 Good morning, John. Your video about the time when you almost failed a class and then your teacher made you not do that reminded me of the time that exactly that same thing happened to me, which maybe says something. We'll get there. In 11th grade, I took a landscape design course, so I learned about plants and how to plant plants and take care of them and arrange them in people's yards. But that class, weirdly, was at a different campus, so after fifth period, I had to get on a bus and go to a different school. And sometimes I would not do that. Instead, I would go sleep in the band room. I skipped that class because, one, I wasn't taking it very seriously, but, two, my school had a policy that if you got more than ten unexplained absences, you'd fail the class. But before that, nothing happened. And so I kept very close track of my unexplained absences so that I would have exactly ten of them. Because I was that kind of self-important egotistical. Shurned out, into the semester, it wasn't more than ten, it was ten. The teacher told me that I would be failing the class and I got really mad. And I wasn't mad at the teacher, I was mad at myself for thinking I could be so clever and smart and being wrong about that. And I think it helped me realize that I was just sort of taking it for granted that I would always be let off. But regardless of any of that, I was very pissed off. And I went into the hallway, I like walked out of the classroom, and I kicked a locker door that was hanging open. I was wearing steel-toed Doc Martens because it was the 90s. And the locker door flew across the hallway. Like it just ripped off and flew away. And now I'm thinking, okay, well I failed the class and I've destroyed school property so I'm in much more trouble. I go back into the classroom, everybody's looking at me, and the teacher says out loud, I'll mark it down as nine. So somehow, John, I went from failing a class, then I destroyed property, now I'm not failing. What happened here? Even in that moment, it felt wrong to me. I didn't question it, because that would have been a bad day, headed home to tell mom about. I actually did a lot of kind of like bad stuff in high school, and I did it knowing that it was like a risk, but it wasn't a big risk. And I remember back then thinking that I was just good at getting away with stuff. Ugh. Why? Because you know, I looked like this, and I had good grades, and I had so much potential, you know, that thing that people say. Because that's the thing, we're humans, we never stop doing the math. Prejudice and privilege aren't a sign of like some kind of interior rot. They're not a disease that monsters have, they're signs of biases that we all have and deal with. Yes, sometimes racism is cruel and violent and intentional, but sometimes racism is just that a white kid looks different to you kicking the door off a locker than a black kid does. I think a lot of America is really stuck on this idea that racism is a secret disease that only monsters have. There's a link to something that Gene Demby wrote that helped me think a lot more correctly about this stuff, and that says it better than I could. But a thing I've been thinking about is it seems like the more you have, the more people are wary of taking things from you. And the less you have, or are perceived to have, the more society is okay with exploiting you or punishing you or just giving up on you. I want a sociologist to explain this to me, but it seems real and it seems like both a cause of increasing inequality and the kind of thing that only gets worse with increasing inequality. And yeah, it seems like it's the source of a lot of bad. I'm really grateful to have been raised by parents and had mentors and teachers who helped me realize that I wasn't just some clever kid who was just so good at getting away with stuff because I still see people my age thinking they're that person and it's a bad look. But that instead I just was a person who had a lot, and so people were wary of taking it away. And that, among many things, is a good thing to know. And there are many other things that I think I still need to learn. John, I'll see you on Tuesday.