Sol Smith: The Autistic's Guide to Self-Discovery

say it was a big influence on me. Not so much for the alien part of it, but he actually, out of his own pocket and resources, would fly to different parts of the world and look at ruins, and because the archaeological community was in his infancy back then in the early nineteen sixties and beyond, he would actually go to Peru, to various Mayan sights and Aztec sites in Mexico and Central America and actually go and travel

through the jungle. He would take an interpreter with him and a small team and he was taking and you can see these in some of his early books. He was taking photographs of temples and pyramids back when it was not even really vogue to do that, and you know, and I was just fascinated as a kid to see these photographs and all these images that he was impressed with.

Now it was late that he interpreted this data as alien cities and pyramids, and later would kind of go off the deep end and even consider the Great Giza Pyramids, Cufu, Caffrey, and so on as works of alien technology. And this is where I kind of separate myself from his work.

His early research, his early explorations are fascinating and really impressed me because he is kind of going against the grain and asking the reader to look inward a little deeper rather than taking the explanations by the archaeological community as the final word. And I think that was more of an impression on me than the alien builders the alien technology, which is ancient aliens all over the place, and you know how I feel about it. I mean,

it's just gone too far. That's not simply explained, is automatically relegated to the technology of the ancients, the ancient aliens. So but it's a loss. He led a very full

and active life right up to the end. And after years of interviews with him, I'm going to pull together a best of Eric van Downkin before the end of the month, and that'll be a special edition where we can hear not only his philosophy, but also what got him excited, where he got the idea that these are aliens rather than advanced humans, because that's that's where I'm

all about. These are many of these cities are from a lost civilization that developed their own technology and not only built the pyramids, but built many of the temples and other buildings that are considered anomalists and almost because we can't build them today, we don't know the technology that was used in building them. And as you will hear from this interview with him, it's not easy to understand exactly what was in place when these places, when

these temples, pyramids and buildings were built. So look for that the best of Eric von Donkin before the end of January twenty twenty six. And I think over the years, I think I have seven. I mean it was rated. He was putting out books about five to seven years ago, almost one a year. And what they these books were were not simply writing they were mostly translations of lectures and they're not really that great. But you don't throw it all out because there's a lot of really good research.

There's a lot of good travel material that he andes in this material in these books that he put out, So look forward to that. Today's program is on autism and a term that I just discovered called neuro divergence. And this is people who process data, who think differently and express themselves in a different fashion. This is the various autistic types, the spectrum you might call them. And my guest, Soul Smith, has been working as a counselor to people with autism, and as we'll hear today, this

is not just autism, it's also ADHD, dyslexia, tourettes. It's basically people who are working with this. And what we'll hear from Soul today is an understanding that this is not a simple These people are processing data differently, and we're talking millions and millions of people how they are leading successful and active lives. So today's program is the Autistics Guide to Self Discovery and my guest is Saul Smith. Hey, the seventh annual Grand Egyptian Tour is coming up. We

have Mohammad and Nohah by him with us. We're going to be visiting Tennis, Egypt, which is very very old. We don't know what happened there. It looks like a catastrophic event happened. It has megalithic structures, statues, and some large pieces strewed around. Mohammad, What do we know about Tannis? What makes it so unique?

built out of rose granite. Fromus one, you know what people don't know that there was more than twelve obelisks in Tennis, maybe more but the remains some of them still in good condition, but all of them are laying on the ground. The one they took it to the Grand Museum, the one in front of the main gate of the Grand Museum is from Tennis, and the one in Tarry Square now is from Tennis. So there are about ten obelisks or eight obelisks still there at Tennis.

So the story is very strange because we expected, even if the temple was in bad condition, we expected more ruins to see more cat ORed blocks, but we found only few. But we found the biggest. By the way, there are remains of blocks weighing more than two hundred ton and three hundred ton we found the foot of a statue. According to the dimension of the foot, the statue would be more than fifteen hundred ton. The foot is like a car size. Wow. Okay, so we don't

know what happened exactly. It must be something very strong hit Tennis and hit that temble and it causes it caused great damage, like great exublusion happened inside the temple and caused that all the pieces are scattered on a distance maybe like three or four kilometers wide.

And I was an excellent artist. I just didn't process mathematics and anything else very well. And I think there's a lot of us out there. And the book I'm highlighting today addresses this in a very very good way. It's called The Autistics Guide to Self Discovery. And my

guest today is Saul Smith. He is a liberal arts professor, life coach, writer, speaker, social media personality, and I gotta tell you he has done a remarkable job in this new book in describing how neurodivergent people see the world and how to get around and be the best you can. So, hey, Soul, welcome to Destiny. Great to see you.

I just I felt like we had to kind of get something there to just sort of serve as like a little bit of a roadmap for people to better understand themselves through this lens, and just there wasn't really anything out there in place for it. So the book seemed like a really natural thing for me to branch off into.

And I just kind of had this idea that that like, you know, maybe I was just extra mature or something, and you know, I got along with my teachers better than my peers and that kind of thing, and so as a did get older, you know, it just kind of kept being like each next level wasn't wasn't it?

You know, I was expecting something different out of college than I was expecting something different out of working and it was it was frustrating to see, you know, in the workplace, how you can do your job really well but still feel like your your head's always on the chopping block, you know. They it was not really doing your job so much as fitting in and everything. And I just never really fit in very well. So yeah, I just kind of always knew this. And and my

my whole family was pretty pretty, you know different. My dad was was was brilliant and just super kind of empathetic. And when he died in twenty seventeen, my brother and my uncle and a couple other people and I were standing around just sort of swapping stories about him, and of course most of these were stories I had heard but never really come of all in one place. And my brother said, Wow, it's like he was autistic or something.

And I was like, oh, my gosh, and it kind of hit me, you know that, like that makes sense because I've been studying psychology. I had been reading about autism a lot, and I was like, oh no, oh no, And then really like did a deep dive into it, and I just kept seeing myself there, and it was just really it's that I never saw my experience reflected

in the DSM. You know, I never saw my experience like things like take things literally, and I thought they meant like, you can't deal with metaphors or something, and you know, I'm a literature professor, and of course I

can deal with metaphors. But what I didn't understand is that they meant that, like, you know, communicating literally means we see discussion and as a transfer of information from one person to another, we use words for their intended meaning, and that this sort of normal cultural way is to have a sort of meaning woven between your words that the other person is supposed to extract. There's this sort

of code of politeness, like you know. A good example of where this can get you off track is if a boss is giving you sort of marching orders and you don't track that that's what's happening because they don't want to order you. They're being polite because you're being friendly, and you know, so they'll say, well, that's not how I would do it, and I would go like, yeah, that's not how I would do it either, And my boss is like, okay, well can you go tell her

to or no. She wouldn't say that. The normal thing for me would be if we were talking, you know, talking about another teacher, and she goes, okay, well why don't you go tell her to do it a different way? But my boss wouldn't say that. She would just say I don't like how she's doing that, and I would say, yeah, that's not how I would do it either. And a couple of weeks pass by and the boss is like, what, why is she still teaching it the course that way? And I go, oh, I just thought we both agreed

this isn't how we would do it, you know. But it was really that was a sort of implicit command to go and ask somebody to change the way they were approaching something. And you know, to me, I not being paid to extract implicit commands from people. I just you know, wait till somebody tells me what to do, you know. So yeah, so that's I just never saw myself in it. And I finally like went in for the assessment, which I do stress to people that as

an adult, nobody has to go through the assessment. Nobody has to be diagnosed. You can self identify by really studying and really understanding yourself just as well. And even studies have shown this, especially if it's a problem of access, like how expensive it can be in that kind of thing. But yeah, when it finally came, there was a bit of a you know, identity crisis of like, wow, all these things I you know, kind of thought of myself

as special. There's you know, a label here now And it took me a while to really come to grips with all of it.

I was thinking about this. Is it an evolution? Do you think as you look at people and talk to people, is it a different kind of homo sapient sapien that we are perhaps not looking at correctly And we can say, hey, this is just a person who sees the world differently, who processes differently and who is just functioning a little different rather than a disease process.

that it's just always been part of the group. It's been a minority part of human existence, but that the way that roles and jobs used to be there, it wouldn't stand out quite so much as it does now that in our current like economic structure, most jobs, we see ourselves as sort of like replaceable parts of a machine that are you know, you put somebody in this position and they should work the same way as the

last person. They just need the training. And it makes us really sort of stand out because it's not really how we work as somebody who's diverged from the norm. You know, if you picture a normal standard distribution and most people followed and within one, you know, one standard deviation of of what we would consider average. Just by definition, autistics are our way out in the margins. So so we really stick out in this type of world where

we're expected to be very similar to each other. And I think that it's just kind of always existed, and I mean, you look back and read it's very fun to read about different historical figures and and try to spot the autism there. Yeah, but but in some cases it's really like pretty clear, like like you know, Mozart is pretty clear, and Socrates is pretty clear if Socrates existed, but it's there's yeah, so it's we really I think it's just always kind of been there but not really

been identified. And as we you know, go into the twentieth century, many autistics were put in institutions and ignored, and so we didn't see the way that people on on the more needs heavy side of the spectrum relate to people on the high masking side of the spectrum. And now that we've sort of mainstream things a little bit more, we can see these similarities. But yeah, it's

definitely not it's it's definitely genetic. And yes, our environment does help decide how it manifests, like how much it shows up, and I think, you know, how well we adapt to that genetic difference. But but you know, yeah, there's just so many factors and we're finding out more all the time, and we are not finding it out from from the yeah, from our esteemed mister Kennedy at all.

to me, and I'll never forget it. But yeah, you would think that the educators would see that it's still a functioning person. You just need to tweak the educational system a little bit.

different you know, it's not efficient. It happens at different times with different people, but even more so, Yeah, with neurodivergent folk. And I do think that there would be a lot of benefit and letting them approach things differently. My own kids, all of whom are on the spectrum.

We did do, you know, thanks to the pandemic, we did do a lot of stuff homeschooled, And what I found is that my kids really thrived that way because they're very autodidactic and they were able to sort of we let them approach all of their subjects through things they were really interested in. So they were very motivated that way. They're very motivated to dig into things and learn, and you know, they might spend all day on one subject.

You know, they might spend all day looking at something with chemistry, or all day looking at something of the math, and you know, school system you have to make these transitions all the time, and transitions are hard for autistics. They're hard for adhd yars. You know, it's difficult. And it also sort of implies that we should be the

same good at everything. And for the most part, autistics have this sort of what we call a Spikey profile where some things they really excel in they'll be way above grade level, and some things they just will have a lot of difficulty grasping or demonstrating, depending on the context. So it would be very beneficial, I think, for us to approach education differently and more individualistically, and we have

a lot of lip service to that. There's a lot of talk about differentiation and education and how different people learn different ways. But it's really done on a very micro scale, like well, we'll do some stuff as group work and some stuff as lecture, and that doesn't quite get to it. You know, I feel like the whole structure doesn't. You know, if the structure is made for this sort of common denominator, it's made for the average.

It doesn't serve autistics. And we see autistics very often be pushed either into you know, remedial education or pushed into gifted education. And either one of those is a sort of marginalization. Yeah, you know, either either one of those is a sort of way to kind of get it out of the way of the rest of the class and makes makes there be a difference, and it's uh, yeah, so it can be hard on either side of that.

And and yeah, a lot of autistics might be held back in a class, not because they're not smart enough, but because they're either you know, one subject in particular, they're having trouble grasping, or maybe even just socially they're not thriving. And teachers will say, yeah, they could use

another year here because they're really not right. But if you when you think about it's kind of weird to really, I mean, as an adult, we never hang out with just people born or year, you know, like like of a certain vintage like we you know, like we're able to spread out and talk to lots of different age groups, and I feel like that would really benefit us socially as well.

an overall picture. And the sort of typical way to do this, and of course be thinking of this and lots of different variations, The typical way to do this is to see things as a sort of umbrella concept and through that to sort of like be able to

assume some details. And this makes it where it's a lot easier to understand certain settings in certain situations because you're looking at things as it's sort of interrelated, and you're using past experience to advise your current experience, and autistics tend to see things much more individually than that. So a good example that I always try to pull out because already this feels very nebulous, but a good

example is sort of pull out. Is I used to teach this course on media literacy, and we would talk about advertising, and I would want students to sort of analyze these print ads. And I found that they weren't instinctively very good at this, you know, because advertising is meant to be more not noticed than anything else, meant to sort of get a message to you pre cognitively. So I wanted them to sort of strip down how

this is happening. And I'd say, okay, we're going to for every ad, we're going to look at three levels. Level one is what do you literally see in the advertisement? You know, what is there? And then level two is what's the intended meaning? You know, the advertiser wants you to come, have some sort of meaning to walk away with. Most people can understand this because it's made to be understood, and I go, but level three is what kind of stereotypes, what kind of social norms are we you using to

make that intended meaning come across. And I thought this was a brilliant way to do it. So we look at the first ad. I would show this add up on the board, up on the screen and I'd say, okay, so level one, what do we see here? And a lot of students would go, coke is delicious and refreshing, and I go, no, no, I go that's the message, right. I go, okay, so what do we see? And they go happy people like coke? And I go no, and they go, coke makes you happy? And I'm like, no,

what do you see here? And I finally would have to say, we see a woman in a swimsuit, smiling holding a can of coke, and they'd go oh yeah, yeah. And it's just kind of like the top down processing jumps to what does this mean? They don't they? Looking at all those details is cognitively draining. And that's really the thing is that most of our brains aren't really concerned with bringing in stimuli. It's concerned with filtering out

unnecessary stimuli. So our brains want to focus us like a laser, on what, you know, evolutionarily speaking, what can keep us alive what's going to keep us functional, So it's filtering out a lot of stuff that it decides isn't important. And this's why you know, you're walking in the woods and the bushes rustle that's going to grab your attention, but all of those leaves along the way aren't going to grab your attention if they're just blowing

in the wind. And an autistic person our filter is off. Our filter has not really tuned into that same like razors point of awareness, and instead lots of things are coming in that you don't want to. And that's why you know, autistics can have like the tag on their shirt bothers them, or the feeling of this fabric bothers them, because you're getting this sensory input that your brain would

normally filter out for most people. So instead we have taking in an excess of information and trying to siphon it down as much as we can. And I mean, you know, you can think of this filter as like a way to sort of tune in, like on a on a radio dial. And a lot of autistics are getting so much static that they're going to have a difficult time really discerning the importance of language, the importance of words, because other things will feel that same level

of volume, that same level of importance. And it I mean like I've heard, for example, that in many studies autistics have shown to have different ear structures than neurotypicals because over time they have not tuned into the same way of hearing that neurotypicals do. So, like a lot of us have audio processing disorder. You go into a restaurant that's noisy, and it's not that you can't hear the person next to you, it's that their voice is

swimming in all the other sounds. And the normal way to do it is, as you know, neurotypicals have like a mixing board in there somewhere where a guy is like tuning you in too exactly what somebody's saying. And that seems like a dream. I thought of that the other day. I was thinking, like I was watching a movie and noticing how in this restaurant scene you could hear the voices so well, and I was like, man, that must be fantastic.

called The Autistics Guide to Self Discovery. This is a look at neuro divergent types of people, people who think differently and perceive differently. I got to tell you one of the most irritating things that I had to deal with is these fake robo calls. Each day. Even when I try to block them, I seem to get them, and it's really really irritating. It's a real problem. I don't know. Sometimes the phone system catches it, but most often it doesn't, and I get these random fake calls

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a special package deal that will eliminate these robocalls. For all the details, go to incognitate dot com Forward slash Earth Ancients and get an exclusive sixty percent off the annual incognitplan. That's Incogni dot com Forward slash Earth Ancients. This is a way to remove robocalls and these irritating, time consuming bother some robocalls. That's I n COO g NI dot com Forward slash Earth Ancients. Yeah, you bring up you bring up the entire idea of a spectrum,

which you really don't like. But what is the autistic spectrum? And I think it's you just give us a hint of it. High functioning, less functioning, and so on. And because of this excess sensitivity, that becomes the issue with it on the high functioning spectrum. But talk a little bit about the spectrum itself.

it somewhere. And I can see how people get that message because we've been trying to sort of push this message of autistic people are different but just as valuable, and so it kind of bleeds into this notion of like, you know, all of us have different traits, and we do all have different traits, but the spectrum is is basically saying that, like, if somebody says that they're autistic and they don't seem as you know that the same as your nephew or your cousin or somebody else who

you know who's autistic, it doesn't mean that they're wrong. You know. We tend to see that as trying to people trying to sort of like weed out people who aren't autistic, Like, wait, wait a minute, you know my nephew is autistic and he has trouble with with with you know, potty training. You can't be autistic you're doing complex math. But those are two very different parts of the spectrum. And that's where it becomes really handy, is just kind of like understanding that this is going to

be lots and lots of different ways. And what we found is that any two autistic people, if you look at their their brain structures on a fMRI, any two autistic people will be more different from each other than they are from a typical brain. So very often we don't have as much in common with each other even as we do with somebody who's neurotypical. But where we do have our commonalities is just in being different. The fact that we are recognizably different from a neurotypical makes

it really makes us sort of a club. It makes us sort of be able to relate to each other in very interesting ways just because we're basically coming from outside of the culture, you know. And yes, so the spectrum is really broad. You have some people who present in ways that, especially if they highlight a lot of their really good skills, you would think that they were just somebody who's you know, just brilliant and doesn't necessarily

have a differently structured brain. But then they again, you know, this spikey profile. They'll have other things usually that they're not as good at, that they don't grasp as well. And they'll have other people who, yeah, they they're filtering out so such little like inputs or or their focus is so different that that they struggle with taking care

of themselves. And then you know, parents have to find ways to sort of like ways into that sort of communication, and there's lots of different ways to sort of to find that, but it is it is obviously like challenging, and uh, you know a lot of parents of high needs autistics will will sometimes take issue with autistics like me who and say, you know that's not You're not challenged. I'm not challenged in taking care of myself. That's true.

But my whole demographic of people who didn't know we were autistic till later, we are the most underemployed class, disabled disability class. We're the most over educated disability class, and we are also the disability class with the highest rate of suicide. So it's obviously very hard to be this way too. It's just presents very differently than that way.

makes everything kind of feel like rejection. Even if the rejection isn't there, you can feel it, like, you know, if you're invited to a part that's not a rejection, but we can very easily go, well, they just feel sorry for me because they saw I wasn't invited to the other eight parties, and you know, so you're instantly

you're feeling rejection from that. And then we also just have trouble in jobs, you know, because again because of that communication difference, we can be out of sync and be working really hard in your job, but always get on somebody's bad side and be a little bit off.

We tend to have trouble walking the line of between the parasocial relationship of coworkers and the very you know, rigid relationship of coworkers and how you're supposed to relate, and so these things kind of make us somewhat of an outcast. I've read statistics that say that eighty percent of autistics with a college degree have chronic trouble with employment. And that's massive, you know. And that's a lot of people. Yeah, it's a lot of people with a college degree. And

I mean I did that. I have four degrees, and I kept thinking, how many degrees is it before I don't have trouble you know, getting a job and keeping a job. Yeah, but since we're just a little off, there's this sort of suspicion, this sort of like Uncanny Valley effect of hmm, there's something about him, and that's

usually enough, you know. And this is why just for example, like my kids, they're always friends with the exchange students, they're friends with first generation Americans, they're friends with minority races, because their differences can be attributed to that. You know, they can go, you know, if something's a little weird or a little off, or they miss something and they go, oh, you know, a white girl, you know what, Like it

can be put off to that. And I mean to the point where even most autistics I know who are guys will say I got along more with the women, and most women I know will say I got along more with the guys growing up because even then you're in a little bit different culture, and those differences can be attributed to you know, oh what a boys know and it's you know, all fun and games on that level when compared to just kind of being like, wow, you're you know, a middle aged white guy like me.

But there's something different about your experiences making you act this way. Maybe there's something wrong with you.

But to me, and to most people I think who are sort of engaged with modern autistic culture, we like to say autistic person because it doesn't suggest that this is something needing curing. You know, when you say you know my friend who has cancer. You know, we don't say my cancerous friend cancer needs to be cured, cancer needs to be removed. We don't like that. But but you know, I am a bald man. I'm not a

man with baldness because I want to. I want to suggest that I don't need my baldness cured, that I that's part of my identity. I'm bald. So we really like to sort of we find it more affirming to say that we are autistic rather than like we have autism, as if it's a disease, as if it's a passenger. But it does go back and forth, and I generally will refer to somebody however they want to be referred to. But I do think that it's important to see it as like this isn't something that we want to get

rid of, that we want to cure. It's something we want to be able to adapt our surroundings to, rather than having to have us adapt who we are to our surroundings all the time.

fit both of us. Uh, And that's it's hard to tailor things to the individual, like going into a job or something. But we are sort of starting to see that it's being treated more like a different experience. I have a friend who has a son who's autistic, and she just and he's very young, and she describes him to other kids who're going to meet him. He moves through the world differently, And I like that sort of take on it, that he moves through the world differently.

He's paying attention to different things, He's experiencing things in a different way. Some things that would like scare the be Jesus out of other kids, he finds thrilling because he loves sensory input. And then some things that are really benign and kids might like, like you know, a dog might scare him because it's unpredictable and it's it's feels feels very wild to him. And so yeah, just a sort of different way of being. And I think

we're really starting to see that. We're starting to see more books written this way, more things saying like, you know, you have to find some individual tools to make it through this world, Like you know, maybe you need a roommate for your life so that you don't have to work full time. Maybe both of you can work part time and support each other and you can find a

different way of again moving through the world. World. Because we're in this system that assumes a lot of normativity that a lot of us don't come with.

chemical addiction, eating disorders. I think now that I'm talking about, I think it's eighty eight percent of autistics will have either an addiction, an eating disorder, or you know, gambling addition, sex addiction, something that they use to sort of like deal with the anxiety and deal with the challenge. And like I myself had an eating disorder, and I thought that it was my only problem in life. I thought, man, if I can just get rid of this eating disorder,

everything would be fine. And it turns out that really wasn't the case. I got rid of the eating disorder and found myself like anxious and nervous, and I and it was like I uncovered all of these places where I like you know, I was piling all my problems in my head there. So yeah, so coping can be unhealthy, and of course healthy coping mechanisms like you know, I go for a run every day. That really helps with anxiety. And you know, I'm gonna be anxious my whole life.

Where if I'm no, I'm going to a situation where I'm very anxious, like an airport or something else that's

that's loud and crowded. I'll wear a compression shirt and that sort of constricts your blood vessels in a way, so your heart isn't working as hard, which decreases the physical aspects of anxiety and basically tricks your body into thinking this isn't as Yeah, it goes, oh this, this isn't as anxious inducing as I thought, and it's it's a wild feeling and a lot of people don't like a compression shirt, but I love it.

yourself do this. And you think everybody else is working the same way, but for the most part they have synced in with their mirror neurons to the same ways that everybody else has and ours are underactive. So we are, you know, sort of making ourselves go through these motions, and that means having a lot of anxiety. You know.

They did an experiment where they showed typical college students and autistics college students these videos of just normal everyday interactions, and they found that the mirror neurons and the typical students would light up seeing these two people talking or flirting or whatever, and as if they were sort of like experiencing the same dynamic as the people in the video. But the autistics had their mentalizing that work light up. So they're mentalizing that work is trying to figure out

what's going on. So instead of feeling like they're part of the scene, they're like, wait a minute, are they flirting? Are they not flirting? Is their tension here and there? So they're analyzing it and this leads to again a lot of anxiety because they're mentally working so hard. And the number that always comes up is that on average, an autistic person's brain is working forty two percent more

energy than a typical brain. And that's again, our brains are made to they understand that they use more more of our energy than other mammals do, so they really want to not think as much as possible, so, you know, jumping all the way back down to top down processing. If you're able to see things through their umbrella concepts without having to consider everything individually, then you're processing a lot less. Where if you take eleven pennies and put

them in somebody's hand. One person might go, I have eleven cents and see each penny as you know the concept of a penny, where some autistics might go, I have eleven different coins that are all very simil alert, but they have many differences, and to be aware of all those differences takes a lot more energy.

many of us. You get into some science in this book, and you apologize that to the reader that we don't want to get too full of size, but we do want to bring some of this information in because it's important. And one of the things I want you to describe, because it's I think it's critical, is what you call synaptic pruning and This is kind of what you just described where the autistic brain might overwork on a certain

topic or an involvement or an issue. And I want you to describe why this is an important concept.

happen in Mandarin that don't happen in English. But by the age of five, if you haven't been exposed to that sound, if you haven't been exposed to other people making that sound, you have taken that synapse out of your head. Your brain has removed it to use it, to use that those same neurons for something else. So it cuts away different parts of different connections that don't need to be used. So yeah, yeah, so this is.

do that still. So yeah, so we prune away things that we essentially feel like we don't need based on the world we're seeing around us, and a lot of that is guided by those mirror neurons, which is the same sort of function like if you see somebody get punched in the stomach on television and you kind of feel it, or you, you know, pick a print, prick a palm with a pin and you feel it in your hand. Those are your mirror neurons acting up, and

you're feeling what somebody else is feeling. You're going through what they're going through, and so, gosh, I'm sorry. This interesting fact that if you show again that let's take a pin and you prick somebody's palm with it, most people will feel that if you do it to an epe on television, most people will feel that. If you do it to a lizard, people don't feel it. We have no camaraderie with reptiles. It's weird anyway. So that's so this is how like intricate and weird brains are.

So we're exercising different connections and if you don't exercise them, they'll usually go away. But autistics, since we have underactive mirror neurons, we're behaving in different ways and we have this abundance of connections that we may or may not use, but they are not trimmed away in the same in the same measures. So by the time you're an adult, there's different times where the trimming really happens. When you're three,

when you're seven, when you're twelve or fourteen. By the time you're an adult, a autistic person will have something like thirty three percent more synaptic connections than a non autistic because the brain is still going like, well, we might have to use this, we may have to do this stuff because you're overthinking and overworking different functions in order to try to fit in instead of being very efficient.

And so that's really what masking is is behaving trying to behave within the realm of the synaptic connections of people around you, but you still have these other ones happening that either you know, or out of sync or out of line or or whatever. So yeah, it is.

and it's acceptable and it's cool. An autistic person is

still doing that code coding. They're still trying to behave a certain way because themselves it's a much sort of a bigger experience of who they feel like they are, and they basically try to match the expectations of people around them, where the typical way to form a personality is that your personality sort of gets finalized in your early teens and you have trimmed away things and you've exercised certain connections and then that's kind of who you are.

And you know, personality scientists they have a lot of fun with theories about what a personality is, but essentially, a personality helps us to connect with other people and work with other people, and the autistics have to do this very manually, you know. It Really it feels a

lot like you're trying to fit into another culture. So if you were going into a party with a lot of Australians and you were trying to convince them that you're from Australia too, that's what it would be like, you know, and like you might be good at it, you might not. You might try to pick a really remote region of Australia where you're from, so nobody's going

to relate to it. But it's definitely, you know, trying to fit in rather than just fitting in, and that's sort of difficult just because people are very narrow in general with what they see as fitting in and there's a you know, we usually hang out with people a lot like us, and there are very few autistic spaces that I've been to where there are a lot of autistics together at once. And a good example is for me, as a Rubik's cube competition my daughter. My daughter competes

Rubik's cube and she's very very good. She can solve a Rubk's cube in six seconds and I know, right, and she still hasn't, you know, even taken third place in any of these things. But you you come into this space with all of these autistics of different ages, and their behavior in how they interact with each other

is really various. Like there's just a lot of different things happening in that room, and yet everybody's really getting along because they have this one thing that we're all talking about and that we're all relating to and that we're all comparing things with, and they're all you know, working on different kinds of cubes at different times, and

it's really it's really nice and exciting. And it's the one place where I've seen, you know, my daughter, for example, just be able to relax and be herself and make lots of friends, and she feels like in control there because she's not editing herself, she's not trying to fit it into any sort of box.

so forth and so on. What are your suggestions? How do you go about do you evaluate the individual? Are there are there some tried and true programs that you integrate into your teaching.

be accepting of that. There's nothing saying that that that'll work, right, So sometimes we do have to sort of like try and read the room differently, but with the understanding that if you're going to do this, you know, maybe be looking for another job, or find lots and lots of ways that you can keep doing things for yourself outside of your work so that you're able to use that bandwidth and function at home, because a lot of us get to a point where we get home from work

and we're just so exhausted. We don't have any hobbies or interests or social life because we're just exhausted from trying to act like everybody else. So there's lots of different ways to sort of try and balance things out

and change your environment. But in general, you know, as far as like common tools of how to deal with that kind of thing, yeah, it's I think that the first thing that a lot of us have to do is really reconcile our identity, really take a look back at the way that autism has influenced our development, our growth, our history, and hopefully get rid of a lot of shame that may have come with that, a lot of shame of our you know, job history, social histories, and

be able to feel more comfortable as who we are. But that's it's a it's a long road.

But you know, but on the other hand, if you have a lot to say to your boss, and you know that after so much time, they're going to feel like you're just ranting, they're gonna like you have a lot of details, a lot of things to say. You could write it out and ask AI. You know, I'm autistic, this is what I want to this is what I want to communicate to my boss. How can I make

it work for a neurotypical person? Who's higher in the hierarchy than I am, and it might be able to give you some good tips or trim it down or something. And it may feel to the autistic person like, wow, what this is saying doesn't really capture what I mean. But sometimes it does, it just doesn't really to us. So there is that possibility for sure to be able to sort of use it as a translator. And I've tried to build some but it's just it's been very

mixed because again it's very individual. So it's possible that you know, there there could be sometime in the future a way to sort of solve some aspects of this communication problem by having the AI be very closely trained to the individual and understand them and then try to make that understood to somebody else. But yeah, in the meantime, there's you know, people like me who try to do that.

it's very good. It's very good at sort of like where like the normal DSM feels very clinical and it's from the outside. The CATQ really tries to get at things that you may be experiencing, more like how you experience social situations and things. And it's very it's very very.

other as well. And then yeah, one on one coaching is that professor soul as well, and that of course gives you the sort of individual attention you may feel like you need.

a free resource for Comuity members as well. But yeah, it's in general, you know, I try to try to make things for the the adhd TikTok attention span of around three minutes. It's a challenge because I'm very verbose, I'm not very efficient with what I want to say.

whatever our culture is. But basically an expansion, an expansion of what is considered normal and to have autistic folks feel, you know, grow up feeling normal, grow up feeling like, you know, I have a certain toolkit that other people don't have, and I don't have to hide to the things that are different about me.

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All right, that's it for this program. And when I think my guest today's Soul Smith in his new book, The Autistics Guide to Self Discovery, as always a team of guiltour Mark Foster and Feya Bavar. You guys rock all right, take care of you will and we will talk to you next time,