Lisa Wade, “American Hookup: The New Culture of Sex on Campus” (Norton, 2017)

Hello, everybody, this is Marshall Poe. I'm the founder and editor of the Dubux Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a world by the audience of two million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast, as you probably know, there are challenges. Basically, I have two kinds. One is technical, there are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience, building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBN have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts. And we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the new Dubux Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form, and we can talk. (upbeat music) - Hello, everyone, and welcome to a new installment in the new Books and Gender Studies podcast. I'm one of the co-host Kyle McMillan. And today we're gonna be talking with Lisa Wade about her new book, "American Hookup, "The New Culture of Sex on Campus." This book really explores not only what makes up the hookup culture on college campuses, but also topics about masculinity, femininity, and the sort of institutional power that colleges hold generally. And I really hope that you enjoy this conversation that I had with Professor Wade as much as I did. And without further ado, let's dive into the interview. - Hello, everyone, and welcome to a new episode in the new Books and Gender Studies podcast. And today it is my pleasure to be here with Professor Lisa Wade of Occidental College talking about her new book about hookup culture. Professor, how are you doing today? - Well, I'm fantastic. Thank you so much for having me. - Yeah, your book is a wonderful read and I really encourage people to pick it up if they're at all interested in this topic. But to start, I kind of wanted to give a little bit more about you, sort of your academic career and trajectory. And then what led you to writing this book in particular? - Oh, sure. Well, I, coming out of undergrad, I was really excited about homosexuality education and sexual health, policy, and information. And I had done the kind of peer specification that a lot of colleges facilitate. And I decided to get a master's degree in human sexuality. So I went off to NYU and I pursued that degree. And came back to the Bay Area where I grew up and was teaching sexuality classes as an adjunct professor at a number of community colleges. And after doing that for a while, I realized that being a professor might be my true calling. And so I pursued a PhD in sociology and I had kept studying sexuality all along and was teaching sociology and sexuality classes for years. And as the conversation has got hookup culture, became louder and louder in the public discourse. As more and more news organizations were talking about it and it was getting a lot more attention. I felt that it was doing a disservice to the students I was talking to in my own classes. They were far more diverse, had far more diverse experiences, were far more thoughtful and sophisticated about what was happening to them than the media seeking to give them credit for. So I was really motivated to give them a platform to tell the world what hookup culture is really like. - Yeah, and I think that it's important to start with some of the terminology that you're using. And so why do you call it hookup culture and why is that important? - So that's a great question. So you can think about hooking up as a behavior. It's the thing people do. You can think about it as a script, like a particular way of getting together that has a set of rules for interaction. And you can also think about it as a culture. So something that becomes a commonly accepted way of doing things, sort of reinforced by people interacting with each other and also part of the institutions in which they're living in. So hookup culture is a space in which hooking up is seen as the only or the best way in which people should be becoming sexual together. And it's reinforced by interaction, means for interaction, and then facilitated by being institutionalized part of the architecture and the rhythms of whatever organization they're a part of. So in colleges, you see a hookup culture because most students believe that hooking up is what they're supposed to be doing. And they reinforce that in their interactions with one another and then colleges themselves are organized in ways that facilitate hookup. - Yeah, and I guess another sort of terminology question and you kind of lay this out in one of your earlier chapters, but what exactly involves a hookup or what are you kind of labeled in as steps of the hookup? - So if you ask a student what a hookup is, they will probably give you an answer that sounds that's pretty vague, something like, well, it's kind of like a sexual encounter that is meant to be not meaningful, just a one-time thing or a spontaneous thing with no romantic future implied. Most of them happen in some sort of party atmosphere. So at a party or in a dorm room where there's partying happening, most of them are involved drinking 'cause drinking alcohol is kind of how they show that they're being playful and careless and not deliberate. And so alcohol is really important for establishing that this is kind of a meaningless, emotionless encounter and often they start with dancing and on the dance floor and they may never go any further than that, so it may just be making out on the dance floor or it can be anything between there and actually going back into the dorm and having sexual intercourse. - Yeah, so I guess another question that I had, you kind of lay out in a chapter sort of how sex became cool. So why did you think that that was an important chapter to include in your book? - Yeah, but so 'cause if you look historically over time, what sex is for has really dramatically and radically changed. So I talk about how in early America, the Puritan colonists believed very strongly that sex was for babies. And this was because they were in a situation where their population was at dire risk of disappearing. It was so dangerous to be a colonist that they created a culture around sex that emphasized what we have to be doing here is making more colonists. And so that that was part of why all sexual activities that were not reproducible were considered thin, including things like oral sex with someone you're married to. So they're sort of thinking about sex was very strongly shaped by their situation. And that's true throughout history. So later on sex becomes about something, sex becomes about conviction and love. This is why we call it Victorian Romantics. They have suddenly we have populations that don't need children as badly as we used to. People are living in cities, kids are expensive, and things are crowded. So they had to sort of think of a new reason, have sex, because the Puritan reason didn't work anymore. And that was where the idea that sex should be for love came from. And as we move forward in history, we see all kinds of changes to where we start moving away from the idea that sex is for love. So then how do we then reconstruct the meaning of sex? And right now we're at a position in American culture where the idea that sex is for fun is a very powerful idea. And that's part of us driving hookup culture. - So one of the interesting things you lay out toward the end of that chapter is sort of how the high value of masculinity toward the end of the 20th century really contributed to hookup culture. - So what did you find in terms of that? - Well, I get asked a lot why hookup culture happened and why at the moment that it did. And if you look at what was happening in the '70s with this range of social movements, the women's movement gave liberation, sexual revolution. One of the things that comes out of that is this definition of female sexual liberation as being able to have sex like a guy, like a stereotypical male knife. And so the Victorians were the ones that kind of separated love and sex. And they really feminized love that women were really more emotional and they were more interested in sex for connection whereas men were more carnal and more interested in sex for pleasure. So then when we're trying to figure out what the female liberation looks like, it's the idea that women, that liberation for women is their ability to do what men do that sticks. You know, seven minutes at the time, they wanted two things out of some of this movement. They wanted us to believe that the things that women were doing were in fact valuable because they were so powerfully devalued at the time that their occupations, the personality traits attributed to women, that these were positive and good and valuable things. They wanted that and they also wanted women to have access to the things that were valued which were coded masculine. And they got the latter thing, but we failed to get the first thing. And in fact, our prejudice against feminine things and femininity has been getting worse and worse over the years. So if you are a parent raising a daughter today and you're in relatively in the mainstream, you actually encourage your daughter to mix in masculine personality traits into her personality and to pursue masculine interest, hobbies and possibly occupations. And so it's okay for us that our daughters decide to be girly, that's usually fine, but we're pretty impressed and proud of her if she starts to be a little boyish. And women are getting this message they're entire growing up. And so it's really the daughter of those 1970s mothers when they arrive on college campuses in the mid-1990s who apply this logic to sex. They say, well, my parents have always been so proud of me. Every time I embrace masculinity, this must be the answer to how I become impressive and cool and how I gain prestige and perhaps how I become rewarded in society both economically and socially. And so then they embrace this stereotypical male sexuality and of course men are continually encouraged to do this. And now we have an entire community that is trying to enact this stereotype of male sexuality and that is part of her hookup culture comes from. - Yeah, and I think that was just one of the more important points from your book and that just kind of struck me. So I had to ask you about it. But ultimately, okay, so this generation gets the college or university and so who ultimately opts in and who opts out of hookup culture? - That's really interesting, right? Because one thing about being a culture and not a behavior is that many students aren't participating. And that's typical of cultures. A culture can very have a very strong value or rule. And even many, many people can deviate from it. So for example, it's cultural in America to get a college degree and then get a job and then get married and then have children. But we don't all do it that way. We cannot recognize that that's the norm. But there's a lot of room for deviation. So a lot of college students find themselves in a hookup culture not participating in the behavior that that doesn't excuse them from having to contend with the environment they're in. And similarly, this enactment of a stereotypical male sexuality that hookup culture encourages doesn't appeal to most men or women. It's important to point out that these aren't women trying to act like men. They're trying to act like this false stereotype was what men are like. And that is a stereotype that doesn't really suit most men or women. So a lot of men are disappointed about during their sexual experiences on campus, even if they are hooking up quite a lot, as well as women. But overall, that a third of students opt out of hookup culture entirely. They will never have a single hookup their entire college career. About 15% of students really love it. They really enjoy hooking up men and women. And the studies show that they genuinely do enjoy it. The students who report really liking it the more they hookup that better their well-being, the happier they are. And the students, the rest of the students are what I call dabblers. They're ambivalent about hooking up, but they don't opt out entirely. And they have mixed experiences. So in what ways is a hookup culture and the people who either opt in or opt out sort of either racialized or shaped by sort of heterosexual norms? The short answer to that question is that every social hierarchy at play in America is at play in hookup culture. And so every group that is disadvantaged in America is disadvantaged in hookup culture. And they report worse experiences. They're less likely to enjoy their experiences. And they hook up less than their more privileged counterparts. So the students who are that are most enthusiastic and most active in hookup culture tend to be heterosexual, white, able-bodied, conventionally-attractive, fast-complaged men. Yeah. And I guess it's sort of going along with that sort of unequal distribution within hookup culture. You talk about the orgasm gap. So what is the orgasm gap? And then why does hookup culture have one? [LAUGHS] Well, the orgasm gap is the relevant one, in this case, is between men and women. It's the idea, the fact that women report fewer orgasms than men when they're engaged having heterosexual, sexual encounters, sex with the other sex. And we started measuring this in the 1950s with Kinsey. And we see about the same orgasm gap building steady over the decades. And that is about-- women have about one orgasm for every three that men have. This suggests that maybe it's an unchanging natural gap, but there's a lot of evidence that they just otherwise. Perhaps the most powerful is that the men have sex with men. They have as many orgasms as men have sex with women. And when women have sex with women, they have as many orgasms as men having sex with women. So women are just as capable of being as orgasmic as men when they have a partner that is really invested in giving them orgasms. In hookup culture, we see the same exact number. So women are having about one orgasm for every three that men are having. And where it gets really interesting is that if you look at college students who are in committed monogamous relationships, that orgasm gap shrinks down. And in fact, it starts shrinking down every time they hook up with the same person over time. So the second time they're sexually active together, that orgasm gap shrinks. The third time even more and even more. So the point where when they decided to commit to one another, we see the smallest gap by far that I have ever seen in any study of the orgasm gap between men and women. So what this says is that young people today are better at giving each other equal pleasure than we've ever seen in any heterosexual population. But they're not choosing to use those skills when they are actually hooking up. - Right, and that kind of plays into part of what makes hookup culture, I guess hookup culture is, you kind of mentioned it before, the sort of perceived carelessness or like an emotional state of the hookup. So I guess why is that important or why is that a key component of hookup culture? - The hookup culture tells students, the hookups are supposed to be careless. And careless in both the meanings of the word. They are not supposed to be careful about what they're doing or why. And they're not supposed to care about the person that they're hooking up with. And so that creates a dynamic in which you have sexual interactions that are not very caring. They have, students have, they believe in, and this is something that they learn from the wider culture that monogamous relationships are the sight or love and tenderness and concern, and investment in one another's pleasure and happiness, and casual relationships with the opposite of that. So when that's the rule guiding a sexual interaction, there's little motivation for either partner to really care about anything, about the see other person's sexual experience, about their pleasure, their desire, or even their consent. And so that's part of why we see the orgasm gap persisting so powerfully in hookups, but not in relationship. It's because they're being told very clearly that they're not supposed to care about one another. Now, that's when gender inequality jumps in, because gender inequality has scripted the hookup in such a way that it benefits men. And so if the first thing that two students are quote unquote supposed to do together as they're becoming sexual is for women to give men a blow job, then that's the first thing that's going to happen. And we see men, they will say very clearly, a hooking up is really not about mutual orgasm, hooking up is just about an orgasm for me. And a lot of women agree that hooking up is not about mutual orgasm. It's about practicing the skill of getting guys off. Right, and that kind of leads into my next question. And it kind of came from a quote that I plucked from your book. So this is from chapter eight. And you say that men and women alike looked to men for approval and value and devalue the opinions of women. So how did you come to this conclusion? And this kind of leads into a discussion about the notion of being wanted or sort of that-- I think you call it self-deprecation, am I correct? No, I'm not sure what you're referring to there. But I think I get where you're going. OK. And so I think there's two stories that really, I think, look into this idea. The one of the stories about a woman named Cynthia, who is sort of new to hooking up as many students are. And she ends up hooking up with this guy who she knows is kind of an asshole. And she knows he's a player. She knows he hooks up with anyone. He can get his hands on. But she's excited to hook up with him because he's considered good-looking, and he's an athlete. And so he's high status in the community. And so she's really excited that he chose her to hook up with that night. And the actual hook up, he traced her pretty badly. He's very manipulative. He tries to push her to do things she doesn't want to do. She's never threatened by this. And in fact, she says she says that she's thrilled by it. But it makes her feel good. That he wanted her badly enough to be jerk about it. And so this is a very interesting story, because-- and I think most readers are thinking, oh my gosh, this guy's terrible. How could you possibly be having a good time? But for us, yeah, it was so exciting. And also such a relief that this guy wanted her, because it taught her that she was desirable. And she was living in an environment in which female sexual desirability was your most important asset, but also constantly threatened by being incredibly high standards women were being held up to in order to be seen as desirable. So women are looking to men. Women who are interested in men, sexually, are looking to men to reassure them that they, in fact, are desirable. And because the alternative is this great existential threat, there is one woman who said something like, if men don't think that you are sexually attractive, then you're nothing. And then the other story is about a guy named Cory. When he has a friend named Simon, and they're in a group of friends that are pretty well invested in hookup culture. A bunch of guys who are doing the guy thing and hooking up. And Simon, his friend, comes in one morning. He announced that he had hooked up with a girl, that he knows his friends think is ugly. And so he announces it sheepishly. And his friends give him a bad time about it. And that night they go out again last night, which Friday, this is Saturday. And he hooks up with a different girl. And Sunday morning he announces this girl with much more enthusiasm. Because he knows that his friends think she's hot. And his friends congratulate him and all of that stuff. So then Simon goes off, please, with himself. And my student Cory continues to sit there and listen. And the guys start having this conversation about whether this second girl that Simon's obsessed with was easy. Because if she's easy, then it didn't take a lot of game to get her. So it didn't give Simon any point. Because you can only get points if they say the-- if there's no one guarding the net, then you can't get points for getting the ball in, right? So for Simon, or for Cory, he is saying, well, geez, there's this game that I'm supposed to play, where I'm supposed to hook up all the time, but only with women by friend think count, quote unquote count, only women who are hard to get and beautiful. And that was really intimidating for Cory, who actually calls it a hostile environment. It's a contradiction. How do you hook up with all the time, but only with women your guys won't give you crap about? So here we have a situation in which men are looking to men to approve their sexual behavior and women are looking to men to approve their sexual viability. In both cases, we have the situation where men control other people's behavior with the ability to approve or disapprove of what they're doing or what they look like. Yeah, and I think that kind of goes back to the previous point about sort of the high value of masculinity, sort of shaping hookup culture. And I think when most people will pick up this book or kind of if they sit down to think about hookup culture, their mind, at least mind it, sort of kind of went to sort of all the statistics and sort of horror stories that we hear about sexual assault on campus. So in what ways does hookup culture perpetuate rape culture on campus? Well, if you think about hookup culture as a set of rules that tell students that they need to be having careless sex, then we realize that the sex that hookup culture actually encourages is not that far from sexual assault. It is sex that is supposed to be uncaring, unconcerned with your partner's desires. It's sex that is supposed to be potentially callous. In one study, students were asked what emotions they think that their peers typically felt in a hookup. And they said, lust and nothing else. So we have these lust driven, non-caring sexual encounters as the expected norms. And what that means is when your partner isn't kind to you, you have no basis on which to object. So it opens the door for cruelty and callousness, and you see plenty of that in hookup culture. And so that is, if there is some sort of invisible line between sexist cruel and sexist criminal, we are asking students to nestle right up to that line, but not fall over somehow. And so then what ends up happening is for students who are predators, who are deliberately going out to sexually exploit their peers, they blend right in. They nestle right up to that line. And when they go over, it's really difficult to see. And so they can get away with sexual assault in that environment. And so hookup culture is camouflaging the predators. But it's also catalyzing sexual assault. It's tipping people over into the criminal behavior from the careless callous behavior. And so it's creating criminal behavior among people who, in other circumstances, would never, would never even get near that line. Part of what we would need to do, is we need to back students way, way back from that line. We need to be telling them that if they're going to hookup, they need to be able to do so in a way that's caring and careful. Yeah. And I think before we sort of get to what should we do, or can we sort of combat these negative effects of hookup culture, part of the stories that you tell about sort of these either predatory practices or the like horror stories from various parties happen at fraternities. And I thought this was a particularly interesting point, given the other points you make about how high-valued masculinity is, and sort of why do these behaviors sort of come together in these all-male spaces? Well, fraternities are the space on college campuses. And it's not fraternities in fraternity-like organizations where that stereotypical version of masculinity that students think they all should be trying to embrace is most aggressively nurtured and protected. So fraternities sort of represent the space in which the most toxic features of hookup culture are carefully guarded and then promoted. They are also traditionally a space for privilege, for white-ass privileged men, place in like that since the get-go, the traditional fraternities. And so it resonates as well with this idea that it is the most privileged students on campus that like hookup culture the most. And because of sort of a series of unfortunate events, fraternity men have gained the power to control the socio-sexual lives of a lot of their peers. And one of the things that contributed to this is that in 1984, the federal government passes a transportation law that tells the states that if they don't change their legal drinking age from 18 to 21, then they're going to lose their federal transportation funding. So all the states change the legal drinking age. And then what happened on college campuses is that students, they can no longer party in the dorm because they need-- they used to have big tag parties in the dorms all the time-- but now they can't do that because the colleges are policing them. They can't ask easily party in farther clubs. Now they need fake IDs and the money to get them and the bravery to use them. The wordies aren't allowed to throw parties with alcohol through the most part. And so the only place left to go party is fraternity houses or places like that. And that just gives these very privileged slice of men the power to control the socio-sexual lives of their peers. And those men-- and this is just a fact. It's been proven for decades and hundreds of studies-- those men are most likely to promote sexist beliefs and they're among the most likely to report sexual aggression. And so we have a situation where the men who are most interesting-- the people that are most interested in entrenching their own power are given the power to do so. And everyone else is just along for the rise. Right. And along with that, I found this particularly interesting when you talk about sort of the cultural salience of movies that sort of depict hook-up culture, like party culture after fraternities, such as Animal House. Yeah, this actually starts in the 1930s. The 1930s is the decade where college is becoming a thing that many Americans did. It wasn't just something that the very, very elite were doing. And so there's this expansion of cultural interest in what college life was like. There was this explosion of like novel set in college and life magazine was doing exposés of what college life was like. And by that time, fraternity men were so powerful on college campuses, but they ended up being held up as the model of what the collegiate person looked like. And that was the time, too, where they're approached to doing college, which was to party through the whole experience very hard, sort of becomes democratized and available to everyone. So now suddenly, everyone is expected to party in college, not just the fraternity boys. So it starts in the '30s. Animal House definitely had a huge impact. And students, to this day, a report animal house is having an important influence on how they think about college. And so that made a huge difference. But let's not give media too much credit because in the aftermath of animal house, the alcohol industry spends millions of dollars to try to convince Americans that the story of animal house was true and good, to convince Americans that the best way to go through college is to be drunk, at least a good portion of the time. And that continues today. We still have really aggressive marketing by alcohol companies about what college should look like and how much drinking it should involve. So the media stories students are exposed to, both the entertainment stuff, like movies and TV shows, the marketing they're exposed to in alcohol companies. And even this day, colleges themselves, which sells themselves as social spaces, perhaps even more so than educational spaces. And then, of course, news coverage, which tends to prefer the titillating story to the boring one. Between all of those forces, it's no surprise that students believe that it's one of my, one of mine said that college is going to be a big four-year orgy. Yeah, and again, that's just-- I don't want to sort of overdo it. But that's sort of the-- one of the things that I think your book is so excellent at, is sort of bringing in sort of all these intertwining influences that kind of all play into hook-up culture and make it such an excellent read. So getting toward the end of the book, you sort of lay out like, what should we do about hook-up culture? How do we change this? So what do you kind of envision as sort of a best practices going forward? I have a lot of ideas about what we can do. I think that we need at least a couple of things to happen on college campuses, and one is that we need to create space on campus for alternative sexual cultures to flourish. So hook-up culture doesn't have to go away. But we need to force it to compete with other ideas about how students might engage sexually. That might be rooms for a more traditional dating culture, or the kind of 1950s going study style dating culture. Or it might be room for religious-based abstinence or preference-based sexuality. It might be room for more polyamorous relationships, relationships that are open but caring. We really need to create a lot more space for alternative sexual cultures that can compete with hook-up culture so that students feel like they have some option other than just doing it or not, which is how they often feel these days. And then we also need to change hook-up culture itself so that it's not quite so toxic. Right now, a lot of the students that are opting out of hook-up culture aren't doing it out of some principal objection to sexual activity before marriage. They're doing it because the way students are hooking up looks so scary. And if they're not right to be worried, it's a tough world in hook-up culture. And you have to be pretty hard to be able to enjoy it. So we need to take a closer look at hook-up culture and think, how can we facilitate hooking up in ways that are less dangerous and are easier on students while being? And I think that one thing we can do to make that happen is that students need to start actually being open about how they feel and what they want. It's so scary when you think that everyone around you want to hook up, when desperate is the worst slur that can be thrown at you to actually say out loud that you want connection or that you want love. That's so scary, but it's true of most students. And so if they just started talking to each other, I think that they would discover that there is a lot of, a lot of hidden, hidden power to create these alternative cultures. Colleges can help them do that by giving them the actual information. Students are in a state of what we call pluralistic ignorance. It's been a large proportion of a population misunderstand their own reality. They are overestimating how much their peers are hooking up by something like 25 to 50 times. So we need to start giving students information about themselves so that they can actually have a good idea that, hey, you know what, I had the impression that everyone just wanted to have these careless, sexual encounters, but maybe I was wrong about that. And so maybe there's some point in actually opening up and telling other people what I was like if it's not that. And then colleges also need to disrupt the power that those most powerful students on campus currently hold. So essentially, they need to go after those spaces and nurture hook-up culture as it is so that students' efforts to be more honest and open and transparent with one another aren't crushed by those most powerful students. And that means that we actually have to end the fraternity system altogether because there's no way around, there's no reforming it. There's no way we're going to have all-male social groups that treat women like human beings. There's not evidence that we can do that. So we need to gender integrate the fraternities, gender integrate the sororities, create spaces that are more egalitarian and integrated. Yeah, and we've taken up a lot of your time and I know that people listening to this interview are going to rush out and buy your book. So I just have a couple more questions. The first one being, if you were to narrow down to one take away that you hope people take from your book, what would that be? Well, I think it would be to challenge the idea. And I think it applies to everyone that's living in America right now, not just students. To challenge the idea that sexual liberation is defined by carelessness. The idea that sexual liberation is being able to have sex without dealing. The sexual liberation is being able to pursue your own sexual desire and pleasure at the expense of other people. I would really like to see an America of really rethink what sexual liberation should look like. And to do so in a way that does what the feminists of the 1970s wanted, which was to give women access to masculinity, to also turn around and value the things that we decode feminine. To value feminine approaches to sexuality, to see those as worth pursuing and not embarrassing or pathetic. That, I think, would go a long way towards all Americans being able to have healthier and happier sex life. No, I wholeheartedly agree. And if people read your book and they're very interested and love it, like I did, what would you recommend as two or three books that also pertain to this topic that you would put on your recommended book list? One of them would be a book called Paying for the Party. And it is a look at the role partying has come to play on college campuses and who is hurt and helped by that, a really wonderful book. I also recommend the company he keeps, which is a book about the history of the fraternity, specifically the traditional white fraternity, that really helps us understand why these institutions are a problem, how they became this way, and why we need to just suspend the system altogether and reform is going to be impossible. It also has this wonderful stories about the history of higher education that are not very widely known, that I would be able to explain for this book. So those are two where I would certainly recommend. OK, well, I took up a lot of your time and I thank you so much for coming on our podcast. And I really hope that people go out and get your book because it was one of the best reads I've had in a long time. So thank you so much for joining us. Well, thank you so much. It was a pleasure. [MUSIC PLAYING]. [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING]