J.D. Barker: From Aspiring Writer to Bestselling Author and Autism Advocate

Welcome to Why Not Me the World?
Podcast, hosted by Tony Mantor, broadcasting from Music City, USA, Nashville, Tennessee.
Join us as our guests tell us their stories.
Some will make you laugh, some will make you cry.
Real life people who will inspire and show that you
are not alone in this world. Hopefully you gain more awareness, acceptance,
and a better understanding for autism around the world. Hi,
I'm Tony Mantor. Welcome to Why Not Me the World.
We're honored to have J. D. Barker, renowned New York
Times an international best selling author, joining us today. He
will share his personal journey of discovering his autism diagnosis
and how he leverages his platform to challenge societal stereotypes
and foster greater understanding of autism through public engagement and interviews.
Welcome and thank you for coming on.
I thought thanks for having me.
Oh, it's my pleasure.
So if you would give us a little background on
your writing, how it's developed over the years to ultimately
get you where you are today.
So I've been reading since I was really young. I
started reading around three years old, and by the time
I got into kindergarten, I'd read all the Hardy Boys
and Nancy Drews, and I was kind of really taken
by the fact that you could basically create a world,
you know, create people, anything that you wanted within the
pages of a book, and like that completely fascinated me.
I was even writing back now, woul write these crazy
little short stories and I would have a library in
my bedroom. My sister would check them out, charge your
late fees, the whole deal. And my parents encourage that
to a certain extent. But they also told me what
you can can't make a living as a writer. It's
something that you do for fun. So they pushed me
down the traditional paths, you know, went high school, got
my diploma, then I went off to college. I was
down in for Lauderdale. I was getting in a degree
in business and finance. To pay for the student loans
and all the debt I was racking up, I ended
up getting a job with RCA Records and BMG Distribution
that was essentially a glorified babysitter. So if you ever
seen the movie get Them to the Greek that was
essentially my job. So I would have to pick up
a recording artist at the airport, get them to the radio.
Station from their interview, get them to their concert, and
then get them back out of town. I quickly realized
I had some very famous people in the car, so
I started to interview them to really date myself. This
was people like Tiffany and Debbie Gibson and new Kids
on the Block Madonna. Then the hairbands came to town.
We had poisoned bon Jovi, Motley Crue, Guns and Roses.
If I got everybody from Guns and Roses off an airplane,
kept them in South Florida for a week, and got
them back on the airplane without anybody getting arrested, that
was a huge win for me. But I would interview
them in the car, and that would take those interviews,
and I would sell them to like teen magazine and
teen People and seventeen magazine, and I'd interview one person,
chop it up to a bunch of different ones. And
when you work in that world, you know, you quickly
realize everybody that works in publishing has a novel at
some stage of development and a desk strawer somewhere. It's
always you know they've been working on it for the
last ten years. It's five hundred thousand words long, they're
almost done, they feel like it needs a little bit
of work, and I kind of became their go to
guy for those projects. They pull up the manuscript and
give it to me, and I would help them with
anything from punctuation and grammar the story development. I used
to do that for fun. It kind of kept me
entertained while I was getting the degree so on the
business side, and I ended up getting a job in finance. Ultimately,
I was a chief compliance officer for a brokerage firm,
which is as horrible as it sounds, and I would
come home and that I would write to keep saying.
I did that for I think twenty three years, and
during that time I had six different books that I
had worked on that all hit the New York Times
bestseller list, but with other people's names on the cover.
That gets really old after a while. So when that
six to one hit, my wife pulled me aside and
she said, listen, I know you want to become a
full time author. Let's come up with a plan to
make that happen.
I get that A lot of things happen that same
way in the music business here in Nashville. So was
the Forsaken your first book that you released.
That was the first book that I wrote under my
own name. It was called Forsaken. I got really lucky
with that one. In the book, I had to explain
where the wife buys a journal, and just to get
the book finished, I wrote that she walked into Needful Things,
you know, Stephen King store and bought it there. Fully
expected to have to change that because you can't do
that sort of thing without warriors, you know, jumping on
down your throat, knocking on the door. But ultimately I
got Stephen King's blessing to use the reference, and that
was huge for me when word of that got out.
That's really what sparked sales in that book and started
my career off.
That's just so good that it happened that way. And
then from there you started putting more product out there
and really started flourishing as a writer and getting well
known around the world.
Yeah.
I mean. My second one was called The Fourth Monkey,
and that one really took off. It was about a
serial killer in Chicago. There's a full trilogy out for
that one. I ended up getting contacted at one point
by Bram Stoker's estate and they asked me to write
a prequel to Dracula using Brand's original notes. So I
did that one a bunch of high profile type projects.
James Patterson picked up one of my books at one
point and read it and then reached out to me,
and we ended up writing not only one book together,
but I think we're on five now, so we've we've
been writing together quite a bit. Yeah, it's been a
wild ride.
So did you ever, in your wildest dreams think that
with everything going on, that your work would rise to
this level of success.
No, because you know, everybody kept telling me, you can't
make a living doing this. And the funny thing was
even the people that I worked with who were making
a living at it weren't very happy, you know, like
they were they were getting by accounting every penny that
came in, and you know, so that that really kept
me grounded in that that corporate world because that you know,
I hated the job, but it was a steady paycheck
and it was a good paycheck, so it was hard
to walk away from it. I mean, ultimately, that's that's
what ended up happening. We kind of got trapped in
that because you know, when you have a decent corporate
job for a number of years, like I did. You know,
we had all the trappings of that. We had a
big house, we had cars, we had a boat. That
lifestyle is expensive, you know, so I couldn't walk away
from the job because we needed the job to pay
for the lifestyle. So ultimately, when my wife came to me,
and you know, we came up with this plan to
to become a full time author. She came up with
this crazy idea. We ended up selling everything that we owned.
We bought a duplex in Pittsburgh and rented out one
side of the duplex and lived in the other one,
just essentially so that I could live off of savings
long enough to write first Sake and write that first book.
And I got lucky. It took off and at worked.
That's just awesome. We all have to have a little
luck on our side. So how old was you at
that time.
It's going to be ten years for me in November,
so I was forty three.
Forty three, okay, so you're doing everything right. The books
are just flying off the shelfs. Did you have that
feeling that something just wasn't right? You got a late
diagnosis for autism, So what happened that made you decide
you had to check it out to see what's going on.
That actually came out of the corporate world. I was
chief compliance office for brokerage firm, which is essentially I
was in charge of making sure all the employees and
clients adhere to all the state and government rules and
regulations when it came to the stock trading. And I
was really good at it. But the problem was I,
you know, I could work with numbers, I could work
with computers. I was terrible at working with people. And
I was twenty two at the time. I had a
big blowout with a couple of the members of Senior's staff,
and my boss pulled me aside and he said, listen,
I want you to continue working here. You're a great employee,
but we need to figure out how to deal with this.
So he sent me to anger management classes. My first session,
it was a one on one with a therapist. She
stopped about twenty minutes in and she said, listen, have
you ever been tested for autism? And other than watching
rain Man, I had no idea what that that even
was or meant. She had worked with autistic children. Now
that's what her her day job was. And she had
seen just in those twenty minutes, you know, a couple
signs that were you know, and they were flags for her.
My hands were constantly moving doing something, I didn't make
eye contact during the conversation, you know, all these things
sort of jumped out at her. So ultimately I was
tested and I was diagnosed with with Aspergers. That answered
a lot of questions for me, because up until that point,
I had no idea, you know, why I had trouble
on social situations, why I couldn't relate to other people,
you know, a lot of those types of things. But
at the same time, you know, I was very good
with structure, with anything that was structured, you know, at patterns. Yeah,
that was great.
At So once you started working with your therapist and
you kind of figured out what was going on, how
long did it take you to get your actual diagnosis.
It was fairly quick. I mean all of that came
together in under a month, three or four different sessions.
All right, So once you was diagnosed, you really didn't
know that much about autism and what it's all about.
Like you said, the main thing that you knew about
autism was Rainman. Right, how did your perception change. Once
she was diagnosed, then what did you do to find
out more about it and understand the autistic community so
that you could thrive in it and help others as
well well.
It basically became another puzzle for me to solve, another
problem for me, for me to fix. And once I
approached it from that standpoint, I was kind of all in.
I got every book that I could find on it,
every documentary. I just researched everything I could. And at
the same time, I was working with that therapist and
she helped me with you know, the simple things like
eye contact and stuff like that. It just pointed out,
you know, what I was subconsciously doing, Like once it
was brought to light and I saw it. You know,
there was a couple of sessions where she just videotaped conversations,
even the fact that I talk fast. I mean I
still do that today, but like she you know, explained
why I talk fast and how it was impacting other
people that couldn't follow a conversation at that speed. So
once those things started coming to light, I was able
to address someone at a time, and now I'm thirty
some years in, I can have a conversation and make
eye contact. I have to force myself to do it,
you know, which is another whole thing. But I can,
you know, more or less play the part of somebody
who's atypical, I guess is probably the simplest way to
describe it.
Yeah, I find that pretty interesting. I've talked with a
lot of autistic people over the last several years. Most
of them will talk slow. Some are a little bit
faster in speech than others. Very rarely do you have
anyone that's actually a fast talker. What did your therapist
think that could have caused just fast talking?
Well, for me, the reason she pointed it out, I
was doing something called cluttering at the same time. So
somebody would ask me a question, and I would get
three to five different answers to that question would all
pop up in my head at the same time, and
then I would try to verbalize all three to five
of those answers all at once. So what should have
been five different sentences basically got all mishmashed together and
came out, you know, on like this word vomit. And
that was why she brought it up. She basically taught
me to, you know, slow down the conversation a little
bit grab just one of those answers out of the
air and just verbalized one of them rather than four
or five of them all at the same time. But
you know, it still happens with me, like when I'm
when I'm excited about a topic, I tend to talk really, really,
really quick.
Okay, yeah, I mean that makes total sense. So you
mentioned briefly that you was focused on things. That's one
thing that autistic people that I've dealt with had in
common is they become very focused. And when they do
become focused, they tune out the rest of the world
and only focus.
On that one thing.
Did you find that that was what you'd been doing
pretty much all your life?
Yeah, that's exactly what happened. I mean, it was something
that I've been doing, you know, all along, but never
really realized it. I just that was my norm. That
was just the way things was. But until she pointed
it out and said, hey, you're doing this, you know,
I didn't realize that I was actually doing that. But
you know, at that point, we basically created more or
less a pro and cons list. You know, here are
the things that are negatives that we should try to
work on. Here are the things that you you should
focus on because autism, you know, not only did it
have negatives, but it also has a pretty strong positives.
A lot of the things that I was able to
do in the corporate world, typical person may not be
able to do what I do today, you know, writing books,
Like I mean, you can see my desk behind me.
It's more or less empty. But I'm working on eight
different books right now, all at the same time, and
they're up here, They're in my head, like that entire
structure is there. I used to write computer code. If
you write any type of computer code, when you write
that first sentence, you have to understand how it's going
to impact the last sentence and everything in between. Writing
a book to me isn't isn't different. It's another pattern
that I see and I'm able to recognize. My wife
calls those superpowers, you know, like we basically the autistic
the good things that came out of it, and we
focused on those.
Yeah, that is just so good.
I talk with so many people that have kids or
they've been late diagnosed like yourself, and they often refer
to their autism as their superpower, and I think that's
just great. So once you started putting it all together
and you started understanding what you had to deal with.
You kind of knew something wasn't right, but you didn't
know that it was autism. So when you met with
your therapist and was diagnosed as autistic.
And you were living the way that you lived.
So once you got that diagnosis, how much did it
change your lifestyle and the pattern in the way that
you live today?
Yeah, I think I tweaked the existing patterns. For anybody
like me, patterns are extremely important. A ridge's schedule for
me is a extremely important. So when those things change,
you know, my world kind of goes into the chaos.
Because those things were brought to the forefront. I was
able to recognize them as the day went on and
you know, adjust for them. And it's been thirty some
years and I'm still doing it today. It's not something
that goes away.
Right, As they say, autism is a lifetime thing. It's
not just part time. So how did it or did
it affect your circle of friends once you got diagnosed
and found out that you were autistic.
Well, I've always kept by my circle of friends fairly small.
I think that the ones that you know, people that
were close to me. I think it was. It created
an understanding for them too. They understood why I was
just a little bit different. I'm very big on having
dialogue about that sort of thing, you know, So we
talked about a lot of it. I explain how I
perceive certain things. My wife has been a tremendous help
in all this because in a lot of ways, as
an autistic person, when I'm out in public, I'm putting
on a particular persona. It's almost like I'm an actor.
I'm mimicking what people expect me to be. But you
can't keep that up twenty four to seven, you know.
So when I'm home, my wife sees that other side
of me. That's very helpful too. In a lot of ways,
she helps me understand, you know, somebody who's atypical. So
if her reaction to something is different from my reaction,
he explains why, and you know, I try to understand
it from her standpoint and vice versa. So my friends
this entire time, last thirty years, they've all kind of
been like that. They've been my sounding boards.
Yeah, that's a great way to look at it. That's
a great way to handle it. I spoke with an
autistic guy that was married to a neurotypical woman. They
had a very inspirational way of looking at it. They
looked at it as two different people from two different
cultures living in the same house and learning how to
adapt to each other. And it's been extremely successful.
Yeah, that's essentially what we do too. And I think,
you know, if you're in a relationship with somebody like
that where you are so different, I think that's extremely important.
We've got a daughter now whos seven years old, and
she was recently diagnosed. We both brought certain things to
the table because she doesn't have a lot of the
symptoms that I have, and she's got her own set
of symptoms. But you know, I was still able to
recognize some. But you know, we're able to talk out
a lot of this stuff, I think on a level
that a lot of other couples probably couldn't.
Okay, So how is she handling it? Is she thriving
and doing good or is she having some difficulties dealing
with it?
A little bit of both? You know. I started seeing
things when she was maybe eighteen months old, you know,
just little things, you know, like she would build like
a block tower, and like if she was stopped before
she finished, you know, like she would get very upset
about it, like she needed to finish whatever task she
was working on. To me, that was, you know, a
red flag. But at the same time, I kept telling myself, well,
you're looking for stuff where it may not be because
she had no trouble making eye contacts, she has no
trouble being touched by other people where I you know,
that completely freaks me out if you know, somebody touches
me and I'm not ready for it. She's very good
in social situations, so you know, it's a very different
set of things. She's got her own issues too. But
the nice thing is that, like she was diagnosed at six,
you know she's seven now. We founded very early and
her school has been phenomenal. Our teachers have been a phenomenal,
phenomenal at you know, helping with that. Back in the seventies,
when I was you know, like it wasn't even something
they looked for. You know, you were the weird kid.
They pushed off it at the corner and that was it.
In today's world, they tend to embrace it, they find
ways to work around it. You know, she's fantastic at math,
she's not very good at reading, but you know, they're
focusing their efforts on reading and coming up with different
ways to the teacher how to read. So far, it's
been great.
Yeah.
I spoke with a lady that kind of thought the
same thing as you just brought up. She felt like
she was the odd person out and got pushed over
into the corner. Just as you spoke of. She found
out that she was autistic in her late bodies. She
said that she feels like she lost four decades. Her
fifties was just fabulous because she knew how to work
around and what to do, so when she hit sixties,
she said, life was just great. You also brought up
another interesting topic. Do you have any issue with textures?
I know a lot of autistic people have either food
textures clothing textures that it just really doesn't work with them.
Do you have any of those issues at all?
I can't wear wolf socks. Is that? Yeah? There are
certain things that for what I can't explain why, but
it's just as horrible to me as nails on a chalkboard,
like hearing that sound. And again, my daughter doesn't seem
to have any of that, or if she does, we
haven't noticed it yet.
Okay, that's great. So what about food textures? Does that
bother you or her?
She's at that stage where like she won't eat anything
but pizza and macaroni and cheese no matter what. So
I'm not sure if that's autistic or just her being seven.
I know I went through that early on. I had
trouble with different colors of food. I'm still to this day,
Like if you put a plate in front of me,
I eat everything one at a time. So I will
eat the protein, then I will eat the potatoes, and
I will eat this, you know, where somebody else might
just kind of pick it everything individually necessarily a problem,
just something that's different.
Yeah, sure, sure. Now what about meltdowns? Does she or
you have a problem with meltdowns? I know you mentioned
that you to get upset in the corporate world. Was
that a meltdown or was you just getting upset?
It was like a low scale meltdown, I think, I
mean a lot of I tended to go off on
my own if that sort of thing happened, Like I
could feel it coming on, and I tried not to
let it happen in front of other people. My daughter,
we saw that also very early on, but you know,
at the time, we didn't know what it was. Is
this a two year old throw in a temper tantrum
or is this, you know, something, something bigger. It's it's
tough to tell. When our teachers started telling us that
she would shut down on the playground because her friends
didn't want to play whatever game that she wanted to
play or didn't want to finish, you know, like they
were acting out a storyline and they didn't want to finish,
and she would curl up in a ball in the grass.
We knew that there was something there. And again, she's
received a lot of a lot of help and support
along that and she doesn't do it anymore, you know,
so she doesn't know that she's autistic. She doesn't know
that there's anything different about her, which I think at
this stage is good. She had a little problem and
you know, she worked through it with the adults in
her life.
Yeah, I think that's really good. I Mean, I've always
believed that let a kid be a kid for as
long as they can be a kid, So as long
as she's learning, growing, I think that's the way it
should be and eventually be because she's got supportive people
around her. She'll grow, she'll learn that she's autistic, and
the people won't mind because they understand her, and she
won't mind because she understands what's going on, and it'll
just make a better environment for everybody involved.
Yeah, and that's definitely what we're seeing. And her friends,
even at this age, you know, they don't notice it
at all. I don't think that's going to change. Whereas
when I was seven, you know, the kids definitely noticed that,
they made fun of me, they wouldn't talk to me
or whatever. I don't know if it's a generational thing
and just kids are different these days. I don't know
if it's the particular school she's at. I'm grateful that
she's not going through that, though.
Absolutely, I don't think things have changed that much. One
of the biggest things that I hear from all the
parents is how their kids still, unfortunately get bullied. The
second thing that they fear is the females masking it
and trying to fit in, because that makes things very,
very tough for the girls as well. I think the
one good thing is that she's being raised properly.
You've been through.
It, you understand it, and that gives you the opportunity
to help her get through it as well.
Yeah, I mean we're we're already seeing that. You know,
there's you know, if we as a family, like if
we have a particular problem that or something that she's doing.
You know, a lot of times I can talk to
her and I can relate to her on a level
that maybe my wife can't because I've been there and
done that, and I can explain it to her, and
I think that that's helpful to Yeah.
Absolutely, So, now that you've adapted, you understand what you
have to do, understand who you are. What do you
see for yourself over the next four or five years,
do you see yourself still growing, evolving in building upon
what you've already accomplished.
Yeah, I mean I think I've got, you know, from
a treatment standpoint, I think I've got to dialed in.
I've you know, narrowed down you know, what wasn't an
issue before, and I think I've kind of curtailed it.
Where I find myself slipping and walking a tightrope. Is
you know, like I write books for a living, It's
a very solitary thing. I literally so at that desk
for six days, eight hours or so, all by myself,
documenting what I see happening up here in my head.
I could spend twenty four hours a day doing that.
I'm perfectly comfortable in my own space all by myself,
more so than I am with other people. But the
flip side of my particular job is I do have
to get out in front of people. I was just
recently in Budapest at Istanbul and Head close to a
thousand people that had a book signing. I had to
get up and give a talk, I had to shake
hands with everybody. I had to sign books for a
couple of hours. You know. So I'm thrown basically to
the complete opposite of what I consider to be my
comfort zone. But I sort of forced myself to do
that because I find that the more often I do it,
the easier it becomes. I could easily slip back into
just twenty four to seven being all by myself, you know,
like I was when I was younger. But by forcing
myself to do these public appearances and things like that,
it kind of keeps me. You know, I got one
foot basically each in each camp.
Yeah, that makes absolute perfect sense when you get ready
to do these big events that have thousands of people
and you have to take and meet and greet them.
Do you feel any anxiety to it, during it, or
even after you've had the event.
I don't get anxious about it anymore. I did at
the beginning. I've kind of gotten past that. What I
find happens is that when I'm in those situations, I'm
basically dialed up to eleven. You know, I'm putting on
a persona. I'm basically becoming the person that they expect
to see, and I have to keep that up for
X number of hours X number of days. When I
get on the flip side of that, I tend to crash.
You know, my batteries are completely depleted and I need
to recharge. So like in this case, when I was
on that airplane, I basically slept the entire flight back
because I was completely exhausted from what I had done
the few days before. That's never changed, and I'm pretty
sure at this stage it's probably not going to. So
when I'm in a public situation and I'm forced to
put on that persona, you know, to deal with those
social situations, there are repercussions. There's a you know, there's
payback for.
That, right, So that actually requires a lot of energy
from you, where other people could slide in and then
slide out and leave and not feel the effects.
Many might not realize.
Talking with people, shaking hands, meeting, greeting requires so much
energy from you to do an event like that.
Yeah. I mean, any typical person can go to a
party and have fun, right, they can. They can chat
it up, they could have conversations, they laugh at the jokes,
you know. It's an entertaining, fun experience for them. For me,
it's really not. I'm there, I'm mimicking what I see
other people doing. You know, somebody tells a joke and
I'm laughing because other people laugh, not necessarily because I
saw that. I thought that was funny. Again, that's not
something that has ever changed, and I don't think it
ever will. But that takes energy to do that.
Yeah.
Absolutely, you just brought up an interesting topic. You mentioned
that you would see others laughing and a joke possibly
and you'd laugh along because others are too. I've spoken
with several autistic people that when they're around people one
on one and they're joking and carrying on like that,
they have a hard time processing it. Do you have
that same hard time difficulty in processing somebody that can
just trying to be humorous in a one on one situation.
Yeah, it's very, very difficult for me, and I basically
want to run away, you know, and going to go
into the corner of the room somewhere. But I've taught
myself over the years not to to just stick it
out and try to deal with it.
Yeah, how do you handle something like that? I mean,
you just brought up the fact that you like to
get away if you can, and you have a linear
way of thinking. In most cases like that, then they're
making their movements or facial expressions, whatever they're doing to
put the joke across. How do you process it? And
what do you do so that you can get through
a situation like that?
It's really through mimicking, right, you know. It's like I
smile when I know I'm supposed to smile. I know,
laugh when i know I'm supposed to laugh. But those
aren't necessarily, you know, true emotional reactions. They're meat flipping
a switch.
Yeah, I get it.
You do what you have to do and that way
you can move on. So now your do aughtits Evan.
What do you see for her in the next five years.
She's still learning, adapting. How do you see her evolving
over a period of time.
I think we're just going to keep a very close
eye on everything. You know, Like I mentioned, she's very
good at math, she's not quite as good at reading
and writing, so we're focusing on that. I'm keeping a
real close eye on what she likes to do. I'm
blessed to be able to do a job that I
absolutely love, Like I would do this for free and
I get paid for it. I'd love to see her
fall into that same thing. And I don't know that
that necessarily means she's going to become a writer. She
may become a painter, she may become a computer programmer
or something else. But I want to make sure that
she does what she wants to do. You know, I'm
there for her to help guide her through those those
more difficult things, you know, the things that she doesn't
understand where she has problems. I can be a guide
for that.
Yeah, that's a great idea. So what would you tell
a parent or someone like yourself. They're living their life
and then all of a sudden they're getting diagnosed. What
would you tell them now that they're just finding out
that they diagnosed autistic? What advice would you give them
to help them through their journey.
I speak to a lot of parents, and one of
the reasons why I do stuff like this is just
to try to get that word out there. I'm fairly successful,
I've got a good career, I'm doing what I love
to do. You know, I'm fifty three years old at
this point, so I'm kind of on the other side
of that. You know. So if you're a parent and
you've got a two year old that isn't speaking, or
a two year old that's banging its head against the
wall on a daily basis, you know, you're trying to
figure out, you know, how are we going to get
through the next sixteen years of this? You know, how
are we going to raise our child for them? It's
helpful to see somebody like me, you know, somebody that
has gone through it and it's gotten to the flip side.
So I try to talk to parents about that sort
of thing as much as possible.
Yeah, I think that's great because one of the most
common things I hear is when a parent first finds
out that the child may be autistic, is they are
thrown in this world that they know nothing about. They
have to kind of learn it as they go because
there's no real manual that they can learn and then
come back and use. They have to live this every
day and start their journey worrying every day about their kids.
And it's tough.
Yeah, but the thing is, you know, some of the
most successful people in the world are autistic or were autistic,
you know, so sometimes it helps to seek them out
and you know, figure out how they got there.
Yeah.
Absolutely, there's always a path. They just have to find it.
So what would you like to leave us with? No?
I think that that's basically it. I mean, if you've
got a child that that you recently received the diagnosis on,
get out there, research it, understand what you're dealing with it.
It's not a bad thing, you know. Autism is has
given me, you know, like my wife had said, superpowers.
You know, like I'm doing something that I normally would
be able to do without it. Your child will be
able to too. You know. You just have to find what,
you know, what is their superpower. You have to hone it.
You have to help them focus on it and get
them excited about it exactly.
Yeah, that's a great thing. Well, I really appreciate you
coming on. I think this has been really really interesting,
a good conversation, and I think people going.
To enjoy it.
Oh, thanks for having me. I appreciate it.
Oh, it's been my pleasure.
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