Imagine learning to read at 12 and then dropping out of school for a year and a half only to find out you had ADHD & Dyslexia.
What would you do, where would you go, and how would you turn your life around?
This is the story of Jonathan Mooney. A man who discovered his different ways of thinking and turned his life around. He went back to school and turned his previous weaknesses into strengths graduating from Brown University with an Honours Degree in English. Jonathan has also written 3 best-selling books.
This story has the power to change your life, the way you think and your opinion on the neurologically diverse and how they could be the leaders of tomorrow.
This is Personable episode 14
I hope you enjoy
Imagine learning to read at 12 and then dropping out of school for a year and a half only to find out you had ADHD & Dyslexia.
What would you do, where would you go, and how would you turn your life around?
This is the story of Jonathan Mooney. A man who discovered his different ways of thinking and turned his life around. He went back to school and turned his previous weaknesses into strengths graduating from Brown University with an Honours Degree in English. Jonathan has also written 3 best-selling books.
This story has the power to change your life, the way you think and your opinion on the neurologically diverse and how they could be the leaders of tomorrow.
This is Personable episode 14
I hope you enjoy
Hello and welcome to episode 14 of Personable. Today I am hugely honored to be joined by Jonathan Mooney. Jonathan is actually a guest. I've been wanting to get onto my podcast for a while. He has had an incredibly fascinating journey being diagnosed from dyslexia from a young age, learning to read at a later age and basically beating all the odds, eventually graduating from Brown University with an honors degree in English Literature, writing a book at 23 and having a very successful career campaigning and basically showing that there is no normal and that people with these conditions are actually. They have abilities and, yeah, basically going against all the odds. And yeah, thank you so much, jonathan, for joining me today. Yeah, man.
Speaker 2:I'm excited to be a part of it. I appreciate the opportunity and the positive messages you're putting out there in the world. Thanks for letting me be a part of it.
Speaker 1:Thank you. So I wanted to get started by seeing if you could bring me back to what it was like as a child, if you could describe your experience growing up learning to read. When you first found out you were diagnosed with dyslexia.
Speaker 2:Yeah, look, you know me and school didn't really get along. So, to say the least, I had a hard time sitting still pretty much from the beginning. So I spent a lot of the day chilling out with the janitor in the hallway. I had a hard time kind of controlling my behavior. I would blur things out all the time. So I grew up on a first name basis with surely the receptionist in the principal's office and, as you mentioned, I had a really hard time reading. I had a terrible time reading out loud. So I spent a lot of the day hiding in the bathroom to escape reading out loud with tears streaming down my face.
Speaker 2:So my story of school was, you know, a round peg that doesn't fit the square hole. As a result of that, I had a whole bunch of different labels. At first they were more sort of punitive, moralizing labels. You know, dumb, bad kid, crazy kid, lazy kid, kid not applying himself that whole constellation of language. And then those got replaced with more medicalized language when I was diagnosed. So I was diagnosed with dyslexia at 9, 80D and a whole bunch of other stuff when I was 10. And that was the story of sort of one step forward, one step back, it felt better to be dyslexic opposed to stupid, you know, because that's the message I was getting. But at the same time the diagnosis is tended to focus pretty exclusively on the challenges of my neurodivergent brain, the deficits, the disorders, the problems, and they didn't really create space for the good things that come with brain differences. So I struggled with that whole idea that my differences made me deficient for a long time.
Speaker 1:Yeah, how did you? When you were diagnosed, how did you eventually move forward from that? Because you ended up going to one of the best universities in the world. But I don't get how you went from being diagnosed to then, you know, from 12 to 18, what changes did you make? You mentioned one step forward, one step back. What happened? Did you take us on that journey of how you went from that to suddenly going to one of the best universities in the country?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean like you know, I dropped out of school for a year in sixth grade, so that's when I was 12. And that was really the sort of low point of my journey. I was struggling with the whole constellation of mental health stuff depression, anxiety, I had a plan for suicide and I felt that I really had no place in school and didn't really have a positive future in front of me. Fast forward, as you mentioned, I ended up graduating from Brown not as good as Duke, but it's not too shabby Wrote my first book as an undergraduate at Brown. I've written to others subsequently and have had a whole constellation of social impact ventures that try to make a difference in the world. So your question is you know, how do you go from that low point of 12 to to that positive ending? And obviously that's a complex answer and I hope we can kind of you know, dive into a few pieces of it.
Speaker 2:But let me give you the overview. First of all, I had a bunch of folks in my corner who believed in not just my capacities but really believed in the idea that different isn't deficient. You know, while there's a lot of challenges having a brain difference dyslexia I suck at spelling, I suck at reading. I get it. I'm not in denial about that, add. I got a hard time sitting still paying attention, being organized. Those are real challenges. I don't want to dismiss those, but I had a whole bunch of people in my corner who said there's another side of the coin, you know, there's another part of the story that we're not telling and there's a whole bunch of good things that go with that. So that gave me hope and that gave me a sense that I wasn't deficient as a human being.
Speaker 2:The other piece of that journey was very much about focusing on my strengths and creating a pathway about stuff I was good at. I got through high school being a soccer player, being an athlete. You know, I really thought I was the dumb kid. So what I could do was play ball and my goal was to get a Division I soccer scholarship. So I actually transferred to Brown from a school before where I a Division I school, where I went and played ball on scholarship, and so that kept me going. I'm happy to come back to the whole. How did I go from the first school to Brown? That's a whole nuanced story, but that focus on what's right opposed to what's wrong played a foundational role in keeping me going, keeping me engaged, keeping me having a sense that there was a positive future in front of me.
Speaker 1:What sort of advice would you have for kids that have had similar diagnoses at a similar age, or even at any age, but don't have those figures around them that are telling them that they're intelligent, that are telling them that they can do things right and have a clear plan for them? What advice would you have for those kids and how they can experience similar results what you did?
Speaker 2:Well, you know, the good news nowadays is you can find that message of positive neurodiversity anywhere you know on your podcast today, right on YouTube, in social media spaces. There's a tremendous amount of accessible knowledge and stories about the power of brain differences. I had my mom in my corner. I had a bunch of teachers not a bunch, that's a lie. I had a few teachers that saw the good in me and that kept me going. But nowadays, you know, go seek out the next generation of advocates who are advancing this message in social media spaces and know that they're preaching the truth.
Speaker 2:You know, you may hear that dyslexia is a disorder. You may have heard from a psychologist that ADHD is a deficit of attention. You may hear that autism is a genetic defect from the medical professional community. But the other side of that story is that there are strengths and talents that go hand in hand with those challenges. The challenges are real. The strengths, gifts and talents are equally as real, and so my first piece of advice to anyone mom, dad, young person, adult who's just entering this world is seek out the whole story.
Speaker 2:We're good at telling part of the story of the challenges, but the other part of the story is equally as valid and more important in terms of building a successful life for yourself. It's more important that you anchor your identity in the reality that neurodiversity is good for the world. You know neurodiversity is associated with entrepreneurship, creativity, with a whole constellation of human traits that we need as a society. We've always had needed them and we need them more than ever. So you matter and go, seek out that part of the story and tell that story not only to yourself, but about yourself, and anchor your identity in the idea that different isn't deficient. Brain differences are valuable to the world and you have a role to play and you have something to give.
Speaker 1:When you've gone through university and, against all the odds, you've learned to read and gone from this amazing journey into English and learning to write. But why write? If you'd struggled with it so much when you were younger, why even bother going into that field? Why not go into entrepreneurship, as you mentioned, something that would be a benefit or a strength of this? Why go into something like where you have to spell and things that will be typically tough with these conditions?
Speaker 2:Yes, it's an insightful question. So when I was always kind of telling stories as a kid, like always trying to kind of make sense of my world and express myself in a narrative medium I'm not saying that as if I was some progeny or whatnot, that's just kind of how I was kind of wired in the world when I met school meaning when I enrolled in traditional school, storytelling became confused or conflated with spelling, grammar, handwriting, right, and that happens to a lot of us, dyslexia aside, you know, narrative storytelling is a bigger human trait that gets narrowed in school environments as a set of sort of menial academic tasks. So in third grade, when my self-esteem was just starting to just plummet that's really, you know, where things started to go south for me I had a teacher named Mr R and he was the kind of kind of dude that was just really focused on what was good about students, right with them, not just kids with learning differences, but all kids, and so he would always talk to kids about like hey, what are you good at, what are you like, what are you into, you know? And he would ask me that question of what I was good at and I would say I'm not good at anything. Man, you know I'm like I'm crap at school. This, you know nothing. But he never really gave up on me and one day he came to me and he said hey, you're wrong about yourself. You are a really good storyteller. Now, sometimes the stories you tell are inappropriate, he said, but I don't care, you are such a good storyteller that you could be a writer.
Speaker 2:I was literally nine years old. This guy said you could be a writer. Nobody had ever said anything like that to me in my life. And I looked at him and I said Mr R, writer are you? Are you out of your mind? I can't spell. You know, I suck at spelling and I'll never forget. He looked at me and said Jonathan, screw spelling, screw spelling, man. Yeah, right, right on. And for the first time somebody said, kind of, forget what you can't do, focus on what you can do. And for me that was storytelling. So if you would ask me when I was nine, what do you want to do in the world, I would say, hey, I want to be a writer.
Speaker 2:And it's because of Mr R, but it's also because of this, this the bigger message that he embodied. And that message was, you know, creativity. Storytelling. It's not about spelling, it's not about grammar, it's about something bigger. So he connected me to that. I had other mentors along the road in school that that reinforced, that, reconnected me to it when I lost it at times, and so that was always close to my kind of DNA. But my journey of writing, more specifically, it started for a very, very, very polemical purpose. So when I transferred to Brown remember my story I go to a school for two years to play soccer. I was done with that LMU, alamirah Mad University and then I transferred to Brown.
Speaker 2:And when I transferred to Brown, I meet another transfer student who had a very significant, challenging journey to Brown too, named David Cole. And one day Dave says you know, we should write a book. This guy was homeless, this guy ADD, he struggled with substance abuse, and he said well, we should write a book together. And I said you're crazy, man, who would want to read this thing? And he goes there's a lot of people like us out there who need hope. And so I said, yeah, you're right, let's do this, and so that became this book called Running Outside the Lines that was written there. It is another. Check it out. Yeah, it's like 20, 20, almost, you know, 23 years ago. And so writing for me at that point became not abstract, it became purposeful, it became about contributing and using story to make the world, in our own small way, a little bit better of a place.
Speaker 1:When you I had a question. When I said that I was going to get you on my podcast, I had a question from someone that has ADHD that wants to be a writer as well, and they were wondering when you're thinking of actually writing? Should you follow the typical routes of what people without ADHD do, and which you just go through it and you just keep spending hours and hours trying to write and force yourself to write, or is there a more creative way that someone with ADHD or without should spend their time writing?
Speaker 2:You know so I've been. So I got three books under my belt, written at very different times in my life, for very different reasons and for very different ends, or creative, or based on different creative capacities or or inspiration. That book that you put up learning outside the lines. Undergraduate at college, I wrote a book called the Short Bus, where I drove around the United States in a short bus, which is a special ed bus, and talk with folks with different brains and bodies and and listened and learned from them. And then I wrote a book in 2019 called Normal Sucks. So I only give that overview to say each book so different, each book a total shit show to write in and of itself and you think you learned something. And then you started a new book and turns out that you didn't know a goddamn thing. I'm working on book four and I even feel more like I'm ill qualified to be giving any advice, but nonetheless, let me see if I can extrapolate from from that confusion Any lessons.
Speaker 2:First. First thing and I really think this is Mr R's lesson to me, and it's the thing that matters most in writing is to is to to get your voice and your soul onto onto a page or or dictated through speech to text. Whatever you want to do, that's the most important thing. And so to go to that question of like, is there a more creative way to do it? You know, all of my stuff, when it's successful, it's not always successful in any way, shape or form, but when I think it's it's working, it just it sounds like me, not not you, not somebody else like it, just sounds like me, like that. And I think that's why human beings come to literature is to connect with another human being deeply and to hold that voice in their head. So if you, if you, if you have a bunch of run on sentences, because that's how you talk, like I do, then cool. If, if you, you know, if you have a, have a different voice, then cool to the challenge and the opportunity is to just get it down. So for me, that that does mean a lot of dictating. I'm trying to sound in writing like I'm talking to you and we're in dialogue.
Speaker 2:So it's not about sitting down there and time things out to your point, it's about walking around the neighborhood dictating ideas, thoughts, what's in my head, and and that's the core act, now the thing I will say, that does go through all three projects is there is a time in which you got to, you know, figure out how to, to roam free in the cage, which is a Buddhist saying. There's a time in which you have to follow the, the, the, the stoic advice, that discipline is destiny. So, you know, I, in all the books, had to get to a place where, like if I I got a job, I got to do something, I got to, I got to contribute to the project every day, even if I don't want to, I got to, I got to show up to it and I got to just sit there, even if there's nothing in my mind, for 15 minutes. Instead of timer, there's a.
Speaker 2:There's a writer named Paul Thoreau travel writer fiction writer too, but most famous for his travel writing who talked about his process was well, the deal I make with myself is I got to go to my desk, I set a timer for 20 minutes and, even if I don't have anything to write, and even if I don't write, as long as I sit there for 20 minutes, I've done my, my work for the day. Now, obviously, most of the time you start and 20 minutes turns into to 40 minutes, but it's that sort of discipline, that that. That that is what, what gets that voice out of the head onto something and then gives it, gives it shape that can become accessible to others. So it's an and both. It's a it's a rejection of traditional approaches, and then it's an affirmation of what has been a long standing cliche in the writing world, which is what a writer's do. Well, they write, and as long as you're engaged in the writing, whether you get published or not, you're a writer and and and it's a practice, not a product.
Speaker 1:Sure, I get the. That's very helpful. So thank you for that specific question. But for other people, I've come across others in which they have these ideas in their head and they're not necessarily writers, but they could be a businessman or anything else, and they still struggle to get their ideas onto paper because it has different forms. So how can you actually you know, without getting distracted and actually just get those ideas onto paper? How can you actually go about doing that?
Speaker 2:Well, I mean, first of all, I think I think we were so, we're so and I think this is changing. But I think for a long time we were so fixated on the idea that, you know, you got to sit there and write it down. Nowadays you should, you should talk it out first, Especially neurodivergent not all, but but, but many are more comfortable in the medium of of talking things out.
Speaker 2:And then, if you're in the sort of kind of a ADD space or OCD space, or if you're, if you're neurodivergences in that kind of constellation, the core barrier you have to get over first and foremost is the blank page, paralysis. You know, sitting there looking at something, there's nothing on it, oh, I'll never be able to get anything on it. Whatever I get on, it will suck. So forget it, you know. And then you quit.
Speaker 2:And so the core hump to get over is getting something there, whether whether that's on the writing side, whether that's on the business side, whether that's on paper academic paper well, that's an email. You know the number of emails I haven't responded to because I don't know how to start, and then somebody gets pissed and then, and then I don't respond because I know they're pissed. Right, like, I get caught in this, like, get caught in this, this, this, this, uh, perseveration cycle. So just just talk it out. You know, like, like, like, popping your, your AirPods, push, push. You know speech to text and ramble, and then you have something to edit.
Speaker 2:The number of times I've heard people say the moment I can get to a place where I have something to edit, then then then I get over that sort of anxiety hump that is astronomical. And now we have, obviously and there's a little deal of the devil here but now we have, you know, chat, gpt and others that can get something out first, and then you can work on it and you can edit it. I do think the latter is really important, meaning if you've outsourced all of your I quote, unquote writing to to the machine and and and you don't engage with it actively, we're losing some core human faculties and it just won't be as good as it needs to be. That's the truth. But if you got good ideas in your head and you're stuck, get something on the page first, call that success and then you set that timer for one minute or five minutes or 15 minutes and you sit down and you work on it and you refine it. But it's always easier to start when you have something there.
Speaker 1:At what point did you realize that you could make a career out of becoming an author and then subsequently campaigning for social change and justice? You know, I don't know.
Speaker 2:I don't know, bro. You know it's been 23 years now and and I still am like, oh shit, what do I do? And you know what do I do next year, you know what, if the phone doesn't ring? So I'm not sure I'm kind of in that space of like, like this was this, was I set forth to do this career? What I think I did instead was I, I followed, what I, what I really cared about, and I, I tried to stay engaged.
Speaker 2:You know, not all neurodivergence, but a whole bunch of neurodivergence. If you don't care, you're crap at it. You know, like, like, like, if I don't care, I'm crap at it. It's just the truth, like, but if I care, then I'm exceptional at it. And so there's some truth to that for all people. But there are but, but, but neurotypical folks. You know they can hate the class, hate the subject, think it's boring and still bang out, you know, a B or maybe an A, because, because their motivational systems are different and their brain's different. I can't do that. So that was true in school.
Speaker 2:You know I went to Brown, in large part because of the open curriculum. What that means is that there's no core requirements at Brown. So the moment you show up, you take what you want to take. Then you declare a major and obviously you've got some requirements in your major, but that's like you know, that's like 20% of your entire course load. The rest is everything you want to do. So I'm like, yeah, that's what's to do this, you know I'm gonna take, take stuff I care about.
Speaker 2:And I tried to just continue that post post college. And I got really excited about a nonprofit that I created at Brown called Eye to Eye, which is a mentoring program that took Brown University and RISD students with neurodiversity and matched them with children who had similar experiences as mentors. And I'm like, let's see how far this thing can go. And so, you know, I and some others from it raised money and launched it nationally and it's an organization to this day called Eye to Eye National. And then I got really excited about, you know, trying to help folks with brain differences get jobs, because so many people with neurodiversity are locked out of the employment system. And I went down that rabbit hole and was involved in a whole set of social impact ventures that they tried to support marginalized people in, in creating economic opportunity, and then the list just goes on and on and on.
Speaker 2:So I don't know if I ever had the realization that this could be a career. I don't know if I was thinking in those terms I probably should have been, but nonetheless I tried to follow things that I authentically cared about and was passionate about, and then then did the best I could. You know, like I committed myself all in to try to be excellent at it, not from an ego perspective, but, you know, when you care about something, it deserves all of you, and that's kind of the core values that I've tried to use to create. To create a career, sure, but I think, more importantly, a life.
Speaker 1:Oh, how have you dealt with external pressures along the way? I was reading some of your articles online last night and some of them had comments on. Below 90% of the comments were I love your work. I really appreciate everything you're doing. You've really helped me, really help my kids. And then there's 10% of maybe people being like if there's 32 kids in a classroom and there's one kid with ADHD, why should any of the attention be focused on that? Kid Schools are supposed to get the average kid up. They're not supposed to deal with them. Why even bother? So I'm curious as to how you've dealt with people talking like that along the way, why that kid matters and also how you've dealt with the hate as it's come along.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, I mean the latter is the easiest thing to answer, which is I don't think I've read a single review of pretty much anything that I've written, and I can tell you why on that, and that's not entirely true. So my second book, the short bus, got like a ridiculously positive, rave review in the Los Angeles Times. That was then syndicated to a bunch of other papers Chicago Tribune, etc. Etc. And I was like, oh yeah, look, I'm hot shit. You know like ah, and then, and then I read a New York review of books review and you know I was so excited to have the New Yorker Like, if you're a dyslexic dude and you wanted to be a writer, like it doesn't matter that nobody cares about the.
Speaker 1:New.
Speaker 2:York review of books, the New York Times book review, because nobody really does, but you care. And so I was like, oh, I'm so excited, I love this, I can't believe it. And it was not a great review. And what I realized then is like if you attach yourself to one review, you have to attach yourself to the other one. And the truth is and this is writing, this is being a business person, this is just living if you attach yourself to other people's opinion of your work on the positive side, you've got to attach it to the negative side too, and really what you can do is just try to act with integrity and try to do the best you can do and put it in the world and disconnect from that. So that's my answer to the kind of hate, for lack of a better word. But I think underneath those things are legitimate criticisms. So I certainly engage with legitimate critique of ideas and challenging of ideas. And I think the latter that you brought up the comment and I think this comment was sent to me I believe you're referring to in New York Times op-ed I wrote about I think it's your special now sit still, or something along those lines but that legitimate question of hey, 30 kids, one kid being a pain in the ass, why? Why does that matter? And then I definitely engage in that and I engage in thinking about why the few would outweigh the needs of the many, and I respect that critique tremendously, and it's often coming from people who are in the public school system, have constrained resources and are struggling with it authentically themselves. And so that particular question let me reflect on it for just a few seconds here. First of all, we should not have school experiences or working experiences in which somebody is made to feel deficient as a human being. So if that's one kid, that's not okay, if that's 10 kids, that's not okay. And so my experience in school which unfortunately is not an aberration is that I felt ashamed of myself in school and it led me to have a plan for suicide. And no kid should have that. We should hold ourselves to a higher standard.
Speaker 2:But the truth is, the experience of that ADD kid is not an aberration. And it's not just that. Neurodivergence constitutes well over 20% of the population. That's not a small number. It's that so many people in education have been unfulfilled by a one size fits all approach. So by wrestling with the kid who obviously doesn't fit. We can open a bigger conversation about what are the systemic practices, what are the processes and procedures that marginalize a whole swath of people, whether it be neurodivergent, whether it be black folks, whether it be LGBTQ folks or whether it be the so-called normal learner. I mean, there's been so many people I've met in 23 years of speaking who said look, I was fine in school, maybe more than fine, I got a 4.0, but, I was a robot in school.
Speaker 2:I mean that word, that word.
Speaker 1:I was a robot.
Speaker 2:I was there regurgitating things to please adults, and now I'm in college and I have no idea who I am or what I want to be. So a critique from the margins, a critique from the 5% when done right, is really a critique of a system to try to hold it accountable to do better and do right by all the people there. And so I've wrestled with that question deeply. I respect the question, I respect the questioners as well, and I think if we wrestle with the idea that neurodivergence is a minority community, that has universal consequences for our systems, that neurodivergence challenges us to think differently about the brain, think differently about learning, think differently about working, and ultimately it has benefit for the neurodivergent but it ultimately has benefit for all of us.
Speaker 1:Sure, I mean that was actually going to be my next question. In that a lot of your work you've talked about how these conditions of ADHD and dyslexia are not disabilities, but they're just shown in the wrong environment, shown through this cookie cutter approach of school. And you know, when you're trying to learn to spell and you know you're not able to do that, you're seen as deficient in areas. And I think there's been a common identifier, both in the US in the UK by individuals, that school is not a right for all Really neurodiverse people, but also other people as well. What practical things do you think could be done to change the way the school system is, whether it be getting rid of exams, whether it be focusing on skills in which people are actually good at things, whether it be being able to progress earlier? You know we have these national systems. In the UK, everyone takes GCSEs in A-levels. In the US, everyone has a GPA type system. What do you think can actually be done to fix this problem for people in education?
Speaker 2:And you're right to be challenging all of us who care about this issue to be thinking about it at scale and at the systems level. One of the great achievements of the 19th century in many countries was the scalable system of public education that created access at scale for large swaths of human beings to develop skills and to advance their future. Now the court challenge running parallel to that is that the system was designed originally literally running parallel to the advent of the notion of a normal brain or person. So if you look at the history of public education initiatives certainly in the United States, which has a younger history than the UK, but if you look at the history of public education at scale, it began in the sort of 1850s. The word normal did not come into the English language until 1860. Before normal we had a whole constellation of mean, average et cetera, but it became popularized in the 1860s when the discipline of statistics became sort of dominant and rampant in our cognitive thought.
Speaker 2:Running parallel to that was the birth of eugenics, eugenic thinking and for those listeners, watchers, eugenics was a concerted effort to eliminate defective human beings. That had branches that led to scientific racism, meaning the justification of racist practices and processes through science, ie those folks are inherently deficient. And then it had a whole tributary of consequences for people with brain and body differences, disabilities, eugenicists around the country. And the eugenic movement in large part began in the UK with Charles Darwin's cousin, survival of the fittest type of thinking. But it came to its apex in the United States where people who were deemed deficient could be sterilized against their will. California, where I'm speaking to from today, had legalized sterilization. On its books it draws until 1980. I'm just giving you a sense 1980. So this whole notion of normal is good and right, deficient is bad. Let's create processes and procedures to eliminate deficiency in our genome. Those were deeply ingrained.
Speaker 2:And then, running parallel to that was the creation of a scalable system around education. So our system was designed around the norm, not the different. So how do we unravel that design process? That's your question. A couple of things. One, the most tactical, the most doable, meaning it doesn't cost money, it doesn't cost a revolution is right. Now we have a system of accommodations for some. If you're diagnosed like I was, you can get time extensions on exams, you can listen, you dictate, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, all the way through the workforce right, higher education, k-12, into corporate settings. We gotta move away from accommodations for some to accommodations for all, because the truth is, who wouldn't benefit from the accommodations that I used? Why do I have to be diagnosed which costs $5,000 in Los Angeles to be diagnosed to be able to dictate opposed to read, or listen opposed to? I got that all mixed up, but you get where I'm going, yeah all tight, yeah, all tight, exactly right.
Speaker 2:So let's move from a cultural paradigm of accommodations for some to accommodations for all. That creates access to a whole continuum of people. But that's kind of the first step. Let's talk about something you astutely mentioned, which is how do we move from a sort of content memorization system? You're gonna get through this content to a mastery of skills system, and that has dramatic consequences both for the K-12 system but also the college system. We have been immersed in a lot of debate recently about the value and function of higher education. Are you getting skills that will benefit your life or are you checking boxes of content? So there are public schools around the country in the US that have moved to what's called a mastery transcript, opposed to the traditional GPA approach, and I think that has revolutionary consequences for the system at hand. Let me say one other thing at a systems level, because I really respect and value your question about systems reform.
Speaker 2:Right now in the United States, the largest federal allocation to dollars is special education. In America, the way education is funded in the United States is you got federal dollars, but most of it is state dollars, and the largest form of federal dollars is for special education Through the IDEA, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. Those dollars are used for segregated special education programs. They're used for remediating primarily, and there's an opportunity and there's many advocates pushing this to use those dollars for inclusion and universal design of instruction. Universal design of instruction is the idea that we move away from the notion of a normal brain as our design principle and we design instruction, pedagogy, curriculum to be accessible to the reality of different brains, which the truth is. We are all on a continuum of cognitive difference and that's a real systems opportunity to use special education funding to transform the system around universal design principles.
Speaker 1:What do you think are for people in and outside of education, without relying on external change, without relying on people changing the school system? What are things that people can internally do in themselves or in their environment to help with ADHD, to help with dyslexia and really harness their full potential?
Speaker 2:Well, I mean and I love walking in chew and gum here, because the truth is we do have to keep an eye on systems change, but at the same time, we all are gonna live, work, learn in systems that are outside our control. So we gotta do both right and we gotta walk in chew gum. So what can individuals do? Let me take that question from a few different individual lenses. Let's start with parents. Look, be an advocate for your kid. My mom wouldn't be here if it wasn't for her.
Speaker 2:My mom a character, total character. She's on a good day in High Heels. She's like 4'11". She's a little Irish bulldog. She's got a really high-pitched, squeaky voice like Minnie Mouse, like my mom totally sounds like Minnie Mouse and my mom curses like a truck driver, you know. So if you were a principal or a teacher doing wrong by me, you did not want cursing Minnie Mouse in your face, right? But that's where my mom was right. Every day my mom was advocating for me, but what my mom was advocating for was distinctive and different. You know, my mom would say to any teacher who would listen, she would say if my son doesn't learn the way he's taught, then you should teach the way he learns Now. Look, I'll admit that's a paraphrase, because when my mom said it there were a whole bunch of F-bombs in there. Yeah, I left that part out to not get banned on YouTube today.
Speaker 2:But nonetheless, nonetheless, my mom was all about changing the environment, not the person, and she was an advocate for that. So if you're a mom or dad, or you're a boyfriend or a girlfriend, and you're advocating for somebody you love or brother or sister, whatever it may be, you know be in their corner, be an advocate for their right to wear differently. Now, on the individual side, the most important thing you can do is figure out what you care about and what you're good at. You know successful human beings, with or without great differences. They don't get good at everything. They're good at something and they build a pathway on that. Now, does that mean that they don't got to do a whole bunch of stuff that they don't like? Of course not.
Speaker 2:Life is as we talked about with writing requires some discipline to do things that are hard, but what we know about motivation from a science perspective is neurodivergent. Humans are more likely to commit to doing the things that are hard for them when they're connected to something they care about and they see a sense of purpose. So what is that, north Star? What's that purpose? Why are you in college? Why are you pursuing this career? Why are you? Why, why, why. And stay connected to that when I say stay connected to that, I literally mean like I remember when I wrote my first book and it was. It was an hour away, man. I'm like 22 years old, I'm in college, I have a book contract with a real publisher. They're going to take money away if we don't finish. It was intense and there were many times in which I wanted to quit. And I remember I had a picture of a kid that I had met at a eye to eye, the mentoring program I was developing, named Robert, and Robert was getting tortured in school and I had a little photo of him up there to say I'm doing this because no kid should feel like I feel or Robert feels. So stay connected to that purpose and passion. Now the last thing I'll say about what we can do you know, be an advocate if you're an individual, find that sense of purpose, passion and hold on to it.
Speaker 2:And then the other thing that we can do as educators or people who are in charge of systems is integrate neurodivergence into our broader systems, work around diversity, equity and inclusion.
Speaker 2:You know, unfortunately, when we talk about building a more inclusive world, brain differences and disabilities have been left out of that conversation.
Speaker 2:The number of times I have read a diversity statement by a university my own university, brown University, and others or by corporate America, and it has a whole list of folks they're trying to do better by. And what's left off that list is people with brain differences or disabilities, and we got to do better. We have to understand that folks with different brains and bodies have gotten the short end of the stick for millennia and they've been disenfranchised. They have some of the highest unemployment rates, they have some of the highest incarceration rates, they have some of the highest school dropout rates out of any group in the nation and the world, and that's not a tragedy, that's a crime and we got to do better by that. So making our systems understand that disability is diversity, neurodivergence is diversity and doing right by that form of diversity is one way for us to walk and chew gum, to pursue systems change and, at the same time, survive the flawed systems we find ourselves in.
Speaker 1:I've got three last questions very quick. Go for it, bro, do it. The first one being I'm very curious about this because I think a lot of your journey has related to improvements in standard forms of improvement, aka learning to read, learning to write, writing a book, and you have become successful in that view as well. But I'm curious about how you've also become, or have you become, successful in the happiness realm. I mean, you, dropped out of school, might have had depression and things like that. You said you wanted to kill yourself at one point, and yet you've come so far. How does happiness feed into your mind and in the mind of a neurologically diverse person, and what can they do about it to make themselves happier?
Speaker 2:You know what's so insightful about that question, and I'm not going to be real with you, man, 23 years, and I've been interviewed by NPR, by New York Times, everything in between, and I've not been asked that question before. So your own divergence has given you some insight into the human experience that others have and I appreciate it tremendously. So your question, for me at least, had two parts that are interrelated. Part one, which I'm really intrigued by and I've wrestled with in my own mind, which is in some ways my story, is a journey of trying to appropriate and become normal. I was told I couldn't do these things. We started our conversation with you, were told you couldn't write, so you wrote a book. You're told you weren't good at school, so you go to Brown. You know one of the apex or epitome of being good at school, and does that lead to happiness as a neurodivergent person? And the answer is no. And let me tell you a real moment for me. I thought it did. I thought if I could do the things that people told me I couldn't be and couldn't do, then I would not be that hurt kid anymore. And I did it. I did it, man, from graduation from Brown in May of 2000,. I had sold and written a book with Shaman and Shister, I had founded a nonprofit that was going to go off to be a national organization and I had won the Harry S Truman Fellowship for Public Service there's about 32 Truman Fellows from around the country that you win your junior year in college and I had been nominated by the university to compete for a Rhodes Scholarship. So here you are, from the bedroom to this, and I remember feeling like the kid in sixth grade still, and there's a real moment in my life in which I could have kept down that road of trying to fill a hole with gold stars or I could try something else. And that moment and it's a real moment was when my book and my story was going to be optioned for a movie.
Speaker 2:And I went to this meeting with Merv Griffin Entertainment and I remember sitting across from this guy and he was telling me all about why he wanted to do it and how the story would inspire other people. And then he said this word and he said it would inspire other people to be normal. I'm like is that what I'm about? Is that what I want? Is what I thought I wanted, but it didn't work for me? What would work instead? I remember I stood up and I said, hey, no, thank you man.
Speaker 2:And I said I'm going to go ride the short bus. And the guy goes what the hell, what are you talking about? The short bus? And I said I'm going to go get a short bus and I'm going to drive around America and I'm going to listen to people who have traveled this journey and see what I can learn from them not from me, but from them to live a better life myself. And that was a fork in the road.
Speaker 2:It was a moment where I said I'm going to reject that idea, which is really internalized ableism, that what it means to be OK as somebody with a brain or body difference is to be normal, and I'm going to figure out what it means to go down a different path.
Speaker 2:And so that's what I did. I mean, I lived out of the short bus for six months and I traveled all 48 contiguous states about 35,000 miles and I listened and I learned from people who were trying to figure out how to live and thrive as different. And so, to answer your question, I found a different way to define happiness and to define success in that short bus and I found a way to begin to articulate and extrapolate myself from institutionalized and internalized ableism the idea that the functional brain, functional body, is the good or right body and brain and to have a sense of pride, have a sense of acceptance and celebration of not being normal. And that worked for me. I'm not that kid in sixth grade anymore. What didn't work was filling it up with gold stars and what worked instead was connecting to a community of people with differences, understanding that different isn't efficient and that normal is like the horizon. You think you're getting closer to it, it just gets further and further away from you and the reality of human experience is different, not normality.
Speaker 1:The second and my last three questions. What's next for you?
Speaker 2:What's next for me? I don't know, man. I mean man, like you know, my life is broken into three buckets. You know, I try to write, I try to launch ventures in the world that contribute, and then I speak publicly about all of the above. And so I'm trying to figure out a book about the neurodiversity revolution. I think that the idea that we have different brains, while we're now kind of used to saying it, I don't think we really understand the social consequences of that and what a revolution it is to our systems, to our relationships, to take seriously the notion that we were all on a continuum of cognitive difference. So I'm trying to figure out what that book looks like, what that means, and that's a tumultuous process. So that's what I'll get off this call right now and go walk around and dictate some thoughts and I sit at my desk and feel bad about myself and then, you know, go to the gym. I don't know, we'll see.
Speaker 1:My last question. My last question what is one thing that you either did or didn't say that you want a listener to take away from this podcast, from you?
Speaker 2:You know, I just want people to take away how in all hands on deck moment this is. We collectively, in the broadest sense of that term, have an opportunity and an obligation to contribute to building a neurodiverse future, and a place that we all can start is inspired by you, harvey. We can share our stories, you know, and we can do so with courage and conviction. It's so easy, man, for you to like pass as normal if you wanted to, right, like, oh yeah, hey, I'm just this dude. You know, it was easy for me. I gave it a go, a big go. I'm going to be the soccer player guy. Forget it, normal, I'm going to be better than normal. And it was, you know, dave Cole, the co-author of Learning Outside the Lines, that really taught me the power of rejecting normal. I mean, I remember when I met Dave it was the first day at Brown, it was transfer orientation we had an icebreaker for the transfer students. You went around the room, you said where you transferred from and what you did the summer before, and every kid was bragging. You know, fancy schools, fancy internships. And Dave Cole stood up. He had purple hair, he had bicycle chains around his wrists like they were bracelets, and he said my name's Dave Cole.
Speaker 2:I transferred from Landmark College, which is a two-year college for kids with ADD, and I worked construction last summer I'm like that's my boy right there, you know. And he saved my life. I was going to leave Brown. I thought I had no place at Brown. I thought there was nobody like me in a space like that, and Dave's story changed my life. I hope my story has changed a few people's lives. Harvard, your story has changed people's lives. Our story and our collective story telling gives people hope for their future. So it's an all hands on deck moment. Stop faking normal, share your difference with the world and collectively we build a brighter future for all of us.
Speaker 1:Well, thank you very much, Jonathan, for joining me today. I think when I initially got you on and I was reading about I mean, your website's very clear and I like it's very easy to read similar with your book. I find it very easy to take in information, which is great, and really learn your journey and I think it's incredibly inspiring what you did on an outside perspective, but I think on this one hour long podcast, I think both me and anyone listening has been able to understand the real you and how good you are on the inside. And I think that the fact that you've dedicated your life not only to writing books of something you're passionate about, but also generating social projects that actually have a meaningful and real and practical difference, I think is really inspiring and I can't wait to see what you do next. And even if you don't do anything next, I think everything you've contributed so far is truly incredible and I feel honored that you were able to join me for this hour today.
Speaker 2:Thank you, harvey. I'm inspired by you and it was an honor and privilege to spend this hour with you, and I wish you the best.