Good evening, everybody. How are y'all doing? All right. We are going to start this week off. Great.

I'm going to give you a little pep talk, but before I do want to let you know what's going on for the rest of the show, we're going to be talking about some LGBTQIA news.

Got to keep everyone getting their needs met. And also, later in the show, we're going to be talking about essentially the vast constellation of creativity that sexual orientation is.

We'll say more about that, so stick around.

But I wanted to start the show by giving everyone a little bit of a pep talk.

I know that people are still worried about finances and employment, all sorts of different things going on.

And so I want to just take a moment to remind everyone that the stats say that about 60 to 70% of the wealthiest people inherited their wealth.

You know, people want to believe that we live in a meritocracy, which means everyone works hard

and they get what they deserve for working hard. And if you work hard enough, you'll get all your

needs met. And it's not true. We live in a racist culture, right, where people, you know, don't necessarily call individuals in for interviews.

If their name doesn't sound white, we have tons of research on that. Not every trans individual

has an identification, which matches their gender presentation. Some people, again, just won't

even hire trans individuals. There's all sorts of barriers, right? And I just want to remind

everyone that your worth is more than what you produce or rooted in materialism and what you own, right?

Again, that's why I bring up that stat that most people that are wealthy have inherited that wealth.

Or they were given a leg up because of their family's connections. It wasn't earned.

And so it is a lie that we can have whatever we want.

Most people can't. When we talk about body shape and size and how fat bodies don't get the same access

and aren't hired as easily as smaller-bodied people,

like we have tons of research to show what happens in the hiring process,

the employment process, all sorts of things that don't make it equal, right?

But I just want to remind everyone that there are these books like, you know, the 10 secret steps to success, which implies that we all have the same opportunities and we don't.

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