 Good day and welcome back to the Forty Auty podcast. With your host as always Mr Thomas Henley, today I've got a very very special episode for you indeed. We're going to be talking to none other than Paul from Autism from the inside. Now if you have been in the YouTube space sort of watching videos on autism, learning about autism through online content, you all have no doubt come across Paul's work in the past. I think he's just gone around about just above 230,000 subscribers on YouTube, which is absolutely tremendous. And basically the background of how me and Paul got in contact is I sent an email, I asked him to be on the podcast of course. And the reason why is because we seem to share a lot of focus in terms of what we like to talk about specifically around the topic of today's podcast, which is autism and emotions, something that I'm sure a lot of people have mixed experiences with. Autism and emotions tend to be very, very complicated. And I know especially when I was a lot younger, I used to think that emotions weren't really worth it. I didn't think that socializing and being around people and filling my own emotional needs was that important. Obviously, in adulthood, a little bit different. So without rambling too much, Paul, how are you doing today? Yeah, not too bad. Thanks for accommodating the time difference. It's like first thing in the morning for me. So hopefully my words are working. If not, they might take a little bit of time to warm up. Yeah, yeah. So it's we do have quite a hefty time difference. It's actually about quarter past nine for me. And I think it's like quite early in the morning for you. Yeah, I think it's like 11 hours or something. Yeah, yeah. And you're tuning in from Australia. Yes, where in Australia are you based? In Melbourne, down the southeast. Well, what is it? What is it like to live in Australia? Because it's not one of the countries that I've ever been to. It does vary quite a lot from city to city. Melbourne is a fairly big city, like four or five million at least. But one of the reasons I like it is because it has lots of sort of microcultures and like lots of sort of small niche groups going on. It's famous for sort of hidden bars in the city and hidden shops that you wouldn't know unless you unless someone actually tells you about. So that's very cool. Yeah, I find it on TripAdvisor. No, you can't find the gems on TripAdvisor. There's lots of good stuff on TripAdvisor. But cool, cool. So I suppose the best place to start is your YouTube stuff. You know, obviously, you've been doing absolutely tremendously well on YouTube and bringing a lot of awareness and understanding and education around autism. And what I really want to know is like, what was your sort of starting story and, you know, what was YouTube like for you back then when compared to the stuff that you do now? Yeah, so I was very hesitant before starting a YouTube channel. Do I really want my story to be public on the internet or not? That was a really big decision for me. But I definitely felt like I wanted to share something, even though I didn't know what it was in the beginning necessarily. So it started off, I was just really excited to tell people about my autism discovery. And for me at the time, it was obviously a big discovery. And I was coming to terms with the ways that I'd been masking and my coping strategies. So you're late diagnosed, aren't you? Yeah, so this was at the age of 30. So I wanted to tell people what I was discovering about myself. And part of the motivation for starting the YouTube channel at the time was that the very first thing that I did was decide to shave my head for charity. So you can still see that all on YouTube with my dreadlocks story. So I had dreadlocks for 15 years before that. Yeah, I do remember that. I think I came across a YouTube channel like quite a few years ago. It's like sometime during like my university days, I was trying to do YouTube and stuff, but it was just like, at the time, it was just a little bit too much. I was studying biomed at University of Manchester. And it's very hard to kind of juggle things, juggle the Taekwondo with the education and then do the YouTube. I was a little bit in over my head about it, to be honest. But I did come across your videos along with, I think stuff with Purple Ella as well as I think a little bit from the Aspie world was the main ones that I saw on YouTube at that kind of time. But you did, you had the really cool dreadlocks and stuff. And I was like... Yeah, so as you can imagine losing them after 15 years, I mean, it was literally half my life at that time. And the formative half of my life from ages 15 to 30, so yeah, big stuff. And I wanted to share about it. The other main driver behind the name, at the time I started with the name Asperger's from the inside and only changed it to Autism from the inside, sort of recently to reflect more of where I've gone since then and what I've learned. And when I was reading stuff about autism, it just didn't resonate very much. My kind of reaction to it was, I can fully understand how it looks like this from the outside, but actually what's going on is something completely different. And another big part of my story is The Book Look Me in the Eye by John Elder Robinson. There's a moment in his book that's very, very similar where he's describing what his psychologist wrote about him, something along the lines of, Johnny doesn't like to play with the other kids. And his adult reflection on that was something like, Johnny would love to play with the other kids. All the other kids are really mean to Johnny. But Johnny is going to sit in this corner and play by himself instead, because he can't figure out how to do the whole social stuff. So huge difference between what we see on the outside and what we see on the inside. I think it's also as well like, from sort of being quite a, you know, I've had on the podcast like people from sort of different walks of life, like I've had people in from like the autistic community. I've had like researchers and scientists, as well as some parents in sort of on the podcast. And there does seem to be different sort of cultures and ways of thinking about autism in each of these different circles. Like it's like even even to the point where things around language is very different, like a lot of the sort of educational and how do you say, parenting worlds, they seem to have a very big sort of focus on person-first language, because they have that sort of disconnect between like the child and their autism. Whereas you talk to someone like myself or you talk to someone within the autistic community, and they're like, oh, it's part of me. Like, how can you separate that out? It'd be crazy. So it's really interesting sort of seeing the contrast with that. And, you know, the thing about changing from Asperger's from the inside to autism from the inside, I think it's something that I have obviously done a lot of thinking about. And I think it's, you know, it's a good consensus, I think that most people prefer the autism label. Yeah, it was a little bit hard to let go of the Asperger's label, because I really strongly identified with it at the time. But I guess one of the main reasons for the shift, for my personal shift, which is probably very similar for others, is that it's too neat and clean. And it kind of implies that there are neat, clean, different categories, and there really aren't. Like I, one of the things that I did on the YouTube channel a little while back was I did something that I started calling ASPE interviews, where I just, when I meet someone, I just had a chat with them, I'd record it, I'd put it on, put it online. And I thought, this is a fantastic way to get real people, you know, on into the public eye so that you can see what autism looks like in real life. And as I was doing this with my friends, eventually I recognized, well, not all of them identify with that word ASPE at all. And does that mean that I now don't share their part of the story? Because they're on, you know, in a different kind of category, like, but they're not, they didn't feel like a different category. So, yeah, it was just getting really confusing. And the overlap was, yeah, getting confusing. And I find that there, I was really surprised to find how much I can resonate with other people's stories, even if they didn't identify in exactly the same way as I did. Because in the very first moment for me, I originally identified as an engineer. And I attributed all of my characteristics to, well, I'm an engineer, engineers are supposed to be that type of type of person, like the 16 personalities. Yeah, have you ever done that test before? I have. And it keeps changing. I did it again after COVID. Apparently I'm an extrovert now, because I want to leave the house. Yes, well, you must be an extrovert. It's really weird. I used to be something like the thinker, something when I was a lot younger. And like, sort of going through life and sort of finding sort of passion and sort of meaning in understanding people, understanding emotions. I think over time, like my personality has shifted quite a bit. I used to be very sort of, you know, logic is king. You know, emotions are just annoying. I used to very much have that sort of mentality about things. And now I'm more of the INFJ, like the advocate type, which I thought was really fitting. It always really surprises me just like how accurate those 16 personalities quiz can be. It's not like 100%, but it's pretty spot on in a lot of cases. Although I do sit very neatly in between introvert and extrovert. So, you know, if I factor in sort of a difference of my choice on some of the introvert, extrovert questions, I could be considered a different one. So it's interesting. Yeah, that's definitely part of my story as well, because I thought my way into the emotions, if that makes sense. And for a long time, I actually did a video on this and my emotional intelligence journey. And for a long time, I was sitting on the sidelines, watching people, trying to figure out what was going on. I had this similar problem that I was talking about before that from the outside, I couldn't really see what was going on. Because all of the social stuff was happening on the inside that I couldn't see. And so it wasn't until I got my dreadlocks and then suddenly found myself on the inside of all of these social groups that I sort of discovered that world through practice rather than through observation. So your dreadlocks were sort of an inter-certain social groups? Yeah, that was part of my story is that after I got dreadlocks, how other people treated me changed radically overnight. All of a sudden, I was being talked to and being invited to things and being included in things. And I went from being boring, shy, and awkward to someone that people actually come up and talk to and interact with. It's really weird how sort of modifications to your sort of outside appearance can sort of influence how people treat you. It's like I used to be treated very much as like a, I used to be infantilized quite a lot when I was younger because I wasn't like, I was quite sort of skinny. I didn't really pay much attention to my fashion. I didn't like, you know, my hair was just like overgrown and I just didn't pay much attention to it. And now it's really weird growing a beard, putting muscle on. People very much have different sort of reactions to you. So I find that when I was younger, I used to have a lot of female friends. But nowadays, it's really, really difficult for me to make female friends. Whereas you know, guys nowadays will just come up to me and be like, you know, how's it going? And I was at the gym the other day, I was like, my head in sort of the way I can listen to my music. I've got these noise-canceling earbuds in and I was just going out and I didn't want to talk to anyone. And then I had like a couple of people come up to me and I was just like, please go away. I need to focus on getting through it. It was, yeah, it's, they can have some, some, some changes. And I think that's a really good sort of transition, I guess, to the topic of the podcast because you've been on an emotional social journey and I'd say that probably I have as well. I guess what I want to ask is what aspects of autism do you think make it hard for us to meet our emotional needs? That's a huge question. There are quite a few aspects of autism that makes it hard to meet our emotional needs. Let's go from the top down. Most of the way that human beings meet their emotional needs is by socialising and by having strong social networks. So if for whatever reason you find it hard to do what everyone else around you is doing and have strong social connections, then it's going to be difficult to meet those needs because it's hard to have a strong social network if you don't do the same things as the people around you. A great example of this is just if you, if you need something in terms of information, or maybe I need help moving house, or I don't know, fixing a water system or something, something happens and I don't know how to deal with it, if I have a social network, then I'll ask one of my friends or I'll ask my family and they will say, Oh, well, when that happened to me, I did this. And then, and I'll put you in touch with the plumber that I used or something. And all of a sudden that's problem is solved instantly through the passive help of the social network. And I didn't have to know where to go to find the help because I had this sort of supportive network around me. So I suppose as well, like if you have that sort of social network around you, like a lot of the ways that a lot of, you know, just observing other people, a lot of the ways that they seem to sort of process and get free emotions is by talking to people about them, you know, like having sort of like that outside in kind of view on it. I don't know a lot of, there's not a lot of people that I know that can just kind of sit free and just sort the stuff out on their own without, you know, talking to other people. Well, that's how we're designed to sort this stuff out. It's, that's how human beings have coped for a very, very long time is in groups relying on each other. And so it's near and impossible to do that by yourself. Now, in terms of what a successful like autistic social network will look like, it does, it's obviously going to look different. But we still need to have some friends, some social network, some way to tap into those resources. Otherwise, it's going to make everything really, really hard. So for, I mean, I hear a lot from people every once in a while, things like making friends is too hard. It's not worth the effort. I've, I'm just going to give up, basically, I'm going to focus my energy on looking after myself because it's too hard to make friends. And that's a really sad story, because it doesn't normally end well. It is very, very difficult to get by without that at all. I think there's a really, you know, obviously secondary school doesn't tend to be the most pleasant experience for a lot of, or high school doesn't seem to be the most pleasant experience for a lot of autistic people. But I found that, you know, that a lot of the systems that we have in place specifically in the UK are set up and surrounded, surrounding these younger people, like, you know, early, early ages up to, up until like late teens. The issues that seem to come up quite a lot is that transition from teenagehood to adulthood, you know, because when you go through sort of a school experience, or around your parents, that those environments that you put in a sort of to a certain degree controlled, like, you know, that you're going to be around people during these certain times. But if you go after university, if you move out, you're in a whole different new place. And the responsibility for setting up social events and social times and and times to talk to people is on you. And like, you know, for some people, it's it can be really, really difficult to sort of know where to go to find people to be friends with, but also how to go about it. Do you do you do go up? Like for me, I used to go up to people and say, hey, do you want to be friends? So like, you know, that very direct way of making friends with people obviously didn't work. It was cringy, but I think that that time, especially for me, was was was a very difficult time. And the stakes are a lot higher too. I mean, if you don't successfully make friends at high school, no one's going to kick you out of home because you didn't make friends at high school. But if you don't do the adequate social things at work and you don't form good relationships and you lose your job and you've got no money, well, maybe if you don't pay your rent for a couple of months, they're gonna, you know, there's going to be serious consequences for that. So so these these are just a couple of examples of where it might not be immediately obvious to everyone how emotions and emotional intelligence are absolutely crucial for these types of things, things like making friends, things like keeping a job. But it's all to do with managing relationships and managing relationships is the most complex thing that we do as human beings. So it relies on a few other emotional intelligence skills that not everyone has developed because we weren't taught how to how to develop. Yeah. So the education system, the socialization is it's all geared towards people who are not like us, you know, and especially if you don't get picked up as autistic. I mean, you know, we could talk about the utility of certain certain types of autism education. But, you know, a lot of people don't get picked up. And they sort of have to go through that that experience. And oftentimes learn things the hard way. And, you know, talking to a lot of autistic women, it also seems that that masking can be a really big roadblock because, you know, people can perhaps mimic, learn and mirror different social skills and fit themselves neatly into a specific social group that they want to be in. But they don't really feel that that genuine connection, that ability to share things that they love, that ability to connect to people on a deeper level and share how they really feel inside. That's a really good outside inside example. Again, the mimicking and camouflaging and things like that. You're doing all the things on the outside, but it's not being matched by what those things, how the other people are actually feeling. So I remember figuring out much later in life, probably my late 20s, the reason people dance is because they actually feel good when they're dancing. Who knew? How was I supposed to know that? I just thought people did it because you were, I don't know, I had no idea to be honest. You just put in a situation, then you just, yeah, it was something, I don't know. Turns out people actually feel good in their body while they do that sometimes. It's the same thing with like wearing a suit and tie and having like a formal wedding and things like, why do people do that? Turns out because a lot of people really enjoy that. Oh, that's why they do it. And it turns out that I don't enjoy that. So just naming those things and recognizing that the reason for people's behavior is because it makes them feel good means that, well, when I'm looking for behavior that's going to work for me, it needs to actually make me feel good as well. It's not just copying what everyone else is doing. You're not kind of sort of trying to neatly fit into these social norms of what's, what you're going to enjoy, you know, you go out and you go to a party or you go to like, go to a club because that's what people do for fun on the weekend. Then everyone tells you that it's fun and you drink alcohol and you do all of these crazy things and that's fun. Not for everybody and especially when you're younger, people don't really tell you that you don't actually have to do that if you don't want to. There's such a big culture in the UK. I don't know about Australia, but we have a really big sort of binge drinking culture in the UK. Australia is pretty good at its binge drinking culture. You taught a little bit similar. Yeah, I think for me, I wouldn't really understand if someone said to me, they do this because it feels good because usually the way that I would approach things is, does it make sense for me to do this alongside the other things that I'm doing and can I actually do this consistently on a regular basis? Then I think another really, really big thing for me which comes up in a lot of my podcast episodes and the stuff that I do is things around Alexa Fymia. I really couldn't connect enjoyable things that I do with me feeling good, me feeling happy. I always just felt like, I made a video on YouTube three or four years ago which was called My Split Brain, where I pretty much all of my early adulthood, late teens, I felt like there was two different parts of me. There was this uncontrollable monkey mind emotional eight brain that I just absolutely hated and I had to feel like I put it in a cage all the time and keep it controlled. Then I had my logical brain which was in my mind, it was the best brain. It makes sense. I don't want to do things that don't make sense. I don't want to do things that aren't productive to me and I think that disconnect between my emotions and the actions and the things that I did and the things that I fought really made it hard for me to understand how other people work. I used to think they're just crazy beings. They just run about and do stuff that makes them feel good. It's like they scared me. Neurotypicals were really hard to understand. Is they're emotionally based rather than logically based? Yeah. It led to me having a lot of thoughts of superiority when I was young and I was like, well, you're going and doing this stuff because you feel good. Well, I don't do that. I'm a logical being. I'm an adult. I know what I'm doing and obviously I had a lot of work to do in terms of integrating my emotional side. That exact attitude is one of the reasons I started my emotional intelligence training course online is because I noticed that attitude a lot. I noticed it in myself. I noticed it in my colleagues, in my engineering office, the one that basically put intellect and logic above emotions and it's like, haven't we kind of evolved out of emotions? Do we really need them anymore? The answer is, yeah, we do actually. For anyone listening who is thinking yeah, but isn't logic actually significantly better? I would recommend a book called Thinking Fast and Slow. It's a really good way to understand how we have two brains that do very different things. One of them is the logical brain and as you might be surprised to know, the logical brain is the slow brain. It is incredibly painfully heavy and slow and it does some things really well. But if you try and use it to do everyday tasks, you're going to run out of executive functioning resources and you're going to be overwhelmed by social situations and you're going to feel like there's a lot of anxiety and stress in your life because you don't have enough resources to do what everyone else seems to be doing really easily. One of the reasons for that is because we don't use the other part of our brain very effectively or efficiently. So when you start thinking about it like that, all of a sudden it's not emotional intelligence, it's brain training. I am training my emotional brain to do what I want it to do and serve me and it's like having a personal assistant or something where I just delegate all of the non-important tasks, the ones that can be done really quickly that don't need a super amount of precision and they just all get done. Things like small talk, things like other social interactions and figuring out what I feel and things like that. Just the fast emotional brain does them in an instant without any effort whatsoever without draining my intellectual capacity on Monday and everyday things. Yeah, so I mean one of the things that really separates us from animals is our ability to have that sort of higher cognition. But it actually does, as you said, it requires a lot of energy. Like a lot of the reasons why we have things like routines and habits is so that we don't have to think about things, that we just act. Like this is what we do and we do this and we feel this way and then we go and we feel that way and you know, you need the bathroom, you don't have to think, should I go to the bathroom, you just go because it's like an emotional sort of habit kind of thing. Yeah, I think that's really worth highlighting to a lot of people because as you said, I've heard that from a lot of people as well. Like whether it's from close friends, whether people are doing it sort of cognitively, like they actually, you know, actively trying to push emotions to the side or whether they just don't really think about that side of them. And I think, you know, for me, that alexifamia was massive in terms of sort of putting a blocker on my ability to feel and to connect events with emotions and to do all of that things. And you know, when I was younger, I used to think I had multiple personalities, you know, I because my outward, you know, I'd notice now and again and sort of bring myself back and sort of observe myself, you know, for information now it's different emotional states, but I thought I was having different personalities and I labeled them with different colors. I was like, yeah, I'm feeling a bit red today, which will be so I was just angry. But I thought that just because my the way that I was talking and the way that I was behaving and the things that I was thinking about was so different, I was like, I can't be the same person. Like, that's that disconnects was because crazy and me not knowing much about autism, much about alexifamia, I was trying to do all these really crazy roundabout ways of understanding my environment from that sort of logical understanding. It was it was a funny time. Let's say that at least you were recognizing that you did feel differently. Sometimes one of the barriers for people, especially in the case of alexifamia is I'm trying to check in with how I feel and I actually have no idea. For me, I'm sometimes able to do that. It's kind of weird. I did a video on what I called it emotional damping, because I've got like spring damping, not equations, well, equations as well, but like the the graphs and things from my mechanical engineering days, and I'm like, well, my damping coefficient on my emotions is really high. Anyway, so what basically what that means is really interesting. You say it because a lot of the ways that I try and explain alexifamia to people who don't understand it, you know, like, obviously, like it's really useful in interpersonal relationships with like romantic partners and things of that nature. Like for me, there's I try and describe it like most people can tell when they're 20% angry or something, they can sort of feel it, they know that it's there, they can see it in their behavior. Whereas for me, it might be like 60, 70, 80% angry. And by the time that it gets to that point, it's overwhelming. It hits me all at once. I have a shut down, I have a meltdown, I go off in a huff and have a patty about it. But up until that point, it's really just a feeling that something's not really good. And my body feels a bit weird. Like, do you have that experience? I don't know if you have the experience sometimes of not realizing until later. So something will happen. And there'll be a bit of a delay. And it's almost like all of the sort of appropriate emotions, all of the things that I could have felt immediately. I feel nothing for the moment. And then a little bit later, it might be five minutes, it might be a day, it might be a year. Suddenly they all hit me later on. And that is fantastically useful for dealing with crisis situations. Because I don't get overwhelmed. No, no, no, it's actually really useful. Because when something big happens, then I can stay focused and I can do what I need to do and I can make good decisions. And then it's not till later that all of the emotions come up and it gets overwhelming. Some people get scared or feel unsafe or something and they just lose their ability to think clearly. Whereas for me, I can usually keep my ability to stay conscious and think clearly a lot longer than most people. The downside is that it makes it harder to react instantly and emotionally and in an appropriate kind of way. Which in relationships... Some of the situations you do, oh, my dad's died and you're like... Yeah, exactly. Whereas in relationships, people need you to respond in the first quarter of a second for them to feel like you care, for example. So it can come up as a challenge in relationships. Honestly, I've never thought about the crisis situation. I'd say there's been a few times in the past where that's been the case. I kind of go into this weird sort of... I get a bit zoned out, but I'm fixed on cognitively understanding what's going on and trying to get a solution. And then as you said, I'll have a shower or something. A few hours later after this event, I'll just be like, oh, my God, this is intense and breaking down. I'm going to cry. I think as well, it can be hard interpersonally when it comes to things like arguments as well. Because any situation where emotions are heightened for one person or for both parties, being able to really understand how that person's words or that person's emotions make you feel and then respond to that, it's quite important to do that. But a lot of the time, it's not something that I can personally do. So I need an hour or two or I need a couple of days where I can go back, I can really think about it, write down my thoughts, try and think about how I felt in that moment. Yeah, definitely interpersonally, especially in romantic relationships, it can be hard to navigate, especially when you don't know that it's there and that it's something that not everyone experiences and they don't understand it or they choose to ignore it. And part of the goal of emotional intelligence training is to sort of reduce that lag time so that you're having a conversation and someone says something that you find inappropriate or offensive or something or they, and instead of going or instead of saying okay and going along with it and then the next day or the next week going, hang on a minute, I wasn't really happy there, you can say something in the moment and say actually how I feel at the moment is I would prefer not to go out to dinner right now. I actually am a bit tired, I'm going to go home. Wow. And instead of it just helps making choices in the moment, it helps with relationships in terms of standing up for your own boundaries of what you are happy and not happy with. And also it means that the other person gets instant feedback as to whether something, whether you find something good or bad. Because if I tell someone, hey, remember that thing you said last week? Well, I felt this way about it. What are you talking about? It's a little bit, it's a little bit hard to train you as my friend or my partner or something else right? It's a little bit hard to train them if you're giving them feedback a week after the event. Whereas if they do something or say something and you're like, oh, that's the thing, can you please not do that or say that? Because it has this effect on me. So I suppose then they get the anxiety as well, they're like, all right, they said they're okay, they always do this, but they're not and they're going to be waiting a week or so and they're going to come back with this long paragraph of text and oh, Jesus Christ. Exactly. And if you can say you're not okay when you're not okay, that actually builds a huge amount of trust in relationships. Because it means someone can ask me and they can trust my answer. When I say yes, they can trust that I mean yes. And when I say no, they can trust that I have a good reason and that I actually mean no as well. So yeah, but it all comes down to training how to do that properly in the moment in the relationship. And that's what a lot of people have trouble with. It's really interesting. I think it'll be good to kind of go over some of the things that sort of the practical ways that people can really understand their emotional side and sort of integrate it into their lives. But I think another thing that we haven't touched on is the stuff around cognitive empathy. Because, you know, Alexa Fine here is related to us, our emotional state and ability to communicate our emotions and categorize them. Whereas cognitive empathy, or indirect communication, being able to look at someone, understand from the tonality, the body language changes, the facial expressions that they're in a certain emotional state. It's important. It's an important part of reacting to it appropriately with adaptive empathy. So it helps to understand how most people do this and then why it doesn't work for you and what you need to do instead, if that makes sense. So how most people do this is they start with the base assumption, the other person is just like me. Which means if you're crying, it means you feel the same way as you do as I do when I'm crying or it means if you are pacing around the room, it means that you feel the same way as I do when I'm pacing around the room. For most autistic people that is not a very good starting point. So we need to recognize that we probably need to check our own assumptions on that because it may be quite different. And then once we recognize that we can start to link up how the person is actually feeling with how I actually feel at another time. So the base emotions are all the same. When you're sad, it feels the same as when I'm sad. Now you might express it differently. Different things might make you sad, but we still know what that base emotion is like. So it's like we need to do one extra step with the cognitive empathy to recognize the emotion that the other person is communicating, link that to an emotion that I know what it feels like, and then link that to a situation and an expression that I would use to express that emotion. And then that way I'm translating from their behavior to something completely different in my behavior that's essentially emotionally equivalent. And making those cognitive links between the two. It's a bit of a mental gymnastics, but it is the way that we can make cognitive empathy work really well. And then once you try it, like that feels like a lot of effort to go through. But once you train it and you do it again and you do it again and you do it again and you do it again and you do it again, it becomes second nature. So that I can build up in my brain a database of how most people behave most of the time, which means it's like learning a second language at the, in the beginning, you're learning all this grammar and you're learning all these vocab and you're like, oh, how am I going to remember all of these things? But if you do it enough, our brains, you know, link up the patterns so that they're almost instantaneous. They go from our slow brain to our fast brain. And then suddenly we can do them all instantly with the code switching that would otherwise have taken us a long time. So the goal is not to keep doing those mental gymnastics. The goal is to train your fast brain to do it automatically so that it doesn't take you effort in the future. And there's a big difference between those two objectives. I mean, definitely sort of out in, out in the, the world, you know, with, with friends, coworkers, you know, through podcasting and stuff, I think when I'm mentally quite, I have, I have quite, you know, my mental energy, I feel quite good. I think that those, those are the times where I'm a lot better at picking up on emotional cues like that. I think that the issue for me particularly comes in when I'm feeling comfortable or that I'm around people that I'm around around a lot. I kind of, I kind of shut my brain off a little bit. And I think some, sometimes you can get yourself into a bit of a situation where you get paranoid about, Oh, are you, are you thinking about this in the right way? Are you, are you exaggerating how they might be feeling? And I think, you know, to a certain extent that that's really sort of a useful way of sort of navigating the world from, from our perspective. But I also think, especially if you're in a relationship with a neurotypical individual that they can do a lot of stuff themselves as well. Because, you know, there will be times where you don't pick up on the fact that their tone is just a little bit different than usual, you know, because people vary how they speak and how they look and feel on a daily basis. And it's not always connected to a certain emotion. So I, you know, I think it's, it's kind of like meeting them halfway with it. Because I think that something that really helps me feel a lot more confident that I understand the situation is that they tell me, you know, I pick up on something that's maybe a bit different. I say, Are you okay? And instead of going, Yeah, I'm good. They'll say, No, I'm not, I'm not good. You know, they'll say, Yeah, I'm good. I'm like, are you sure? That's actually a really fantastic, simple strategy that I, that I teach people in my emotional intelligence course. It's around guessing and just noticing, like, even if you don't know what the right answer is, you've noticed something is here. So you say, Yeah, I noticed something is everything okay. And they'll say yes. And you'll say, Okay, because the reason I'm asking you is because it doesn't sound like you're okay. And, and then it might take one or two goes, but you'll eventually they'll eventually help you to figure out what was the thing you noticed. Because what you're noticing is there's a mismatch. Someone's saying they're okay, but they're sounding like they're not okay. And it's hard to figure out which one is correct. But that's the hard part that you that we want to get better at over time. Some people can feel really like someone's lying to them as well. Like, you know, if you if you're very sort of hyper fixated on direct communication, you don't really go with the indirect stuff. If someone says they're okay, you'll be like, cool. You just get on with stuff. So it's like, if they say they're okay, but they're not, you're like, why the hell why the hell do you like to me about it then? Like, so you get the issues around that. Yeah, so so even just mentioning it is a really good is a really good strategy. But what I was going to say before, just very quickly, we'll probably have to wrap up. Sure. Sure. Is that yeah, it's this kind of stuff works both ways as well. So in my coaching work, I work a lot with partners of autistic people. And a big part of that is helping them to train their brain to recognize when I come up to you and tell you in a calm voice that I'm at about 95% of my capacity, and I'm going to need to go home pretty soon. Yes. They need to recognize that that means I'm actually at 95% of my capacity. And you better do something really quickly because it's really urgent. And I know I'm not really expressing that through my emotions or words or speed of voice or emotional tone or anything at the moment. But that's because I'm trying not to get tip myself over the edge. So so they can also help with that with bridging that gap as well. And there's obviously a lot of different sort of gaps and ways of bridging communication between autistic people and neurotypicals. I think it's it's it's also, you know, really important, especially when it comes to mental health settings. No, if some if someone has a patient, there are a patient, there are psychologists, there are mental health worker, and they're autistic and the mental health worker doesn't really know much about autism. And that person comes up and says, I'm having the worst time. I am just completely depressed all of the time. And the fact that they're not breaking down and sobbing and crying in front of them, they don't really take it seriously. And I think, you know, there can be lots of situations like that, whether it's at school, or in the workplace, medical is a good example of people being like sent home from hospital come back when it's worse, like, I wouldn't be in emergency if it wasn't worse. This is like 10 out of 10. What do we what do we do about it? Yeah, yeah. So, um, yeah, the risk of the rambling a bit more, I think it's been really good to sit down with you. And it's, it's really nice to be able to to talk to you about self emotions and autism. And, you know, I really value a lot of the work that you've done. And obviously your your YouTube videos, where can people find you? So look up autism from the inside, you'll find me on YouTube, that's probably the first thing that'll come up. I've also got a website autism from the inside.com.au I do one on one coaching. So that's mostly for autistic adults. Sometimes parents need help working through a situation. Or the other the other big one is relationship coaching. If your partner is autistic, and you're gonna need some help navigating that and understanding their needs and common patterns and things. There's some really common patterns that I see all the time in that. And yeah, emotional intelligence, training, public speaking, various different advocacy things and training. And yeah, you'll find it all on the website. Sure. And I will put the website link down in the comments. So thank you very much for that, Paul. It's been really lovely to chat to you. And of course, if you have talking to you guys, if you have enjoyed this episode, whether you're on YouTube, hit that subscribe button, of course, give it a like. If you're on Spotify, Apple, all that stuff, give me a rating, even if it's just a star rating and no text, that is completely great. Better than nothing. And if you want to keep up to date with my life, some of the blogs, or you want to check out the videos that I make and the reels, you can find a lot of my stuff over on my Instagram page, Thomas Henley UK. And if you want to get in contact about anything to do with coaching, something that I'm going to do at some point, gonna settle my new business in April, very excited about it. Or public speaking, or modeling, anything like that, getting in touch with me through my website, thomashenley.co.uk. And with that, yeah, thank you very much for listening. How have you enjoyed the Forty Orty experience, Paul? Yeah, good. Thanks, Thomas, for inviting me. And I'm not sure exactly when this is going to be broadcast live. But another exciting piece of news is that I'll be in the UK in July this year. So I may see some people there during that time. So stay in touch for details about that. Awesome stuff. So thank you very much for listening. And I will see you all in another episode of the Forty Orty podcast. See you later, guys.