathrooms in schools because you can't get security cameras in there obviously you have to keep the door on them everybody has biological needs so yeah so think that think when when designing schools thinking about school trips and stuff like that back of the bus part of me school trips back at the bus, staying overnight, doing camping, whatever it might be.

1:37:35So I guess one thing that I'm kind of interested in, we skirted around some behavioral genetics -y type stuff today, interaction of nature and nurture of environment and genes. What about parents who were bullied, then trying to parent their kids, and this sort of hyper -awareness, this maybe this fixation on their experiences of child and then the inability to regulate what their future child is going through. So studies show that there's a genetic component. So parents who were bullied tend to have, the kids have a higher likelihood of being bullied. So beyond the genetic influence, there's also an environmental influence.

1:38:22I think a lot of it has to do with attributions. So let's just say something's ambiguous. And you tell me about it. And I put my lens of how I was treated as a kid and influence your perception of an ambiguous situation. Chris, they're being mean to you. You just don't realize it. They're bullying you, right? And yet it's ambiguous. So it can go left or it could go right. That's part of the mechanism of what's also going on. So in a sense, parents are creating a threat sensitivity in their child based on their experiences. We do that across all aspects of life, right? Like we're always about finding patterns, making inferences, that sort of thing.

1:39:09We tend to be our child's prefrontal cortex, like we're, you know, their serigate prefrontal cortex. I mean, that's what parenting is. The problem is, is an ambiguous situation. You don't wanna have a hostile attribution. So you're basically making the child's see threat where there may not be any. And then when you see threat, you behave differently, right? So then maybe I've guarded myself. So now I'm seeing as being a loo for arrogant, and then that influences an interaction. I mean, social interactions are pretty complicated. There's a lot of little things in the equation. So that's just one example of how it can happen.

1:39:55What about the differences between childhood bullying and workplace bullying? Have you ever looked into what happens? People get out, they're now 25, they're no longer 15, and if there's anything that's interesting or illuminating? So the interesting thing is there's a lot of polyvictimization. So if you're bullied in childhood, you're bullied in the workplace. So we show the study where you see that across all areas. So intimate partner violence, dating violence, that sort of thing, workplace, peer relationships in adulthood. So kind of there's some continuity. But at the end of the day, we're using self -reports.

1:40:38So I'm not saying that these are not people who are like that their perception is Not true, but there could be a bias in their perception and you know again If you're looking for evidence that you're not well -liked if you're looking for evidence that people are gonna treat you poorly You're gonna find the evidence and so I think some of that is happening. I also think that there's probably some of the vulnerabilities that made somebody that led to their victimization, not blaming victims at all. Like never ever would I suggest that you retreated poorly because of something that you did. Like you should be spared from oppression and humiliation, you know, full stop.

1:41:23But there's some hues that are being picked up by others that may still be there, that may still be present in adulthood. Well, you've seen from Bad Men by David that study were criminals or sexual assaults was shown, maybe it was silhouettes of women walking or maybe it was videos of women walking and they were asked who they would pick and they converged a lot of the time on the same sort of women. So it's exactly the same. You're not laying it this at the feet and say, oh, it's because of the way that you walk. But there is some sort of signal which is given off which portrays bestows, exposes of vulnerability of some kind that a cohort of people may pick up on and then try and take advantage of and the single is hard because it wreaks of Victim Blaney, right?

1:42:20And yet it's not what the intention is in the ideal world. So a lot of times what we do when kids are really bullied, we change them schools. In the past, they were put into programs, social skills training programs. So it was all about the deficits of the victim. Instead of thinking about their rights and how they should be allowed to exist in this world, being the way they are, that really the owner should be on changing the perpetrators' behavior. And so I just need, I think we need to be cautious because this is a sensitive area. We don't want people to ever think that whatever they did, they deserve their poor treatment.

1:43:07But at the same time, there is something that some really terrible people are picking up on. And then it could be a lack of confidence. It could just be, like as I said, that there's, when I talked about, if you were squeaky, you know, you probably would be left alone, but if you're not, you're gonna be picked on again. We do know that there's victim shopping, that that exists, that kids do that, and there's probably a shop. Oh, they tried out on a bunch of different, there's, you tried out on a bunch of different victims, and you wouldn't see what the reaction is. That's so interesting. Exactly, and so that's not been studied in adults, but I imagine that it probably will be, like, that that will exist, that there is going to be victim shopping.

1:43:49Yeah, very interesting. Tracy, you're awesome. I can't wait to say that. No, you're awesome. Honestly, I wish you forever. Yeah, well, be careful. Be careful what you wish for, because you've got a book coming out soon. Yeah. In the interim between now, and is it still called mean girls? It's not called mean girls, because it's women. It's called mean. Mean, mean. Yeah. Between now and when that comes out, where should people go? If they want to keep up to date with all of the things that you're doing, and you seem to be publishing an awful lot of studies. I mean, so if you're publishing for sure, I'm still on X, I'm still hanging on by Fred on X.

1:44:24So anyhow, they can find me there. I'm on LinkedIn, they can find me, Google Scholar, of course, that sort of thing. And then they can also find me on your podcast next year. Let's go, we're doing it again. We're ready to run it back. You're great, you're great. I adore speaking to you and I can't wait to see the new book and go through it and everyone here will be that to listen as well. And thanks for putting attention on this. Like a lot of people are hurt. So I think that you have a huge microphone and people are going to appreciate hearing what works, what doesn't work and my mispronunciations.

1:44:59They're going to appreciate that. And they won't put it in the comments. I can't imagine that. They've never put it in the comments. No one's ever commented anything on the internet. So no, no, it's never existed. All right. Until next time. Thank you, Tracey. Bye.