Oh, yeah?

And I was like, "What? How the hell did this happen," right? And all they were doing was, like, making beats with their pens, listening to music, but nobody was talking.

It was so boring, and I look across the room and all the weird kids are just, like, hanging out with one another.

They're being rowdy, they're playing Yu-Gi-Oh, they're having a good time, and I'd be like, "That looks like a lot more fun.

Let me go over there." And like a movie, I'm not, I'm not joking, as soon as I got up and I started walking over to the cool kids, the cool girl of that group, like, grasped me by the wrist and like, "Where you going?" "I'm going to the weird kids." She was like, "Do you wanna be a cool kid or a weird kid?" [laughs] You know? And for some reason at that young age I understood there was a significance in that moment, and I was like I had a choice.

Worrying about how I'm perceived or how I-- the truth of what I feel, and I was like, "I wanna be a weird kid." And so I went there, and that choice kind of butterfly effect made me lean towards being more of letting my gut make the decisions rather than-

[camera clicking]

Hey, guys.

Hmm.

And so I read as much as I could, voraciously, as many books as I can, trying to catch up with my, um, my peers.

And, um, from then on, I, I stopped a- allowing myself to be treated as, like, the side character or, or an extra to my own movie, and I treated myself like a main character.

And I think from that point on, from 17 to where I am now, um, I really applied myself and tried to work as hard as possible and also be more effective in how I'm trying hard.

And so I became, like, a straight A student, went to, uh, UC Berkeley, and, um, graduated with honors and, um-

Hmm.

I was like, "There has to be more." And at the same time I was listening to podcasts and stuff like that, and the military came up and I was like, "Oh, yeah." I think a lot of people can look at my life and see how all the struggle that I went through, if I had resentment, I think people could understand.

But because of, of all the struggle that I went through and despite all that struggle, I was able to make it out okay or even good on the other side.