 Good day, 40 Auti listeners. Welcome back to another episode of the 40 Auti podcast. I'm Thomas Henley and today we're going to be diving deep into autism and dating online. Very interesting topic. Personally, I've found great difficulty with navigating the dating world as an autistic person. I have done a lot of work on myself personally and over time I've built up my social and dating skills enough. But one thing that I really struggle with most still to this day in single life is online dating. I can never seem to catch the drift and I guess understand exactly how to navigate that area. Today I'm joined by the very lovely Jamil and we're going to be talking about his app, the HIKI app, a online dating service for autistic people. Jamil, how are you doing today? I'm doing really good. Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here. Of course. It's been a bit of a strange day for me today because I usually work like four day a week and I usually take the Fridays off but I've got something on work on Friday so today, Wednesday is the day today and it's been very strange waking up at normal work time and just being like, oh, there's no work today. Yeah. It's been a funky time I think of a funky couple of years. Yeah, definitely. With all the changes to people working at home. I started my job online so I started my job from home so I've only met about three of my colleagues from a workplace. Wow. Yeah, the HIKI team has always been remote from day one so the transition hasn't been uniquely challenging for us but there's a whole host of, you know, there's a lot going on in the world and so it's just we're just trying to figure things out as we go. I suppose as well, do you, you know, because it is a sort of a dating app, do you have to like put like notices, like COVID notices on the app or? You have the ability from, it's your choice if you want to disclose that you are vaccinated or not so all of that is sort of is a part of your profile. Should you please? I think that the biggest impact that COVID had for HIKI is, you know, people needed to feel a sense of connectedness and a sense of community more than ever. And so in a lot of ways, you know, for lack of a better word, COVID was a tale and our growth numbers really skyrocketed. People came to the app looking for friendship, love and community. That's what we're all about. It's, you know, one of the common things that I get so I make a lot of dating and relationship posts and videos and stuff like that. And there's a lot of people out there, a lot of autistic people have had like really, really bad secondary school experiences. And like they've never truly sort of got over that. I like to say it as like you're biased towards negative experiences with other humans. And there's a lot of people out there who are saying, you know, I don't need a relationship, I don't need friends. And you know, I think that although we are, you know, we may be autistic people, it's really, really important to have those sort of communal community aspects to our lives. It doesn't remove our desire to connect and love and make friends. So I guess we can sort of move into the actual podcast questions. Cool. Let's do it. I guess a really great place to start would be, you know, when did you start HIKI and why? Yeah, so HIKI became available in the app store in July of 2019. Cool. And it took us about a year to build the app, which means we probably started working on it in the summer of 2018. The why, which I suppose is the big one. My cousin happens to be autistic. He confided in me one day that he was finding it very difficult to make friends. And you know, ultimately, I think he had fear over finding a partner to have a family of his own. And at the time, I had the same fear. I was sick. I wasn't in partnership. And we were building closeness by having similar fears and worries about our future. And when I walked away from the conversation, went to go look for some resources for him, he said he was going to look for some resources for me. He was able to find a bajillion things. And I wasn't able to find much of anything. And so there was no light bulb moment. People think, oh, like HIKI, it didn't really happen like that. It was mostly a trigger for just a bit of an internal sort of educational journey. My background is in sociology. My academic background is in sociology and research. And so I spent the next few months learning in the ways of which the sort of health and wellness effects of loneliness were intersecting specifically with the neurodiversity of autism. And I don't know that I learned or discovered, but I learned that autistic adults were committing self harm at really alarming rates specifically due to lack of social opportunities. And that's when we started to collaborate. Okay, well, I think this is not only is this a public health crisis that no one's really talking about, but it's one that we can probably solve. And so I decided to build HIKI. Brilliant. I think there's many, many ways that autistic people struggle. But I definitely, from making my videos and posts and stuff, it's always the ones about relationships and dating that seem to fly off as it be. And I mean, it's for a good reason because I mean, back then when I was single and I didn't really feel comfortable dating and having relationships, I tried to go on different sites. I think it was like an Asperger's dating or like something like that. And I was looking around and I was trying to find something where I could connect with other autistic people to find someone to have a relationship with. And I really just couldn't find anything. And, you know, I kind of had to default to in terms of online stuff, I had to default to using things like Tinder and Bumble and let's see if I want hinge. And it's a very, I mean, we could talk forever about how difficult it can be to date as a dude with online dating and stuff, you know, the algorithms usually against you. But even then it was very hard to find someone who was autistic. Like nobody put it in their profile, which is why I was like, I need to get you on to talk about an autism-specific dating app because, like, wow, that's really awesome. It's something that I've been looking around for for a long time. Yeah, thank you. Now, I think, you know, I think all beyond autism specifically, I think marginalized, historically marginalized communities, communities that have been sort of othered by dominant culture, whether that be race, gender, neurodiversity, all these things, sexual preferences, those communities feel underserved by the dominant platforms. And so Tinder, hinge, Bumble, we don't always feel welcome. We don't always feel like we can find community there. And so the success rates are terrible on those platforms for marginalized communities. And I think that is one piece. There's a whole lot of things that went into why we decided to build this, but that was one piece of it. And beyond the specificity of the community that we serve, I think our app goes further by, you know, including things like a human-centered approach to designing the platform, right? I mean, I'm neurotypical. And so it was tremendously important that I wasn't the one designing and building the app. The app's not for me. It should be built by other autistic adults. And so we have a remarkable team of autistic engineers, autistic designers, 80% of the employees who work at HIKI are neurodivergent. That is so good. That's like the amount of organizations out there that are specifically for autistic people. And just like, they don't even employ like 10, 20, 30% of their employees. Wow. I mean, it's both heartbreaking and also it's just bad business. It doesn't make sense to me. My job and my role as the founder of HIKI, there's a long history of autistic adults self-advocating for themselves. I don't need to be some savior or anything like that. The community doesn't need that from me and they didn't ask it of me. What I can do is sort of leverage my privilege as a cisgender, neurotypical male to uplift all these other amazing voices who have been doing the work long, long before I existed. And so that is like, that's the role that I play at HIKI. I'm an advocate and an ally, but I'm not, I shouldn't be the one, I'm not the face of HIKI. Like I'm not the one, I'm not the one building it. That's not my job. So we have an incredible team who makes HIKI what it is. And so we'll get into that very, very soon. All right, I'm getting excited. I'm sorry. Yeah, he jumped in the ground. Yeah. One thing that perhaps unrelated to the thing that wronged for me was you said that you were struggling with dating as well. Like, what happened? Did you have like a glow-off and then? No, no, there's still no glow-off. I guess I should just put this out there. I'm still single. So I guess I'm still struggling. I guess I'm still struggling with dating. So I think that the irony is like everyone struggles with dating just for some of us who are more privileged, we have more resources at our disposal. And so I have more options. And so there are more ways for me to navigate that world than there were for my cousins specifically. And so I think that that's the disconnect. Sure. Well, ladies want to send in, or lady or men. I don't know. If the people out there want to send in some emails and... It'll be a new segment. Righty. So I guess a good place to start would be what differentiates Hiki from other dating slash friendship apps? And what kind of adjustments have been beneficial to autistic people? Yeah. So I think actually the first one is it's sort of nuanced, but I want to... It's important is most of the other apps, if not all the apps, are actually just dating apps. And so that is an important distinction for us is Hiki's not just a dating app, it's a friendship dating and community app. And so there's sort of this... There's the pressure of finding a partner who we're going to be romantic and then we're going to do what XYZ is alleviated because the goal of the platform is actually to find connectedness and community and that could be in many different forms. That can mean a lot of different things for a lot of different people depending on what you're looking for. And so I think that there's a diversity of access that happens on Hiki because people are looking for a lot of different types of things and they're able to find that. I think beyond that is the fact that it's just for autistic adults. And so whether we did all these other cool things, which I'll talk about on the design side, which I'm really proud of, even if we didn't do any of those things, I still think we probably have almost as much success as we've had because the real value of Hiki is being able to be a part of a community of people who have a shared experience as you do. And so being able to feel seen and feel validated is, from my understanding of what people have shared with me, it can be a really liberating experience. But beyond that, I think is the actual design or the user experience of the platform, which we built in this like wild community-based approach to product design where we design screens, which were designed by an autistic woman, we would send out those screens to a community of about 200 or 300 autistic adults and they would share their feedback and then we would make changes. And then we'd send it back and they would share their feedback and then we'd make changes. And so everything from the size of the buttons to the colors that sit next to each other to the unique notifications that happen on the app as a means of mentioning expectations so they're now surprises. All of those things are intentional and all of them were built not just for but by autistic adults as well, which I think is what makes Hiki really special. I really like that you've sort of bled the lines a little bit around dating and friendships and sort of tied it all in together because there's a lot of people out there who they want multiple things. They want to be part of a community and friends and they want to have a partner. There's also a lot of people who find the idea of joining a dating app and everyone on there being focused on meeting people and dating and talking. It's very high pressure and it can be very demoralizing as well sometimes. Perhaps if you were to go for a Tinder and swipe the max amount of people that you can swipe or whatever and you only get one match a week or something along those lines, it really destroys people's self-esteem. I guess I've completely lost my train of thought. No, I'm with you. I'm with you. I think it can be really daunting and the stakes can feel like they're really high when you're on those types of platforms. Honestly, it's probably not the healthiest approach even if to dating in the first place. I think going in with a set of intentions is really healthy so that there's transparency in the communication and we understand what the other person desires. That to me makes a tremendous amount of sense, but skipping friendship and just dating, that was probably a gap in our socialization growing up. I think having a platform that allows and encourages that fluidity and that optionality gives people control back over their experience. I can think to myself that there is a a lot of differences in sexual preferences and sexual orientation with people who are autistic. There's been a lot of studies on asexuality and things of that nature. Some people, for myself, I'm demisexual so it means that I need a strong emotional connection in order to feel romantic and all sexual attraction to people. The whole thing with Tinder is that the thing that you have to do is you go on and you swipe and you match with someone and you have to try and get them to meet up with you. I don't even know if I want to meet up with them. I could give them a video call or chat to them about certain things and that would be so much nicer than feeling rushed because it's almost as an experience as just a man in general on dating apps. It's like if you don't nail down a date within the first week or so, a lot of people tend to drift down the DMs and you don't hear from them again. It feels so pressured just to get everything perfect, the social communication, the the date idea and then you've got to go out and you've basically got to do an interview for yourself with another person. If I'd met someone online and I've been chatting to them for a while and then we connect on a lot of things and we video calls, I'm going to feel a lot more confident going into a dating situation with that person. On top of that, you're expected to make all of these decisions based on a photograph. There's an unlimited amount of reasons why that's flawed. For some of us, we don't care what the other person looks like. For some of us, we do care, but that's one of one million things that go into a decision-making process. Having only a photo, which is I think Tinder's model, which works for them, it wasn't what we wanted to build. On Hiki, you have the ability to talk about your stims. You have the ability to list your special interests. You have the ability to write a free phone bio if you want. You have the ability to respond to prompts if you want. You have photos, but it's one of 20 pieces of information that creates your profile, which I think just it's empowering because it's a fuller picture of who you are as an individual. It allows other people to make more thoughtful decisions of whether they want to talk to you or not. Physical attractiveness is only really one dimension. You can find someone very physically attractive and then you meet them in person and you're like, oh my god, how did I get myself into this situation? We have nothing in common. I just don't get the wavling that they're on. Yeah. If things like match.com and early online dating platforms were more popular, then it would be a bit easier, but it seems like the majority of people on those sites tend to be a bit older, a bit more of the older generation. When I was single and I went on to these places, it's very hard to find someone who's my age. Everyone's on the apps. Everyone's on the apps. Everyone's on the apps, but I think things are shifting a little bit. We see it with the success of Bumble. We see it with the success of Hinge. Hinge made a decision, I think five or six years ago, to make their onboarding flow so the process of creating a profile four times as long as it was. The traditional thinking in technology platforms is the quicker the onboarding flow, the better for the user because there's less friction in getting onto the platform. They did the opposite of what anything you would read in a book would tell you about how to grow a platform. People were really investors were angry and they thought it was a bad decision. It ended up being the catalyst for all their growth. It's the reason why Hinge is what it is today. What people didn't realize is, okay, if we make the onboarding flow four times as long, we're going to lose a lot of people who don't want to do that, but a lot of those people were interested in more the Tinder experience, which is they want to get on, they want to find a partner, they want to go on a date, which, to be clear, there's nothing wrong with. There's nothing wrong with. You should do whatever you're missing an element. You're missing an element from there. But on Hinge, the people who stayed were really invested in the experience and really invested in building this profile. Their engagement numbers were much better than Tinder's and their retention numbers were much better than Tinder's because the people that stayed really wanted to be there. I always find those things really interesting because what we think is the right decision from a business perspective is not always correct. I think that spoke to me when we were building Hinge, we wanted to build it in that ethos of like, okay, yeah, it might take some time to build a profile, but there's going to be more information. There's going to be more there. The people who stay are going to be really invested in the experience. It's awesome. So as a neurotypical person in a neurodivergent space bubble, what do you think your role is in the co-producing of Hickey App? Yeah, no, it's a great question. And cannolids, it's one that I'm constantly revisiting. So I think the way that I approach it is that, and I sort of shared this earlier, so I thought if I'm repeating myself, but my job is not to build the app. My job is not to design the experience because it's not for me. And so my job is to empower my team to do a remarkable job at that. And so hire the absolute most talented autistic designers that are out there. Hire the smartest autistic engineers out there. Hire the most creative autistic content folks out there. And leverage my privilege as a cisgendered heterosexual neurotypical male to drive this company forward from sort of a technology and business perspective. And so I think of myself as I would sort of any advocate or ally, in my opinion, is supposed to leverage their privilege to empower the voices who have been doing this long before they did. And so that is the role that I've taken at Hickey. And that's sort of my approach to the work. What kind of numbers do you have in your team? Do you have in the tens or the hundreds? Definitely not in the hundreds. We're in the tens. Still a really small, scrappy team doing our best to figure things out and try to build a really special platform to help folks find community. It sounds really good because you're not only sort of tailoring the actual inner workings of the app and the user experience to autistic people, but you also have autistic designers and graphics people and content people. Like it's kind of going above and beyond for co-production. It's the way things should be done. And in my opinion, at least, you should never build something for a community without the community. And that doesn't mean you can't be a part of it, of course. I can only speak to personal experiences, but as a black man, I need white allies. I need everyone to be in the fight and struggle with me. I can't do it on my own. It's building those bridges. Yeah, yeah. And the role they play might be differently, but everyone needs to be invested in this. Otherwise, we're not going to get shit done. And so that's how I approach my role. I'm committed to this journey, but that doesn't mean I need to be the loudest voice in the room. In fact, it probably means I should be the most quiet and I should spend most of the time listening and very little of the time speaking. And so that's how I've approached the work I do. Cool. I often, whenever I do presentations or public speaking events and stuff, I always bring people to the analogy of the caveman. If you imagine a community of neurotypical cave people together, they all go out and they hunt and at the end of each night, they sit by the fire and they chit chat and they socialize and they network. And you know, the autistic people in that situation would be the cave people at the side tinkering with all the tools and ideas and thinking stuff up. And I think that in general, we do tend to struggle a bit more in the organizational sort of social aspects of businesses or the world or organizations. And I like to think of neurotypical people because we are a social animal, like we've only got to this point in our society, not because of one individual with a great idea, it's all the people who help to pull that idea and organize it and create structures around it. And I think that the neurotypicals are the glue that holds everything together. Not to say that autistic people can't. I know many autistic people who are very highly organized, but I am not one of these. And when you were speaking about your sort of role within as Hiki kind of sparked up that memory. Yeah, I think any team, any business who doesn't have diversity of thought, age, gender, race, neurology is going to struggle in the future. If you don't have all those different types of folks on your team, you're not going to be able to make the most thoughtful decisions because you're only going to be able to see things through a specific lens. And so we, given our product, absolutely, this is what the team should look like. But even if our product was like, I don't know, selling tissue paper, we probably, we should still look the way that we look, you know, no matter what it is, that that is the future. And those are going to be the businesses, in my opinion, that succeed. So getting into a bit more of the specifics, I mean, can you, can you take us through like a, so imagine if I'm, I'm a person, I'm an autistic person, I struggle, I'm sort of, I can hold a conversation, but I struggle a bit socially. And I've always wanted to have a girlfriend. And I've always wanted to have friends that I can just chat to whenever I want, and communities that I can get involved in. And I, I find Hiki on the App Store and I download it. What is the, the experience? Like, what, what, what do I have to do? And what will I see? Yeah. Yeah. So it's, it's the intention is it for, for it to be as sort of intuitive as possible. And so what you'll be doing is you'll, you'll have an opportunity to, to answer questions about yourself. And those questions can be a variety of whatever really speaks to you. It could be as sort of direct and straightforward as what are some of your favorite stems? It can be as creative and out of the box as if you were a character from a TV show, who would you be and why? And all these types of questions can be answered. You pick which one speak to you. You say yes to some, you say no to some. And it builds this really beautiful profile that has all these things about you, you know, name, age, gender, sexual orientation, and then all this stuff. And that is what creates your profile. And then you jump into the app. And once you jump up, jump into the app, you sort of have two different types of experiences. One experience you are looking at people individually and making a decision if you're interested in being friends with them, or if you're interested in something romantic. If that person also is interested, you match and then you can start a conversation. And then the other piece is a more community-based approach where anyone on HIKI regardless of matching can sort of post content and anyone else can engage with that underlying content through comments, likes, loves, etc. And so that is like the HIKI experience. It's very interesting. I'm actually, I just downloaded it when you were telling me, because I realized I haven't had a flick for it yet, but I very much like the checkboxes. It makes it a lot easier. So there's some questions like what kind of match would you prefer, men, women, non-binary? Got some photos. Okay. And I need to load one photo apparently. Okay. Yeah, I really like the way that it's sort of clearly segmented. Like the sign-up process is very clearly segmented. Like it's not like you have your bio and then you click on each aspect of it and you add stuff to it because like, I mean, sometimes the majority of dating apps that I've seen people tend to be very, they don't really put anything in the bios or anything like that. It's just like their photo and maybe like their social media type kind of submitted for wanting to get some views. I guess, would you say that a lot of what draws the communities and people together are answers to these questions? Do you have an algorithm that sort of links people together or is it just you go on there and you see like different profiles and you choose who to message? Yeah. So right now, the decision-making is entirely on the person. And so the information in the profile is what empowers people to decide if they're interested in meeting someone. Now, the future of HIKI, which is all these features are sort of being built, is will be the ability to search and find people based on specific profile things. So as opposed to searching people based on geography, you'll be able to search for people based on special interests and you'll be able to say, okay, I want to match with people who also are interested in XYZ. And then we'll be able to show you that. And so that's like all this, like we're building all these really incredible, exciting features that are coming soon and we're really excited for what they're going to look like. That's really cool. From looking at the match window, the match icon that you have, it kind of looks like a mix of hinge and tinder, but it's a bit more streamlined. I don't know if that's the right word. I'm just trying to talk while I'm having a look through. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now, check it out. So you have like a feed on here. I imagine this is like the community aspect to it. Yeah. Does it just post as like a global feed or is it like locational? It's a global feed. But again, the features that are being built are you're going to be have full control over what you see on your feed. So coming soon in like the next few weeks, you'll be able to decide, okay, I only want to see this type of content, or I only want to see content from these types of people, or I only want to see content from this geography, or I'm interested in talking about sports and I can go to the sports feed. So the future will be a much more customizable and personal approach to the feed. When you're building HIKI, you're starting out with zero users. Like day one, there are zero people on the app. And so apps get built in these stages. And we've just reached the point where there are probably far too many people on HIKI front for there to be a singular global feed. Now you'll be able to control your experience. Okay, I only want to see the feed from my friends, or all that is sort of being built because we're it's really interesting. There's so many possibilities. I suppose one thing that I wanted to ask you a bit more in detail about is, you know, you were talking about your was it your brother or your friends who was who you were sort of exchanging information on dating with your cousin, your cousin, of course. Yeah. I mean, is your cousin involved in the projects? No, he he didn't want to be. He's involved because he's a user of HIKI. But at like a working at working at the company was not something he had any any interest as he as he found it to be helpful. Has he has he made some friends? And yeah, is he wanting to go on dates? He has. He's had a girlfriend for the past year. And I'm putting all of his business out here in the streets. He's he's had a year and a half. And I think he's made really a whole a whole community of really amazing friends. So he's brilliant. And where where did where did he come from? Like what what kind of you know, you know, you say that he was struggling with with dating? Like, had he had he tried other things before as you know? Yeah, he tried the the traditional apps out there. Like, I think he tried Tinder. And I don't know if I don't think Hinge was as big back then, but he definitely tried Tinder. And didn't didn't find any success. Found it very difficult to to connect with people and found it very based on what he shared with me challenging to understand when to disclose if to disclose how to disclose. Yeah. Yeah. And I really knew if he should be doing it. Or, you know, I think it was just it adds a layer of things to navigate, which isn't to say it's it's unnavigatable. You know, I think there's certainly success. I think there's success to be found anywhere depending on what you're looking for. And you are. But for him specifically, it was challenging. Mm hmm. So I guess, you know, one one thing that sort of separates autistic people from neurotypical in dating is understanding the unwritten social codes. And I found talking to my friends who use dating apps that they're neurotypical that they just kind of that they understand the process a bit more like it's it's more of a natural thing for them. You know, for for me, you know, I used to be extremely socially awkward and extremely like shy. And I really struggled with the communication and social and emotional aspects. And it took me a long time to sort of build up my my skills and understanding of myself and other people. And it was only until I'd done all that work that I started to kind of understand the framework of, you know, how how dating works and, you know, what boundaries I need to put down and, you know, things of that nature. And I always felt like I always felt a little bit, you know, in open water, you know, I trying to adapt as much as I can. But, you know, still, you know, falling under the surface. And it's I find it it's very, very difficult because the psychology as well with dating apps and meeting people online is very different to meeting people in real life through hobbies and things like there's there's a clear sort of you connect with people talk about things. And oh, they're they're quite attractive. I quite like to go on a date with them. And then you you go on a date with them, like not saying that that's easy. But, you know, there's it's very different to just swipe, swipe, swipe. Oh, there's a match, right? I'm going to text them. How can I fully understand how this situation works? And, you know, get a get a date? And then what happens after I don't I don't know, with the only time that we've interacted each other is in, you know, once in person and then messages and, you know, it's all very complicated. And very hard to to understand the the process of and work with it as an autistic person. Yeah, it's, you know, I think the the core of why we exist and why why Hiki is out there is so that you don't have to subscribe to those social norms and those unwritten rules of communication. And, you know, to put it simply, you don't have to mask when you're on Hiki. You can just that is very important. You can just be who be whoever you are. And that's you should come. That's that's exactly who you should be. And I suppose considering that, you know, it's for autistic people, you don't have to but it's about masking and masking not not even in the sense of talking and interacting with someone. It's more like, you know, if I was to create the the perfect profile for myself, it would be including all my special interests and what I do and like, and, you know, from from experience, that kind of thing doesn't work. And it's just pick the photos that you look most most attractive in and, you know, try and talk in their language as much as you can. And then maybe and maybe when you meet up with them, you can sort of say I'm autistic and so let the mask slip a bit, but you're just going straight to it. Like, this is me. This is the autistic me. You're autistic. We know the ins and outs of things that that won't be like required or optional questions on mainstream dating sites. Yeah, that's right. That's, that's it, man. That's, that's exactly why we're here. So that you don't have to exhaust yourself doing all those things. You can just, you can just be here. Brilliant. You know, just to kind of round up the main questions I had. Where do you hope to take Hiki in the future? Do you have any grand plans that you're aspiring to or your team is aspiring to that you can disclose? Yeah, our grandest plan is to create a safe space for neurodivergent adults to feel seen, to feel validated, to not be othered and to have a space where they can find friendship, love, and community. And it's a big, that, that is, that's the grand, that really is the grand plan, you know. And then how can we do that for more people? How can we, you know, there's X amount of people on Hiki today. How do we get, how do we get more? How do we empower more people to lead more fulfilling lives? We had our first Hiki wedding a few weeks ago. Cool. How did that go? Well, someone, when I say Hiki wedding, what I mean is someone wrote in to our customer support team and said, Hey, just wanted you to know two non binary autistic adults met on Hiki 16 months ago. And today we got married. And we just wanted you guys to know that we're really crazy. And we want more of that. We want more people having those types of life experiences. Because everyone deserves that, you know, everyone deserves to be happy and everyone deserves to find joy. So that's, that's the grand plan. Awesome. Well, that concludes all of the, the questions that I was hoping to ask. Amazing. I guess what we'll do now is have a look on Instagram to see if anyone's replied in the short time I've given people. Okay. So I've got, I've got one here. Can anybody join Hiki? Anyone who is autistic and over the age of 18. And we respect and honor self diagnosis as well. Cool. That is, that is a very good, very good point. Actually, like, I don't imagine that you've, I mean, I imagine it'd be quite complex to, and legally complex to, to require people to, to give in their diagnosis forms. Yeah, I mean, well, we would like for one, like no one should ever have to prove their diagnosis, no matter who or what it is. And the system is so broken anyway. Okay. People of color, women go undiagnosed and misdiagnosed at, at alarming rates. And so, yeah, we respect and honor self diagnosis. If you're, if you're autistic and over the age of 18, you are welcome. Is Hiki going to be expanded to different neurodiversities in the future? Uh, maybe, maybe, I think if there's, if there's a way, if, if, if that's what our community wants, then I think it's something that we will, excuse me, think about doing. If it's not what our community wants, then, then we won't. We've gotten feedback from, from both sides. I think a lot of, we've got feedback from a lot of autistics who, who say, well, we would love to have ADHD years on, on the app. There's, and there we've gotten feedback from autistics that said, you know, we really want this space to be just for us. And so that's going to be just like, that's, when we think about our approach to product design, which is community-based sort of human centric design, that that's the, those are the types of decisions that will, that will empower our community to make. Sure. And so we'll see. So maybe in, maybe in time. Maybe in time. Yeah. So it's an interesting question, that one, because, um, like just from, from personal observation of, of our autistic people and, and people commenting on my, on my posts about their, um, NT and D and, and D and D relationships, um, that there's a lot of autistic people who are friends, good friends with or partners to people who are ADHD. Like, um, even in my own life, I just find myself just meshing, meshing really well with people by ADHD, ADD. I don't know if it's, it's because of just being just existing and being different to the rest of the society and growing up that way. However, it's, you know, something to do with the traits, the common sort of traits of each, you know, autistic being the straight sort of direct blunt kind of bringing people down and ADHD being the, the more sociable, talkative ones that you can kind of just listen to and not have to, to input as much, um, like it does, it does seem, seem to be a trend that way. Um, but, uh, okay. So that's the Instagram questions over. I guess what I want to ask is what do you want people to take away from this podcast? No chat. Hiki is committed to creating the absolute most amazing platform for autistic adults to find friendship, love and community. And that doesn't mean we always get everything right. And we are open to any and all feedback on how to improve. We want to know what we're doing well, so we can do more of it. We want to know what we're not doing well, so we can do less of it. And we want to empower the community to be the ones who drive this product forward. I think often within the technology space, people are prescribing what they think we want. And they strip a lot of agency away from, from the community and from the users. And I want to, we want to do things differently. We want to give that agency back to the community. So we're going to build what people want. And we're really excited about that. And we're really committed to, to this mission. Brilliant. Great takeaway there. So now it's time for Song of the Day, a new segment to 40 Autie Podcast. What is your song and why? Oh, I'm looking over here on my, I always have Spotify pulled up on one, on one screen. What is my song of the day? That's something that's, that's even meaningful to you or is related to the topic. Let's see. This is the pressure is, the pressure is on you. I should have had this prepared. That's what, that's what editing is for. This, this segment's all about adding a new dimension to people talking to each other. You know, like making like a little playlist on Spotify where everybody's songs of the day. And I'm hoping that it sort of ties in some more of that emotional aspect to conversation. Yeah, I like that. Okay, cool. So my song of the day is going to be Satisfy My Soul by Bob Marley and the Whalers. Every time I hear it, it feels like a warm cup of tea. It feels like feet in the ocean. It just feels, it feels very healing. It feels like a hug. It feels like a hug from my mom. And so Satisfy My Soul by Bob Marley. Check it out. Are you a fan of Reggae? I am. I grew up in a Jamaican household and so Reggae Music was, was the background noise to my, my childhood? That's cool. And it's, it's, it's still a deep love of mine. It's like a type of Reggae that people do. It's like, is it like trip, trip Reggae? I can't remember what it's called. Send me some stuff after the podcast. Send me, send me your favorite jam. I'd love to jam. Yeah. It's, it's mostly just a collection of, of different songs, but I do love Bob Marley. Like I remember the, the first time that I really heard a Reggae song was watching I Am Legend, the one with Will Smith in it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The end of the world. With his dog. And he's just kind of listening to, is it free, free little birds? I think so. Yeah. Yeah. I think so. Beautiful song. Amazing man. Well, of course, if you want to find my podcast, you can find it from anywhere that you usually get your podcasting streams from. Spotify, Apple podcast, Google podcast, the lot. And if you want to follow my work, you can find me on YouTube and Instagram. I post a lot of stuff around autism, dating, mental health, and I'm soon to get a bit more involved in my uploading schedule of YouTube. So you can definitely look forward to that. For anybody who's interested in getting me on to do a public speech or do a presentation, or be a part of a panel or do some modeling work, you can find me at my website, thomashenley.co.uk. And yeah, thank you very much to, to all my YouTube members as per usual and Patreon supporters, specifically Mr. Patrick Veddy, always got my back. So I guess what one final question Jamil would be, have you enjoyed your time on the 4080 podcast? I had a blast. I feel grateful to be here and had a lot of fun hanging out. And thank you so much for having me. No worries. You've been a pleasure to have on and, you know, I will definitely be looking into the, the hickey up, particularly the friendship side, because I'm currently in a relationship, but I do definitely need to get some, some friends in my area. So I will be, I will update you on, on how that's going. Keep me posted. Keep me posted, man. Well, thank you everybody for listening and thank you Jamil. It's been absolutely an absolute pleasure to have you on. Thank you. See you later. See you later. Bye.