Welcome to Roon Soup, a podcast about Magic, Culture and the Paranormal, coming to you from Sunny West London.

My name is Gordon and I shall be your host. Enjoy. Today on Roon Soup, I am very pleased to welcome one of my favorite economic commentators

and creator of the wonderful blog of Two Minds.com, Charles Hugh Smith.

Charles is the author of Get a Job, Build a Career, Defy a Bewildering Economy,

and the recently published A Radically Beneficial World Automation Technology and Creating Jobs for All.

Charles, thank you so much for your time.

Gordon, it's my pleasure to be on your show.

Thank you for the invitation. Oh, you're very welcome. I regularly share your insights amongst the Roon suit people.

And in fact, in some of your books, you drop a few kind of enigmatic autobiographical comments used to be a partner and so on.

So there's a question we tend to start the shows with here, which is Charles, were you a weird

kid?

To the degree that I never really fit in and struggled to create the illusion that I fit in at least some of the lesser weird circles?

Yes.

I see. So you're like a sleeper weird agent?

You sort of pretend to move amongst the normal?

Well I had to move around a lot of schools

due to parapethetic parents, shall we say?

So I was often the new kid in town,

and before about the age of 15 or 16,

I was quite small and skinny and easy prey shall we say

for bullies and of course those of you who've been the new kid in town you're acutely aware that

that bullies realize you have no friends, no support, and you are a really easy

...