 I have horrible problems with anxiety, horrible, and as I went through my 20s, it got worse and worse and worse and worse, and in my thinking and pictures, which is available in the UK in all formats, I described my experiences with antidepressant medication, it saved me. It stopped horrible colitis attacks, horrible, health was just a mess. I'm sorry to hear about that. I'm absolutely a mess and I think some of the masking thing is anxiety, but what motivated me in my 20s is people thought I was stupid. I wanted to prove to the world I was not stupid. I really wanted to prove to people I was not stupid. I can do it. And for me, my sense of identity is career. And I'm saying a lot of, and some of the most fun stuff I ever did was in construction. Funnest stuff we ever did. You see, that's friends who shared interests. I was bullied horribly in high school, horribly, called all kinds of names like tape recorder. People don't even know what a tape recorder is now. Big thing with reels like this that you record on. And they called me that because I would keep using the same phrases. So I'd walk across the cafeteria and they'd go tape recorder and it was horrible. And the only places I was not bullied was horses, model rockets and electronics. I mean, something that really sort of poked my ears up was your experiences in education or all the workplace around bullying and mental health. Do you think that there was some, like, what do you think? Because personally, for me, I have quite severe depression and anxiety that was caused by the bullying and isolation that I experienced at secondary school. And the issue was for me is that I have always had, even from a very young age, a really, really, really big interest in other people, you know, the psychology of people, how people work and how to get on with them and make friends. And I've done quite a lot of work in my time on things such as cognitive empathy, reading, reading people. And I've had a lot of practice sort of out there in in group situations, in at parties, talking to people that I don't know and chit chatting and stuff. And it's something that I've developed over the years because people for me, people and emotions are a really interesting area for me. But, you know, going back to what I was saying, you know, for me, I gravitated towards Taekwondo. OK, there's quite a few people on spectrum that are good at that. That's good. Yeah. And my mom, my mom has always been really great. She's always introduced me to different different hobbies and stuff and different, you know, within those hobbies, you have other people that you can talk to about the things and sort of slowly build those social skills up. Well, and I did a lot of things like that, too, and the friends who shared interests. And fortunately, when I was in elementary school or what you'd call primary school, my third grade teacher when I was eight years old, really good teacher, explained to the other students that had a disability that was not visible like a wheelchair. Yeah. And that's called peer mediated intervention, actually the fancy name. And so I managed to not be bullied in elementary school or primary school, but went by the 14, 15, 16 years old secondary school. That was the worst part of my life. And and and the only places I was not bullied was the friends who shared interests, forces, electronics and model rockets for another child. I had a mom tell me, oh, my kid is in the regular high school, he's in band and he's a music concert and he's love it. And then another parent comes in and their kid is miserable and high school is horrible and he's depressed and everything else. But where things have been good or a whole lot better is when there's a lot of there's a shared activities they can do. It is a really big issue, bullying and. Oh, it's terrible. It's absolutely terrible. Like even rates of severe mental health and and suicidality, even even at a very young age is something that occurs way too regularly. Like it's it's always something that I, you know, in my head, I'm like, why aren't people talking about this this group of people who are, you know, just to subject to such horrible life experiences very commonly and and, you know, developing these these mental health conditions. Well, no, it's completely terrible. And the thing that saved me is even in a career. OK, to sit around the shop, there's two things you do. You talk about in the shop, how to build stuff and how stupid suits are. Now, I have the managers, but the thing that saved me was friends who shared interests. Same thing at work. You know, we would talk about animal behavior research, stuff like that. That's making up new studies to do an animal behavior. Like I did study 25 years ago, my student did it. I thought it up. And I said, well, I think cattle, they jump all around when you handle them, they're going to have lower weight gain. People thought I was crazy. Well, that's been replicated a whole bunch of times now. Yeah. But you see that that, again, is career related and and I'm. Where I've had, you know, this is a book different, not less. This is 18 people in the US. Well, actually, it's one in the UK. Actually, there's a veterinarian where getting diagnosed later in life gave them insight into their relationships, you know, and why they weren't getting along. And I edited this book that wrote in their own words. I learned a lot from this, too, about how I think differently. It's my main emotion is fear. OK, I'm. OK, yesterday, for example, OK, I went to Canada and I've been out of the country for two and a half years. Sure. Now, I'm not going to say I freaked out as we approached customers, but I mean, I'm going to be just fine. You know, it's it's I'm fear is my main emotion. Yeah. Yeah. And and there's like an emotional complexity that most people have that I don't have. And it kind of sounds like because I do a lot. I've done a lot of reading into a concept called a lexaphymia, which I think is I don't know what that is, because you tell me what it is. Sure. It's the ability to to recognize and categorize your own emotions. And it's it's something that is very, very highly correlated with autism. And, you know, one, I kind of like to describe it as sort of like a threshold condition. So it's so for, for example, if you have a threshold of anxiety from zero to one hundred, one hundred being complete meltdown, complete, can't do anything. And most most people, their their threshold for noticing when the anxiety sort of increases would be like maybe 20, 30, 40 percent. Whereas for autistic people, our threshold is a lot higher. So it takes, you know, it takes a lot, a lot more time for us to notice or a lot more strong emotions to notice them. And, you know, that that, you know, you think, well, the other thing I find a lot of my problems is that a lot of problems I don't have any processors. The other day, the stupid parking gate didn't work at the airport. This car I got, it's got proximity sensors. Then I take the seatbelt off to try to reach the thing, to stick the credit card in it that didn't work. So now I get the seatbelt thing going on, proximity sensor going off, going to get the machine to work. And and that kind of stuff on, you know, it loads my processor. Yeah, I like to use a computer analogy. I'm an Intel 286, but I got the cloud warehouses full of servers for memory. And you see it just all those going ding, ding, ding, ding, and it's making some other noise. And I couldn't reach the machine. And and then if I get closer to it, then the proximity sensors are made another alarm and that kind of stuff. If you want to tired, I'm so I go to the gate with the attendant. But the attendant gate wasn't open that night. So I just want to avoid that problem. So I just, I go to the gate that's got the person in it. Yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, the whole thing, the whole thing about Alexa, if I'm here is that it's, you know, it's, it kind of goes off the basis that you do, you feel those, those background complex. Like you experience those complex background emotions in your behavior. So it's a thing, you know, complex emotions. I get scary easily. But then there's things where I used to be afraid of airplanes. Terrified. Yeah. Well, you know how I got over that? You make them interesting. Yeah, you just make them really interesting. I got the ride in a cockpit back in the 70s, a big airplane hauling halfers. That was really interesting. I'm not afraid of airplanes anymore. It's sort of like you learn more about COVID. What I did with COVID is I read all these scientific articles about COVID, OK, there's all this controversy about medications. I won't discuss them. That is too controversial. Yeah. But let's put it this way. I went deep into the scientific literature and I was pretty sure if I got COVID, I could save my life. Let's just leave it at that. Yeah. And having that knowledge reduced the fear. So it's so having the knowledge reduced the fear. So I am a scientist. I was going very deep into the literature, scientific literature, way further than 99.9 percent of doctors. So. I spent hours online, hours online, on scientific databases, doing that. Yeah. That's how I dealt with my fear. Now, I can also be really happy. And I've learned I got when I was in teenager, I got in trouble for anger. So I had to switch anger to crying. Yeah. So then when I get in some situation that's upset and cry because you don't get in trouble for crying, you get in trouble for hitting. Yeah. So you have to, you know, get rid of that and I can be sad. And I can tell you the things that make me sad. I have to give you a specific example. I read about a scientist in the Ukraine who was studying whale fossils and he couldn't take his fossils with him. And so he photographed everything and he had a single portable hard drive. It's not like I think about the size of this block. Yeah. With his life work on it. And that's so it's a fragile thing. It could break so easily. His whole life's work was in a hard little hard drive box. And I start to get upset just talking about that. Yeah. He was doing everything he could save his life's work, trying to download it to France over slow internet connections. I'm going then finally went on a train with it. And I'm going, what would I do with that hard drive? It'd be right here under my shirt, tucked in with a jacket over it. Yeah. I'm I wouldn't even have it in a bag. Yeah. And the cords would be under my shirt, too. You see, but preserving his life's work, I can't even talk about that without getting upset. I can't even look at a hard drive now, without a portable hard drive, practically, not without getting upset because I think about that. And this gets back to what identity is. The scientist's identity was what was in that hard drive box. And he wanted to get it safely downloaded somewhere else. You could drop it in a puddle. You see, I'm a visual thinker, not the end of his life's work. I get I get upset about that. You see, and that's I'm I'm not saying the path I've taken is a path that everybody should do. But having interesting career, interesting stuff to do. I had to have a COVID project. So I worked on this book on visual thinking. I went deep into scientific literature on that. Because I had to have stuff to do. Yeah. On. And then the knowledge I had of medical stuff. Well, now I'm quite brutal vaccinated and I'm not worried about it now. Good.