2e High Cognitive Intelligence - Anshar Seraphim

In the realm of cognitive brilliance, the stories that resonate most are those that challenge conventional perceptions and unfold the rich tapestry of human intellect and emotion. Lillian Skinner, the host of the **Gifted Neurodivergent Podcast**, introduces us to Anshar Seraphim—a figure of remarkable cognitive intelligence and a testament to the extraordinary capacities of neurodivergent individuals.

Anshar's journey from being predominantly nonverbal, with autism, to becoming a beacon of insight and empathy is nothing short of inspiring. Navigating through the challenges of a late autism diagnosis, sensory processing issues, and synesthesia, Anshar illuminates the intricate relationship between neurodiversity and personal growth. His story underscores the importance of understanding and accepting one's neurodivergence as a unique asset rather than a limitation.

An essential theme that emerges from the conversation is the profound role sensitivity plays in shaping one's intellectual and emotional landscape. Both Lillian and Anshar share how their heightened sensitivities have been pivotal in their journeys. This sensitivity, often seen as a hindrance, is reframed as a powerful tool for creativity, learning, and adaptation.

The dialogue takes a critical turn as it questions the traditional educational system's ability to nurture neurodivergent individuals. Lillian and Anshar explore the notion that the system, in many ways, stifles creativity and forces conformity at the expense of personal and intellectual freedom. They advocate for a society that values and cultivates the unique abilities of neurodivergent individuals, allowing them to contribute in ways that align with their innate strengths.

A recurring motif in the discussion is the transformative power of finding community—a group of peers who reflect and understand each other's experiences. For Lillian and Anshar, connecting with like-minded individuals has been instrumental in their personal and professional development. This sense of belonging and mutual understanding fosters a nurturing environment where individuals can thrive and explore their potential without fear of judgment.

As the conversation draws to a close, Lillian and Anshar contemplate the future of neurodivergence in an evolving world. They touch upon the potential impacts of artificial intelligence, environmental challenges, and societal shifts on neurodivergent individuals. The discussion points towards a need for adaptive strategies that leverage neurodiverse talents and sensitivities to navigate the complexities of the 21st century.

The insightful exchange between Lillian Skinner and Anshar Seraphim shines a light on the intricacies of neurodivergence and the untapped potential that lies within. It challenges us to rethink our views on intelligence, education, and societal norms. By embracing and celebrating the diversity of the human mind, we can foster a world that appreciates the full spectrum of brilliance and enables everyone to find their path to success and fulfillment.

The conversation between Lillian and Anshar serves as a powerful reminder that in the journey toward understanding and valuing neurodivergence, we are not just uncovering new ways of thinking; we are rediscovering the essence of what it means to be authentically human.

Contact Anshar here:
https://linqapp.com/anshar_seraphim

www.giftednd.com
copyright 2024 Gifted ND

Transcript

2e Cognitive Intelligence - Interview with Anshar Seraphim

Lillian: [00:00:00] Hello, everyone. Welcome to the gifted neurodivergent podcast. My name is Lillian Skinner. Today, I'm going to talk with somebody who is cognitively brilliant. Someone who is a perfect example of 2e, strong cognition. His name is Anshar Seraphim. He has a really amazing story. 

He has definitely been denied his intelligence for a long time. Now there's no denying his intelligence. I love those stories. I think that there are so many more out there because we learn differently. We need more context and Anshar's story definitely shows that.

We had such a great time on our podcast , we kept in contact. I have some processes, he has some processes and we're building one together that will hopefully get everybody who is nonverbal, a way to talk. 

 It's funny how these things work so easily and quickly when you meet people who are similar. That's what I want for the rest of you. I want you to realize that most of us are meant to be entrepreneurs and that when we meet each other, it's so easy .

Everyone's going to have to become an entrepreneur because the systems breaking, it's cracking, it's falling apart and all the most sensitive, brilliant [00:01:00] people are being shed right now. 

The very best thing in the world is when you find someone like you, and you're finally getting that mirroring and you realize how amazing it is to be mirrored and have people around you, like you. If you find those people, you will find success. If you don't, find those people, you will struggle. 

When you don't and you find yourself apologizing for being you and that's not okay. You're amazing. We need to get you around people like you.

So please welcome with me Anshar to the gifted neurodivergent podcast.

Anshar: Oh, thank you so much for having me. I have an interesting story.

I was actually about 75, 80 percent nonverbal with autism until about age 11. Then Very slowly, I started to socialize with others, but I came from that generation before we were handing out diagnoses like paper pamphlets to kids. I know at the median age of diagnosis now is about 4 years old, and I didn't get my diagnosis until I joined the military. I was 19. I had to retroactively evaluate my life with new information, which was [00:02:00] a big adjustment for me.

I still face a lot of challenges. I didn't get my driver's license until I was 37 years old because of my sensory processing issues. I also interestingly enough, have synesthesia. We can probably get into that later. I have an almost autobiographical memory,

 Intake of information for me, 1 of the ways I describe autism to people who don't understand it is it's like having to look at the whole world through a magnifying glass.

 You're constantly getting bombarded with information. And over time, your brain starts to learn its own way of coping with that intense amount of sensory input, whether that's ordering that information and categorizing it and storing it or trying to interrelate. Sometimes it's just so overwhelming that we just shut down. For me, I had that social experience that a lot of neurodivergent people have where I had this intense desire to socialize with other people, but I didn't know what it should look or sound like. I remember being 10 years old on the playground with other kids.

 I knew I wanted to be closer to them, and I wanted friends. I had a, I don't know. A little bit of a warped idea of what intimacy social intimacy was like. [00:03:00] So I used to chase the other kids around on the playground trying to kiss them, , because I didn't understand, social reciprocity all that, and I didn't talk much. I had a lot of challenges.

 Once I did get that neurodivergent diagnosis at first, I didn't really know what to do the information. I was actually homeless in 1 of the coldest cities in the United States for 11 months while I was trying to figure everything out. I made a mistake that a lot of neurodivergent people do, which at first, I tried to mask. I tried to learn how to emulate social behaviors of other people in order to be able to try to blend in, make friends because it was so important to me. But what I didn't recognize in that epoch of my life was that the attempt to gain the verisimilitude of, whatever social group I was trying to integrate into, it actually really harmed me because even if you're successful, you know that's not you.

So if you do get the love and acceptance that you're looking for from doing that, then you will always doubt the authenticity of it because you're not being yourself. Then you'll secretly hold the belief that other people wouldn't [00:04:00] like you if they knew who you really were. So I wasn't able to recognize that was a self effacing and sabotaging self sabotaging strategy for coping at first, and I put a lot of effort into it. I did get some positive things about it. It's like putting on that anthropological pith helmet and going and living with the tribesmen for a while.

So I got to observe, social culture and social transactions and things that I felt excluded from. But I always felt like an outside observer, T hat was always complicated by my sensory processing issues, which was complicated by my synesthesia. And I was raised by 2 music teachers. My grandmother's crazy. She teaches and plays, 23 instruments.

My mom teaches and plays 13. I'm the dumb 1. I play 5. I would come home from being overstimulated at school, and there would be, sisters and brothers of music lessons in my room, playing in my room and breaking my toys. I didn't have anywhere to retreat to.

There were little kids, destroying Twinkle Twinkle Little Star on violins, and I would go and lock myself in the bathroom. And I would turn on the extra hot water in the bathtub to, numb my skin so that I could lower my sensory threshold And then get my ears below the surface of the [00:05:00] water so that I could try to, stim a little bit and attenuate that input. To this day, I actually went back to that strategy, because as an adult, every once in a while, I have meltdowns. It used to be destructive. It'd be lots of, , clawing at my and then ripping my hair and all that.

 I tried to redirect that behavior and try to find, a quiet space and realize be able to recognize the antecedents of emotional dysregulation I'd be able to take charge of it. But it's been very challenging. 

Lillian: One of the things I'm completely resonating with you right now is that, music thing, because my parents were musicians. My dad's a musical savant. My stepfather was a musical savant. I had bands, every type of band. So one night it's country, the next night it's heavy metal. It was everything all the time. The whole floor is vibrating. There's no way to get away from it because there's a band in your living room. Everybody was always playing. Everybody was always yelling. Everybody was always talking . There was no downtime for me ever I was never once knew growing up that I was an introvert. 

Anshar: My synesthesia really complicated things because I do have chromesthesia.

I do have auditory tactile synesthesia. It's interesting because, [00:06:00] I teach applied behavioral psychology and cognitive neuroscience and psychosocial dynamics. I basically, that process of trying to escape the isolation chamber of my neurodivergence and having to take all those skill sets and break everything down. , I never expected that I would be teaching other people those skills, but the fact that I would my cup was literally empty, and I had to basically realign my special interest. Because I'd had, 50 special interests up until age 25.

, I would go on to 1 thing, and then I would finish it, and then I would go on to the next thing. I just asked myself an interesting question, which was, what would happen if I made my autistic special interest into applied behavioral psychology and cognitive neuroscience? What would I learn if I deep dove into that? It's an interesting metaphor. I did study mechanical engineering, mechatronics electronics, all kinds of things like that. 

So I like this metaphor a lot. But when you first start learning about circuit theory a lot of instructors will try and teach you the metaphor of water and plumbing pressure, which never worked for me. Know, I'm the kind of person who really needs to understand things at a different level in order to be [00:07:00] able to comprehend them. These little shortcut metaphors that that usually work for neurotypical people just don't work for me. I found myself seeking out the chemistry professor, in between classes and having her explain all of the movements of electrons and all of that so that I could actually have a fundamental understanding.

 For me, it was the same with my brain. Once I started to understand how the human brain works and how different psychological elements work in between people. It started to give me more of a rubric to be able to decide my own failures and successes and to be able to identify gaps. And so that was huge for me. But for me, when you look at a flower, let's say you don't see the same color as everybody else. You've got numbers of cones or rods in your eyes, different numbers of neurons in the occipital. But you have this experience, let's say, the color red. And you could point at a flower and say that's a red flower, and you'll be pointing at that same color your whole life. But a lot of people don't consider that experience of what that color looks like might be incredibly different or vastly different if you have, color blindness.

 So for me, when I had [00:08:00] synesthesia, I was seeing colors in the periphery of my vision that were associated with sound, and I was getting tactile feelings on my skin when I heard, like loud noises, and it started to overwhelm me. I didn't know that wasn't a normal, in quotation marks, experience for other people. So I was constantly baffled by I would watch people, listening to loud music or going to a dance hall or whatever and be like, how can they do that and wear that, loose clothing. I couldn't do that. , that would overwhelm the hell out of me.

 I just felt this intense sense of envy for other people at first because I didn't understand that they didn't have the same challenges that I did. So in some ways, I had to have a realignment of perspective because the basic human mistake is projecting your own experience onto other people and thinking that other people are going to respond to things the same way that you are. And people make that mistake in and at work and all kinds of things all the time because they'll project their own wants, needs, and desires onto someone else. We're taught this really terrible linear rule, as children, to treat other people the way that you wanna be treated. That's a fine philosophy for when you meet an absolute stranger.

But [00:09:00] Once you actually start to learn something about someone you go from what I call the going from the golden rule to the platinum rule, which is learning how to treat other people the way that they need to treated. When you're neurodivergent, people don't do that for you, especially if you don't learn how to self advocate and you can't identify reframe things for them. So I just spent a long time just apologizing constantly to other people. I always felt like I was the problem. That was a really hard perspective to hold on to self esteem and self worth and all of that as I was moving into being a young man.

 Lots of challenges. There were lots of challenges there. I think that journey has been earmarked with so much failure, but I started to realize that our conceptualization of failure as a society, that we need to work on that a lot. Because when we're watching children, if you watch, a child that's learning how to walk, an adult will smile to themselves a little while the kid's stumbling around and all that because we know what's at the end of that process, and we know that those failures are endemic to that process of being able to succeed. But there's this transitory phase, liminal phase if you wanna get an anthropology, where you have this coming of age [00:10:00] and after that happens, adults negatively evaluate failure.

 Even though there's not a person out there who's ever acquired a skill that wasn't just symptomatic to them and natural without failure to acquire it. But we've gotten this weird kind of judgmental element of social elevation in society where, we look down on ourselves and on others for failure. T hat was always confusing to me too. It made me feel again like I was the problem. A lot of it was, cognitive realignment, and then there were, obviously, the physical and neurological challenges.

Lillian: I think one of the indicators that our system oppresses creativity is the oppression of failure is the making of failure to be such a huge, big deal that you are shamed for it. They know who got an, A. They are not supposed to know who got an F, but we all know.

Grading uses shame to induce a very visceral fear of failure. 

I have to fail. My way of learning is through failing because in failing, I can learn all the ways I am eliminating doing it. For me, deductive learning is key. That's how it works for me and [00:11:00] mine. We are massive deductive learners. We're also top-down learners. So they're really stifling the brightest, most intellectual children in the manner that they're doing this, but that's kind of the whole goal. 

That's the creatives. The creatives must fail as part of the learning process and their job is to stifle creativity. It's to get you to slot into the system where you recreate for others, and you're not competing with the bosses and the owners and such of the system.

Anshar: It affects mindset 2, because, 1 of the most amazing things that you can do for your personal development and growth is to willingly and intentionally put yourself into situations where you're apt to fail where you're going to have to go through a process of growth and to be willing to expose yourself to challenge in order to be able to overcome that. 1 of the things I've learned about peer groups and reciprocity and psychology is that we have a tendency to surround ourselves with people who make us comfortable not changing. There's a desire to get a sense of social comfort so that we don't negatively self evaluate as a result of this failure culture.

1 of the things I [00:12:00] had to grow out of was develop a willingness to fail and to put myself into situations where I knew I was going to fail often in order to be able to get past that failure and grow. That was, especially with the self esteem problem, a really big hurdle ,for me to overcome. Because being willing to put myself into a situation where I knew I would be negatively socially evaluated, that's a problem. It does make me wanna segue into something that I think I need to mention, especially since this is a neurodivergent podcast. There is a gigantic social problem that We have as a culture, as a society with assigning symptoms as character traits. 

 It's weird because when you're neurodivergent, unless it's, comorbid with other physical challenges, it can be an invisible disability. , if you had a friend that was in a, let's say, a wheelchair or something like that, you wouldn't get mad at them for not helping you move. But if you had a friend with ADHD who forgot your birthday. You might take that personally, and you might assign that as a character trait for them or an inability to, to finish projects before starting new ones. In the case [00:13:00] of autism, giving overly critical feedback without reference to the limbic response that it creates in the brain.

There's so many little things like that. So 1 of the things that I've had to learn to account for in that process is to recognize that the default for other people who don't know that you're neurodivergent, who don't understand what is different about that experience that they're going to be exposed to traits that they would normally negatively associate. When I was trying to get the social thing under control , as a person who's an intensely critical thinker, when I'm really invested, I will give lots of critical feedback because that to me shows that I'm being passionate. I'm actually reading or looking out what you've shown me, and I wanna give, the this work. This didn't.

 I didn't understand that there were a bunch of emotional responses that went along with that for other people. So in the end, what it meant was whether I was constantly changing the topic to something that I knew more about in order to be able to feel more confident or a lack of, a eye contact or being able to use my face with microexpressions or the inability [00:14:00] change the tonality of my voice in order to be able to reflect my emotional state. That to other people, absent of any additional criteria and understanding of my symptoms that they would assign those things as character traits. What I found was that I had this experience of Every time I was myself, people thought that I was being a jerk because if a neurotypical person did those same things intentionally, they would be being a jerk. People always assume your intentions, and that's another hard lesson that I had to learn. That ladder that I had to climb, I had to slip down on those rungs several times in order to be able to overcome that, and that was definitely a journey. 

Lillian: I completely understand what you're saying and I agree. You wish other people would change. I don't actually see any space for other people to change. I think that we have to change in the sense that we have to value ourselves. 

I see that average people are even more trapped into the societal expectations. They're conditioned into them at a somatic level that they cannot break free from. , many of us can because we have more access to our subconscious [00:15:00] it's part of our higher sensitivity. 

So we can actually uncondition ourselves or condition ourselves in a way that's easier for us. We have all of that high plasticity of the brain. But it is hard because we are going against the masses. , coming out of the baby and being told as soon as you. Basically interact in a group that you're doing it wrong, that you don't know what you're doing. 

 I remember showing up in kindergarten, I had been so controlled , told how to talk and walk and move through the world that I sat there with my hands in my lap and watched everybody else. And didn't know what they were doing when all they were being was normal children. 

I had been so censored as a child that I didn't know how to be a normal child. I still don't know that I know how to be normal I was so afraid of doing anything that I really was blank, like you were saying. I would respond to people because my parents were very insistent on that. 

I was giving scripts about me having to serve the other person and meet them where they were at. But I didn't know who I truly was. When I had children, I finally learned because I got enough [00:16:00] mirroring and reflection of myself back from them. 

Especially because I took time off with my children and I pulled them out of the system. I really got to see how they naturally move through the world. I always found it fascinating because I had no idea how I naturally move through the world. When I saw myself reflected in them, I was able to see what parts of me I had added and what parts of me were naturally me. 

 I just accepted them because I love my children with such deep love that the idea that I couldn't accept that part of them was not possible. So of course I could accept in me. It's funny because when I meet with people, when I go into different groups for other neurodivergence, I do not have the fear or hangups that they do. 

I have accepted that I am supposed to move through the world this way. What I think is if other people can't accept us, we should just accept each other and make our communities because it is not on us to change the world. We will change it by being us in our space with people like us. And they will come and join us and change for that.. 

Anshar: Being sensory [00:17:00] seeking or sensory avoidant even can create some big problems for kids in school. Because if, let's say, you're sensory seeking and you're constantly trying to get new stimulation and tactile stimulation. Are you trying to attenuate the input that's going into your brain by having some kind of input that you're able to control? In the case of autism, that could be that could be something like rocking, for example.

 You're getting that middle ear response, and you're being able to attenuate that input. So when you're feeling overwhelmed, there is that tendency to sway or to move or hand flapping or there is a need to be able to create consistent sensory input. It's like a spoonful of sugar to make the medicine go down when you're being overwhelmed. What happens with educators is they're you know, already classroom sizes are too large and all of that. There's an element of that. But If you're already trying having trouble trying to get 30 kids all marching in the same direction to learn their ABCs or whatever, and then you've got another kid who's, , constantly derailing to go off and grab something else so that they can make input bite size enough.

That frequently gets mislabeled as things oppositional defiance disorder and all of that [00:18:00] because to them, they feel disrespected of the process of trying to educate And, ergo, they assume and assign symptoms as character traits, and I see it constantly in the public education system. I have my own experiences with it. Although in fairness, when I was in school, we're talking about back in the eighties and the nineties. Generationally, some of that stuff has changed. But There is a market something that's going on now that really bothers me, which is the way that some of the approaches for For IEPs and ADA and all of that at school, a lot of it seems very directed at trying to make the environment better for the teacher rather than for the student. 

That can be a big problem, in my opinion, because without them knowing that they're doing that it creates a very hostile environment for the child for learning and for being negatively socially evaluated by their peers, by the teacher, having their work, all of that. 

Lillian: You say it in a much nicer way than I say it, actually. I see it even more nefarious or more cruel. I think that the whole system is set up to take the most [00:19:00] extreme outliers, the most gifted kids and forced them into being the scapegoats. I think that the teachers are taught to basically use us as the scapegoats. 

I think it's set up to destroy us because if you cannot be conditioned, then it must destroy you. So for me, this is a very purposeful effort.

Anshar: It's not that I disagree. I don't like using hyperbolic language like that because all it does is elucidates the limbic response in the listener, and then it's even harder to get them to see if they're doing something wrong. I've learned to choose my language more carefully, but it's not that I disagree with you at all. 

Let me give an experience. As a person with autism with sensory processing disorder, my brain does not have the ability to Broca's and Wernicke's area for speaking and listening, it doesn't have the ability to isolate conversation. If I go to, a, greasy spoon breakfast place or something like that. I hear all 60 people in that place all having their conversations at the same time. Whereas, a neurotypical person has the ability through the focus point of their attention, a combination of [00:20:00] reading lips and focus attention and all of that for their brain to naturally lower the volume on the other conversations in the room so that they can focus on what's going on. So the more speakers that are present in a room, the more my heart rate, my blood pressure, everything elevates. Becomes more and more physically overwhelming. I have to take sensory breaks.

 In a classroom with a bunch of kids, they're all having little conversations and throwing paper at each other. There is a a social process of development that goes on in child development psychology where children are trying on roles. 1 of those roles is being a bully or being a jerk or, this or that or and they're all going through that process at their own speed. All of that is going on in the room at the same time that this teacher is trying to get you to look at the board. For everyone else in the room, they're able if they're looking at actually focusing what the teacher is doing, That input that's going on in the back, it gets quieter and quieter the more focused that they are.

For me, the more focused I get, the volume goes up and up. I'm paying more and more attention to everything that's going on. So I had this experience of constantly getting overwhelmed. they would [00:21:00] give the kids a break. Right? Then during that 5 minute break, you stressed me out more than the entire lesson did.

You gave them a break, and you put me through hell. Then you're just like, now we're ready to go back to work. I'm like, no. I'm ready for a vacation from my vacation. 

Lillian: Yes. That's a very key thing. I think that recess, any time that was just with the children was actually really scary for me. I remember living in pretification of those moments. The opposite of a break was occurring. Everybody else is getting a break and you're being thrust into the truest hell when you're already in a little higher level of hell before that.

Anshar: Thank you very much. That's the problem with not understanding how that inputs affects people differently. That's a very simple example. But to address some of the systemic issues in education.

We frequently punish children for being exceptional. And 1 of those things that manifests as, for example, is homework. Think of how frustrating it is to already know something, To have it repeated to you every day because no 1 else gets it. [00:22:00] And then to be assigned a bunch of busy work at home, Writing out the stuff that you already get for the benefit of the people who don't get it when you're already feeling bored, disengaged, and bullied and sensory over processed by all the people that are around you. It's for reasons like that a person like myself I mean I don't wanna go all self aggredizing and say I'm, high and mighty above everyone else.

 I have my flaws, but I'm a very intelligent person. I literally got d's and f's in school because of those factors and more. I would ace all of my tests, and I wouldn't do any of the homework because, personally, I felt like it was a waste of my time. It was almost insulting to me that I was already during all of that. On top of that, you want me to write out the stuff that I'm having to listen to you say over and over again force feed into these other people's ears, and it started to make me less and less engaged.

The thing that I see with ND kids, and this is just my personal experience, so feel free to contrast. Is there they almost develop a resentment for education for the school process, and it becomes like going to the dentist. It's something to run away from to avoid. , so you try to get them to do homework at home or do whatever, [00:23:00] and They almost switched into a fight or flight response because they've been exposed to this environment where they're literally put through hell, and then you're trying to bring it home where they're supposed to feel safe. 

Lillian: I have a similar experience. It is hell I had the fight or flight for school. I hate school passionately. I don't see any value , for me. It was just trying to sit through the day without wanting to scream and tear my own skin off. I couldn't focus on what they wanted me to focus. There was too much going on in the classroom. Everything about it was torture. 

I always internalized that and made myself feel like I had to deserve this for some reason. But I do want to also add that going to school. I obviously never met anybody else. Like you who processes as quickly as I am, because I'm not actually thinking about what I'm going to say next, waiting for you to finish, because they're already know where you're going. This is so amazing. 

It's that part that is most torturous. There's no respite from the fact that you're constantly being put in a place where everybody's talking slower than you everybody's talking is if you [00:24:00] were the outlier horror and you have nobody telling you that it's okay to be you. So you have all sorts of damage from that. 

 I think it's horrifying that the medical industry, keep wanting us to try to be average. Like that's the ideal. My life is so much easier. The only part about it, that's hard is actually dealing with average as they struggle and have so much emotion and are projecting it on me. All I'm doing is being a mirror. 

Lillian: I feel very fortunate and I was able to figure out how to get out of the system and start working for myself because I would not be successful in the system. I had to work so hard. It cost my physical and mental health so much. Once I got out, I realized how I actually moved to the world. 

Then life became easy. We really are wired to figure it out for ourselves. It's why our sensitivity is higher it's so we can figure it out for ourselves. 

Now, when I go back into the system, I'm so very aware of how much easier it is for me to move to the world and how much everyone else is struggling. 

When I was in the system and I said, we should get out. People get really mad at me now that I'm out of the system. I say, [00:25:00] Hey, you know, you could get out. People, get even more mad at me. It is very upsetting to them for you to say something that seems really simple, but they can't picture. I think a lot of this boils down to the mental modeling. 

It's very easy for us to mental model things. If we're given the data, once we get around somebody and we could see how they did it, we can do it. But there isn't anyone in the system that really succeeds by getting out of it. So when I come back in, I feel like I'm just a trauma machine walking on everyone else because they want me to be like them. 

I'm not, and then I'm on the outside, but the reason I'm different is because I'm on the outside, I'm healthier.

I'm better for it I can't help, but notice. I have to serve them when I'm in the system, I'm constantly serving everyone else. Very few, if anyone is serving me . It's so much more work for me and everybody is set up in this, a weird emotional caretaking role of upward maintaining the hierarchy. 

And I don't even know what that is anymore. I don't do that with my children. It's very dysfunctional and I want to run screaming from it.

Anshar: The feeling is like watching a little kid when they say, [00:26:00] look at what I can do. Then you have to sit there patiently for 10 seconds while they do it, and you'd be like, You did really great. You're a great ballerina, but I feel like that with adults. 

It depends on the subject matter and the person and all of that, but Often, it can feel and I'm sure that a lot of people can feel this way on different topics and subjects. It feels like someone who, you cook for them, but also have to chop up all of their food for them, and you have to be very careful. They'll overreact if you put too many things on the same plate that are different colors. It's almost like you have to Create this style of presentation of information and then develop this almost endless sense of patience. It leads to this problem of having to take people in at least small doses and then avoiding that social connection.

The thing that I've heard commonly from people in that same tier is that Sometimes, regardless of friends, family, connections, everything else, they almost have to drop off of the map for a few months and take, a sabbatical from people because it's so overwhelming. During that point and maybe you can relate to this, maybe not. Maybe it's the synesthesia for me. It takes [00:27:00] me about 20 minutes or so of a lack of sensory input or a lack of negative emotional input before I start to be calm enough that I actually start to get some spoons back. If anything happens, if there's a knock at the door, unexpected phone call, or someone calls and I have to deal with their emotions and they don't understand why they're saying the thing that they're saying, so I have to be extra patient with them, it resets that counter.

Until I can get past that 20 minute window, it's only at 21 minutes that I get 1 minute of respite. So that counter keeps on resetting. It's like a chess clock. I feel constantly, I have to people are giving me this 20 minute break, and it's that 20 minutes that I need before I even start to enjoy the break. That's been really difficult for me too because other people don't have that same experience necessarily. . 

Lillian: Mine's actually about two hours, but once I hit my two hour limit, There's no, fixing it. There's no getting a break and coming back, I have to go home and lay down and recover. I dissociate because I cannot handle it. Then my somatic intelligence comes up and then I'm functioning on this different level. 

I'm [00:28:00] fairly convinced that all the overexcitabilities are just there because we have run out of juice in one form of intelligence and we're switching to the . That's just part of being so sensitive. And that's what drives intelligence and giftedness and sensitivity.

That's like, let's swap these two jobs and deal with whatever we need to, by doing that. After that two hours it's over I'm life of the party after the two hours . I'm really disconnected. I don't even know myself and I'm like, what is coming out of my mouth right now? It's this energy that I'm pulling, but it's definitely future energy because as soon as I get away from that situation, I'm going to have to go lay down. 

 I can see this particularly young boys, but also some young girls. The whole day of school they're dissociated and they are acting jazzed up because they have no energy for this. . Like they get their bodies still whipped up and they don't sleep enough and it just starts spiraling. This kid is actually just over their head. They're drowning. That's why they're so whipped up because they never get enough downtime. We are looking at this all wrong.

Lillian: It's interesting how we have different time limits and different filters and what we can and cannot handle . 

I [00:29:00] went to Podcast Fest in January. The second day, my third eye was buzzing and it felt like seizure activity. I have learned to stay in that and stay on this level of dissociation, because I can't do anything else. I had to exist. I was never allowed any downtime and I wasn't also allowed to have any reaction growing up. So I've learned to just exist in that space and nod. I think that's how I deal with it. 

Anshar: It can feel that way sometimes as depending on the severity of the over stimulation too. Like I said, I learned to put myself into really challenging situations. So when I started to get much closer to the end of this journey I did something that would have terrified me and made me run-in the opposite direction when I was younger, And that was of my own volition. I applied to work at a jewelry store. I did that because here is an environment where the value of the product is completely emotional and social.

You have to listen to people's stories [00:30:00] and their romances and get involved in the storytelling of that romance, things that I had a lot of difficulty being able to relate to. You have to excel in building personal relationships, being able to keep track of and maintain those relationships. And then to also if you're dealing,, with 2 people, like a couple, example, they have different methods of emotional engagement for being there, different objections. And you have to be able to answer those objections in such a way that you don't invalidate the other person, but you can deal with the primary objection of the person. And then on top of that I grew up with chalagynephobia.

I was terrifying fear of beautiful women. So my hands would get sweaty, and I couldn't talk. I looked at the ground all that stuff you see in movies That was cliche. That was actually me. Here's this industry that's dominated over 90 percent by women.

 I saw this opportunity. It's like, wow. That's absolutely terrifying. Let's do it. I just went into it. Every single day =What am I gonna learn today? What am I gonna work on today? What are my gaps? This is an feeling type dominated industry with those rah rah cheerleader types. Their [00:31:00] manager meetings and stuff, they'll flood 1600 people into a single hallway and play loud music and people are high fiving. So I had to expose myself to that environment because I knew that was the kind of environment that terrified me the most. I learned the most crazy stuff about myself Doing that. I did it for 7 years. By the time that I was done, I was actually teaching applied behavioral psychology applied cognitive neuroscience, interpersonal psychosocial dynamics, and sales to the entire Pacific Northwest up in Oregon to all the salespeople and the managers and all of that.

 I got to literally go to the point where I was actually teaching other people those skills in a feeling industry. That was disorienting and terrifying . It was an amazing opportunity for growth. I'm so proud of myself for doing it because it's really helped me read me in that Process of reinventing myself. 

Lillian: That's a really key thing what you just said. when I was younger, I went into things that terrified me because I knew that the only way I was going to get onto a better role where I'd have more control over my schedule or whatever is if I went through them. There was no getting around them. I was [00:32:00] never allowed that. So I did learn to go into the things that terrified me, as well. I did it for other people though. I never did it for myself. The idea that I would do anything like that for myself is still foreign. I am definitely the echoist. I did it for my siblings , for my mother when I was younger. Today I do it for my children, everything that I do, I do for others, because it is a lot for me to exist in this world. I get so much joy out of other people's being happy. I love so deeply that I do it for others . I don't want to do the anymore it's so much work to be me and then I think. No, This is why I'm here and I'm doing it for everyone. That's just how I live.

Anshar: My Job has this amazing thing where if you do your job well, you get to do other people's jobs too. 

 Psychology doesn't necessarily let you stop that behavior even if you know it's coming, which is always frustrating. 

 My blood pressure still goes up when I hear the word show your work. I will, but you don't want me to. It would be interesting for me to talk to your math savant because for me with number forms synesthesia and spatial sequence [00:33:00] synesthesia, I actually see shapes and colors in my head with reference to numbers and the way that they fit together or contrast 1 another, it describes mathematical relationships to me.

 I remember 1 time I was in differential equations in calculus and matrix theory in college, in community college. Someone was like, show your work. I was like, okay. This number is a purple triangle with a little dangly with a little flagella, and this 1 fits around the flagella, which means that it's a cube root. So because we it's a cube root and we know it's a perfect cube root, then we can use this method. He's how do you know that? Well, it's got a tail. 

Lillian: I don't know that ours works like that because I have asked her that. my synesthesia is physical. I have that really high mirror touch synesthesia. I also think my dissociation there's a blending there between my synesthesia. Like I was talking about the third eye buzzing. I really think we need to get together as a group and really go over our synesthesia because there's so many things that could be it. I've asked my daughter, do you have anything? Anything that helps you do that, , no, it's feelings. I know being an emotions savant mine's pretty clear too. I [00:34:00] don't know if that's just maybe the clarity of the different levels of savant ism, because who knows really. We should figure that out because it is very cool.

Anshar: It's interesting to me because even linear people. I say that because I'm actually a founder of a non linear thinking group called the Octopus Movement, and I've showing you the periphery of that during our interactions. That was started by Dr. Perry Knopert in the Netherlands. 

Basically, the idea is trying to show the world the benefit of nonlinear problem solving and how it Novel approaches and changes in cognition can actually change the way that we solve problems or make them even more efficient. Thinking back to that whole math thing.

Because now you're making me reexperience my education. I remember 1 time, I was doing a math problem, and At 1 of the steps, the number was 4 65 . You had to calculate the square root of that., that's approximately 21.5. And I went on to the next. And he's like, wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. How did you estimate that was 21.5?

I said, , 21 squared is 4 41 and 22 squared is 4 84, [00:35:00] and that number lies within those 2 outliers, and it's approximately halfway on the number of line between the 2, which means it's approximately 0.4 or 0.5. And there wasn't a significant figure that was involved in that, so I didn't need to be more accurate than 1 tenth. Then I just started to go back into my explanations. It's like, wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. 

That's very different for people. It struck me because I don't think many of us have a lot of good social realizations on Facebook. It's usually more passive theater for the brain. But I did see this interesting post where it was like a simple 2 digit math problem, like a multiplication problem. The person asked, describe the mental process that you use to solve this. Right? Because it's just basic arithmetic. And, notably, there's, 882 comments on it. Every single person, with almost no exception, solve that differently.

Despite the fact that we have, , that shared education and everything like that, that There is a way that we're supposed to solve problems, but we all develop our own novel methods. And then it depending on our strengths and our abilities and the things that are about us. we changed those methods. When I multiply a 2 digit number times 11, I that doesn't even take any effort my [00:36:00] head because,, it's 52 times 11, 5 plus 2 is 7. I just put the 7 in the middle, 5 72.

I move on to the next thing that I'm doing. But for someone else, they actually have to write it out and align the numbers and do columns and and then there will be things that are hard for me that are easy for other people. I think 1 of the things that's really lacking is an appreciation for the difference in our cognition. I don't think that we're taught to mutualistically appreciate our differences because we have the society That celebrates sameness. We want this equality, but equality doesn't really exist. What you wanna go for is equity. But people can't acknowledge that any more than they could acknowledge that it's a bad idea to try to legislate their morality. It's strange to me because there's a lot of self deception in that process .

A lot of it is just assumed to be true, which can be really frustrating too, especially, I think, for people like us. 

Lillian: We do really need to understand all the different ways we can learn because there are such a multitude of ways. for me, there's definitely none that in the system were covered. None whatsoever. They may try a little bit more now today, but when I was back in the system in the last century. it [00:37:00] was you did it that one way with their worksheets and there was no thinking about it in multiple ways. If you didn't get it, you were just dumb. So I figured out how to do it my own way. But I never really could get it their way because they had so many more steps than I needed and I'm a top down thinker, not a bottom up. Everything's about linear bottom up. 

, I knew that there's something deeply wrong with me and I wasn't going to fit in, but that said, I also know now that they're stacking, it's all that 2d. That was one of the reasons I went into this because I could never learn. I now have built applications around how I learn. I've built this somatic learning style for my kids. It's changed how fast they learn . I think with AI, it's going to be a of learning for us because we're all going to be able to customize how we want to get our information so that it becomes more engaging. 

 They have us all competing to be something that some of us are just not meant to be. They demean us and break us so that people feel this is the right way and it just serves the whole system. I can't help, but see how much manipulation is all there and it drives me insane.

Anshar: Psychometrics is [00:38:00] very interesting for that reason. Usually, when you're giving someone an IQ test, what you're really doing is seeing whether or not they can use the same methodology that you did in creating the problem, which means that your question in and of itself is specious.

 I remember having that experience with multiple choice questions where my brain was making an argument for every 1 of the answers. Because with the right amount of persuasive argument, each 1 of those answers could be equally valid. If you get lost in that process, Sometimes you can even forget what the final ask in the question is because you're like, all of these answers are equally equivalent or none of them are correct. 

Lillian: I think this is where all that anxiety comes in. That's was a real struggle for me. My brain used to wear out. Because I could see so many choices and I would have to figure out how to think like the person wanted me to think, but I can see so many perspectives. I had no clue. 

 Then add into the fact that also at my emotions substitute or shortcut for so much of my thinking. Because my emotions deliver whole concepts with a feeling and I can not think about the words. That makes it also very difficult. 

Anshar: If I say Velicore and you know that means the wistful [00:39:00] smell that exists in bookshops, you know the emotion that is associated with that, and we Just move on. 

Lillian: I can go all day on neuromorphic AI, how we're going to destroy that for everyone else, because we have so many shortcuts. The neurodivergent minds, we should just get together, have our think tanks because we will modify the way everybody sees the whole world with neuromorphic AI. It's going to be fascinating when we start figuring it out. 

Anshar: You just gave me an idea for new projects. Give me a second. That's gonna be a paper tomorrow.

They're actually creating a pick my neurodivergent pick my nonlinear brain.

 It'll be interesting to see, what because you're talking about cultivating think tanks. If there is an organizational methodology for being able to describe people's different strengths or the way that they solve problems, it might be very iteratively interesting depending on the problem to amalgamate a team.

 I totally resonate and agree with that. At the octopus movement, we're we're going into this thing called the Brainforest Alliance. We're basically trying our own version of that. 

I would be probably be remiss if I didn't say that right now, we're we're doing the production last part of the postproduction for a documentary on nonlinear thinking with the octopus So I'll have to share [00:40:00] that with you when it comes out. 

Lillian: Why do they call it nonlinear thinking though? That's not accurate. Everybody has to think linear to some degree, or we couldn't even tie our shoes. I always struggle with the nonlinear statement because I know that mine is big picture. I know that I make bigger leaps, but it's definitely linear. 

 So why do they say nonlinear?

Anshar: It's in comparison to the established modalities that people accept as normal. Non normative thinking. 

That's the problem with the invention of neologisms and stuff like that is that whether you're inventing a term or not, whatever relation that has to existing language is still going to create, observer bias on meaning. That's always a problem. It's so funny to me when I see 2 people arguing. What they're really arguing about is they're having a semantic argument about the way that feel about certain words because of their own personal experience. I feel like when you study psychology and anthropology and psychosocial dynamics, you learn that when communication evolves, it's like soul food. We had this basic system where we were, , warning our fellow pack members about predators or, trying to be able to communicate, meeting season and all of that. And then as we started to develop higher cognition, we try to use those same systems to be able to [00:41:00] transmit ideas and the use of tools and all of that. But it is a very crude smoke signal way of communicating. , I'm literally just, resonating my vocal cords and,, Grunting with certain, syllables to you, and then you have to go through the imposition of, okay.

What does that mean to me? And then what is the implied meaning? And what does this person mean? And do I know enough about this person doing for a And so even when we speak the same language, we're not really speaking the same language, and that really seems to cause a lot of problems. It seems like there's not enough of a higher level of understanding of those common problems in communication that It becomes a huge problem. this is all about existential authenticity to me because for me, It's all about self awareness. You know when you're dealing with a self aware person. Right?

Because they have the ability, 1, to be able to receive critical feedback without going into their limbic and getting all emotional. 2, they're reflecting on the things that they're saying, self editing, being willing to admit mistakes. But I think the marked difference with that is some people are just reacting to their environment. Their rats running [00:42:00] around in a maze. their reliability, their communication, their ability to solve problems, their loyalty, everything is just subject to the impulses of their current experience.

 That's really frustrating because then there's no consistency in that person because they're basically as reliable as their reactions. There's so many people in society that are like That . It creates that pain point that you're talking about, that feeling of everyone being destructive because they're unknowingly reacting to everything around them without even knowing why. 

Lillian: I agree that there is something missing. We have people who are moving through the world, following all these rules and they haven't developed emotionally or logically to the degree that they can have those deep conversations. I see that a lot in our older generations, I think that the younger generations are learning to talk a little bit better, but there was such a critical eye and expectation. You were talking earlier about making them character traits. I think that was so strong in the boomer generation the gen X-ers and silent generation, They were critical of anybody who was outside the norm. We've lost communication because people have [00:43:00] gone for being copacetic and agreeable over understanding or comprehending or having deeper relationships. 

 It became about what it appeared like to the outside and not so much actually how anybody was doing in an internal state. Now that we are so dysfunctional. , we have one generations begging and pleading for connection and then the older generations that are like, you don't get that. That's not part of the deal. It's about delivering and I delivered for you. That's sad. That says to me that the cost of delivering was much too high. It costs them their relationships and they were so alienated and isolated that they forced to do it anyways. We do have this massive breakdown in communication. 

In addition to having this massive breakdown in communication, the people who are the best at communicating the people who can communicate in ways that aren't even involving words. Knowing all the levels and ways we communicate is really important. I think synesthesia is very important. I think that. Our brain is communicating with ourselves with synesthesia. I think that we are taking the world in, interpreting it in really amazing and cool [00:44:00] ways. I think those are all things we should be exploring right now. 

, I don't know that we are, I feel like I'm doing it myself.

Anshar: They have no consciousness of what you're trying to say. It's almost like there's only 1 person putting effort into that conversation. To paraphrase Jonathan Swift, you can't reason someone out of a position they didn't use reason to get to in the first place. 

Lillian: I don't think anybody actually has reason for being right now. I don't know that our system will even allows you to have reason. As a part of why you're doing what you're doing. It seems like we're all just being part of the hierarchy. We have the slavery essentially in place serving upward. I don't understand why we don't just roll out, but I also realize that my mental modeling is exceptional. 

I can see how we could easily do that. I can see how all these things come together. They hand out all of these labels to us that are all dysfunction. When in reality that I don't see dysfunction there. What I see is dysfunction in the system and we're putting it on individuals. Why would we do that? We're doing this on children, little kids giving them drugs , after drug, like trying to fix them biologically when they're probably supposed to be [00:45:00] that way. 

Why the heck are we so stupid? But we've created a fake world. We have Terraform the world, we have psychopaths running things. So now it's just fit. Fit in or die. I don't agree with that. I think we need to pull ourselves out. Otherwise we're going to lose our minds and it's only going to get worse. I think for those of us who are outliers, we just don't have a choice. 

This is the only thing we're made to do. We're supposed to be outliers. There's more and more outliers coming out because we're going into a time where everybody's going to have to figure out. their own thing, because it's about to all fall apart. We obviously need some people who are going to be changing and rolling off and trying to prepare for what's coming so that. we can adapt. But instead of letting us do that, everyone's screaming at us to stop doing that, stop being that way, be something else. I don't really understand it. We've known since 1972, that we are headed towards this system breaking down. Now we know that we have ecological collapse in there. Why are we trying to make our children fit into the old, we know the old is going away. That's really scary to me. 

We're trying to figure out what our differences are and what those [00:46:00] differences mean. In the past we had people that had all these abilities and we've made them into mythology, but I think we're going to need them back. 

Anshar: Pick the right people to be the canary in your coal mine. 

 I can use my synesthesia for all kinds of interesting things. I can use my autobiographical memory with my synesthesia to generate physical gustatory olfactory responses.

So When I'm cooking, I can think of what a spice tastes like, and then I immediately, upon tasting what I'm cooking, know what that taste like when I add that spice. It's completely predictive because my brain can literally mix those inputs, and I know what it's going to taste like., But some people have olfactory tactile, and so when they smell something, they actually feel it on their skin. 

 I do use it for things like that. The other thing I use it as a mnemonic device. They do this as a test taking strategy. They say whatever it is that you had for food or a snack or breakfast or whatever while you're studying, that if you have that same food just before you go and do your test, that it can help you with [00:47:00] your brain storage.

Anshar: But for me, I have the ability to call up those things with my memory. Or when let's say I something or or I'm listening to a particular kind of music and it causes physical sensation on my body and colors. If I think about those sensations Or if I touch myself in the same place, it'll trigger the memory because olfactory and gustatory memory is the strongest form of memory in the brain. Knowing that I basically use it as a mnemonic device, much like someone else might, memorize something to memorize the order of the presidents or something like, What are just men? Men are just virtuous, honest, and true, petting their fitness pride bloodlines, and that's Washington, Adams, Jefferson.

They might use a mnemonic like that. For me, I'll just make an order of sensations and then associate that with what I'm doing and or make a visualization, let's say. That is so strong for me because of the synesthesia that it's way it works way better for me as a mnemonic, but it's not something that I could teach someone else. that would be based on what kind of synesthesia they have if they have it at all.

Lillian: What you just described emotions led learning that I built for my children, which is essentially what turned them into prodigies. It [00:48:00] uses their creativity as the way that they memorize, as the way that they follow information to figure out the end goal and figure out how to build it in the way they need it. Because I didn't get what I needed while growing up. I knew that the way they were making me learn it was steps I was never going to use. It was excessive for the way that my brain worked. So I taught my children to use their emotions to tell them what next steps Potentially could be or what next step to go with if they had a selection. We use it for test taking, we use it for Everything because we have so much knowledge and that snack thing is a .Prompt We can bring anything up from our subconscious by having a prompt So anything that brings up the same emotion does what you just described you're using the exact same thing you're using Way more complicated terms.

I have boiled it down to simple as possible because I was doing it with a three year old and that was important was making it as simple as possible. But it is this prompt driven thing. 

Anshar: That's the downside of having to learn other people's methodologies instead of inventing your own. But being able to teach the kind of critical thinking skills and the self awareness that is necessary for a person to synthesize their [00:49:00] own is something that's sorely lacking. I have a certain amount of excitement for artificial intelligence. I know that it's going to make life very difficult educators in the near future because using the existing hegemonic system, we're gonna have a whole bunch of people who are trying to basically circumvent that by trying get AI to do the work for them. Yes.

There's gonna be that frustration in the immediate future, but long term, as we start to learn how to ask more critical thinking questions, Yeah. I think that the future of education is gonna be less about memorizing facts because we already have the world's knowledge in our, pockets. But it's gonna be about epistemologically being able to separate information from knowledge and being able to, have enough critical thinking and understand bias and fallacy to be able to posit it questions and ask for information process things in the correct way in order to be able to better utilize that kind of technology. My hope is that as an educational shift, invariably, we'll shift to that. I'm sure there'll be some resistance to it because people like their systems.

But when we can get to that place, I think it will start to make people more self aware about the way that they learn [00:50:00] process and evolve themselves. My hope is moving into the age of AI is going to create A new generation of people who by virtue of the fact that they can excel with that technology have learned how to ask the right questions. That honestly, is a sorely lacking skill right now. The inquisitive element of wanting to challenge existing information, known information, being willing to change and alter perception.

 Now, we've degenerated as society into finger pointing. If someone doesn't agree with us, , we just hit the block button. Has become almost that cancel culture thing has become a thing that has kinda spread across a lot of different social avenues now.

My hope, at least my ardent wish, is that in that process of having To reevaluate the way that we use this technology, we'll start us thinking in different directions, and maybe we'll actually get some better critical thinkers out of it that actually take advantage of being able to alter their own cognition, taking their own perspective, their own method of solving problems or and being able to integrate that and basically use their brain as its own form [00:51:00] of AI. 

I'm dealing with this AI that does , this, and this. How do I ask questions, posit this, combat this, get away from this fallacy or this bias? , then turn that system inward. What kind of AI is your brain? What kind of things does it remember? Do you realize that your negative experiences have primacy, and therefore, You will remember with absolute clarity that job interview that went terrible 20 years ago, and then we'll keep you up at 2 o'clock in the morning with 1 eye open. That you will forget that thing that happened to you 10 days ago because, your biological system of memory favors negativity for survival. If you can understand that about your internal AI programming, if you will, then you will learn how to ask the right questions, state the right kind of input and output out of it.

Lillian: Agreed and I'm already there. I brought my children there, but it's a process that does take 20 years if you're not going through the school system, because it took me 20 years after going through the school system to learn it. So I put my children directly in it because I saw, this is not going to work. I really think that most neurodivergent children who are like you and I who have a multitude of different neuro divergences, they have the [00:52:00] ability to be prodigy. 

The problem is that we have a system that wants to make you a generalist, or they want to make you a specialist slash generalist, but you have to be a generalist as you move up through the system. We are completely formed the opposite way. We start as specialists and we become generalists. They do not get that our brain only has so many resources to become good at one thing, when you're a little kid, because you're growing and then you move through that and eventually you stopped growing and then your brain rounds out. But they will not allow that to happen. 

You described yourself nonverbal when you were younger because your brain was putting so much into your bucket, that it didn't have it to give it to the other buckets. You had to go back and learn it to a much greater degree than with being taught because your brain needed that context at that level of degree. That's how the outliers brain work. Why are we letting people try to make us average when we are the future? This is mind blowing to me. 

Prodigy is actually really simple. If you have a neurodivergent child and their brains only forming in that one area, what you do is you go into that one area and then that child is amazing. It's the way their brains are naturally made. So I pull my kids out, once they could learn on their own, and said, okay, what are you [00:53:00] interested in , good at, what do we like? We just go all in on that and they had their prodigies. 

 I've been trying to work on that for. AI build something that will allow the parents to not have to create this. But these kids aren't meant to be in the system. They're not meant to be tested. They're not meant to be all of the things that the systems making them to drive them to average.

These kids have a different projection and we need to go into that because that is where genius lies. Are we insane? Yes, clearly we're insane. We have been destroying the most sensitive, brilliant people. Now we need them and we're doubling down on the destruction, maybe tripling and quadrupling.

Anshar: In the past culture, , we celebrated our differences, and now we literally have a culture that socially elevates and denigrates, but we've created an entire industry based on it.

 I was listening to a radio show. It was from, 50 or 60 years ago, and they just had they had a housewife and a businessman and a person who worked in the military and a physicist. They would ask them a question, and then they would express their opinions about things and how they got to that conclusion. They would all respect the their differences and the different things about them. I don't necessarily agree with that point, but I respect that you have it.

Anshar: We're in a period of social discourse where it's like you're a bad person. [00:54:00] Blocked. 

But that's the social valuation of different traits and all that. Being able to figure out what kind of cultural changes we have to make in create that value again. Because at the end of the day, you have to get the sheep to all be running in the same direction if you want the wolves to get to be able to enjoy the changes scenery.

Lillian: Do you think that's possible though? I don't know that people are able to think like that. One thing I'm reminded of every day is that. I can easily think that way and people think I am a freak for it. 

 I do think that there's something that's changed in our ability. Most people seem to be so malleable that they can be made into something that's useful. I am however, hardwired from out of the gate that you can almost kill me and I can not be made into something that's useful as a tool. I am my own person, who's going on their own route. Why do we not have education system for that? This is what I'm trying to build. This is what we really, really need.

Anshar: Look at the contrast between the Renaissance and all the way in the Far East And what was going on in Europe in the time?

People would still be, throwing feces out their window in a bucket, know, if those [00:55:00] scholars and everything didn't come back from Turkey and Constantinople. To see how People can develop in different directions and how necessary it is to have strong positive cultural influences. If we wanna have those kinds of changes. Then we just have to fight for it and see what it could look like and hope. Otherwise, we just give up, and then it just becomes futile. 

Lillian: So then what do you see for the future for us? How do you see it going? Because we cannot continue to live in these cities. The cities will be too hot. 

I just saw an article about Kuwait city, having birds dropping out of the air dead because it was so hot. The sea was boiling. People couldn't go outside of the buildings with air conditioning, that's not sustainable.

That is just the beginning. For all of the cities that are in the warmer parts of the world. That's going to get warmer and warmer. We will not be able to maintain those cities. 

Anshar: Have you ever been exposed to John c Calhoun's mouse universe, mouse experiments?

Lillian: No, 

Anshar: basically, he posed the question. Whether or not you find this in the Agulist human society, that is a personal decision. I'm merely providing the substance of the information. Feel free to make your own judgments [00:56:00] based on it.

He basically took this limited physical place and put mice into it and let them breed, in captivity And ask the question, , if I supplied unlimited resources, food, water, bedding, all of that, but they had a physical limitation on the amount that population to the point that it got saturated, what would happen? And what happened was there was a genetic divergence that happened from overpopulation where there were these mice that he called the beautiful ones. Rather than engaging in mating behavior or any other stuff that would be, , normally important, they would go off to the side and they would just focus on preening themselves.

There's this interesting thing that happens when you get to population saturation in a society. Now whether or not that manifestation is the same in humans or if it's different or, , we could expect to see something different, I think that as population saturation continues, that is there's gonna be different genetic factors for natural selection that are also involved. But I think it also brings up the eugenics conversation, and that has become a , very bad word as a result of World War 2 and all of that. Let me [00:57:00] clarify what I mean by that. If you have a society that has medical technology, then the people in that society who would normally not survive, the people who are born with 3 rows of in their mouth or have a, , congenital heart defect or have their heart born on the outside of their chest or the people who, you know liver enzyme problems that we can now fix with technology or whatever.

We now have the technology to allow those people to survive and live a full life. Ergo, natural selection no longer removes them from the gene pool. If in ancient times, 10000 years ago, that person may not live to be 6 years old. So We now have to look at the future of the genetic population of the human race without some of the controlling elements that biologically would normally be there. Are lots of different ways for us to face that challenge.

We could continue to develop medical technology to the point where whatever variances are a nonissue. We could start to come up with gene testing and screening and in vitro fertilization and all of that to be able to selectively try and get some of those [00:58:00] recessive genes out of the gene pool without having to necessarily restrict things. But then there's the ethics of how do you actually integrate that into a society. I think 1 of the things that's gonna happen as we get into this population saturation and we continue to evolve with medical technology is we have to ask solves what our authentic response is going to be to that. And 1 of the things that happens is we avoid conversations until we have to have them, And the downside to doing that is then we're not prepared.

 I think that having those conversations now is really important even if we just decide that the whole thing's a terrible idea and shame on you for bringing up at least we have the conversation because we are we have to exist in the possibility that maybe, universal income is something that we have to consider with robotics and AI and everything coming out, lots of people being displaced in the job market, oversaturation of population. Maybe we're gonna have to live in a world that has multiple shifts where some people are awake during the night. We have night shifts and stuff, but imagine entire population of people because there's so many people. 

 But we could have hundred story Skyscrapers in our future where the bottom 50 levels are lit by [00:59:00] artificial illumination for an artificial daylight, and then the people that live on the top are all sleeping during the night. We have to live in different shifts because there's so literally too many people for the planet. 

There's literally so many interesting things. It creates a narrative for question. I think that we need to have those conversations because, otherwise, we're unprepared for things like AI. Like, when came out. Chat GPT came out, and we had a hundred and 150 million users on it in the first week. You compare that to, people getting on Twitter when it first came out or, people getting on, dial up modems when they first came out. , they have this thing called the diffusion of innovation, which is a sociological curve at which, things are accepted. That curve is changing because the cultural value of acceptance for new technology is also changing as a result of the generational changes that we have.

But we also have this really bizarre thing of reverse compatibility. I a lot of people who aren't in technology don't know this, but we had a lot of these next generation processors and stuff that we have right now back in the mid 2 thousands, but we weren't able to use them because we needed to have backward compatibility with 32 [01:00:00] bit applications and 16 bit applications and all of that in order to be able to still use all the existing stuff that we use. People didn't wanna reinvent the wheel and have a whole new operating system and rewrite all of their programs and all of that. I think reverse compatibility in our society is also something because people wanna hold on to that hegemony and hold on to those old values. There is gonna be a storm that happens, and I don't know what that saturation point is at which the needs of an increasing population are going to push past that limit and enforce those kinds of changes on people. 

Lillian: Why do you think the population's going to continue to increase?

Anshar: When you go to India, for example, the population is so dense that You can just travel 40 kilometers, and there's a dialectical change in the language. Because it's so close.

I think that's probably saturation point. But imagine a whole world that is at that saturation point. It's not that an existing population like that is necessarily going to get intrinsically way more dense. I think they're probably already to that saturation point.

We're getting close. It's a question of how many spaces do we have left in the world that aren't like that. I think [01:01:00] that is where that shrinkage will happen. 

Lillian: I don't see it that way at all. I actually think we're going to have a population drop because poverty coming. We're about to go through a great depression . The original great depression led to families, having a lot less children, not more. I also think that our systems have poisoned our environment so much our fertility is dropping. 

Somebody wrote an article on subject and was talking about gene selection in Africa, which to me is just eugenics. Selecting for autism. that would mean you and I are gone. Our autism would show up in that because my family all has autism. It's had autism through the eras and I don't think that you'd want to get rid of people like us. We're the people that are smarter. I saw a recent study that said, yes, it is autism that makes cognitive intelligence higher. 

 We are losing our mind here because at the same time we need the most intelligent, extreme thinkers we're doing eugenics and we're also talking about having more people like that's going to solve everything that will solve nothing that is the heart of the [01:02:00] issue.

Anshar: I'm an autistic person. A person with developmental disability talking about eugenics

that's why I found the movie Gattaca interesting just because it positive that question, if we have a society that already has that, what kind of cultural effect will it have on our morals, our values, our social Elevation, all of that. 

Lillian: Oh, I think that's already been done. I think that this is part of that whole process of eugenics. You first have to make them all think that autism's bad and forget that there are people who are brilliant because of it. That autism is sensitivity and not developmental disability that you can be born with it and we are actually developing the way we were supposed to

All of these things that we talk about with neurodivergence is the extremes. There are the extremes, but we're supposed to have species variation. Why would we not have the extremes? Why is average the sample of selection for ideal? Why wouldn't the savant be? Why wouldn't be people who are moving through the world with natural intelligence. 

 Because we are built in a hierarchy that's produced slaves and slaves have to be cognitive. They have to follow directions. They have to meet easier for their masters and they can't think too much. They can't use all that somatic [01:03:00] intelligence coming in .

 We have built a system that is really about valuing people as underlings. 

If you are not one of those people whose IQ is low enough, that you can turn into somebody who can be led around,,, an underling, then you are destroyed by that system. The system is not about making us our best. It's actually about dumbing us down. I puts something out on one of my pages about this monkey that was actually doing the job of a rail lineman, changes the tracks and actually passed all the tests that people are using. 

Our systems are not about making us our best. They're about making us slot in and make people money. They have nothing to do with making us our most intelligent, those of us who are neurodivergent, we don't fit into that because we really can't be made into things. But I do believe that we are definitely not cultivating people who probably could be doing amazing, great things because the system doesn't see a value in it. 

So put them into institutions. They tell you that they're not valuable. I think so many of the somatic gifted are destroyed by their families. Because their families are seeing them as a liability and not a value. You don't have children because you want [01:04:00] people to be producers. 

You have children because you want people to love and you want to cultivate and and foster them. That's why you have children yet. We've lost that in our society.

Anshar: I think what their selectors were would definitely be different, Hopefully, in an ethical system, especially. Is there a version of it that isn't inherently monstrous? 

Lillian: The whole system is meant to be a struggle for everyone. It's meant to force you to deny your somatic side. But it's horrific for those of us who are profoundly gifted. It's horrific for those of us who are extreme outliers. We're destroyed because we don't even recognize the neurodivergent gifted because they're that much of an outlier. 

I honestly think that the neurodivergence made AI to help us break out of the system so that we don't have to do this mindless crap that we've been doing for the last hundred years. 

Anshar: Here's something to consider about AI too a language based AI, , let's say, chat g p t, for example. It what it's essentially doing, Right?

 The way I like to describe AI like that, there are different kinds of AI, obviously to people who [01:05:00] are uninitiated is that, in the past, you would go to a library. You would be interested in the subject, and then you would go to the card catalog, and it would tell you where the books are. Then you would physically go to the books, and you would read them, you would draw your conclusions. What language based AI does is it's like having a little research assistant, and it goes and finds the books.

It reads them, and then it basically summarizes what it's found. The problem with language based AI, in my opinion, and I learned this from having my own little conversation, , is that All it can really do is reiterate the existing opinions of people. I asked it about morality because that be a very nebulous area for AI. I said, talking about morality, talking about what is moral and what isn't, 

I gave you statistics, about the amount of money that we spend on luxury pet food. Not pet food to people to feed our pets, but, , luxury pet food, the amount of extra money that we spend in the United States, that we could use that same amount of money Just giving our fats our pets and, their survival and everything is just fine, but not luxury. That we could take that money and have access to clean drinking [01:06:00] water for the human race in perpetuity.

Is it moral or ethical that we spend that money on our pets? It could not concede the point. All it could do is regurgitate the moral opinions and apologists and all of that, trying to position that it's okay to spend money on luxury pet food while human suffering exists because it doesn't have a knowledge of the peer dynamics that exist, social dynamics that are causing that effect. 

 If you have 2 groups of primates and they go off in 2 different directions, this group has to care about its own survival more than it cares about the survival of this group or the pack dynamics fall apart. We do that with with people, , in our society. During the time period, we had the September eleventh attacks. We had just a few thousand people that were affected by that. It was a big, national thing. It was on every news channel.

Yet during that same time period, We had 6 figures of people that were dying to Boko Haram, and it wasn't even in the news. So what we call attention to, what we consider moral, all of that is be based on our social proximity and our ability to project our own cultural identity on the people that we're watching. The more that we can do [01:07:00] that, the more that we can feel. And the less that we can do that, the less that we feel. Otherwise, we have to have a preponderance of all suffering that's going on all the time, And it's too much.

It's too much for a person to process. I can't be buying an ice cream and thinking about children suffering and starving at the same where I won't buy the ice cream society falls apart. There has to be some element of that is intrinsic and genetic in our evolutionary psychology, it creates this thing in AI. Here's a manifestation of evolutionary biology in AI in that It's unable to explain or be able to substantiate the morality of making choices like that. It just means that 1 of the things that we have consider about AI is that it's only as reliable as the people that make it and with the information that it draws on.

 The social conclusions and everything else that it makes are all gonna be based on those same specious arguments. I think that is why critical thinking in and of itself is going to be such an important skill moving forward as we start to continue developing these technologies and starting to realign what our values are as society in education and all of that is we're going to have to start thinking about our own observer bias, [01:08:00] our own fallacies, our own all of that, And recognizing, ethos, pathos, logos, demagogues, and all of that so that we have enough of an understanding to be able to filter data and be able to take it with a grain of salt that it needs when it needs it.

Lillian: I think AI is going to be interesting. It's going to be rolled out early. It's going to have a lot of flaws because it's so average. I saw they're going to get rid of nurses and have AI come in. I thought, well, now I'm going to die because everything pushing it's about profit. So if it is programmed to profit, it's going to not see you by not serving you at all. This doesn't fit into the parameters so therefore it doesn't exist. It will just shove you out. 

We already know that capitalism does that. We know that capitalism does not serve the outliers. AI is going to take all the prior data and as things change more and more, as we see people getting sicker as the environment degrades. 

 I'm going to have to drop out of society in order to get my needs served. I'm going to have to create a small community where I have a doctor that's also neurodivergent and meets my needs because the system's broken. AI won't care because there's no money to be [01:09:00] made on us. 

Anshar: Synesthesia, really, going back to that point is an interesting metaphor for that because there's an entirely different sense of sensory interpretation, all that people do not share, that you cannot do in, , with sample size and average. 

Lillian: I looked up synesthesia and AI, just to see the different kinds because you and I were going to talk about it today. All of these synesthesia I never heard of before. They didn't have the ones that I actually had. Obviously not accurate again. We should know all of those things. We should be using all of those things because they're going to be really necessary in the future .

Anshar: That would be a useful form of psychometrics to put our kids through is, hey. What kind of interesting sensory, , experience you have, and how is that going to help inform your education process?

Lillian: I think it will increase our value but it's going to be a bumpy interlude where they realize that the data doesn't match and they at first will just bleed out the middle and not worry about the outliers. When they realize everybody's becoming more outlier then they're going to start seeking us. 

Anshar: Will it be taken from us, or are you thinking that we're gonna all become Luddites? 

Lillian: I think one thing that we're not talking about is how much power is needed in the future. At the same time, be [01:10:00] going down to 20% of the power that we currently use to be sustainable in the future. I think that the wealthy are not going to allow us to go down to 20%. 

I think that they're actually going to make us go down to zero or one or two. Because they're going to be taking it. Cause they're not going to lower their amounts and they use the vast majority of it. What they're going to do is steal it from the middle class because the lower class hardly uses anything and force us all out of using air conditioning and heating and such like that for any sort of energy uses. 

 I think AI will probably end up getting rebuilt by us. We'll end up doing the neuromorphic AI ourselves. Then the wealthy will at some point come to us and demand it, or somebody will betray us. 

 We're going to have to figure it out, out of just pure necessity to even be able to have technology. Cause they're going to take away the power to power technology because we keep finding out AI requires way more power than we realized.

Anshar: Interesting. I wonder what kind of effect that's or manifestation that would have on society if it does play out that way and how we're going to regain our footing.

We do also have the preponderance of the question of if we do end up having an [01:11:00] extinction level event on the Earth and we have a, , a couple supervolcanoes go off or we have a, , something traveling in space that we can't deflect or whatever? , are we going to, by that point, have been able to get our own little blue dot under control so that we don't all, get wiped out. 

Lillian: I don't think that's even on my radar. I think what I'm more worried about is the pandemics. I think we're going to have more and more pandemic issues because we have such high population I'm already struggling with medical issues. Those of us who are highly sensitive, we need to be in areas that are. Healthier. As the environment degrades, it's going to get less healthy. That's why the cities are going to become unlivable. Nature's job is to control population and it does so through pandemics. I think we're going to have massive amounts of diseases sweep through . That's another reason why we need to move out and have, our own community so that we're healthier because the diseases will be coming through the public systems, coming through the cities, coming to the suburbs. 

Anshar: The natural controls that are supposed to happen with the population.

Lillian: Yeah. It's [01:12:00] about us understanding how our sensitivity works too, because our sensitivity is what's going to show us how to get in front of it. It's going to be the thing that allows us to get ahead of the cycles of nature, because the more sensitive you are, the more data you have coming in, the more you're aware . 

I know that you know this. What I am setting up is for people who are sensitive, because we're the first that , it's going to hit. Then the rest of the population, it will impact them. 

The more sensitive you are, the more inputs you're taking in the more you can process them. But if you're in an environment that doesn't allow you to process them or your environment that's unhealthy and your brain isn't functioning well, all of those things will make it worse for you. 

People are going to become dumber because the air quality is poor because the environment is poor because the food has less nutrition. 

Anshar: That's the problem. Whatever we place cultural value on, that's what we're gonna expand our resources on. Right now, that's a bunch of nonsense. We gotta figure that out.

Lillian: I don't think that people understand technology will not be the saver of us as the environment gets so crazy. The thing that will be. Is actually being [01:13:00] so sensitive and adaptive. Having that plastic brain. Did you hear that the wolves of Chernobyl are now cancer resistant?

Anshar: Oh, interesting. Oh, okay. Yeah. No. Actually, I think I have.

Lillian: That's what I'm talking about. The wolves that have evolved and managed to survive are the ones that evolve the fastest. It's the highest sensitivity that changes the fastest. We really do need to be aware that high sensitivity is an asset. Now it's going to need to know why we're that so that it can survive.

Anshar: There's this impression that kids get in school. Millions of years of evolution. But by contrast, you just have to look at the domestication of the dog, which has just happened over the last few thousand years. Look at the variation and breeds and morphology and all of that stuff that has resulted as a result of selective breeding. When you put environmental challenges like that into an environment, you're really creating a selective breeding situation.

 I was reading a a study about the Potential domestication of the fox and examining some of the same processes that happened with candidates, back with wolves. Then taking a look and being [01:14:00] able to examine more closely some of those processes in the FOX population now that we actually have a lot more of the metrics and scientific data to be able to monitor that process and see, what deciding for certain traits and how that manifests itself and all of that.

 It also brings up some of those conversations about the association between genetics and personality, which I think will be very interesting too. If it is successfully implemented, what will the effect be? 

Lillian: Personality and genetics I think it's all wrong. I think that it's based on how people are conditioned. I think the reason that we don't fall into it is because we can't be conditioned. Our way of being is such that we're the extreme. All of these personality tests seem to be, are you one or the other? And to me, it's the dynamics of somatic, giftedness and cognitive giftedness, they're just measuring that and how it manifests because people definitely are one camp or the other. 

 The reason they're that one camp or the other is basically how our systems have conditioned them to be one camp or the other,. Our system really does condition both cognitively and somatically. It just, the conditioning they do for somatic is about you not allowing your somatic to be conditioned. [01:15:00] So it's unconditioning if you will.

I think that those who are neurodivergent, but not twice exceptional, that's rare. I think that most people are twice exceptional and of course there's a spectrum there, but 

I think the twice exceptional are the least able to be conditioned. I know I'm at the top of that. 

I have all of the neurodivergence is as a savant. Everybody thinks, oh, savants have it. 

The easiest. They're not ever having to work hard. It was not true at all. All that is lies. We're the extreme version of that one talent, but our brain does does round out later. . I think most people who have achieved greatness in their middle-age are savant. They're just big pictures savants and we're so stupid =We've been focusing on the lesser functioning or those who have very small picture giftedness because it's containable and testable. That's how dumb our system is. It's not actually interested in what produces amazing. It's about conditioning and controlling. 

They're not at all interested in our intelligence. They're interested in oppressing it. That's all. 

Anshar: I think that maybe our integration of advanced Systems technology [01:16:00] and tools has given us a playing field in which some of the Traits that are selectively associated with things like autism will actually cause people to excel, whereas before, maybe it would have been a hindrance.

If you get a person who's really good at science and math, let's say, but you raise them in a, Gregorian monastery, then maybe that isn't going to make them feel exceptional, if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree. I wonder, if maybe some of the changing values in our society and integration of technology, us moving toward a highly specialized, workforce where a person , learn all about radio transmitters or whatever and then make that their life's work as opposed to being more of an everyman, , jack of all trades kinda situation.

As the more that we hyper specialize, people who hyperfocus are going to excel more in that environment. So part of it might be The environment. I don't know. That's not an area of science that I have a high degree of specialty, I'm very interested to hear more of that. 

Lillian: I see the integration of all of that. I don't think that we're going into hyper [01:17:00] specialization. I think that we're going to have to know how to survive more than all of those other things. We're looking at seven degrees changing the temperature. , they're not doing anything to address that. So it's going to be about surviving. It's going to become more about surviving by 2050. 

By the end of the century. It may be that we don't survive. I think that hyper sensitization is actually what we ought to be talking about. This is using your high sensitivity to survive, to function, to increase your intelligence . 

Outside of the system, I can figure things out. I go into the system and it's constantly trying to destroy my sensitivity . I've come to realize that's on purpose. That is so that I can not be the brilliance that I possess.

 Our sensitivity allows us to learn what we need to learn, to address the thing in front of our face. That is supposed to be. We call that disability in our system. I call that surviving ability outside of our system. 

We are responsive to the environment around us. What we need to address is what we focus on. That's how you survive in strange environment.

 I'm probably the [01:18:00] example of where we're all going. Everybody else is going to get there eventually. Our sensitivity pushes us further into the future than other people are. We have all this extra data because of that sensitivity, which makes it harder to fit in, but makes you care more about fitting in . 

Anshar: Fitting in used to be the only thing that I cared about because it was such a big pain point. But now that I've learned that skill, My pain points are completely different. And I'm sure that, that's the same for all people. You have a big challenge, you overcome it, and then you move on to the next challenge. But I placed so much focus on it was such a giant pain point for me and I had no ability to fit in that it made everything else that was in my life fall apart.

 Now that I've overcome that hurdle and with confidence and I can literally teach other people how to do it my differences with other people cause me different pain points for example, I used to mask to try and socially approach, groups of people that I wouldn't normally associate with. For the life of me, I can't figure out why that was so important to me when I was younger. If there's a group of jocks or whatever, , the ability to move into that social group and have social [01:19:00] reciprocity with them was a huge pain point for me because I felt so othered. What I recognized, having gotten those skills now, is that once I integrate into that group, because I can do it easily now, I have no desire to talk to them.

There's nothing for me to talk to them about. I don't relate to them at all. So in some ways, I feel like I spent all of this time, learning to master something That didn't necessarily bring me the happiness that I thought. 1 of the processes from that journey was making me appreciate people like you, where I do have that that commonality and that same , being able to have an conversation on I have to dice apart every single word that I use and, knowing that if we both have a semantic argument and then both recognize that we can just move on and then go back to what we were doing, whereas other people will become very emotionally involved or if there's something that I don't know a lot about, it's very easy for me to just go of my ego and wanna hear your perspective on it.

Whereas other people, they're just reacting to that, and therefore, they can't make a conscious decision. All of those things are just different integrated challenges. And so now that I've moved past some of those , I had this giant approach for social value in my life. Then once I acquired it, I was like, man, why [01:20:00] won't these, , normal people leave me alone? 

Lillian: The way I see it is a little bit different. I see it as you are accepting now of your, own kind. you're going through the same evolution that I am. I'm looking for my own kind because I think , I need this for the future.

You're looking for your own kind because you figured out you need your own kind just to live the day to day. So ultimately we're on the same journey. Our perspectives are different yet. It's the exact same journey. 

 I learned that I don't really get a lot of, out of friendships with most people because. After a short bit, I realized this person's dysfunctional , they're a user and they don't love nearly as deeply as I do. 

My friendships are with people that are really wonderful people in their deepest part. That's what I care about. People whose hearts are as deep as mine. They always surprise me with the depth of understanding because empathy really is the driver of intelligence. 

Empathy is what allows you to mental model. That really brings out depth of people that I don't know that our society recognizes or other people even see, but I see it and I feel it. 

 I [01:21:00] think vast majority don't ever figure out you don't really have to be friends with everybody. You don't have to be popular. It isn't about that at all. It's about you being comfortable with however big or small your group is. That is how extreme our abilities are. We can mental model it all the way at the end and see I'm not going to win so I should just cut my losses and go. That is amazing and we need to talk about that more. 

Anshar: That's the thing, though. , if you look at the bell curve distribution and this is 1 of the things about psychology that just made me wanna bang my head into a doorframe. If you look at the bell curve distribution of intellect, if you assume a 100 to 1 0 5 as a median IQ, that means that 15 percent of the population, 1 out of 6 or 7, is has an IQ of 85 or lower. You don't really remember that fact until you're driving on the road with them on the highway.

 Having a society, where there's at those ends if you just go up to, a hundred and 30 IQ, let's say, You're already at, the 98th or the 99th percentile, which means that you're only gonna relate to 1 out of a hundred people. Then if you have it twisted even worse, I think you and [01:22:00] I might share that where it's even 1 out of 10000 or Yeah.

1 out of the worse that number gets, the more disheartening it gets, especially if you have a social pain. 

Lillian: I completely understand what you're saying on that. I want to add one more point to it because we are so lacking in people like us. Then when we do meet people like us, the amount of value that we find is phenomenal. I could see why they separated us in our society because just in this last two, three hours that we talked, I have learned more about your brain and my brain than I've learned with anybody else other than my children. 

It's so phenomenal to be around somebody who is similar to you and see yourself mirrored that, no wonder everyone who's regular loves being social. We are so rarely given the chance to meet each other. We are denied and made to feel like we're less than or dysfunctional or there's something wrong with us because we're just outliers. 

 That is a travesty, we really do need to be seeking each other out. [01:23:00] Not because we're elitist, but simply because we need each other to fully heal and fully grow, I could learn so much from a peer like you. That a teacher could never give me. We can teach ourselves. We actually just need peers. 

Anshar: I do teach applied behavioral Psychology and cognitive neuroscience for business sales, personal development design psychologically driven sales systems. I help with PR, marketing, advertising. I have clients big names like IBM. I've designed psychologically driven sales systems and systems for interaction, customer retention for all kinds of different industries. I take on private clients, solopreneurs and I do all of that.

 I never anticipated that I would be teaching those skills to other people. But by necessity, the fact that I had to learn all of those things and break them down for myself with autism, it gave me a really interesting perspective on teaching others, and I think that my approach is very novel in that way. 

 It was recognizing my areas of opportunity and stopping labeling them as failures that will allow me to do that. 

Anshar: I [01:24:00] have had the opportunity, and I've been really honored to do it and humbled to be able to speak to the nerd diversion community, to speak for local and remote businesses on topics like neurodivergent inclusion, how to make a space for people who are different or think differently in the workplace and to be able to benefit from that. I got to speak on the topic of neurodiversity at the United Nations event, which was really gratifying.

 I have a lot of cataloging of my personal journey. I had to take thousands of photographs of my face, Take video of my face, record my voice because I used to speak in monotone. I used to look at the ground when I talked. I used to just walk around with my arms crossed and look at the ground, and that was my existence as a nonverbal person. I had to learn how to escape that hell.

In the process of doing it, I learned so much about myself, but I also learned a lot about some of the things that happen in organizations that that can really limit the potential of people who have the ability to contribute. That is a topic that's really near and dear to my heart. If if there are any listeners out there that are interested in having a neurodivergent [01:25:00] speaker and wanna, maybe hear about that journey of moving from nonverbal to verbal. Have videos of my progress. I have a video that I have on YouTube of what it was like when I was 25 years old, and I put it right next to where I am now.

You can just see the vast differences, and it's been 1 hell of a journey. If in me putting that effort out, I can save someone else from that same experience and give them the opportunity, like you said, over the space of a conversation to be able to make a few years worth of progress and spare them, That would that would be really gratifying for me because I think that 1 of the things that we can do when we do overcome challenges is that we can become that person that was missing from our own lives that we could have looked up to. 

Lillian: Anshar. Thank you so much for sharing so openly who and what you are .

 Hope you enjoyed Anshar. I think he's brilliant. Everything about him is a delight. He's exactly the person that I'm talking about when I say this is the potential we have . You don't realize the potential you have because it just can't be this big of a lie. It can't be this untrue. But it is, the system [01:26:00] really can be this wrong. Our being average is a destruction of our being ourselves. We are supposed to be what we actually are. 

That's it for this podcast. Thank you for listening. I hope this was valuable. Take care, everyone.

 The views, information, and opinions expressed on this podcast are solely those of the individuals involved and do not necessarily represent Gifted ND Incorporated, Lillian Skinner, or the Gifted Neurodivergent Podcast. This podcast, Lillian Skinner and Gifted ND Incorporated are not responsible and do not verify the accuracy of the information contained in this podcast series.

The primary purpose of this podcast is to inform and educate.  The gift and nor divergent podcast is only available for private non commercial use. Any other use of the information contained within this podcast must be done with express written approval and knowledge of Lillian Skinner. You may not edit, modify or redistribute any part of this podcast.

The developer assumes no liability for this podcast or its use on any other podcast or other media. 

 www.GiftedND.com
copyright 2024