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Temple Grandin - 20th Vs 21st Century Autism Advocacy
225 Plays3 years ago
How far has Autism come in 50 years? Is the shift in focus GOOD or BAD for Autistic adults?
Professor Temple Grandin is a renowned author, speaker and Autism advocate who has and still is changing the cattle industry
In this episode of the Thoughty Auti Podcast, Thomas Henley talks to Temple about his experience of Autism advocacy in the modern day, comparing it against Temples own experiences in the past
Kicking off the chat, they talk all about recent events in the media - touching briefly on Temples book 'Thinking In Pictures', her movie, and the more recent publications like 'Different NOT Less'. Getting down into the meat of the episode, they chat about how the focus of Temples childhood was on manners, following work and developing hobbies... vastly different from the modern day focus on language, stimming, self-advocacy and identity.
The professor explains she has substituted 'Emotional Complexity' with 'Intellectual Complexity' and the two theory over the impact of work and relationships in overall Quality Of Life.
In the modern day, advocacy is done through social media platforms, and Temple highlights that this change has been difficult and potentially damaging for the autistic community (Thin Slice Judgements come to mind). Ending the episode, they chat about positives and negatives to modern day advocacy, reminiscing on the shared difficulties on navigating the language and social landscapes.
If you have an exciting or interesting story and want to appear on the next podcast, please contact me at: aspergersgrowth@gmail.com
Temple's Links:-
Books - https://www.templegrandin.com/books.html
Twitter - @DrTempleGrandin
Song Of The Day (Listen Here) - https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5UDIyN5TSYN4zMcRoQPrG8?si=9255ed3480d840b5
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Website - https://www.thomashenley.co.uk
♫ THOUGHTY AUTI PODCAST Get it on Spotify free here - https://open.spotify.com/show/6vjXgCB7Q3FwtQ2YqPjnEV
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Support via Patreon! - https://www.patreon.com/aspergersgrowth
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Transcript
Introduction to 40 Auti Podcast
00:00:07
Speaker
Good day, my lovely listeners. You are listening to the 40 Auti Podcast. Tune in every week to explore inspiring stories and insightful information that dive headfirst into the world of autism and mental health. With all those tantalizing tongue twisters out of the way, let's get into the show.
Temple Grandin on Autism Advocacy
00:00:37
Speaker
Hello my wonderful listeners and welcome back to the 4080 podcast today I have a really amazing episode for you I am going to be talking to someone who has had a massive impact on myself in my early advocacy days someone who I would consider one of the the OG autism advocates who really made an impact on autism in the world as we see it
00:01:08
Speaker
so today our topic is 20th century verse 21st century autism advocacy and I'm going to be talking to Temple Grandin so with the massive time difference that we have it's taken us a few times to try and figure out how to get on and chat to each other Temple how are you doing today?
Grandin's Travels and Experiences
00:01:36
Speaker
Well, I'm doing just fine. I just got in from an autism talk in Canada. It was my first trip to Canada since pandemic. Very nice meeting with teachers. They particular meeting was about all kinds of disabilities. So they had a display there of things help blind people to read and other really interesting things. It was a good meeting. I was there yesterday.
00:01:59
Speaker
Wow, I've never actually been to the states or I've never been to Canada or any place like that. The only places that I've really traveled is Southeast Asia and a little bit around Europe. Oh, OK. Are you are you are you are you traveling now because pandemic seems like it's kind of winding down. I've been traveling normally within the US for for just over a year now.
00:02:30
Speaker
I think we're allowed to travel definitely at this time. I recently had a holiday in Turkey, which was really interesting. I've only really been in the summer and it was the winter this time. Well, how was Turkey? What did you do there? That sounds really interesting.
00:02:50
Speaker
We did a lot to be honest, we did a lot of walking as you can imagine there's this really amazing place called Kaya which is like this massive sort of expansive valley
00:03:06
Speaker
And Turkey is primarily a Muslim country. So they have the song, the call to prayer, like every, you know, at the end of every day to sort of signal that they have to stop fasting for Ramadan. Yeah. And because of the valley and just how expansive it is, it just echoes throughout the whole throughout the whole valley. And it's a really amazing sort of experience.
00:03:35
Speaker
Well, I've never been to Turkey, but I've been to UK many times all over Europe, Australia, South America. What part of the UK did you visit? Well, I've been to Scotland, London, number of different meetings, animal ethology, animal behavior meetings in the UK.
00:03:58
Speaker
That's really cool. I live in the north of England, so I live in Yorkshire. Well, I've been to Yorkshire a long time ago in the 70s. It's a very beautiful sort of countryside and stuff. It's very nice. So I suppose what I want to ask you is,
00:04:24
Speaker
You know, you've had a very long sort of extensive career in animal sciences, but you've also done a lot for autism, a lot of
Understanding Thinkers in Autism
00:04:35
Speaker
autism. Yes, I'm doing many, many talks. In fact, the talk I did yesterday in Canada, right, at Niagara Falls, I got to see Niagara Falls. Niagara Falls. I've never seen it before.
00:04:45
Speaker
It was mainly teachers at this meeting. There were school board people there. So that was strictly an autism talk. You know, I do a lot of things on autism. And then, of course, I've got some of my popular books like The Autistic Brain, Thinking in Pictures.
00:05:04
Speaker
So I've been doing lots of talks, I've talked to universities, I've talked to a lot of business groups, April's Autism Month in the US, big companies like S&P, IBM Computer. What's been interesting when it comes to hiring people that are neurodiverse, the tech sector, computer companies, they've really reached out, they know they need that talent, and the financial sector has reached out.
00:05:33
Speaker
And these are the sectors that would hire the mathematically gifted people on the spectrum. Sure. I can definitely say that I'm not one of those mathematically gifted autistic people. I am not either. And this brings up another big thing I talk about. And I got a new book coming out called Visual Thinking. And it's about the different kinds of thinking. I'm an object visualizer.
00:06:00
Speaker
If you watch the HBO movie about me, Temple Grandin, it shows how I think visually. And I'm an extreme object visualizer. I can't do math, higher math. So that makes me good at art, animals, photography, mechanics. Then you got your mathematical person that's got autism, your mathematical mind, your computer programmers, chemists, physicists, they often are good at music. And then you have the word-based person.
00:06:30
Speaker
who's on the spectrum, who loves facts about different things. History is often a favorite subject. And I made the mistake when I originally wrote Thinking and Pictures back over 20 years ago, thinking everybody on the spectrum thought in pictures the way I did, that's one. It's a subgroup that thinks in pictures. And then there's a group that's more of the mathematical pattern thinkers
00:07:00
Speaker
And then there were thinkers. That's really interesting. What kind of category would you put me in? Because most of the stuff that I do... I don't know enough about you. That's true. It tends to the visual thinkers like me, I know a lot of them in real high-end skilled trades. I've worked with large companies on installing
00:07:29
Speaker
cattle handling facilities. And I worked with brilliant people that were laying out entire plants on people that were inventing equipment and patenting it. That'd be my kind of mind. And some of these people were on the autism spectrum, undiagnosed. And then you've got the computer people working for the tech companies. The first thing I'd ask you is what were your best subjects in school? Where I'd start to try to figure out the kind of thinker you are.
00:07:57
Speaker
It was philosophy, physical education, chemistry, biology, and physics. Okay, now philosophy is definitely verbal. Chemistry has got a lot of math in it. Physical education, that could be anybody.
Systemic Challenges and Inclusion
00:08:15
Speaker
Visual thinkers like me can't do algebra. And I'm very, very concerned that my kind of mind is getting screened out of a lot of things.
00:08:25
Speaker
on because real higher abstract math I can't do. But there's things that I can do that I'm very good at that the mathematicians are not able to do.
00:08:36
Speaker
Yeah, it seems to be a really big problem nowadays, even for other neurodiverse people like ADHD or dyspraxia or, you know, a whole host of different people. They seem to like the education system seems to be very rigid in their approach. Very verbal oriented. Yeah. Because I worked with people that were designing entire big beef plants.
00:09:06
Speaker
and other things. I'm going to estimate about 20% of the people that I work with that can build anything with autistic, dyslexic, or ADHD. And the problem is industry needs them. I talked to a lady yesterday, just a couple of days ago, Gerber Baby Food Factory, and they have problems of finding people to fix equipment. We've got the same problem in the meat industry right now. The people I work with have always are retiring. Nobody's replacing them.
00:09:37
Speaker
because they took all the skilled trades things out of schools in some of our states. Some of our states are putting it back in and skilled trades aren't for everybody. But how do you know if you don't try things? And often there's like a really big barrier to entry that's quite theoretical and exact. Well I understand the things I did with cattle handling, there was no academic barrier to entry in that.
00:10:04
Speaker
Sure. Yeah. It's considered industrial process equipment. And if they make an academic barrier to entry on industrial process equipment, I don't care what industry you're in, you're going to be in big trouble. Sure. Because they, visual thinker like me, is the one that invents mechanically complicated equipment. Yeah. In fact, if you want a poultry processing plant right now in the US, you're going to import all the equipment from the Netherlands, from Holland. Yeah. And there's a reason for that.
00:10:33
Speaker
they did not take out the skilled traits. That's why that equipment now, and it's mechanically clever equipment, comes from Holland. That's really interesting. Holland has quite a... Their structure seems very different to any other countries that I've been to. Do you think there's anything particular about the Netherlands that is, or Holland, is particular
00:11:04
Speaker
Like, well, why they produce such, such good. Well, right now, um, the Holland's, you know, I went to two just for COVID hit. I went to two state of the art brand new port processing plants. Most of the equipment there came from Holland. You see, there's like two parts of engineering. There's the mathematical part because you look at a food processing plant and I've been in times.
00:11:27
Speaker
The mathematicians design the boilers, the refrigeration, power and water requirements, make sure the building doesn't fall down. But then all of the equipment that goes inside the plant, mechanically clever equipment, not made by the mathematically inclined engineers. And this is something that educators just don't realize. In fact, if you look back at old paths in my new book on visual thinking that you can preorder right now on amazon.com in the US,
00:11:56
Speaker
just put visual thinking and then my name, Temple Grandin. You go back in history, the patent office in the US, they originally required that you submit a scale working model of your invention. Now that's not the mathematical kind of minds. Most of the early patents were coming out of the people that were probably non-mathematicians. Think back to things like printing press and that was too early to even be patented.
00:12:27
Speaker
but mechanically clever equipment. And we've got a problem right now on people to fix factors. You can't find them. I can tell you where they're at. They're playing video games, autism label, when they ought to be fixing factors, all types of factors.
00:12:46
Speaker
That's really interesting. I, you know, I've done a lot of, I mean, a lot of the work, sort of advocacy in the workplace work that I've done tends to be around things related to the media industry, because I know a couple of autistic people who
00:13:10
Speaker
I work for the BBC or do like their own independent related media stuff and one of the big issues that I've really found is that there's a lot of push for diversity in the workplace but yeah we're getting that we have that too.
00:13:28
Speaker
but they don't tend to focus a lot on the inclusion aspects, like the positive reasonable adjustment so that it can get the most out of each
Motivation and Career Achievements
00:13:39
Speaker
person. What I'm finding in the workplace, and I've been doing a lot of workplace talks, is it seems like the financial sector, they can really use the mathematical type of autistic, and the computer sector, they know they need that talent.
00:13:55
Speaker
Now you get into what I'm going to call services and consumer products, and I'm not going to mention any names. In that situation, they're just talking about it, rather than actually doing something about it. And then you get the very creative sector. I visited Pixar one time.
00:14:18
Speaker
I, you can definitely see the visual thinking there, just in how the offices are decorated between a company like Pixar. And then you go into a strictly a computer company, computer guys. Oh, they might put a few geometric patterns on the wall, but you go into Pixar, they've ripped out all the office cubicles. And one person has the Tiki hut. The next one has to start training. No, I'm not kidding. And it's, you see, those are the more my kind of mind. Yeah. You know, a visual creativity.
00:14:48
Speaker
Yeah. But the thing is, businesses need these different kinds of minds. And when I talk to corporations, they say, what's the first thing we have to do? The first thing is you have to realize different minds exist. Sure. And there's scientific research, and I've outlined it in this book, The Autistic Brain. So in my kind of brain, the object visualizer is different than the pattern mathematical thing. There's scientific research that backs that up, and they have
00:15:17
Speaker
very different skills. And I've been involved with the livestock industry for 50 years right now. I've got a plan right now that I've got a real mess with the equipment. And I just talked to a guy just recently who's pushing 70. He's going to be looking at it very, very soon to see if he can fix it. For confidentiality reasons, I have to be somewhat vague about what it is.
00:15:43
Speaker
but this is a serious problem. And I've talked to people in the car industry and other industries too. It's not just a meat industry issue. It goes across all kinds of factories. Wow. I definitely wasn't aware of that. I mean, a lot of the statistics that I look at is mostly around unemployment. It seems to be that autistic people are really struggling to find jobs.
00:16:11
Speaker
the thing I learned is the way I got jobs is I showed off a portfolio of my work. The way I got jobs when I first started in the cattle industry is I basically show people my drawings. I would just show off my drawings and when people, I would sell my work. Now, let's say your talent was in computer programming.
00:16:39
Speaker
Oh, now you'd have it on a computer rather than paper. You'd show off your best paragraphs of code, neatly titled, say what they're for, where someone can look at it and go, well, but you don't show this stuff to the human resources department. You've got to show it to the engineering department, or if it's Pixar, to the
00:17:02
Speaker
art people that make the movies department, not human resources, or they look at that and they go, wow. So it's a lot about picking in and choosing and sort of finding a way to get around the typical sort of route into the workplace. Oh, you have to like get around the whole interview thing. That's not the way to get in. Now, I have a slide when I talk to business people, parents and stuff,
00:17:32
Speaker
on how to help the person who's different. I have no working memory. So I need a checklist of what I have to do. Yeah, me too. I need a checklist. And that's a very, very simple thing to do. I said, well, let me just write down the steps on how to unjam the copier machine. Let me just write down the steps.
00:17:56
Speaker
And I just heard about a guy who had worked for years building fences for a fencing contractor, got a new boss and lost his job because the boss goes, this is what we want you to build today. And he did it wrong because he wasn't able to write it down. But long strings of verbal instruction does not work. And there's certain jobs to avoid like super crazy busy takeout stuff where that's too much multitasking.
00:18:25
Speaker
I definitely agree with you. One of the reasonable adjustments that I have at my workplace, I work for an inclusion charity in the UK. And one of the reasonable adjustments that I have is if someone asks me to do stuff, they have to bullet point the things that they want me to do. Well, that's exactly what I do. And I somehow figured this out.
00:18:53
Speaker
let's say I'm doing a big job, we're going to remodel some stuff. And then I have to figure out what part of the structure we keep, what part we tear out. And I sort of write down exactly what they want this job to do, budget, I'll do the designing, the railroad right away measurements, you know, stuff like that. And, and I've had, you know, people talk about self advocacy, I get specific.
00:19:20
Speaker
You know, on the thing with the checklist, I would just tell a boss, let me just write it down like a pilot's checklist. And if the boss walks at it and say, you know, for pilots, checklists are not options. They have to use it. Well, a lot of people don't even know that. Pilots have to use a checklist for every single flight. Wow. And it's the law in the entire world of aviation. Wow.
00:19:47
Speaker
Well, just give me a couple of minutes. Let's go back to the guy with the fencing. All right, let me write down exactly what you want me to build. It would take two minutes at the beginning of each day to just write down some bullet points of what they want to build that day. Yeah. And that would definitely be ideal for me. Well, that's a simple thing to do.
00:20:10
Speaker
because I was handling advertising for a feedlot construction company early in my career, and I designed brochures long, and the boss was annoyed about it. So I said, now, let me just write down exactly what you want. And I did that. And it took maybe two minutes. That solved a lot of problems.
Communication and Masking
00:20:34
Speaker
I also find that it actually helps a lot of other people be be more specific with what they want because, you know, prior to me, you know, asking asking my co-workers to send me bullet points, it would just be long paragraphs of text. No, no, no. I don't want that. I want more like a pilot checklist. I don't want long paragraphs. Yeah. And and what I found worked the best.
00:21:02
Speaker
is to just talk to them verbally and say, okay, now this, this, this, this. And it might be one sentence per bullet point. And that's a very, very simple thing to do.
00:21:18
Speaker
It doesn't require a lot of extra work. No, it's not extra work. You're talking about... It makes it easier for the person trying to communicate because they have to be really specific with what they want and they have to... Vagueness does not work. It's just that vagueness does not work. And the verbal mind, I'm learning, tends to overgeneralize. They overgeneralize. We got to have inclusion.
00:21:47
Speaker
but you don't discuss how you're going to do it. Now, having spent years on marketing equipment to people, the other thing I found is people want the magic equipment more than they want the management to go along with that piece of equipment. I call it wanting the thing more than the management. But how do I sell equipment? Well, you need it. I can reduce labor requirements. I can reduce accidents. I was really big on insurance claims and figures.
00:22:18
Speaker
I'd give them, and some of these other skills that people on the spectrum have, I can tell you these factories need them. We have factories where people don't know how to fix things. There's two parts of engineering. There's the visual part that cannot do the math. I call it the clever engineering department.
00:22:37
Speaker
And then there's the degree of mathematician. You take the college education, the greed mathematician out on a job and just put him to supervise a concrete work. I have seen some of the worst concrete work you could ever see. I can imagine. Young kid out of college getting ripped off by contract. Been there, seen that. You see, this is where you really need the different kinds of minds.
00:23:04
Speaker
You see, also, I'm a bottom up thinker, I think in specific examples. And then if I get enough specific examples, I start putting them into columns like on a spreadsheet. Yeah, yeah. Now I need that mathematician to figure out my power requirements. You see, this is where you need to have the whole team. And you need to realize that these are complementary skills.
00:23:31
Speaker
got the different cogs for different tasks. Well, you need them. You need the different kinds of mines. And I looked at a building just the other day. I normally don't do stuff. I'm building an old metal building where it was folded to the concrete foundation.
00:23:55
Speaker
I looked at that and I said, if I try to turn those bolts, that entire connector is going to crumble. I won't even have something to attach the new beam to. I won't even dare turn the bolts on that building. I was looking at that just the other day. I said, I am not a structural engineer, but I can tell you right now, if I turn those bolts, they may just crumble off and I don't even have anything to attach the new beams to. It'd be a real mess. You see that? I can see that.
00:24:24
Speaker
So I watched an interview video that you did with Iowa PBS called The Life Autistic. Within the interview you were talking about how work and social skills were taught in your generation. That's right. And how that led to less diagnosis and better life skills.
00:24:47
Speaker
In modern online autism advocacy circles, there's a lot of talk around the ideas of masking social camouflage and discrimination. And so it seems to be developed or geared more towards developing a positive sense of self and fighting for the right to be accepted for our differences. Well, for example, wellbeing and self advocacy seem to be more important than life skills.
00:25:16
Speaker
according to the talks that we generally have. So what I really want to know is in the frame of autism back then and autism now, what things really worked for you as an autistic person and what areas of your life do you think you could have developed better?
00:25:38
Speaker
Well, I do not do well with social high-speed social chitchat talk where three or four people get together and it tends to have very little contact. High-speed social chitchat talk. I can't do that. It goes too fast. Now what they did in the fifties is there was a lot of teaching of manners and this was not stressful. Like I watched a person on the spectrum just the other day. It was a shared dessert and eat like complete slob instead of taking
00:26:08
Speaker
eating off one end of it carefully. And smushed up all the ice cream in the cake where nobody else wanted to touch it. There's no reason to do that. It was just kind of disgusting. It was just the other day with a student. And I said, look, don't do something sloppy like that. I'm not suggesting you'd be social butterfly, but you made a mess in it.
00:26:37
Speaker
you know, or I suggested in the future, her to take a knife and cut off a portion and put it on her plate on a shared dessert. Sure. You know, but this is just in my mind thinks in specific examples, why have such disgusting cable manners that it really turns people off? There's just no reason for that. Yeah. And and it's not stressful to learn how to do things like that. That's that's an example of of, you know, 50s upbringing. Yeah.
00:27:07
Speaker
You know, you'd say, well, if you have a shared, and this was cake, so you could easily like eat off one side of it and not eat with the other person to touch. And you see, now I'm seeing a dessert, right? Now I'm seeing the restaurant we were at, it's real, real recent. Now, the other thing on masking and stress, 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 full thinking and pictures, which is available in the UK,
00:27:36
Speaker
in all formats. I described my experiences anti-depressive medication. It saved me. It stopped horrible, colitis attacks, horrible. Health was just a mess. I'm sorry to hear about that. Yeah, absolutely a mess. I think some of the masking thing is anxiety, but what motivated me in my 20s is people thought I was stupid.
00:28:04
Speaker
I wanted to prove to the world I was not stupid. And when I said, yes, I can design that, dipping that project that was shown in the movie, I had no idea how to do the concrete work. I got on that phone and I found somebody could send me official engineered drawings for the concrete work. I designed the cattle part of it, the special ramp in it, I designed that.
00:28:30
Speaker
But how much rebar or reinforcement rod? I had no idea. No, I got an engineer drawing for that. But 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 some of the most fun stuff I ever did was in construction.
00:28:57
Speaker
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
00:29:26
Speaker
was horses, model rockets, and electronics. Okay, horses may be too expensive for a lot of people, electronics projects were not. So your interests were kind of the driving force, you were kind of- Well, yeah, but the thing is, how did I get interested in horses, model rockets, and electronics? I got exposed to them. Sure. A lot of kids don't get exposed to enough stuff to figure out what they might be interested in or good at. Now,
00:29:56
Speaker
The thing that, I'll be 75 this summer. I went to airport security last night on the budget airline and the full leg isn't really like taking their shoes off. I'm going to be so happy. After August 29th, I'll never have to take a shoe off, at least in an airport in the US ever again. It's something I don't like and sometimes they don't have any chairs.
00:30:20
Speaker
But I look at other people that I work with that are undiagnosed autistics. They own large metal shops, big businesses, ranging from a small shop to a corporate jet that I've been on.
00:30:39
Speaker
And these people, one of the one of the guys with the corporate jet, and I have to be totally vague on what he does because none of these people are declared. So we had a half an hour discussion. He's in his 70s, a half an hour discussion on every label he would have been made. You name the label, he would have had it. He's my age. Juvenile delinquent, autistic, dyslexic, ADHD, horrible student. Yeah. And he started out cleaning equipment at a food factory.
00:31:07
Speaker
Now he owns a big food factory with jillions of patented devices. His patent said it. You see, this is, um, it's sort of like, I think one thing that concerns me is students today don't get exposed to enough different things to find out what would they like welding or hate it. But you wouldn't know unless you tried it. Yeah. This is a lot more computer programming. I've seen parents where they're so locked into the label.
00:31:37
Speaker
They, they don't, they won't think to teach their kid computer programming, even though they were programmers, and the kids are genius in math, and you don't teach them computer programming, and your computer programmers, really. So they, there's certain social things I don't do. I don't do biocene. I don't, I can't hear in those situations. You see, I, for me, well, I've really done a lot of thinking about identity.
00:32:07
Speaker
It's career, being a scientist. I've done things to improve the livestock industry. I've had parents say to me, well, they read my book and their kid went to college or their kid, you know, this it's, I am what I do. And I got into a niche of engineering where I can do engineering without a math stuff.
00:32:35
Speaker
I now have found this scientific research that demonstrates there's two different kinds of parts of designing stuff. It's, it's sort of like, I can't make myself social side effect of medication. There's certain social things I don't do. Yeah. But I've gotten satisfaction in life through doing interesting things and things that I
00:33:05
Speaker
make things better, like just telling employers and teachers about using the pilot's checklist. So that's a very simple thing. They can prevent a lot of jobs from getting lost. That costs nothing. Yeah. Very simple thing. You see, I don't think in Vegas, but then I'm looking at the student that ate this dessert in a very disgusting manner just recently. There's no excuse for that.
00:33:35
Speaker
I don't have to accept mushing up the ice cream and the cake all together, squashed together. Nobody else is going to want to eat it. You know, I said, you cut, you take some off with a clean spoon, put it on your plate. I'm very carefully taking it off the other side. So don't, you know, now you might say with COVID you shouldn't be sharing a dessert. But it was a huge two pieces of chocolate cake with vanilla ice cream and chocolate sauce drizzled all over. I could do with that.
00:34:05
Speaker
not there for four people. But the way she made a mess in that. Why have disgusting table manners be something to hold you back? That's not stressful. That I don't even consider that masking in. Now, the thing I can't do is just chitchat
00:34:26
Speaker
Three people at a table, the other three are talking really fast, chit-chatting, and there's kind of a rhythmic laughing they do, they're having such a good time, I can't follow it. And then I interrupt because I can't, my processor speed's too slow. Yeah, I definitely find that myself. I definitely gravitate towards conversations more one-to-one.
00:34:53
Speaker
I do, too. Yeah, then I do, too. I was on a plane the other night, sat next to a lady construction manager. We had a great two hour flight, concrete forming systems, filled up the warehouse construction and problems with it. Yeah, that was a great flight conversation about something rather than a conversation for conversations. Well, that's that's just it. You see, and I think some of the masking stuff is where a person is trying to do that chitchat conversation. And that would be really stressful.
00:35:23
Speaker
Well, you see, I think we have to look at what masking is, eating a dessert at a restaurant in a really disgusting manner in front of other people. You know, why do that? Yeah. Yeah, I think
00:35:40
Speaker
I mean, something that really sort of perked 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
00:36:10
Speaker
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
00:36:37
Speaker
I've done quite a lot of work in my time on things such as cognitive empathy, reading people, and I've had a lot of practice out there in group situations.
00:36:54
Speaker
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
00:37:20
Speaker
You know, for me, I gravitated towards Taekwondo when I was younger. There's quite a few people in spectrum that are good at that. That's good. Yeah. And, um, 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, we 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,
00:37:50
Speaker
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. And that's called peer mediated intervention. Actually a fancy name. And so I managed to not be bullied in elementary school, primary school, but went by the 14, 15, 16 years old. It was horrible. That was the worst part of my life.
00:38:20
Speaker
And the only places I was not bullied was the friends who shared interests, horses, electronics, the 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 in music concert and he's loving it. And then another parent calls me 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 shared activities they can do.
00:38:51
Speaker
It is a really big issue, bullying and... Oh, it's terrible. It's absolutely terrible. Even rates of severe mental health and suicidality, even at a very young age, is something that occurs way too regularly. It's always something that in my head I'm like,
00:39:14
Speaker
Why aren't people talking about this group of people who are just subject to such horrible life experiences very commonly and developing 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 talk about in the shop, how to build stuff and how stupid suits are.
00:39:42
Speaker
Now, I have the managers, but I have since learned and I didn't know that when I was sitting around in a job trailer, you know, discussing this kind of stuff, shared interests, I didn't realize that the people we were calling suits, the managers were verbal bankers. And the way they think is totally different. They over generalize. And they don't make decisions or they don't have enough detail to make a decision. But you also need the verbal mind to organize things.
00:40:12
Speaker
because these successful people that where they grew their welding expertise into a big business, they have to hire some suits, just and they do normally. And now that I know more about how people think, I'm finding this very, very interesting. And then you get the right leader in there, they can really, really work together on
00:40:36
Speaker
But the thing that saved me was friends who shared interests. Same thing that worked. 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 it was crazy. Well, that's been replicated a whole bunch of times now. Yeah. But you see that that again is queer related.
00:41:06
Speaker
And, and, um, where I've had, you know, this is a book different, not less. This is 18 people in the U S well, actually it's one from the UK. Actually it was 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. They wrote in their own words. I learned a lot from this too.
00:41:35
Speaker
about how I think differently. It's my main emotion is fear. Okay. Okay. Yes. See, for example, okay. 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 customs, but I mean, I'm going to be just fine. You know, it's, it's, um, um, fear is my main emotion. Yeah. Yeah. And
00:42:05
Speaker
and there's like an emotional complexity that most people have that I don't have. It kind of sounds like, because I do a lot, I've done a lot of reading into a concept called Alexify Mia, which I think is... I don't know what that is, could you tell me what it is?
00:42:25
Speaker
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
00:42:41
Speaker
You know, one, I kind of like to describe it as sort of like a threshold condition. So it's, so for example, if you have a threshold of anxiety from zero to 100, 100 being complete meltdown, complete, can't do anything.
00:43:03
Speaker
And most people, their threshold for noticing when the anxiety sort of increases would be like maybe 20, 30, 40%. Whereas for autistic people, our threshold is a lot higher. So it takes a lot more time for us to notice, or a lot more strong emotions to notice them.
00:43:29
Speaker
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, it's got proximity sensors. Then I take the seat belt off to try to stick the credit card in it that didn't work.
Sensory Processing and COVID-19
00:43:46
Speaker
So now I get the seat belt thing going off, proximity sensor going off, going to get the machine to work, and that kind of stuff.
00:43:56
Speaker
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 just all those doing ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, and it's making some other noise. And I couldn't reach the machine. And then if I get closer to it, then it's proximity center, so I made another alarm. And that kind of stuff, if you want, I'm tired.
00:44:24
Speaker
I go to the gate with the attendant, but the attendant gate wasn't open that night. I just want to avoid that problem. If I go to the gate, it's got the person in it.
00:44:39
Speaker
I mean, you know, the whole the whole thing about Alexa Fimier 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 experienced those complex background emotions in your behavior. I get scary easily. But then there's things where I used to be afraid of airplanes. Terrified. Yeah.
00:45:07
Speaker
Well, you know how I got over that? You make them interesting. You just make them really interesting. I got the ride in the cockpit back in the 70s, a big airplane hauling heifers. 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. Okay, there's all this controversy about medications. I won't discuss them, but it's too controversial.
00:45:34
Speaker
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. And having that knowledge reduced the fear. Having the knowledge reduced the fear.
00:45:53
Speaker
So I'm, I am a scientist. I was going very deep into the literature, scientific literature way further than 99.9% of doctors. I spent hours online on scientific databases doing that. That's how I dealt with my fear. Now I can also be really happy. And I've learned I got, when I was a teenager, I got in trouble for anger. So I had to switch anger to crying. Yep.
00:46:22
Speaker
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. So you have to 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.
00:46:47
Speaker
And so he photographed everything and he had a single portable hard drive. It's all I got to think about the size of this book 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 drive box. And I started to get upset just talking about that. He was doing everything he could to save his life's work, trying to download it to France over slow internet connections.
00:47:17
Speaker
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. I wouldn't even have it in a bag. 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.
00:47:44
Speaker
a portable hard drive, practically not without getting upset, because I think about that. And this gets back to what identity is. This 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. He's a visual thinker, and that's the end of his life's work. I get upset about that.
00:48:10
Speaker
You see, and that's, I'm not saying that 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. And then the knowledge I had of medical stuff,
00:48:38
Speaker
Well, now I'm quite approval vaccinated and I'm not worried about it now. Good.
00:48:44
Speaker
Autism, awareness, understanding and societal adjustments from the general public have improved since your childhood, adolescence and young adulthood. Diversity, social media and inclusion are all really hot topics nowadays and that's sure to raise the public understanding of autism.
00:49:10
Speaker
What I want to ask is, what was the world like for you back then? And what positives or negatives have you seen in terms of societal adaptations for autistic people? Well, you see, what I think has happened in my generation is the Asperger types, I know that they officially don't use it, where there was social awkward, no speech delay, those people went ahead and got decent careers.
00:49:35
Speaker
learn how to work at an early age, but their relationships and marriages were very problematic. And they didn't have any idea why. Then the kids like me, severe speech delay, when I was three, I was a complete mess. And I was the kind of kid they would just throw away an institution in the fifties. But fortunately, I was very lucky to get into a very good early speech program that two teachers taught in the basement of their home. And, and
00:50:04
Speaker
The fifties upbringing was helpful. Kids played outside and did all kinds of things. So I had a good childhood, teenage life was terrible. And see, this is the problem you got with autism. You're going to Elon Musk, who was publicly announced that somebody can't dress themselves and you got the same name for it. Yeah, that's I think a problem. I think it's a big problem because they got very different needs.
00:50:32
Speaker
You know, we also have some individuals on autism label where where they got very severe epilepsy and other problems. They're not going to be doing engineering or art or photography or something like that. But some of those individuals can type independently. Yeah. And they have a good brain inside there. And we need to be I always all my formal presentations talk about the ones who can type independently, like Tito Macapatte, Carly, and then of course, no key to Japanese boy.
00:51:01
Speaker
I always talk about that and how we need to be giving them that opportunity. They can do that. But when I talk to businesses, this comes from a background of being in business. I didn't just sell cattle handling facilities based on being nice to cattle. Yes, I brought that up. I told them how they'd make money if they had my equipment. That's how I sold the equipment.
00:51:28
Speaker
then right now I'm saying you need this visual thinker who can't do algebra because your factory is going to fall apart otherwise. You need people like me who cannot do algebra. Your factory is not going to run. How about things like wastewater treatment, the power plant? Yeah, you need the mathematicians for the power load, but you also need people like me to keep the plant running.
00:51:56
Speaker
I got to make sure the suits that are in charge know that. I love that you call them suits. This is sort of how I push things. We really do need all the different kinds of minds. And the other thing that I think is important is not talking about vaguely. Let's talk about accommodations in the workplace that are easy. The pilot's checklist. Don't be vague. Maybe some sensory breaks.
00:52:26
Speaker
keeping out of the jobs with the crazy multitasking. These are simple things. And where I've seen a lot of problems in the workplace is when the boss changes. That's often problematic.
00:52:42
Speaker
I suppose that they're your key authority figure in this in the workplace. And if you have a good relationship with them and they get you and they make adjustments for you, you have some of the things. I think we're talking about making adjustments in a very vague way. Sure. OK. I'm going to be very specific about the pilot's checklist and the bullet points, because I can think of like 10 examples where if they'd done that, the jobs wouldn't have been lost.
00:53:11
Speaker
And it's a very specific, very simple accommodation. And I think it's hard for the verbal finger to understand that maybe I can't remember 10 steps they want me to do. I've got to write them down, you see, and then you get into other disabilities. I'm where a blind person that should have been hired for a call center job, customer service job, didn't get the job.
00:53:38
Speaker
See, my mind doesn't think in generalities. And I think the problem with a guy is he was interviewing with HR and I think they just take one look at the guide dog and go, oh, the accommodation is going to be too hard. You see, I think a better approach, a big, okay, you see my dog, you're freaking out right now. Why don't I give you a two week free trial? I only need one accommodation.
00:54:03
Speaker
the special software and it won't wreck your computer system. It's got this security and that security. And my friend will come in with me for an entire week so we can learn the office. I thought he'd been approached that way. He got turned up like 10 jobs. It was awful. Really articulate, blind guy. That was terrible. But tell the employer how the accommodation is easy and what it is.
00:54:33
Speaker
There's only one thing that corporation had to provide, and that was the special software. He had everything else he would provide. His favorite keyboards, headphones, just all this other stuff he'd provide. And there might have to be some adjustment made on jacks. And no, my stuff's not going to wreck your computer system. But I'm approaching it more from an engineering approach, like how I thought it was disgusting that he was turned down from 10 jobs. Yeah, it's a part of it. Totally disgusting. It is a part.
00:55:06
Speaker
I was wondering, you know, outside of the workplace, you know, talking about, you know, the statistics that we've talked about, do you think that there are any like, can you can you see any way forward in improving like the the overall life quality of autistic people? OK, now let's get more specific social isolation.
00:55:36
Speaker
Let's get more specific. Now, one problem I'm seeing on the job front is I see parents get so overprotective. The child's never gone shopping in his teenager, fully verbal teenager, never gone shopping, learning to drive. That's going to take a whole lot longer, a whole lot longer. I just talked to a guy yesterday at the conference and I said, I want you to start out in a totally safe place where there's nothing to hit.
00:56:04
Speaker
giant parking lot with no light posts that take a lot longer to deal with the multitasking issues. But it's and then another issue for women is getting into abusive relationships. That's a big problem. Yeah, that's a very, very big problem. Yeah. You know, and I basically, okay, I'm not saying a path I've chosen is the right path, but I'm celibate and
00:56:33
Speaker
I put everything into work. Sure. Now, I'm not saying that's a path for everybody. But that's a path I took. Mm hmm. I I do a lot of work around socializing and relationships in my in my online work. And I do I do agree with you, like there is a lot of there's a lot of abuse when when autistic people
00:57:00
Speaker
date neurotypical people because we don't have that sort of inherent sense for people you know sometimes we put too much weight on people's words rather than their actions and you know what
00:57:19
Speaker
what they say to us, you know, they say, right, OK, this is not how it is. This is this is how it is. And it could be something completely different. And one thing that I have noticed in particularly in my relationships that I'm very vulnerable to people who don't have the best intentions, who don't have the most healthy, healthy sort of view of relationships, you know,
00:57:48
Speaker
um and there's a lot of infantilizing that goes along you know like being treated like you're a child because you have a different communication style you know i've seen that too yeah and one of the things that motivated me this whole thing about proving it wasn't stupid yeah that's such a big motivator yeah i can do it i am not stupid
00:58:13
Speaker
You know, even now it's sort of like, okay, I may be pushing 75, but I can still think up good research ideas and I can do things even though I can't walk as fast now as I used to be able to. But it's, but I'm seeing situations where a kid, fully verbal kids, overprotected and not learning shopping, not learning bank account. I mean, just basic stuff. The moms get very, very overprotective. Sure.
00:58:41
Speaker
And then I heard when they get him in the right job, like something like office supply store where it's not too much more my tasking, I'll hear things like he blossomed, he bloomed. I've heard that over and over and over again.
00:58:55
Speaker
So you're saying that it's important to learn these life skills as a priority. Absolutely. Absolutely. Absolutely. And I would avoid the jobs like crazy takeout window at McDonald's. I'd avoid that job. And for your kind of mind that's verbal, a really good kind of job is specialized retail. All right. Let's say you worked in the office supply shop. You would know every printer in there.
00:59:25
Speaker
and help people pick out the right printer for them, not try to just shove the whole store down their throat. And people appreciate that. Specialized retail, selling phones, and you know, every phone that's in there and exactly what it does.
00:59:42
Speaker
What would you say about more, more, um, complex jobs, like, um, well, not, not more complex, but different jobs, like, uh, presenting like, like what I do with my podcast or. Well, then that's, um, that you can be good at that. And again, that's something that's specific that you're doing podcasts. You've got a certain audience that you go to. That's something specific. Yes. You can be good at that.
01:00:12
Speaker
There's no multitasking. There's no load on working memory. That is true. Yeah. You see the things to avoid is the stuff that loads that small processor. Yeah. You see all the things are doing design work. There's no working memory issues with that. The guys programming, working for, you know, one of the tech companies, uh, that's all pulled off a long-term memory. There's no, there's no multitasking issue. Do it writing programs. Sure. Can I ask you another question?
01:00:42
Speaker
me up. So, personally, I've followed your work for a long time. I've read your books. You know, as I said, I think you're, you know, one of the autism advocates that, you know, role models, I would say, they really made a marked difference on myself. Well, good. And how did I help you? Okay, I might ask you a question. How did I help you out?
01:01:13
Speaker
I think you gave me a lot of inspiration that I can approach life in my own unique way. You also gave me a lot of...
01:01:33
Speaker
I think that, you know, I was diagnosed when I was 10 and it was only until my 20s that I started to really read into what autism was. And your books really gave me a great insight into my own brain. You know, some things didn't apply to me, but a lot of the things really did. And it gave me a great basis for sort of understanding who I was.
01:02:04
Speaker
Well, I got a lot of insight from reading other first-person lived-in accounts. That helped me very, very much. Also, some of the scientific research, some of the social circuits aren't hooked up. I got insight from that, too. What I wanted to ask is, in modern days,
01:02:33
Speaker
A lot of the advocacy work that I see seems to go on a lot in social media, seems to go a lot in podcasts and radios and sort of digestible content.
01:02:50
Speaker
What I want to know is how has your approach to advocacy and autism education changed from back then to the modern day? Do you find that there's anything that you struggled to adapt to or is it? Well, I've been, I'm not big on, I don't do social media that much. One thing that worries me about it is there's so much quick reactions. I've read some of the research on it is
01:03:18
Speaker
is okay, read something on social media, you write something and then we push send and it's instantly all over there without time to think. There's a lot of nasty stuff and it comes from making a reaction extremely quickly without thinking about it.
01:03:36
Speaker
Now, let's just look about false things on social media. And it's very controversial. So I'm going to pick out something really stupid that airplanes leave, you know, trails in the sky. Yeah. All right. I think I can safely talk about that. Yeah, you can. I actually talked to one person actually believed that. And and if you let's say they've been experiments done when they force people to look at stuff, but they can't push send right away.
01:04:06
Speaker
or share right away, but they have to think about it. Then they're better at figuring out, well, that really is garbage. I'm not going to share that. But I think the problem is, is this quick emotional reaction. When Facebook was first invented, I don't know, I did a talk at Kansas State University to a bunch of cattle ranchers,
01:04:29
Speaker
And I said, social media magnifies the voices of extremes on both sides of any issue, any issue. And I'll leave it at that. I'm not going to give you examples such a controversial, but it's because you get that quick emotional reaction without actually engaging thinking. Yeah. Yeah. That's the problem. Yeah.
01:04:52
Speaker
I definitely empathize with you on that because one of the issues that I find, particularly trying to grow my brand, me as a person, me as a speaker, me as a...
01:05:08
Speaker
Mentor, etc. The main issue is that I think very, very slowly, but I think very complex as well. So my brain is more suited to that longer form sort of content. It's not snippets of 60 seconds or 15 seconds that I release that I'm good at.
01:05:32
Speaker
Um, it's the, the long, the long sort of stuff. Well, that's kind of the way I am too. I'm a slow processor and, and you get people writing stuff that, uh, it's all based on a quick emotional response without thought. You know, this is the thing that's a concern and I look at so many things and, and, uh,
01:06:03
Speaker
I'm going, well, they're not, nobody's thinking about any of this stuff. How do you solve problems? Okay. I mean, I've worked with, uh, real things in, in designing facilities, animal behavior problems. They got a problem with a dog or something like that. Yeah. I find that first of all, the verbal thinker over generalize, they'll say something like my dog is crazy. Well, I don't know what it did. Crazy, happy jumping on you little white fluffy dog or a huge dog is fighting you. Yeah.
01:06:29
Speaker
I don't have enough information, this is something verbal thinkers do all the time, whether it's an animal behavior problem or a people behavior problem, I don't have enough information to give a reasonable answer to my dog is crazy. I don't have enough information to even begin to answer that. Was it happy crazy, angry, biting crazy?
01:06:57
Speaker
Scared, crazy? It's the vagueness. It's too vague. And I find the same thing people come to me on talking about their kids. Well, first thing I need to know is age. Are we doing early intervention age, primary school, high school, adulthood? Yeah.
Interventions and Support
01:07:14
Speaker
I don't want to be talking about something in high school or secondary school, and the parent has a three-year-old. That's not enough information. Sure.
01:07:27
Speaker
See, the thing is that, I guess for me, is my view of acceptance. I accept and I'm respected for what I do in my work. Yes, definitely. I'm good at my work. I don't do the party scene.
01:07:52
Speaker
unless it's a party associated with an autism group or livestock group or some other convention party. And then I tend to talk to just single people and migrate around the room. I realize there's things in my life that other people do. Like I listened to songs on the radio and I started calculating how much of those are about relationships and love. Over half of all the songs.
01:08:22
Speaker
It's true, isn't it? It gets on my nerves. But I don't care. I like 60s music. I don't care if I listen to the 60s station, listen to Country Western, listen to the 70s. I get Sirius XM 70s station. And I've got to thinking about that relatively recently, actually, that the vast number of songs is about relationships. Now, there's some songs about work. I actually like those songs better.
01:08:52
Speaker
on abstract ideas or, you know, or, but it's there. I realize that there's a part of life that I don't experience and I've replaced intellectual complexity for emotional complexity. Maybe that's the best way to put it. So intellectual complexity for emotional complexity, because I'm emotionally real simple, get scary easily. I get, uh, have a, can't moment ask.
01:09:23
Speaker
try to avoid those situations. And maybe what you need to inform me on is, because some advocates don't like me, is what are those advocates wanting out of life? Now obviously not to be discriminated at work and things like that obviously. But I think they're kind of what they want is different than for me.
01:09:53
Speaker
I would agree with you and that's why I asked a question earlier about how autism advocacy has changed and it seems to me that it's a lot about specifics of language use that is the gateway to people either liking or disliking you in the autistic community.
01:10:20
Speaker
For example, my name on YouTube and my name on Instagram is currently Asperger's growth. Now, I can agree with that because just my own case, I keep learning more and more. How many people say to me the older I get, the less autistic I act and that my talks had gotten better as I got older. So that would be Asperger growth.
01:10:45
Speaker
Yeah. And, you know, it makes sense, doesn't it? And the message is clear. But a large chunk of the amount of comments or messages or emails that I get, it's about my name. It's about my choice of name rather than what I do, you know. Oh, that's it.
01:11:08
Speaker
It's really depressing sometimes. Really language-based, you see, because I'm an object visualizer. You see, because there's three kinds of people on the spectrum. There's object visualizers, there's the pattern math and music, and then there are the ones that are history lovers, where they are word-based, which I'm definitely not.
01:11:36
Speaker
And so they'll really get into the exact language. I'm trying to figure out, okay, what language should I avoid using? What language should I use? What are the rules telling me? I'll do it. Well, I can send you my videos on autism language explained if you'd like to explain it in very, maybe explain me, give me the elevator speech. Yeah. Yeah. Give me the elevator speech right now.
01:12:01
Speaker
Okay. Um, people don't like Asperger's. Um, they're, they're moving away from the term Aspie. Not that I knew that because, because of the bad background of the doctor that I knew about. Um, we're also moving away from, um, we're, we're,
01:12:23
Speaker
moving more towards neurodiversity related language. Neurodivergent is the name that people have given to people who are neurodiverse. I understand that because you get autism in the fully verbal forms, it would just be a personality variant.
01:12:49
Speaker
I can go along with that. I'll use those terms. Now, one thing I got bashed about was using high and low functioning. Now, I can't change old stuff as in older books. But now, in everything new, I'm calling it, okay, once I get past age six or something like that, fully verbal, partially verbal, nonverbal.
01:13:12
Speaker
that those are the words I'm using now, but I can't do anything about the older publications. You can't go back and change a book. No, exactly. But I now sometimes I still got some stuff where I have to use those terms. And because if I don't use them, then people don't understand what I'm talking about. So I'll say, well, talk about Asperger's, I'll just say, they don't use that term anymore. But that's socially awkward, no speech delay.
01:13:43
Speaker
Yeah, in a nutshell, for sort of explaining what autism is to other people, it's, you know, even explaining to other people, but also in medical settings, in social care settings, in teaching, you know, it's important to have some kind of language that distinguishes people.
01:14:07
Speaker
Not because we want to hate on a certain group or we want to be more superior or, you know, that's the kind of stuff that people say. But to actually explain what groups of people we're talking about. And I don't use high functioning and low functioning.
01:14:29
Speaker
Well, I have stopped using it. I'm calling it fully verbal, partially verbal, nonverbal. And when I'm talking about auditory language coming out of the person's mouth, that's how I would find those are the terms I'm using now. And then also in my talks, making it very clear about some of the nonverbals that can't control their movements and look really severe.
01:14:53
Speaker
the books written by people who type into them independently. And when I do a full autism talk, that's in all my slideshows. I make sure people know about those books. And the crazy thing is about this whole thing is that people would be a lot more likely to accept what you say if you say in those terms, if you use that language, but you're basically saying the same thing.
01:15:19
Speaker
Well, that's what it is. It is the same thing. I mean, and it and there's a lot of other controversial stuff, you know, where you're changing some of the language. And I can think of words I said, I'm not going to repeat because the two controversial that I said as a young child that everybody did that even would think that it was wrong. I just didn't know. But the thing that that
01:15:47
Speaker
I want to see, I'm finding the people on the spectrum that are happiest have got jobs they really like. So one of my big things is helping adults make the transition to work. And one of the big problems I'm seeing is this kid's so over protected. He's never gone to the store and bought something by himself and he's fully verbal. Like you gotta be kidding. So I have to talk about shopping. But it's, I also,
01:16:16
Speaker
think about and I've done a lot of stuff about identity is when you look at a lot of last names of people, they are jobs, Smith, Baker, Miner, Mason, these are jobs. So what that tells me is that a lot of people's idea of their identity was tied up in their work as their last names were names of jobs. That's really interesting.
01:16:42
Speaker
And all I can say about the English language, I haven't done it in any other language other than English. And so what I'm thinking is, for me, my sense of identity is not the autism is important as to who I am, but it's secondary to a scientist, designer, inventor.
01:17:05
Speaker
So you have the the own right to choose that whether you want to say, for example, what kind of language you want to use, whether you want to use person first or identity first language, I think it should be something that the individual chooses. Well, I would agree with that. You see one in my very earliest publications, OK, and here this book came out 10 years ago. I call it The Autistic Brain.
01:17:32
Speaker
And I didn't even think about what kind of language it was. Then I had educators. It was educators who were pushing person first. You should say person with autism. So I started doing that. And then I found out the activists want identity first. So then I put autistic in there. Then I get questions from educators. Why aren't you using person first? And then I just explained that a lot of activists don't like person first. Yeah.
01:17:58
Speaker
I just explain it. So sometimes I use a mixture because in writing it's not good to just keep saying something the same way all the time. Don't you think it would be a lot more straightforward and a lot more easier if the focus was not on language for most things and it was on the actual issues that autistic people have? Well, I'm interested in the actual issues. And the other thing is you've got to remember I've spent years in construction.
01:18:26
Speaker
where I would sell a job, design it, supervise the construction, start it up and make it work. So construction is all about finishing projects. So this kid just ends up in the basement playing video games, when he should be out building things. I don't consider that very good. And then I go back and forth between the educational world and the industrial world. I was just out in a factory that was a big mess and I can't go into the details, but I'm
01:18:54
Speaker
we're gonna pull a guy out of retirement, he's practically retired to fix it. And I tell educators about that. In other words, I'm going back and forth between these two worlds. And so I wanna discuss health insurance is a huge issue in the US. Let's talk about real stuff, then how do we fix it? People say, well, how come you were successful in improving things in the cattle industry?
01:19:22
Speaker
Well, I didn't just go the cattle industry is a big mess. I picked out something specific cattle handling that specific or for the person on health insurance. Sure. And you see, one of the big problems we've got the way we're set up is if the person loses their disability payment, they also lose the health insurance. Well, there's a lot of them in the US if they could keep the health insurance, they could give up the disability payment.
01:19:52
Speaker
It's really interesting. But that's a real serious problem. It's been a serious problem in my country for years. Oh, you don't know how lucky you are to have your health service. Certain things were free, like COVID vaccines were free, but you get a real serious health problem. Right now, the price of insulin is a gigantic ripoff.
01:20:19
Speaker
But that's a very big issue.
01:20:25
Speaker
It's like, because a lot of my work is centered around either theory, relationships or quality of life. So I'm certainly interested in quality of life. I focus on the mental health issues, the workplace issues, the education issues, you know. But the biggest problem is one basic principle.
01:20:52
Speaker
You need a slow transition from the world of school to the world of work. Let's start out with chores for little kids. Let's replace the paper routes which don't exist anymore with volunteer jobs where somebody outside the home was a boss. Real jobs are instant, they're legal. So they learn how to work before they graduate from high school. That's really important. So they aren't just suddenly graduating maybe with an advanced degree and they've never worked. A gradual transition
01:21:22
Speaker
But there's a tendency for a lot of parents to just over baby. And I'll say, now, have you gotten your son a job yet? They said, we're thinking about it. I said, we've got to do it. Who do you know that owns a shop? Let's just get them in the back door. Sure. You know, this is where I'm with the with the fully verbal end of the spectrum. We're really seeing problems. So that's a big thing that I advocate for. Theory, I don't.
01:21:49
Speaker
I'm not theory. Picture thinkers are not theoretical. That's really interesting. I'm glad that we see eye to eye on the kind of way that we do it. Well, yeah, I want people to get jobs. I want people, because I think about the people I work with professionally that were designing equipment and vending equipment, building things. I think they have pretty happy lives. Sure.
01:22:15
Speaker
In fact, one of them that was on the spectrum about 10 years ago, he got into a real nasty plant manager. And he called me says, what do I do about that? I said, the guy's a jerk. Take your pull your equipment out, send them a bill, concentrate on your good clients. When he gets fired, then you go back to that plant. So I told him, you see, I've been around for enough years that I had to learn these things. I also
01:22:43
Speaker
had to learn in a very rude kind of way that you could have someone in charge of a project with a gigantic ego that would do things wrong, really wrong. I'm talking multi-million dollar mistakes because they wouldn't listen to their engineering staff, for example, oh, you don't have enough wastewater treatment for this plant expansion. They went ahead and did it, no shut down.
01:23:09
Speaker
Well, what kind of blows my mind is how irrational so-called normal people can be. You built something where you didn't have enough wastewater treatment and all your experts told you not to do it. That happened on a project 20 years ago.
01:23:28
Speaker
But boy, this guy came out of sales. Well, he had it. I was just going to say like charisma. Yeah. And an ego. It gets you a long way in the place. I call them the plant wreckers. Yeah. When it comes to. No, the project failed multi million dollar failure. You know that my cattle stuff worked, but the whole place closed.
01:23:58
Speaker
But that's something, as a person on the spectrum, was like a rude awakening to learn that ego could get so big that it would wreck a job, actually wreck it, make the project fail. And then being a woman, for me, was a much bigger barrier than autism ever was. I can definitely imagine that. Much, much bigger barrier.
01:24:25
Speaker
But I don't get into, you know, you start thinking about what's the meaning of life. I used to look for all kinds of stuff. And finally figured out if the things I do help make something better. Like when a parent says, my kid got a job because of one of your books, or my kid went to college and he's doing just great. As I read one of my books, I heard one of my talks. Then I'm doing, I like those real kind of results. And I know there's some people that,
01:24:55
Speaker
You see, then you get into the masking issue. Yeah, this stuff. So I'm talking about the thing about the dessert. Yeah. Being eaten in sloppy manner. That's business social. That's not even stressful to do that. Yeah. Just don't be a slob with other people at a restaurant. Just don't. Yeah, that's not hard. Now, the thing that takes huge strain is trying to listen to these fast moving, very social conversations at the restaurant.
01:25:25
Speaker
that I cannot do. And now as older, I've got one partially deaf ear, so it doesn't help either. And being someplace where you're putting too much load on that working memory can be very, very, very stressful. It's sort of like I kind of divide the social into business social, shake hands, do it, it's not hard.
01:25:53
Speaker
But to be, I'm finding where you have a cocktail party where I'm supposed to just greet a whole bunch of people, chit chat. Yeah, that can start to get old. Yeah. But I find it boring. I find it boring, too. I agree. I find it very boring. I can do it. I can do it. And it's not. But some people see some people say that that the reason why I have so much anxiety was because of masking. No, it's not.
01:26:22
Speaker
It was total biology. My nervous, my fear center was three times larger. That's been confirmed brain scan. No, I went on the low dose of the antidepressant drug. It made all the difference in the world. I'm really glad. I'm on antidepressants as well. I'm on an ancient old one. And the mistake that's often made is too high a dose. Is that tricyclic? I'm on an old tricyclic. You see the Prozac type drugs weren't invented when I went on it.
01:26:52
Speaker
I'm on an ancient tricyclic that I now am going through a third generic company making it. I hope they don't stop making it. Well, I'm on an SSRI. And those are really good medications. And the mistake that gets made is the low dose will work and then they raise it and then you get agitation and you cannot sleep.
01:27:19
Speaker
Exactly. And that's a mess. The anxiety just... No, you see there's a dose window. Even though this book now is 25 years old, the information in there on the medication is still accurate. And it wasn't masking that caused that anxiety. It was biology. Sure. Sure. But it's, you know, I want to just see people on the spectrum
01:27:48
Speaker
have fulfilling lives, be everything that they can be. In my country, health care is a major issue. You see they get on disability. You see in my country, if you get on disability, you get free health care. And if you go off the disability, you lose a health care coverage.
01:28:08
Speaker
I had I had another question, but OK. All right. I don't want to. I realize that you're a very busy person and I don't want to to drag. Well, I'm glad they had a chance to talk to you because I know there's some advocates that don't like me. And I think that they're going to find that I think my goals aren't that different, except I just put a lot more emphasis on career and the people that I find that are happy.
01:28:34
Speaker
have got good careers, but then sometimes their marriages are a mess. And that's where this different, not less book came in, which I edited. And this is written in the lived in their own words. I'm basically the editor of this book.
01:28:51
Speaker
If it helps put your mind at peace, a lot of the people who are very aggressive in not liking people because of certain small things that you say or do, those people are usually the loudest and there is so many people who, you know, they'll listen to our podcast episode and they'll get so much value out of it and they'll really see what you're trying to do and what you're saying.
01:29:19
Speaker
Well, as I said before, when I gave that talk at the Cattlemen's meeting at Kansas State University when Facebook was invented, we said, social media magnifies the voices of extremists on both sides of the issue, both sides, extremism. And what happens to the monkey mill? It gets bashed on both sides, which is not fun.
01:29:45
Speaker
So I was going to ask you the other question, but I feel like we've already covered that. All right. What is the other question? Well, then we'll wrap it up. Okay. Well, would you be happy with taking some short questions from my following? Right now? Instagram. Yeah. All right. Let's do it. Cool. I didn't know you had some questions from followers. Sorry. Okay. Apologies. I actually made that more clear. I didn't know that you had had that.
01:30:14
Speaker
OK, so what what does some of the Instagram questions? So we have one from Jim Will, 78, who says who asks you if you could write a letter to your younger self, what would it say? I can write a letter about to myself. Yeah, to yourself. If you could send it in a time machine and write a letter to your younger self. There's a lot of things that might honestly to my younger self made.
01:30:44
Speaker
And if some of the information that I got into trouble at work, because when I was young, because I didn't recognize the warning signs, a new boss didn't like me. I'll give you an example. I was working for the Arizona Farm Arrangement Livestock Editor, cranking out the articles every month. We had a new boss. He didn't like me.
Workplace Dynamics and Lived Experiences
01:31:07
Speaker
I didn't recognize those warning signs. But Susie, who did the graphic design and set up the ads,
01:31:12
Speaker
She, I'm pretty sure was on the spectrum. She says, Jim doesn't like you. We're going to have to make a portfolio of all your articles. And then I got a raise. But if I hadn't, if she, but I wouldn't have recognized those warning signs. Well, that wouldn't have happened. And the other thing that I didn't understand when I first started is how ego and emotion can affect decisions that would actually cause gigantic problems with equipment.
01:31:41
Speaker
I have a concept called project oil. Well, I learned that there were managers where it was their ego. It didn't matter whether it would work or not. That was a very hard thing for me to learn that one guy didn't like because I was a girl, he actually sabotaged some equipment. Jesus. Yeah. I mean, it cost thousands of dollars worth of downtime. This is the kind of stuff that was
01:32:10
Speaker
really hard for me to. Now I'm realizing that humans can be extremely irrational. But there's a lot of things that I know now. I found as I said before, I found the reading some of the most valuable stuff for me was reading the lived in experiences. And there were just a few when I got started Donna Williams's stuff. There was someone named Tony W.
01:32:38
Speaker
had a short article I read the about Jesse parks. But I found then later on lived in experiences were were really important for me to learn. The highlighting lived experiences.
01:32:55
Speaker
Yeah. And, but also I'm realizing that the way I was brought up where social matters were taught in a much more structured way. It's really helpful. And it's also the reason why a lot of the socially awkward, no speech delay or Asperger types that my generation got good jobs and kept them, but their marriages were probably had a lot of problems. Yeah.
01:33:18
Speaker
So we've got a- What's the next question? Another question, which is from Harp, Harpen AU. How hard was it for you to find and keep a job? I'm having real trouble with that. Well, one of the first jobs I got was writing for the Farm Arrangement magazine. And one thing I was good at was finding the back door to jobs. And I went up and I got the editor's card, as it's shown in the movie,
01:33:47
Speaker
And I almost lost the job. And I just explained it in a previous question. But I was pretty good at keeping jobs because I was on time. There's a lot of individuals that lose a job because they're on time. So just mouth back. That's a problem I didn't have. I got my articles in on time. And then once I presented a portfolio, I kept that job. But I wouldn't have gotten fired from a job for being late.
01:34:15
Speaker
You see, this is where 50s upbringing did help. Thank you for that. We've got one more last question. What do you think about the crossover between autism, mental health and childhood trauma? Oh, there definitely is. Oh, there definitely is crossover and childhood trauma upregulates the fear circuits in the brain.
01:34:42
Speaker
No, when little kids get treated badly, it is really bad. Yeah, there definitely is crossover. The other thing that helps me is I do vigorous exercise every day. 100 setups every day. And I find this burst of vigorous exercise does some things that just walking a long distance doesn't. Okay, I can do a really long airport walk. And that just doesn't do the same thing.
01:35:11
Speaker
as a very, you know, two and a half minutes of very, very vigorous burst of hard exercise. Now, it took me three months to get up to that hundred. But I find I have trouble sleeping if I don't do that. That's something that's been real helpful and it's easy to do. You know, that's really strange you say that because that's, I used to do leg raises. Yeah, that'd be the same thing. Push ups and squats. All you see and it doesn't take long to do it. And you do it just long enough to start to sweat.
01:35:41
Speaker
And there's something different that that does that a mile long walk out of the airport doesn't do. Now, both are good things to do. But they have a different but a vigorous exercise helps with sleep. Yeah, I would I would attest to that. I go to the gym about five, five times a week. OK, well, that's that's the same thing I travel to. I just do it in the room. But
01:36:10
Speaker
have something simple to do but that was very very helpful to me and I know I want to see individuals on the spectrum get out and be successful.
Careers, Hobbies, and Social Engagement
01:36:22
Speaker
The other thing is we got to find more backdoors to jobs. See that scene in the movie where I got the editor's card, it's a very important scene because that's backdoor. Then I produced a good article
01:36:37
Speaker
and then everything was fine till we got a new boss and I didn't recognize the warning signs. Thank you, Susie, who was also probably autistic, who laid out the ads. She says, Jim doesn't like you. We're going to have to get a big scrapbook together of every article you've written. That saved my job. See, that's showing the work.
01:37:00
Speaker
What I want to ask you is, what do you think, I know it might be a difficult question, but what do you really want people to take away from our talk, our podcast? Well, I want individuals on the spectrum to get out and be what they can do. And what I see happening is, you know, fully verbal people like me.
01:37:22
Speaker
Let's go play video games in the basement or get out and have a life. Now, if those video gamers were going into great careers, I would not be criticizing it. Now, my kind of minds, the one that tends to get addicted to video games, there's been some success with gamers getting switched over to auto mechanics and actually going to a career in that. And you have to do it slowly because the cars were more interesting than the video games.
01:37:54
Speaker
But you've got to get parents, you've got to get to get out doing stuff. Now I'll tell you something you don't do. First job, shove an 18 year old girl in his chaotic clothing store at Christmas time, that you don't do. That was a failure, too much multitasking. Now we do have to be careful about multitasking. But I worked with so many people that I know were undiagnosed on the spectrum, interesting careers, and it gave their life meaning.
01:38:22
Speaker
Meaning I love that. Well, thank you very much for that. Okay. Well, I guess we've been almost two hours and you're going to play the whole two hours of this. Are you going to edit it? What are you going to do with this?
01:38:35
Speaker
I'm just going to edit it slightly, and I'm going to release it. Well, some of the stuff talking about microphones, we can probably definitely edit that. Yeah. So usually with this new season, so this is the second season of my podcast, I try to incorporate a song, so some music.
Conclusion and Future Inspirations
01:39:02
Speaker
Do you have a particular song that you would like to share with our listeners? Oh, I like the song I really liked was we'll never walk alone out of Carousel. We'll never walk alone. When you walk through a storm, you know, that sort of like, that was my favorite song in high school. Thank you for that.
01:39:23
Speaker
So if you have enjoyed our chat and you want to get to go see more of the kind of stuff that I do, you can follow me on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, all at Asperger's Grove. And if you want to find the podcast anywhere else, you can find it on pretty much all podcasting platforms, Spotify, Apple, Google, all of that good stuff. And if you want to get in contact with me to to hire me as a speaker,
01:39:53
Speaker
or to hire me to be a part of a panel or do some modelling work, you can find all of that information on my website thomashenley.co.uk. Today I want to highlight another person throughout our community as a profile of the day. If I can just search them up, where are they? Apologies Temple.
01:40:16
Speaker
I want to highlight the autistic poet Russell Lehman. He does a lot of work around poetry and he does a lot of good work in public speaking. And I definitely go over and check his stuff out. He does have some views that maybe a lot of people don't like, but he did just definitely express himself as an individual. And, you know,
01:40:44
Speaker
Very happy to have them come on my podcast later, later on. So yes, thank you to all our YouTube members and Patreon supporters. And yeah, you know, your guys support for this, especially Mr. Patrick Veddie has been absolutely amazing. So I can continue doing this alongside my full-time job.
01:41:08
Speaker
All really great support. Massive thanks to you guys. And Temple, thank you so much for coming on to speak to me. It really does absolutely mean the world to me. And I'm sure that... Thank you for having me. And I just want to help people get out there and be everything that they can be. Cool. Well, have you enjoyed your experience? Yes, I have. I've had a good experience.
01:41:37
Speaker
And, you know, I want to see, you know, the younger people, I'm way past retirement age, but I still am working. I get out and have an interesting life and maybe I've given them some ideas. Thank you. Thanks, Temple. See you later, guys.