The Don of Boys and Men: Richard Reeves

26:35And so I can, I can keep hiding behind Obama now. That's the nice thing I can say. It's not me saying, Barack Obama said it be angry with him call him a cuck or a reactionary I don't whichever whatever day whatever day I'll just call you Richard Obama from now on you're basically part of the family no I'm just like I'm just a heat shield for me now it's amazing it's like fantastic like don't get angry with me get angry you know email email Obama but yeah I've come to believe that fatherhood is really really important and precious and that most of what fathers do and I'd be interested to know what you both think of this but most of what fathers and mothers do is interchangeable right it overlaps right there's no there's no feminine mystique to changing a nappy right um but i do think as kids get older especially i think that we do bring some subtly different things to the to the parenting enterprise around risk taking around getting out into the world around getting this balance right equipping i see dads as almost like helping to equip their kids um and so i think that that's a beautiful tension between maternal and paternal instincts if we allow it to be yeah i mean i would agree wholeheartedly i found it really interesting there was a study done recently and they found it interesting they felt they had to do this study to check that men were just as disturbed by babies crying in the night as women were and they found that oh yeah I mean amazing men can also hear it's you know so they don't they don't go deaf for the first two years of a child's life um I am absolutely you know I campaigned for this for 10 years as part of pregnant and screwed for dads to have longer paternity leave and it to be better paid and part of the reason I did that was not just because it closes the motherhood penalty We know that if dads spend more time with their children in the early days, women do better in their careers and they have more income as a result.

28:24But we also know the benefits for children. But also, I think the knock-on impacts are enormous. My dad went straight back to work. He worked very hard. We never saw him. And my parents ended up splitting up because they didn't understand each other. They had entirely different lives. My mom was the omnipresent mother, always there, always doing the caring. My dad was always at work, had no real involvement with the children at all. And they just ended up completely not aligning, not understanding each other's lives and ultimately divorced. And so you can see from the data as well that marriages are more likely to last if dads spend time with their children in those early days.

29:01And yet we're preventing them from doing so. So the impact in terms of men and their testosterone levels, their ability to connect with their children, their ability to feel different emotions, because it literally changes your brain, as we both know, Anna Machen, you know, and the research she's done around the brain changes in men. but it you know the benefits for men themselves the benefits for children the benefits for women in terms of their career their mental and physical health but also the benefits for marriages are so vast and yet we still push men back to work straight away I completely agree with that the only thing I would probably add I think it is an addition is that sometimes I think there's a tendency to focus like only on the early days and years which of course are very important but like it turns out that it takes a long time to raise children um and that actually if it's let's call it a two-decade project right um then actually over the course of those two decades you end up just evolving like who's doing what and when and like sharing and you're trying to keep you know maybe my my wife and i have done sort of tag team parenting or kind of relay parenting a bit more right which is like we kind of realize you can't have two very demanding jobs at the same time and so one of you needs to be kind of on the home front.

30:17But in my case, I was much more that when the kids were like coming into early six, seven, and then I did a bit more again in their teens. My wife took time off in between. It was very, it was, let's be honest, it was chaos. We both were able to kind of keep our careers alive, albeit maybe a little bit more slowly, and do the parenting bit. So I agree with you about that, Jolie, but I also think doing parenting, and Anna's new work actually on adolescence has really affected me. um not not the net you now have to say not the netflix show don't you um but at the period of adolescence and how particularly how important dads are for that and my own brother actually for weird reasons was able to take his parental leave when his kids he has two twin boys when they were 14 and he was thrilled about that because he thought they actually need me now more than at any other time and i think he was right about that and so what i don't want to do is sort of restrict the kind of parenting thing to those early years i agree that they're very important and we both need to be shoulder to shoulder around that but i but i think too many dads feel as if they haven't done their bit in the early years it then gets cemented these gender roles get cemented over time and that i think is what causes the problems like 10 years from now so in my case for example my wife did do more of the stuff like in the very early months and years but then i did a lot more later and we were both working equally hard in different ways throughout and i think in the end that's probably what it comes down to is like are you in this together right is everyone pulling their weight even if you're pulling in a different way at different times so when she was incredibly busy in a very high octane job for a while we barely saw her monday to friday by god i was pulling my weight on the home front but wow was she pulling her weight on the economic front right amazing um and i think we both felt that we were in it together and that seems to me to be the thing that you're getting at with the marriage satisfaction thing which is this sense of like no one's free riding on the labor of another that's when marriages go

32:05Elliott Rae:sour yeah yeah important point which i want to talk to you about education we know that boys are falling behind at every level of the education system. And I think that's one thing your book really helped to hit home. One of the key messages I got from your book was around education. Talk to us about the reasons that this is the case. Why is this? Well, I'm going to start by saying everything I'm about to follow with is based on scant empirical evidence, because there's just not enough research. It's one of the reasons I set up the Institute. It's one of the reasons I'm proud to be chair of the Centre in the UK.

32:38It's like actually doing like really high quality research on male education. It just hasn't been that big a field, scholarly field. But I think what we do know is a few things. One is that having more male teachers is positive. Even there, the evidence is a bit mixed to be candid, but certainly seems to skew in a kind of positive direction. And we need more research on that. And also, I wouldn't restrict that just to the educational outcomes. I think for boys to have more men in their lives is important in and of itself. Even if you can't do a randomized control trial showing the impact on GCSE results.

33:11But more men around, more after school activity, more sports, more opportunities to do physical activity. That seems pretty strongly associated with better outcomes for boys. More hands-on learning styles. And I'm using hands-on very much inverted commas. People think I'm talking here about getting back to the idea of woodworking. I still have the things that I made in my school woodworking class and they're not very good. I don't mean that, right? I just, I mean, I don't know about it. Are yours any good? Did you make good things?

33:40Elliott Rae:I don't think I kept them. I'll go into my parents' house on the weekend and say, Richard told me I should have my woodwork. I did one thing. It won't be there. It was absolutely horrible. This little box, the jewelry box, it's an absolutely horrible thing. And my parents have it like on a shelf in their dining room. And I was playing with it the other day and I dropped it and I broke the corner of it. And obviously I was like, well, this is some piece of absolute crap that I made when I was like 13 or something. And my mother was in tears because she was like, what, you made that? And I said, I made it, but it's terrible.

34:08But she's like, no, no, I've cared. And she cared 40 years or whatever. It's the effort that counts. It's the effort. Anyway, anyway, that's love. But I think that what I mean by that is it looks like boys, I hear I'm drawing a lot on Michael Reichert's work as well, who I think is just an amazing psychologist and he wrote a very good book on How to Raise a Boy. Boys seem to need to know a little bit more why I'm learning this before they care about the what. They just need to know the application. It needs to be more connected to the labor market, more connected to specific skills. They're just not as good at undertaking abstract tasks obediently.

34:36And so that's what I mean by more hands-on learning. It's like, tell me why this is important. Link it to the real world. By the way, that's also good for girls. It's just especially good for boys. And then the last thing is that boys do mature a bit later. I make quite a big deal of this, as you know, which is just absolutely true that like a 15-year-old girl on average is older than a 15-year-old boy. By as much as a year, actually, in certain skills, especially these organizational skills, these executive functioning skills, they're called. just like having your acts together skills, remembering your homework, turning your homework in, taking your homework, all that sort of stuff.

35:09And girls, they just get there a bit, again, not breaking news to anybody who's like ever met a boy or a girl or been a boy or a girl, but it is true. And I think that that's now playing out in the education system and giving girls a real advantage on the average because of their older, which we couldn't see before because we were busy back to Jolie's point, we were holding them back, right? We were actually artificially restricting girls' educational opportunities. And once we stopped doing that, their natural advantages were revealed. So I don't think that's a new natural advantage. I think it's just that girls weren't able to express it before because of the conditions of sexism that previously prevailed.

35:42I've heard you call boys malfunctioning girls before. They're treated like malfunctioning girls in the education system, which really resonated with me. And I would say would resonate with my kids, actually. But I have two boys if I spoke to them. You know, both my boys feel that they are feel sometimes that they are they would say they're victims of sexism that they feel that the girls are treated much better than the boys at school they don't express that in those words but that you know that's what they mean when they talk to me about their experiences at school and um the education system in the uk i don't know about america but very much puts kids in a box it says you must behave like this which is why you have so many kids out of the school system in the uk because children with special educational needs it just doesn't work for them at all i guess my question is how do we change that yeah uh i think you're right i think the way the education system works is it's just it is much more like one size fits all uh and that's true in both the uk and the us and it just turns out that um that size is just a bit more female right and so like it's just going to work that kind of narrow pretty prescriptive like conveyor belt thing right just girls are just a little bit better suited for it partly because i do think there's become a bit of a default, right?

36:57If you treat like how a girl behaves and how a girl learns as the default, then you inadvertently create a culture and a curriculum and a pedagogy that's just a bit more girl-friendly in just the same way that arguably we're doing the opposite 50 years ago. Again, I think largely inadvertently. So how do you fix it? Well, unfortunately, you could do a couple of things. One is I think you can start boys in school a bit later. So one of my proposals is at the very least give them the option to have a little bit more time to just develop those skills. So give them the gift of time is what some scholars call it.

37:28A little bit of that. I mentioned male teachers, but I think one of the reasons is it just changes the climate in the act. Female teachers are a little bit more likely to sanction boys' misbehavior and to label it as such than male teachers are. That's just true. And I think intuitive, understand that. So that's why having more men around is important. I should say that my own son is teaching fifth grade in Baltimore City now, and I just couldn't be prouder of him. He's the only male in his cohort of teachers in the school um and so i do think just having guys around helps the atmosphere a little bit for sure but in the long run of course what we want is an education system it's just a bit more flexible there's a reason why there's more boys in special needs there's a reason why more boys have been diagnosed with add and i think that is the problem is that like yes it's one size fits all and unfortunately that size as i just said skews a bit female

38:14Elliott Rae:we have to change that how we found so i think there's sometimes people hesitate to actually talk about the differences between boys and girls and and men and women and you know us with our earlier conversation talking about coming out the box and you can be anything you want to be at the same time recognizing that we are we are different our makeup is different but that can be sometimes a kind of controversial conversation have you had any pushback or challenge when you're talking about biological differences and just how we are naturally different as genders even though you know there is a social construct around gender as well what's been your response to that and the response from the public i mean you're kind to suggest that the public has a response to my but but i would say yes a little bit so a couple of books niobe way uh's book that i the latest book that i don't particularly like uh ruth whitman's book boy mum that i do like i reviewed them both she's a previous guest so it's good to hear that you do like which one and i got it the right way around thank god roof was a previous guest yeah our first guest actually um but they both actually did say look i think that they accuse me a little bit in different ways of like biological essentialism or sex essentialism by pointing out these differences i find it a little bit frustrating that if you suggest that not all of the differences are the result of socialization maybe just a little bit of it comes is more innate that makes you a biological essentialist It doesn't.

39:41What it means is you're just allowing a little bit of room for natural differences. It's actually the other side of this debate who are the social essentialists, the social determinists, because if you really insist that 100 % of the differences in the behavior, psychology, predilections of men and women are the result of socialization, that we are blank slates, then you are the essentialist. And you shouldn't accuse us of being essentialists for allowing any space for it. So yes, a bit of pushback. But here's the thing. I'll give you a specific example. I was to a researcher recently done some work on the manosphere and you know this group term i don't like now but like just for online influencers because it's defined too broadly and he had this pitched battle with his funder who wanted him to include the belief that there are some natural differences between males and females as a sexist view as a sign of being misogynist and he didn't he refused to but it was a pitch battle and i'm like you mean the view that 97 of people behold right i mean this is this is crazy stuff right the question is what do we do about those differences how big are they in what areas do they matter and how do we channel them right because there are some differences that small they don't really matter there are others that kind of do matter like i think that the potential for aggression and violence in men compared to women i do not believe for a moment that that can only be the result of socialization i think i think it's batshit crazy to believe that honestly and knowing that is incredibly important for the way we raise our boys.

41:05I think to deny that there are some natural differences is actually to make culture less important. Whereas I think it makes culture more important. If we know that, for example, that kind of women are more agreeable than men on average, and that makes it less likely that they're going to go into conflict or demand stuff for themselves, we should know that because then we can help to overcome that a little bit and make sure that we don't inadvertently disadvantage them because they're not asking for a pay rise every five minutes, right? Let's not make sure they're not punished for those. But anyway, I'm going on too long.

41:35But I think the point is that just particularly when it comes to fatherhood, it comes to I think the denial of any natural differences ends up being profoundly regressive, because it means we don't take seriously what we need to do as a society to channel those natural differences in ways that are positive and that support gender equality. Big conversation.

41:53Elliott Rae:I think when I saw my wife give birth, I knew there were differences because there's no way that i could even fathom growing a child and pushing them out same same but here's one here's one more rather beautiful example which is about fatherhood i think you'll like this one which is um sarah blaffer hurley she has a beautiful new book out father time and she oh i have the book actually yeah i've got the book yes great book and what i learned from that uh it turns out it's not a new finding but i learned it from her which is that women mothers get an oxytocin spike this kind of love hormone spike from kind of cuddling physical contact with they also get it from giving birth breastfeeding etc so it's very like this kind of physical thing but did you know that men also get an oxytocin spike from a form of interaction with their kids and do you know what they get it from throwing them around throwing them around uh they get an oxytocin spike and so there you've got i think there's a biological difference in not that we both can get this oxytocin bonding love hormone but how we get it and so i think that has just implications because if you if you think like if you're a dad i don't know how you were elliot but like in those early days and kind of months where you just feel a little bit left out in some ways because there's this whole love hormone love bombing thing going on between a child by the way that has no business really being out out of the womb right it's really technically defined as an we should say extra uterine embryo for the first at least the first three months right it's just incredibly young and so this connection between mom and baby especially those first few months is unbelievably strong and we are not going to feel the same way as dads we're just not going to feel the same way but it's not game over we got plenty more to do we can be very helpful in those months and guess what we get our own we get our own oxytocin high thank you very much just a little bit later from saying something different i find that a beautiful biological difference rather than horrible biological essentialism but also i find it really interesting that the different roles that men and women play in a child's life tend to be women tend to be the person that likes to keep the child close that does the sort of real nurturing role whereas men are more the challenger for children and they more like to give them risk you know they're more risk taking with children so they're the ones that's that give them the the view of the outside world as it were that's sort of the roles we naturally fall into whereas women tend to be you know keep them close give them a cuddle and it's really interesting to me that those chemicals work in that way and exactly that way yeah it's almost like we're evolved to have those differences and it creates this beautiful creative tension I think between mothers and fathers like it's a stereotype like have you seen the meme of a guy throwing the kid in the air and it's like how far it looks to dad how far it looks to the kid and then how far it looks to mom and you just don't see women throwing their kids in the air as much in fact almost never and Jonathan Haidt and I are working a little bit on fatherhood and this risk-taking thing and he had this nice observation the other day where he said this at a mom's first event actually where he said look if there's a parent who's pretending to be a predator who's going to gobble their child up and chasing them around which one is it yeah it's always that right mum can be a tickle monster she can be whatever but actually it turns out that acting the role of a predator who is going to kill and eat your own child is not something that mothers are amazingly good at dads are amazing at it um and so i think it speaks to this sort of difference that we have between mothers and fathers that if we take it seriously it's beautiful what i worry about is if we don't if fathers don't feel enabled to play that role in conversation with the mom hopefully right and to have that kind of it can only be a creative tension if there's tension and obviously we're all generalizing at this point but i think it's fine you know if you don't trust us by this point in the podcast you're never going to trust me um or us but like it's fine for mom to be saying i'm not sure you should do that i think that's i'm worried about that be careful be safe etc for dad to say no i think this is okay we're going to do it right and mom's saying i'm not sure and if mom's thoughtful and sensible she'll be like i get it this is hard for me I probably wouldn't do it but I get this important and dad will take her safety concerns seriously but you do need both and if dads don't feel enabled to be dads you lose that creative tension and if they just defer to mom and say mom's way is the best way that ends up not being great parenting it's not that dad's way is the best way it's that they'll each bring something to it and we have to honor and respect that and put it into creative tension within the relationship and it can be creative yeah so just for just for the single moms because I know there will be single moms listening to this that their brains do adapt actually there's research to show that they become more like dance relationships and single moms they do adapt that part of their brain so that they do do the risk take yes i didn't know i didn't know about the brain bit i'd be very interested to learn more about that but i i have heard of that research i also know that a lot of single moms who are listening and the same-sex couples i know who are women are you so pretty intentional about having other men in their kids lives yeah right uncles godparents you know etc and and so actually i find some of the people who are least offended by the idea that there are some special things that men can bring to the raising of children are single mums and lesbian couples right yeah and there's a usually usually get it there's an amazing organization called um lads need dads it's up in yeah i love them and most of her customers are are single mums who will come and say look I've recognized my boy needs some male male men in in their life and they'll go to her and she has an amazing mentorship program so I think you're right in regards to like recognizing a lot of single mums that I know will recognize the need to bring in men and do that very very well I want to kind of move the conversation onto male caring and caring roles men doing caring roles given everything that we've said you you've spoken quite openly about the need to encourage more men to get into kind of caring roles.

47:59Elliott Rae:How do you think we go about doing that? Bribe them. I think money really counts here. I have more to say, but I think that when you have such hugely gendered occupations, I'm thinking about care professions, nursing professions, education, especially in the early years, social work, therapy, counselling, psychology, that are now just so female skewed that it's just kind of hard to get boys and men to think about them. In just the same way, it was very hard to get women to think about engineering when there were no female engineers. Like it's just really hard to get someone to go into a profession when they just feel like they're going to be the odd one out.

48:31Not just true of gender, it's true of other identities too. And so I think in the meantime, we should take another lesson from the women's movement, which is that actually to get women to those roles into STEM, scholarships, financial incentives to help get over that idea. That's number one. So I have no problem. In fact, I'm very supportive of the idea that like, if we want more men in some of these professions, we should actually be targeting some financial incentives towards them. We should keep doing that for the areas where women are underrepresented. But I think there's a case for a little bit of money here.

48:57Then, of course, there's something around changing the conversation about these roles. And I think in the same way that you've been very successful earlier at changing the conversation about what it means to be a dad, in a very playful way, in a thoughtful way, in an attractive way. And so there are ways in which we could be doing a better job of selling those occupations to boys and men, be very intentional about that. When we wanted to get girls interested in STEM, we didn't wait till they went to college. We went into schools. We had whole sessions on it. We had women engineers and scientists and lawyers, and we're going into schools to talk to girls about being those things.

49:28We have to do exactly the same thing for the caring professions for boys. We need to try and de-gender those professions as much and as hard as we can through money and through kind of shifts in identity. And I would love it if policymakers started taking that more seriously. By the way, we have a huge shortage of many of those workers, particularly things like care, which have up until this point very often been filled by migrants. And I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that, but I'm saying that if the government is serious about not becoming less reliant on immigrants to do those roles, well, you've got this huge labor force sitting right there, which is young men.

49:58So maybe get some of them into those roles as well. You can't fix a labor shortage with half the labor market, or at least you shouldn't try to. So I think a really good self-interested reasons why we should do that. And I'm not saying we're going to get to 50-50 in those professions, right? I reckon this is back to some of these differences but my god we could do better than we currently are now in terms of the share of men in them and really really take away the gender stereotype we've done a really good job of breaking the gender stereotypes around male dominated professions not all of them and not enough but very few people say female lawyer or female doctor anymore right or if they do they're really old right because right because it's 50 50 now right but they do say male nurse they do say male teacher they do say male therapist why because there are so few of them so i want to kind of get

50:40Elliott Rae:your advice and help you to give advice to people. So I've got three pots here. I've got the government, I've got teenage boys, and I have parents as well. So if you're going to give one piece of advice to the government to improve the lives of men and boys, what would that advice be? Build on the amazing advance with the men's health strategy by also having a male education strategy in the Department for Education, which is very intentional, or broaden the remits of all of the gender equality units within government to include boys and men as well as women and girls. I don't know if we need a quotes minister for men.

51:16That's been one of the arguments. I don't think it's a crazy idea. I've supported it in the past. But at the very least, we need to find ways to institutionalize within government the attention to boys and men without taking away from the issues to girls. So do what Wes Streeting has done in the Department of Health in every other government department. For teen boys, I would say, God, you're amazing. And we need you. And we need your energy, we need your spirit, we need your ideas, we need your talents, and we need all of those things that are in you, not despite the fact that some of them are more common in males, but because they are.

51:50We need that energy and those ideas from our teen boys. But don't think that in order to be a successful man, you somehow need to turn against women. That is not a good dating strategy, for one thing. It's not a good life strategy. It's not going to be a great marriage strategy. It's not going to be a good labor market strategy, because there's a lot of women in the labor market so like and by the way i think that's what most team boys want to do i think they want a world where their sisters have equal opportunity to them very few of them want to turn back the clock on women but they want permission to be themselves as well and so just we need you will be by their message to you and like don't don't allow either the kind of pathologization of you that you might hear from some quarters or the call to a divisive finding someone to blame don't either of those calls they are the siren calls that will not help you flourish and we need you to flourish in order for us all to have great futures and to parents some of what i just said about teen boys applies too is like don't make the mistake of accidentally treating your sons like malfunctioning daughters don't say why can't you be more like your sister don't even think why can't you be more like your sister i found myself thinking why can't you be more like your sister when i couldn't get the kids to school or to pack their bags or to like my boys right and to be clear they didn't have a sister i made one up i had an imaginary daughter that i would compare them to i was like why can't you be more like your imaginary sister like because i was like um because i knew that just like how hard it was with these boys just for the love of god just two shoes just one shoe on each foot that's all i asked but don't do that and don't don't treat your boys and young men's interest in perhaps some of these questions they're finding online some of their reactions i think joely said about how her boys feel in school don't discount that Don't dismiss it.

53:34Don't prematurely label it as incipient misogyny. Talk about it. Be open to it. These problems that a lot of boys and men are having, they're not the confections of the reactionaries. They're real. And if they can't talk to us as parents about them without being judged, then who, for the love of God, can they talk to about them? And so as parents, it's incredibly important that we don't fall prey to this inadvertent pathologization of our boys, because they need you. And actually, particularly as they get into teen years, etc., God, they need you. And let's all just have a bit more of a sense of humor about this.

54:05I actually think a lot of the work that you've done, Elliot, that I've really admired, I think is really broken, is that like so much of this work has been so earnest, right? It's been so serious. Yeah, but I love like, let's put baby carriers on statues. Let's go on strike for a day. Let's celebrate. And I do think that there's been such a downer on some of these issues around this. It's just been so gloomy. And so like, it's been deficit framed, negative, et cetera. That just a bit of play, a bit of optimism. And I got to tell you, you're talking to me today. I feel great about this. I think that we're going to do much better by our boys and men over the next 10 years than we have over the last 10 years, because they're beautiful and we need them.

54:47Incredible advice.

54:48Elliott Rae:I have two girls and it's still a nightmare to get them to school as well. So that is definitely a girl thing too. So you should get an imaginary brother then. Maybe I'll make one up. I'm going to make one up. they're going to be freaked out about but question how old are yours how old are your how old are your daughters though nine and two okay well if they're still struggling at 13 get back to me well maybe i need to have a boy i'll talk to my wife about that boy yeah exactly you've just you've got the wrong benchmark trust me like maybe you just got the wrong comparison but but also just i think the work you're doing here on this podcast and kind of more generally both of you it's just like so positive and i think that the the thing i've really learned that i think you've just come naturally maybe to both of you.

55:28I think tone really matters here. I think you can point to real problems without becoming a kind of gloom, everything's apocalyptic. I think we can talk about solutions as we have here. We can have a positive affect. I do think that a lot of young people generally, and this is not just about boys and men, I think they're kind of over the negativity. They're kind of tired of it, honestly. They're tired of being told that everything's going to hell that you know they're they're having a huge problem uh they are the problem etc i think they're just kind of tired of it in the us i've really noticed a bit of a move for like can't we just like be happy uh and have fun and play and not jump on each other all the time and just have a bit of room to breathe and be ourselves and i really think that that mood is coming now and it's making me kind of much more optimistic it's the middle-aged people who are still the doomers and the younger people are like they're demanding the right to be happy in a way that i actually think is going to be quite positive and god bless them for that so richard you've got the new center

56:29Elliott Rae:you're chairing over here just yeah quickly talk to us about the aims and objectives and what you wanted to achieve in the next couple of years yeah so there's a few things one is to continue to raise awareness of these issues i think very often still it isn't anyone's job to sort of just notice the data and lift it up um on many of the issues we've talked about and just get that into the media get that into the conversation so that people know. I think the second thing is to keep broadening the permission space for this conversation, right? I think that just the permission space, that's how I think about, like, is it okay to talk about this stuff without being, you know, dubbed a reactionary?

57:03And I think it's more okay than it was, but we still need to provide spaces where people feel able to talk about this without being judged. And then thirdly, to look at solutions, look at kind of what are the effective interventions in school, some of which you talk that actually work with boys. What could we do about getting more male teachers? How could we change our healthcare system so that we're kind of reaching out to men? What do effective male-friendly suicide prevention programs look like, et cetera? Like what works and bring evidence to bear? And so it's awareness, permission, and evidence.

57:32It's what we're doing over here at the American Institute and it's what the UK Institute is gonna do too. There are only two dedicated think tanks or research organizations focused on boys and men in this way. One is here, one is there. So it's the US and the UK, but there's growing interest from others. And I see that as a really nice complement to the work that a lot of the women's think tanks are doing, because they've done a really good job of continuing to draw attention to where there are challenges facing women and girls. I want them to keep doing that. But we just need other people who basically what we're trying to do is create institutions where it's someone's job to wake up every day and think about what's happening with boys and men.

58:08What does that latest data release tell us? Who needs to hear about this? And what can we do about it? And so that's really the big breakthrough for me is that this is not just an intellectual challenge. It's an institutional challenge. And so we need to build some institutions that help keep this conversation going with high quality, non-political research and evidence.

58:26Elliott Rae:Yes, well needed. And you're literally changing the world with your work. So thank you so much, Don Richard Obama Reeves, which we're going to call you from now on. Love it. Writing it down. Got it. Change the name by deed poll. That's my handle. Next time you'll be Don Richard Obama Reeves. I just need him to adopt me. He just ran that past my own parents. But this was so fun. Thank you. Thank you. This has been brilliant. Thank you so much. We appreciate you so much. Thank you, Richard. We really appreciate you and your work. Well, back at you. Thanks. Thanks, Joey.

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