July 3, 2025 • 57 mins
This week, Scott sits down with English comedian, author, and BBC radio host Robin Ince. Known for co-presenting The Infinite Monkey Cage alongside physicist Brian Cox, Robin brings his signature wit and wisdom to a deeply personal and socially relevant conversation.
The episode centers around Robin’s new book, Normal Weird and Weirdly Normal: Adventures of Neurodiversity, in which he champions the beauty of embracing one's authentic self. Together, Scott and Robin explore the rigid social norms that often stifle creativity, connection, and individuality—and how celebrating neurodiversity can open the door to a richer, more inclusive world.
This episode is a tribute to the magic that happens when we let go of “normal” and celebrate what makes us weirdly wonderful.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
I would not like to live in a world without
ADHD minds and autistic minds and all of these what
I want to live in a world because the problem
is not those people. The problem is the limitations of
the society around.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
Hello and welcome to the Psychology Podcast. In each episode
we talk with inspiring scientists, thinkers, and other self actualizing
individuals who will give you a greater understanding of yourself, others,
and the world we live in. We even hope to
give you a greater glimpse into human possibility. Today we
feature English comedian, actor and writer Robin Intce. Robin is
known for presenting the BBC radio show The Infinite Monkey
(00:42):
Cage with physicist Brian Cox, as well as his stand
up comedy career. Today's conversation focuses on his new book
called Normally Weird and Weirdly Normal Adventures of Neurodiversity. We
discuss the importance of appreciating neurodiversity and the happiness that
can happen when people embrace who they truly are. He
argues that there are normal ways we are expected to
behave and think, and many people are terrified of breaking
(01:05):
those social norms. However, he argues that living in a
world that expects us to abase such a rigid set
of rules ultimately deprives us of a far more interesting
place to live, of innovation and creativity, of love and friendships.
Of innovation and creativity, of love and friendships. This conversation
was very near and dear to my heart. So with
(01:26):
great pride I bring you this conversation with Robin Ince.
Robin Ince, it is so good to have you on
the Psychology Podcast.
Speaker 1 (01:35):
Oh, it's an absolute joy to be here. And of
course for those who are listening at home, they won't
know that it's been an absolute nightmare for you because
I have done the full ADHD traditional thing of getting
an email from my publisher and me going what I'm
on a train now though, and so I've dragged you
through the maya of attempted organization.
Speaker 2 (01:55):
I'm really sorry to hear that. So that's the first
time you heard that this interview was happening was when
we were on the train.
Speaker 1 (02:00):
No, I think I knew but weeks ago. And of course,
as you know, you only have to literally see the
movement of a blackbird or the scuttling of a beatle,
and an ADHD mind entirely just revises all information.
Speaker 2 (02:15):
Well, all wells it ends well, And I'm really glad
I've be chatting with today. You're a really interesting character,
and I'm very interested in neurodiversity. I'm I've been a
big advocate of nerdiversity in my whole life. And you
wrote this book called Normally Weird and Weirdly Normal, My
Adventures in Neurodiversity. Why do you write this one?
Speaker 1 (02:35):
Well, this one was I kind of it started almost
I wrote a book when I'm a Joke and so you,
about seven or eight years ago, and in it, I
interviewed a lot of therapists and at the end of
every interview, the therapist would say, I presume you're in therapy, Robin,
and I would say no, and they would say oh.
(02:56):
And so that kind of led to me going into
therapy just for a little bit, and that was kind
of the start of it. I suddenly realized that a
huge number of different things were anxiety. Yeah, like so
many disparate things that I thought were separate, both physical
and psychological. And then I was very lucky because I
would not have gone looking for a diagnosis, but an
(03:19):
autistic stranger called Jamie and Lyon Jamie is a young
autistic man. Lion is the squishy that goes everywhere with
him got in contact with me via social media and said,
I'd really like to talk to you about the neurodivergent model.
And that's how I found out about ADHD.
Speaker 2 (03:38):
I see, so you're a elite diagnosis. You weren't diagnosed
when you're a kid. But yeah, that's happening a lot
these days. I feel like I thought, there's even like
a trend for like lots of adults to suddenly view
themselves as a neural divergent. How do you feel about
that trend? Is that a good thing?
Speaker 1 (03:55):
Oh? Yeah? I mean the point is I've done in
the last month, I'd probably done forty to fifty gigs
around the UK, and I meet people every single night
who are late diagnosed autistic, dyspraxic dyslexic ADHD. I also
meet kids who have just started that journey, who are
eight or nine years old sometimes, and to have the
(04:18):
knowledge of why your mind works in the way it
does is enormous.
Speaker 2 (04:23):
It is.
Speaker 1 (04:24):
You know, in the UK, there's a lot of people
who go on about why do you want a label?
And I always explain. It's not a label. It's a
user's guide, it's a roadmap. It is. And it's interesting
because however, like you know, for years, I've had people
coming up to me after gigs saying, hey, I'm Adhd too,
and I've gone, oh, I don't think I am. I
(04:44):
just think it's the way that I perform. And it
required this particular outside voice to make everything so apparent.
Speaker 2 (04:53):
Yeah, I really appreciate that perspective. I've been wrestling with
something because of this increased trend for especially a lot
of young people too on TikTok, to call themselves neurodivergent.
You know what, well, first of all, what is what
does it mean to be normal? Does that word even
have a meaning? Second of all, kind of a message
(05:17):
of your book is that we're all weird. I feel
like that's a very common thread. So then, third of all,
if you can keep all these things, yeah.
Speaker 1 (05:27):
As long as the blackbird doesn't go past or I
see a beat all scuttling, we are fine. We are fine.
Speaker 2 (05:32):
Okay, Okay, stay with me, Rabin, stay with me. And
you know you say that, like you know, we're all weird.
Third of all, do you think like the word nerdivergent
still has meaning. If everyone is neurodivergent.
Speaker 1 (05:47):
Well, I think it's going to change over time. All
of the labels are quite lumpy. We look at the
history of twentieth century psychology. It's filled with all manner
of kind of errors and misunderstandings and people believing that
everyone's mind is like their mind. And what I think
first of all is what to me is neurodivergent is
(06:08):
where the way that society is framed is working directly
against you, and that you are feeling you need to
conceal yourself. So one of the things that I think
is very important is the disparity between who you present
yourself as and who you actually are. The greater the
(06:29):
gap between those two, the greater your amount of unhappiness.
And what we have in a lot of our kind
of social worlds is a terrible level of concealment. So
no one knew about my anxiety, no one would have
known about my suicidal ideation. I was able to mask
all of those things while at the same time appearing
(06:52):
to function fine. So there might be a point. You know,
we do have people who are more typical than others.
I think everyone you know, to be human in itself
is a weird thing to have this mind where we
have two tracks. We present ourselves and we have an
inner monologue that is a peculiar thing, and the problems arise,
(07:13):
like you know, the further we go down with neurodivergence.
You know, for instance, so many things that are so
simple to make the lives of autistic people easier to
be aware of, whether it's sensitivity to certain kind of
tactile things, fabrics, whether it's a certain sensitivity to light
or background noise. We wouldn't have a lot of the
(07:35):
issues we have if it wasn't just decided there is
one way of working this office, there is one way
of this particular place being. There is one way of
behaving as a human being, and of course it's a
great threat. I think you see people like, you know,
someone like Donald Trump, I think thinks he's both normal
and an alpha male, which is, you know, just merely
from his cheating at golf and everything else. You know,
(07:56):
it's kind of ridiculous. But there are people, I think
who not believe that they are normal, but also insist
that everyone else must obey the laws and the rules
that they have placed upon society.
Speaker 2 (08:11):
Yeah, you say, quote I am Now you say you say, quote,
however normal you think you are, you are weird. Yeah,
the probing would be certainly read more of your quote.
I was going to quote continue calling you. The problem
with being human is that we judge everyone else from
their exterior and ourselves from the interior. And that's also
(08:31):
a very that's a very interesting social psychology bias of
what we do. And I think just like combining those
two things, I think it's just so interesting. Like your
your argument, I mean, what would you say is the
central argument of your book? If you had to tell
me what the central argument.
Speaker 1 (08:45):
Is, I'm not sure whether it's an well I would say,
if there is a central argument, it's that the courages
of normality need to be far wider than they are.
That the society that we have is not fit for
purpose for an enormous number of minds, and minds that
are can be quite brilliant. You know this is I mean,
I found it fascinating when recently, when I say fascinating,
(09:08):
I mean horrible, disturbing, and grotesque. When Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Talked about the fact that autistic people would never write
poetry or pay taxes, and obviously pay taxes was the
main interest I imagine for him. But this idea that
in our society we still don't realize there are plenty
of autistic people writing poetry. The book the book is,
(09:29):
amongst other things, the book is dedicated to a shop
on the south coast of England which is this incredible
kind of thrift store which is predominantly run by autistic people,
and the window is always filled with their poetry, and
the shop is always filled with their art. And until
we try and realize also that what we currently define
(09:51):
as disorder is very often different, it is not disorder.
It is a difference, a different way that our mind
might be as it filters the world and moves through it.
Speaker 2 (10:06):
So autism is one form of neurodiversity, but it's what
else you consider ADHD another part of it?
Speaker 1 (10:15):
Right, Well, I would say the general kind of definitions
would be neurodivergencies, dyspraxia, dyslexia, ADHD, and autism. And then
we have in separate section which is kind of mental
health rather than neurodivergence, would be things like bipolar. Now,
of course, the problem with that is that the labeling
(10:36):
of our mind is it makes it just a little bit.
It's like that bits autism, that bits ADHD, that bits dyspractical.
But of course it's a far more tangled web than that.
There are many people who have suffered depression who are
given antidepressants and then eventually some of them are finding
(10:58):
out their ADHD. Now that doesn't stop the depressive thoughts,
but it means that the reasoning can be seen as
a little bit different. There is a lot of behavior
of autistic people which is very similar to ADHD people.
You know, we have a lot of crossover there. You know, dyspraxia.
I was banned from using an ink pen when I
was at school. I was always tangled in my own laces.
(11:20):
My socks never stayed up, my hair was never flat.
I am chaos. I have a natural force of entropy.
It seems that explodes out of me. And so there's
a lot of crossovers. And I think one of the
difficulties can be when if we make it too specific
is I know from talking to therapists that some people
when they're diagnosed, will say, I'm trying to work out
(11:41):
was that the genuine me is that the me behind
the mask or is that the masked me? Or is
that adhd me? Now there is ultimately one me. The
meanness of me and the unice of you is the
truth that lies in our mind and is how we
(12:02):
genuinely experience the world, not the affectation. The affectation is
part of what we construct, so it comes from us.
Speaker 2 (12:11):
Mm. I mean, it sounds like you'd be a big
fan of Carl Rogers's notion of congruence.
Speaker 1 (12:20):
Yeah, I think, you know, like everything that's a while
ago and things get you know, picked up and moved on.
And but I think, you know, some of the seeds
that are in those kind of works can be very useful.
But as long as we're always looking at its seeds
as we continue to get you know, I think one
of the big bits of understanding that comes with autism
ADHD et cetera is that understanding that it's not something
(12:42):
on the outside. It's not something like it's not just
your trauma and once you get over your trauma, it's
all gone. It's also the fact that the trauma will
have affected your neural pruning, will have affected the way
that you know. In particular, as we see that kind
of you know, the executive function of the brain, all
(13:03):
of that bit that is meant to be managing emotions
and managing the order of the things that we're meant
to be doing on a day to day basis, All
of those things they have now been properly affected by
that trauma. And it's not just a case of oh,
I've got rid of the trauma and it's gone now.
It's much like you know, this is a very lumpy description,
but I'm sure you know those many stories of children
(13:24):
that have sometimes just been kept in a cellar without
any kind of real language or wild you know, the
wild boys and the wild girls that were found in
woods that after a certain period of time, it is
impossible for them to ever learn the grammatical rules of
speech because that bit of pruning has occurred. Now this
is no longer accessible. And in the same way, I
(13:47):
think you know some of the ways that we react
to the world. It really is a great way. It
can improve enormously with understanding. But we should not berate
ourselves when we still might occasionally have a meltdown, or
we might forget a meeting, or things are a little
bit more in disarrayed than they should be.
Speaker 2 (14:04):
M Yes, you think trauma can be a contributor to
neurodivergent nerdivergent mind.
Speaker 1 (14:11):
Yeah, I think we're at quite an early stage. I
know there's a big debate about this, especially with ADHD.
You know, autism is seen as being genetic, but of
course trauma will play a part because by being autistic
you've then very often experienced more trauma in childhood because
of the way that you are treated, the way that
you can received and perceived. And then with ADHD from
(14:32):
my own perspective, so merely anecdotally, I see the trauma
I experienced just before I was three years old, when
I was in a major car crash that led to
many changes in my mum and a car crash that
I thought I was responsible for, because of course, when
you're three, you think you control the world, don't you know,
(14:52):
in terms of the bad things that happen. And I
think that played a major part, both for me and
also for my elder sisters.
Speaker 2 (15:01):
I'm really sorry to hear about this. Touch So did
someone die in that accent?
Speaker 1 (15:06):
No, what happened was my mother would have died actually
if my dad hadn't been three cars behind. There was
a car on the wrong side of the road, small
country lane. It was speeding. It smashed into us, and
my mum was then in a coma for quite a while,
and she suffered a certain amount of kind of physical damage,
lost the sense of smell, paralysis on the side of
(15:27):
her face, and various other things. But also then it
really affected. In fact, last week I was doing an
event and someone came to the event who had not
I had not seen since I was six years old.
They were the Baptist minister in the local village, very
kind person, and I said to him, I've not seen
you since I was six, but I want to tell
(15:48):
you now that I know how important your help was
to my dad when there were a lot of struggles
with my mum's mental health. And I said, I know
she was changed. And he suddenly had the saddest moment
mournful look, and he said, yes, she was changed. And
I think you know now I look back and I
realize I never knew the person that my mother was
(16:11):
before the accident. There's a there's a beautiful line in
a series called Mystery in Between. Yeah, it's very so
I think that's had. But now I can have that
all open and out. You know, now I understand, and
I can sit with my sisters. And of course my
sisters had a separate experience because they were older and
they saw a woman coming out of the hospital who
(16:32):
was very different to the woman who had climbed into
the car that night.
Speaker 2 (16:38):
Wow, tell me about your change and happiness about being
alive over the course of your life, because there was
a big transformation for you.
Speaker 1 (16:49):
Yeah, it really was.
Speaker 2 (16:50):
It was.
Speaker 1 (16:50):
It was basically the moment that because I used to
have pretty much perpetual anxiety, occasionally lost in a flow
state of doing a comedy gig for the Little Heckler
would appear in my head again, and a lot of
kind of I had a lot of rejection sensitivity this
for it. So it would just take the tiniest turn
of a phrase and they would make me crash. And
(17:15):
so all of those things were very dominant, and I
never you know, I could count on the fingers of
one hand the number of times that I've walked off
stage happy with a gig. I might have a standing ovation,
I might get an encore, but within three minutes I
would be dismantling it. You know, if someone comes up
to you afterwards and they say, hey, I really enjoyed
that gig. It would always be oh sorry, it wasn't
so good tonight actually, and then you slowly dismantle it.
(17:36):
And so someone comes up to say thank you, I
enjoyed it, and you say no, no, no, you stay there.
Let me explain how I've given you the worst night
of your life, you know that was. And then the
combination of a diagnosis out of nowhere from Jamie and Lyon,
and then also taking anti anxiety medication, the combination of
those two things has given me. I mean, I've always
(17:58):
been very energetic into terms of the number of things
that I've done, but I think that was an energy
that also came from anxiety, whereas now I have all
the energy that I had. You know, as you know,
anxiety requires an enormous amount of energy. You are hyper vigilant,
looking at the world all of the time, You're looking
for threat, and then once that goes you are still able.
(18:21):
I mean, I had someone in a gig the other
day and she asked, after my talk, she said, do
you ever miss your anxiety? I said no, And I said,
but you obviously asking me for a reason. Can you
tell me while we're in the audience. Do tell me later.
I can tell you now. She said, I've had anxiety
my whole life, and I really worry that if I
got rid of my anxiety, would I know who I was?
(18:43):
And I realized that can be a threat. And I said,
from my not only my personal position, but from the
position of the hundreds of people I interviewed for this book,
the loss, you are not your anxiety. You have this
separate you know, you have this thing that is above
and beyond all that. And when you lose that looming shadow,
when you lose that that terrible thick fog, you will
(19:08):
find freedom and you will find the self that you
can be. And I don't And I think a lot
of people worry. You know, my depression, whatever it might be,
has been so much part of my life. What am
I without it? And I would like to say to
everyone listening now, Yeah, I can't say for sure. All
I can say is every night I meet people who,
especially like late diagnose women who've been diagnosed with autism
(19:30):
when they're like seventy three or seventy four years old,
and they walk up to me, and as they walk
up to me, I know they're walking in a different
skin to the skin they were walking in four years
before they have. They're higher, they're mightier, they are smiling
in this you know, this beamish way that says things
(19:51):
are different now.
Speaker 2 (19:53):
Wow ah, and that's really powerful. So you So what
I'm hearing here is you're saying that by embracing the nerds,
the neudiversent label and identifying your ADHD, it kind of
unleashed an authentic version of you that quelled your anxieties.
Speaker 1 (20:10):
That's yeah. And I think also what happens very often
is the things that are actually your incredible strengths you
batter way and considered to be a frippery the things
that are the negative side. So, for instance, when I
was writing this book, I had one afternoon it was
five point fifteen PM. I wanted to check what time
I was doing a gig the next day. I suddenly
(20:31):
realized I got it wrong. It was that night. It
was in seventy five minutes time. I was interviewing an
author eighty miles from where I lived. I don't drive
a car. I had a kind of big meltdown of
my stupidity, my bad timekeeping, and I managed to get
there one minute after the show was meant to start,
and I sat down with someone who had only just
(20:52):
started reading her books. I always read it immediately before events.
And we spoke fluently and fluidly for ninety minutes, and
people came up to me and said, oh my god,
I didn't know you were friends with Sarah. How long
have you known her? And I said ninety three minutes. Now,
before I would have only seen my mistake. I would
(21:14):
have thought you screwed up, but you got away with it,
Whereas now I go, I screwed up, But then I
have this very special ability that means you throw me
into something and I will find a way to build
an event out of it. I will find a way
to connect with people. And realizing that it's not just
like kind of oh I'm lucky I can do that.
That's part of the same brain that leads to the
(21:36):
meltdown and led to the fact that I got totally
the wrong day.
Speaker 2 (21:43):
Heill. I want to take a moment to make a
few important announcements that I'm really excited about. As you
all know, I'm committed to helping people self actualize. In
the service of that, I just had a new book
I'm out called Rise Above. O'llver become a victim mindset,
empower yourself and realize full potential. In this book, I
offer a science backed toolkit to help you overcome your
(22:05):
living beliefs and take control of your life. Are you
tired of feeling helpless? This book will offer you hope,
not by identifying with the worst things that have happened
to you, but by empowering you to tap into the
best that is within you. Rise Above is available wherever
you get your books. Are you a personal coach looking
to take your coaching to the next level. I'm also
excited to tell you there are Foundations of Self Actualization Coaching.
(22:27):
Three day immersive experience for coaches is back by popular demand.
Foundations of Self Actualization Coaching is a course offered to
enhance your coaching practice by offering you evidence based tools
and insights to equip you to more effectively help your
clients unlock their unique creative potential. You can learn more
about the course and register by going to Center for
(22:48):
Human Potential dot com slash SAC. That's Center for Human
Potential dot com slash SAC. Okay, now back to the show. Yeah,
there's a theme running throughout your book, which, by the way,
I loved your book. I should have said that first.
I should have said that hitting the getting out of
(23:10):
the Gate, I should have said that, really loved your book,
and huge congratulations on these publication is a very important book.
There was one thread that really resonated with me throughout,
which is this idea of loneliness among people who are
no NERD aversion kind of finding your people. But at
the same time, you know, you also talk about, I mean,
(23:31):
there are a lot of paradoxes in your book. Have you
noticed that, Yeah, you know, Like, I mean, one big
paradox I already touched on, which is NERD I've not
work you know, uh nerdi virgin tends to be autism
and dyslexi ADHD. However, we're all weird. So that's one paradox.
But then another one that I picked up on in
(23:52):
reading your book is this idea that well, a lot
of people who are not nerdive vision are actually quite
content being a little you know, in a lot of
situations you talk about how you know you're You're like,
I think you're talking about being in the movie theater
or alone or something, and you're like, I'm totally fine
with that. So how do you see that paradox being resolved.
Speaker 1 (24:14):
Well, I think what it is is the difference between
being content with your own company and being alone and
feeling the threat of the world around you. So it
doesn't mean that you want to you need to be
gregarious or surrounded by friends. And that's the fault of
you know, your neurodivergence is hindering that. It's the fact
that when you are in the world before you really
(24:36):
necessarily understand yourself, and when you sometimes see that there
is a normal world that can be so relentlessly normal
that anyone who is other will be You know that
so many people that I spoke to had had horrible
bullying at school and things because there was a little
bit about them. This was their weakness, their otherness. Once
you're able to realize your otherness is your strength.
Speaker 2 (24:56):
Like I think I.
Speaker 1 (24:57):
Mentioned the book, I can't remember, but one of the
things that I loved is if I'm forced to go
to a party because I'm not a party person, there's
too much noise. I want to hear the conversation. I know,
I know you would think that I was there no
and I am.
Speaker 2 (25:10):
I am actually genuinely sharp because I feel like, let
me tell you why, I think. I feel like unwillingly
and unh and you don't really want it, but you're
probably the life a very party. Like I bet like
even without you trying, you know, I bet other people
probably get a lot more out of you being at
the party then you get out of being at the party.
Speaker 1 (25:29):
Yeah. Well, what I try and do if I go
to a party is I try and make sure that
everything's moving and everyone's you know, they've reached that point
where everything's kind of working. And then I go and
stand in the garden and look at the stars and
things like that, and it's like and it's that bit
where but yeah, I think so so the lonely It's like,
one of my favorite things to find out about in
(25:50):
the book was finding out about the friendship degradation curve.
That and it's certainly true. So for myself and my
new are divergent friends. We don't necessarily communicate all the time,
we don't go out all the time. We actually may
have long periods of time where we don't see each other,
but the moment we see each other, the fireworks go
(26:10):
off and we are straight into either the middle of
the conversation that was the last conversation we had before
we last saw it, Yeah, when we last saw each other,
or about some new crazy idea that we'd find out about.
There's no kind of preamble. And I think that's an
interesting part of neurodivergence for a lot of people, which
is your love for your friends does not dim by
(26:32):
a failure to see them every Tuesday or whatever. And
I think that plays its part as well, the confidence
that comes of saying I'm happy to spend a lot
of time alone in the world because I don't also
feel like I'm in a glass case where people are
looking at the freak or the weirder.
Speaker 2 (26:48):
Yeah, I really love that. I really do love that.
I'd love to hear more about how your unique mind works.
What are some of the main characteristics of that plays
out that's like a common part of your own inner drama.
Speaker 1 (27:04):
Well, I suppose that the commeding is just the speed
of thoughts. It is. There's there's so many thoughts. You know,
if you ever saw me live, you would just see
the like tangent up to tangent, up to tangent up
to tangent and I start telling one story, and then
that reminds me of something else, so I just go
off on that tangent, which leads to another tangent, and
then very often I often have people coming back night
(27:26):
after night if I'm in the same town, because they'll say,
last night, you didn't tell that story that you said
you were going to say about Apollo eight or Apollo nine,
or about universal horror movies, and so could you try
and do that tonight? And I'll go, okay, I'll make
a little note on the back of my hand. So
I think that's the And I think before with the
racing thoughts, because we're kind of evolved to really note
(27:49):
the negative. When you're having one hundred thoughts in a
very short amount of time, some of them will be
the negative ones. So they are the ones that burn
most brightly in the most unpleasant way, and they so
you know, that moment, that possible thought of that person
who's looking at you from across the train or whatever,
the negative thought, that's the one that sticks. Whereas now
(28:13):
the thoughts are nearly all, if not but benevolent. The
ones that aren't, I can back them away very quickly.
I mean I used to have if I had a
gig that I wasn't happy with, and that's most of
the gigs, but if I had one that really was
in my guts and I just felt that was a
bad gig and I'm not happy with that, and I
don't feel that I connected, that would then just stay
(28:36):
with me. And a few months after the diagnosis and
the anti anxiety, I did a gig that I was
not at all happy with and I was really unhappy
like so, and the friend of mine who had driven
me to the gig, I said, let's just leave, Let's
just get straight out here. And for half an hour
I still felt sick in the pit of my stomach,
(28:56):
but within forty five minutes that had gone. Where as before,
so I haven't lost my critical faculty. I can still
look at a gig and go that wasn't good enough
for me, but I don't relentlessly seek go what is
the imperfection here? What is the failure here? And you know,
And so that also makes me far more honest, both
(29:18):
as I think as a human being and a friend,
and also as a performer. I allow myself to take
risks the whole time. I've always been a bit of
a risk taker. But now I'm just like And my
friend Joanna Neary, who I talked to in the book,
she's similar. She's always been one of the most wonderful,
creative human beings and now but she would always at
(29:40):
the end of a gig just feel, oh dear. That
was her letdown for everyone. And now she walks out
there and she does these wonderful, strange things and she
walks off and she goes, yeah, I tried. I gave
that a go, and I think they liked it. I
think they did. I think some of the people didn't
like it, but I think overall and to have that positivity.
And then also it is that thing which is once
you reveal and what may lie behind the mask, because
(30:01):
I'm sure you know suddenly you find out that nearly
all of your closest friends are neurodivergent, because that's why
you made that bond in the first place. Oh definitely,
it's really and it's once one person's diagnosed in a
kind of you little gathering of friends, and it means
that I think you can also express yourself in a
(30:23):
totally Like my friend Joe Turbert, who I met first
watching her tap dance and it was fantastic. And I
look back now and both of us have been through
a lot of changes over twenty years, and now we
still look the same from the outside. In the pub,
if we own the bar, we're laughing and we're throwing
out ideas at speed. What we don't have is inside,
(30:46):
where we're heckling ourselves. And She's thinking, Robbie must be
really bored by this story I'm given about choreography, and
I'm thinking, she must think this guy's so old and stupid,
you know what I mean, all that stuff that's not
there now. So now again we can, you know, just
glow and thrive. And that's another reason that I wrote
(31:07):
this book, basically, because when I wrote I'm a joke
and so are you, in particular, I think he gave
people a sense of permission to approach me and tell
me the battles they had, which I love. I love
the fact people will share those stories after a gig
and they trust me. But I found out how many
people were living lives where they had created a fantastic
smoke screen. But deep down, we're not even deep down.
(31:30):
Every day they would leave their apartment, they leave their house,
and they would be going right here we go, then
I've got to put my armor on. I've got to
try and survive another day. And it's not good enough,
you know. It's that that idea that you go, well,
if you're not, you know, damaging society, and if you're
able to still move through it, then just keep quiet.
(31:50):
And that's a lot of people's kind of opinion is well,
why are you bothering to find out? It's like there's
a woman I mentioned in the book who when she
was she went to a doctor to ask she said,
I think I'm more stick and the doctor said, why
do you want to know? It's not as if there's
a cure. And again that level of ignorance. I would
not like to live in a world without ADHD minds
(32:12):
and autistic minds and all of these what I want
to live in a world because the problem is not
those people. The problem is the limitations of the society around.
Speaker 2 (32:24):
Yeah, that's really well said, And yeah, Robin, I share
multiple interests with you. I don't know if you know
who I am at all? Do you know who I am?
Speaker 1 (32:33):
I don't. I want to know more. I love your
surname because your surname immediately reminds me of a series
of films from the nineteen eighties. So that's one thing.
Speaker 2 (32:44):
Beautiful beautiful. Well, I mean, I'm a cognitive scientist, psychologist,
psychology professor, have been hosting this podcast for eleven years
now at this point, trying to.
Speaker 1 (32:53):
I know that stuff.
Speaker 2 (32:54):
Yeah, oh good, okay, cool, But okay, So here's the thing.
I'm also really into carming. So right in fact, tonight
I'm performing at the Comedy Cellar here in New York City.
Speaker 1 (33:03):
Oh I love that on McDougall Street.
Speaker 2 (33:06):
Yes, on McDougall Street.
Speaker 1 (33:07):
That, Yeah, what a great I used to the moment
I got to New York. I would always Thursday nights
used to have every single act that was going to
play New York that weekend all coming down there doing
like kind of ten minutes, and you would get to
see so many people, and yeah, I love that. It's
a great venue, wonderful venue.
Speaker 2 (33:28):
I well, yes, it's a wonderful venue. And I love comedy.
And in fact, I'm going to be talking about my
new book tonight at the Comedy Stour with nicoll Espie.
But but this is not about me. It's not about me. Basically,
I just want to emphasize that we have a mutual
love of comedy. That's that's all I wanted to say.
And and and my own neurodivergency, I think unintentionally has
(33:50):
made me funny my whole life, and recently I embraced that,
so that and more intentionally done because I do also
do like open mic nights and some but Rabin, I
wanted to discuss this with you, you know, like, to
what extent do you think, you know, you really can
harness this because I don't. I don't know. I still
I'm still trying to fare out exactly my label.
Speaker 1 (34:11):
You know.
Speaker 2 (34:11):
But whatever, whatever my sugna is going on in my
own head. You know, people have found it funny throughout
my whole life, and I'm like, wait, why do you
find that funny? I'm just saying what I'm thinking, you know,
And I was wondering, has that happened to you too? Rabin?
Speaker 1 (34:24):
Oh? Yeah, I mean it's it's it's that thing where
you know Brian Cox, who's a scientist that I do
a lot of work with, he will often say he's
a particle physicist, and he'll say to me, what you're
talking about? No one understands you and I always think
that's kind of in that's that not being understood is
the very oddity that allows us to you know, because
(34:46):
I think one of the things that often comes with
neurodivergence is you don't really take anything. If someone says
something to you, you don't immediately just accept it. Your
brain goes, why why? Why? Why? Why am I thinking that?
You know, it's a lot of what we see in
gender and stuff like that, which is going when someone says, ah,
you know, there's just men and women, it's all binary.
And I see a lot of similarities there with neurodivergence,
(35:08):
because a spectrum world has far more rainbows than a
binary world as far as I'm concerned. But I see
that bit which means you look at everything going why
is that like that? So there is that, you know,
what we often call the child's voice, but I think
is actually the best kind of voice to have, which
is going, why is that like that? Why are we
doing this? Why are the flowers growing in that way?
(35:31):
Why is the person on the subway moving in that way?
And you see, you're always because you've got a perpetually
questioning mind, you're always creating. Like we had I don't
know if you know the producer and musician Brian Eno,
who produced David Bowie and you two, Well, the thing
I want to say about his curiosity and about questions
(35:53):
that So we had him on a show and I
started to ask a question where I could see the
more neurotypical elements the panel. We're like, this is a
weird question to ask, because he's an amazing producer. I said,
do you ever walk past like trash can and look
in it and think, oh, I'm going to get that
out of the trash can because I wonder what noise
(36:16):
it makes if you bang it? And he said all
the time. So it's having this thing, which is so
everyone else was like, why is he asking Brian Ino,
this one of the greatest producers of the you know,
of modern music, this stupid question about trash cans. And
then they go oh. Brian Eno is replying by saying, yeah,
(36:37):
I'm always wondering. I look in something and I think
that's a weird bottle, that's god nod shape. I wonder
what that would sound like if you bang it. And
I think that's part very often of the kind of
the process within a neurodivergent mind, which is you do
things which are not specifically designed to go. If I
do this, I will make money. If I do this,
(36:59):
I will be rich and I will be successful. You
do it because you must, because you're intrigued, and you
are fascinated, and you're curious, and of course what I
generally find, you know, it's a very loose rule. A
lot of ADHD people, you become incredibly hyper focused for
a very limited amount of time, and it's always best
to if you can work with one of your friends
(37:19):
who's also autistic, because they will sometimes manage to keep
the focus going for some time longer than you can.
Speaker 2 (37:27):
Yeah, for sure. You know you talked about in your
book about there's a lot of cool morbidity between autism
and ADHD. Do you have a dash of autism as well?
Speaker 1 (37:36):
Or always wonder that, because I definitely see a lot.
But the other day I was doing a thing with
a wonderful autistic poet and writer called Kate Fox, and
I was not late that I was nearly late, and
I just went straight into this bookshop, straight into the
back room. And I've never met Kate before. We've done
some zoom stuff, and I just immediately I went, oh, hey, Kate,
(37:57):
we've never actually met. Oh man, I loved it assume interview.
Oh if you read that book up there, that is
such an incredible and strange book and is it possibly
had a coffee and I was just like, And she
said to me afterwards, she went, I'd always wondered whether
you were also, you know, autistic to some extent. But
I've never seen such an adhd entrance to a room before.
(38:17):
But I love the fact that you know, the moment
when you're all together. It's one of the things that
I do. You call it banter as well, that kind
of bit where people are Yeah. And you might notice,
by the way, during this I've been translating every now
and again. I suddenly went, I can't say bin bin
means nothing to the majority of people here, so that's
(38:39):
why I said trash can I couldn't say charity shop.
I suddenly went, it's thrift store. So this is like
a duo lingo episode as well.
Speaker 2 (38:48):
Thank you, But we do have a pretty orange UK audience.
Speaker 1 (38:53):
I just thought, I'm gonna so UK US audience, this
is duo lingo that we're going for. Here can thrill
to charity shop if you have a bunch of new
and divergent people together. They you don't have that normal
thing which often happens when like a group of guys
hang out in a bar and they're all kind of
(39:14):
everyone's trying to win the conversation. Everyone's trying to, you know,
pull the other person down so they win. And I
find one of the things that's very healthy in a
lot of neurodivergent meetings and gatherings and just hanging out
together is everyone thrives on being excited to be in
the world, and me excited to be in the company
of people, and no one wants to win. They want
(39:37):
to have a great time with everyone. So I find
it very interesting where again, in a lot of the
gigs that I've been doing on this tour, there's a
room where, like I said, you know, you've got a
nine year old who's autistic, you've got a seventy two
year old who's ADHD, you've got dyspraxia and dyslecture in
that room. And what you have is also no great
(39:59):
age gaps. If you've got a bunch of people who
are vibrating at different speeds of curiosity, but filled with curiosity,
you don't have to go how do I get the
old person? How do I keep them in the show?
And how do I keep the ten year old? You
can kind of It's something that I find very beautiful,
whereas I think very often in a more neurotypical environment,
(40:19):
you kind of go. You'll watch certain comics and you go,
this is a comic who is specifically playing to thirty
to forty year olds. A lot of their references are those,
you know. I was doing a show at the Edinard
Fringe Festival a couple of years ago which opened with
me punching a melon, then singing Mustang Sally, and then
(40:41):
it became chaotic after that very traditional theatrical opening, and
I had a beautiful thing where a seventeen year old
trans man came up to me with his dad and
just said, I've never felt more seen than I did
tonight in this kind of show that appeared to be
crazy and chaotic and a lot of references to stuff
that he won't have understood, but what he was seeing
(41:04):
was It's like sometimes when I have nights where people
will come up to me and they'll say, I've never
heard my head on stage, and you realize how much
people are hiding themselves and you just go, yeah, and
that's and that's a real joy. That sense of camaraderie,
that sense of kind of you know, marching together is great.
Speaker 2 (41:29):
That's that's a real big theme of your book. Here's
another call I have lots of I pulled out some
of my favorite colts from your book. Living in a
world that expects us to obey such a rigid set
of rules ultimately deprives us of a far more interesting
place to live, of innovation and creativity, of love and friendships.
So it's like, I feel like there's another call in
(41:49):
your book is not just to embrace and appreciate the
weirdos amongst us, but also there's like a there's like
a system kind of call as well, you know, to uh,
maybe allow allow a little role bending in a in
a in a legal legal way, but in a way
(42:10):
that's you know, that's conduci creativity, you know, allow people
take a lot more cargnate risks.
Speaker 1 (42:16):
Is that Oh, definitely, definitely, Because I think that it's
so many different spaces from places and education and workplaces
and even socializing and dating, there's this very rigid set
of expectations of how we are meant to be, and
I think that will always limit you know, Jamie in
(42:36):
the book talks about the way that his mind works
needs a tremendously creative person who's able to do a
lot of things that no one else will be able
to do in the room, but he needs to do
it in what he calls kind of flowy attention patterns. Right,
So it's not that kind of had someone come up
to me at an event and they said, we've got
this guy who works for our company. He's ADHD. He's
(42:56):
absolutely brilliant what he does, but he's not very good
at making the nine o'clock meeting. I don't know what
to do about it. And I said, what's so important
about the nine o'clock meeting? He said, well, you know,
is when we all kind of get together and it's
just the start of the day. I said, it sounds
like something that's just not important. And if he's bringing
something that is rare to this space and you are
allowing him to go, right, this is the way I'm
(43:18):
going to work, then that's much better than you go.
This person is fully obedient of the timetabling that we've made.
I mean, you know, it's like with school, where so
many of those things. Don't fidget look me in the
eyes when I'm talking to you. All of those things, God,
they're so unimportant. Like if I look I think I
mentioned it in the book. You know, if I look
(43:39):
in someone's eyes when I'm talking to something, I often do,
but sometimes I'm concentrating so much i'm looking their eyes,
I'm not hearing a word they say. And actually, quite often,
if I'm talking to someone and I'm also writing at
the same time, and someone go, can you pay attention,
I go, oh, I'm paying full attention. In fact, if
I was only paying attention to you, I'd be hearing
far less.
Speaker 2 (44:00):
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I mean, look,
for a lot of people on the spectrum, they say
that looking in the eyes they can do it, but
it's just very distracting because there's so much information that
the eyes convey is that they can't ignore. And it's
interesting if ADHD it's a similar sort of issue. You
can't you get so distracted by all that information being
presented in the eyes. I mean, it's a lot of information,
(44:22):
far more than we're really aware of. You know, the
eyes evolved in a very complex way, it's oh.
Speaker 1 (44:29):
Yeah, the possibility of seeing something within that eye, which
then entirely you turns what you're you're hearing. And again,
I think that's why why these lumpy terms that we've
got aren't fit enough. It's not merely the fact that
disorder should be different, but it's also the fact that
attention deficit and you go, oh, it's quite the opposite.
It's attention overload. You know, for most people, it's the
(44:51):
fact that you are paying attention to so many different
things and excited by so many things, but you're not
able to have that. What's actually required is the linear
route of attention.
Speaker 2 (45:02):
So yeah, I'm really glad you said that. I've I've
written articles about ADHD as a creative gift, and I've
argued that ADHD is really more of an issue of
an overactive imagination m M and because of this default
brain network that tends to be overactive among people ADHD
I call the imagination brain network. And then and then
(45:26):
you you pair that with executive dysfunction, and uh, and
then it's hard to like keep your inner stream of
consciousness out of the out of it, out of it. Yeah,
but that's different than attention death. I mean it's a
different framing, different framing right.
Speaker 1 (45:43):
Yeah, again, it's a framing that sees the advantages within
it and sees what is brought with it, as opposed
to going, why are you letting down society because you're
not doing this? And if you look at it the
other way and you go, hang on, what are you
bringing to society? Oh, you're bringing a set of skills
that other people in the room don't have. But you're
(46:05):
very often hiding those skills because you've been so framed
around going this is this is a problem. This is
an issue, and I think society is very good at
making people pariahs. It is at only focusing on what
you break and not what you build.
Speaker 2 (46:25):
It's beautifully said, and I think that's a big, a
big spirit of the neudiversity movement for sure, you know,
seeing the gifts as well as the challenges. I struggle
with this notion that we're all we're all weird.
Speaker 1 (46:39):
Well we're not. You know what we're not? Right, Yeah,
I'm going to I'm going to clear this up. What
we are is we're all weird by dint of being human,
which is a weird thing to be in the way
that you look at that that in itself. You know,
we are a creature that doesn't live within our environment.
It builds around our environment. You it disturbs the environment.
(47:01):
We have this, you know, I think chimpanzees and some
of the great apes and other creatures may well have
some sense of an inner monologue of something, even though
it won't be necessarily the language that we understand it.
But I think, you know, we're very rare in that way,
We're very rare. You know, we've talked about comedy. What
a rare thing is to have a creature that requires
jokes to survive and needs jokes and like shows. So
(47:24):
in that way, that's why I say we're all weird.
But I do not think that weirdness is the same
as what is then seen as the neurodivergent difficulty aguating
the world. So I think the first thing is I
just I wanted to start the book by basically saying,
(47:45):
just say, you know, we are a very odd species.
You know, I think I think Kurt Vonnegut would probably
have has probably written far better books than me about
the oddness of what it needs to be human. But
so just you know, don't ever think I think the
to go. Don't ever think you're normal. That's impletant, because
once you start going, hang on, how normal am I?
(48:07):
Maybe that will allow you to start to just empathize
a little bit more with those who are more abnormal
than you are. You know, it's the double empathy problem
of autism, which was you know, where people just went, oh,
autistic people can't really empathize, and actually what they were
failing to do those people was empathized with the way
the autistic mind may well work. And so it was
(48:29):
actually and again it's always looking at as you have
a fault because you don't think like me as opposed
to we both have different minds. And my it's what
I love about Jane Goodall's work with chimpanzees, which is,
you know when Jane Goodall she wrote a wonderful book
called Through a Window, which is about how we must
(48:50):
know and remember that we look through the human window.
We we and the other other species see through other windows.
And then that bit where you go, even that we
don't have a single window. When we are gathered together
in a room, we are also all looking through different windows.
And once we start to acknowledge that there is not this,
(49:11):
you know, objective truth in our perceptions that there is
you know, to always It's something I think I said
in the previous book, which is to always hold on
to your beliefs with a loose grip, to always be
ready and open. This is why you get all those
people who bang on about you know, the woke or whatever,
(49:31):
and you go, what's really happening there is? You are
not in any where allowing yourself just to go, hang
on a minute, what does it mean? What does it
mean to understand people differently based on culture, on ethnicity,
on sex, on gender, on all of those things? Stop
thinking you are the correct model and see yourself merely
(49:53):
as one of the ways we walk through the world.
Speaker 2 (49:58):
Wow. Wow, garntlet dropped Robin. Just as an aside, I'd
love to send you an article I just wrote from
my subject called aren't we all a nerd of vision?
What the heck does nerdiversity mean anymore? If we're all
nerdi vision? Can I I share my article with you?
Speaker 1 (50:14):
Please? Do? Please please share anything? I love you know.
One again, one of the things that I love about
touring around is I meet people who have had so
many different things happen, and I so often end up
in a bar afterwards and kind of you know, and
I find out more, and then also I end up
working with people. That's one of the things that I
love is because I've always tried to be kind of
(50:34):
receptive to people. There's people that I met just having
a drink after a gig, and then we've gone off
and written, you know, albums of poetry and music or
you know. Some of the people who've illustrated my books
are literally people that I just met at a gig
and we got on and then ten years later, go,
do you want to really strike my book? And I
love that. That's another thing that I love, which I
(50:55):
think can come with this kind of world, which is
that receptive thing that says, I don't just want to
be going, I don't want to be protective all the
time of my own little world. I want the web
to be as wide as possible. I love that way
that we can all keep kind of fertilizing each other's
minds and and and sharing ideas.
Speaker 2 (51:13):
That's beautiful. I would just really truly love to see
what you think of my perspective about this trend for
everyone to be neurodivers divergent now. I mean, there's a
recent article that came out in the UK with the
headline majority in UK now self identify as neurodivergent.
Speaker 1 (51:28):
Oh, that's absolutely great. Where was that that? That's just
not true.
Speaker 2 (51:35):
You'll see the article it was. It was in the Times.
Speaker 1 (51:39):
Oh god, you know what our newspapers in it's pretty amazing. Really,
our newspapers in the UK are so just terrible and
and they've been It's like how bad they've been on
things like, you know, the trans community, How negative they've been,
how on every single one of them has failed to
(52:01):
in any way really be received on anything that goes
things might be a little bit different to you expected.
It's like there's a book that came out which everyone loves.
It was all about you know, oh, I think it's
going to be I think this over diagnosis. And in
the book this person says anecdotally, I worry that the
majority of people diagnosed with ADHD see no palpable improvement
(52:24):
in their life, and then follows it with the sentence
though many of them say they're much happier. Well, I
don't know how you measure palpable improvement, but happiness is
definitely very high. On that kind of list.
Speaker 2 (52:35):
Yeah that counts. Yeah, yeah, so there's a It just
was an absurd in my view, it was an absurd headline.
It sounds like you agree with me, so oh yes.
So anyway, I just emailed the artic because I thank you,
you know, But then I start, you know, the way
my mind works, I started to think cheeky things like, well,
(52:56):
can you be so normal that it actually makes you
nerd divergent because you're so extreme in your normalness, you know,
Like you know what I'm saying, Like, there's some people
I meet who are like so not weird that it
bothers me and they're sore. They're such like rule followers.
They are such like everything they say, every word that
(53:19):
comes out of their mouth is so perfectly not not weird,
and it I'm like, that in itself is so extreme.
You're so extremely normal, you know, Like, like is it
could that be a form of neurodivergency? Yeah?
Speaker 1 (53:33):
I think you know. Also, I mean I always think
obedience is a very That's again why you find so
many social activists are neurodivergent, because the point the worst
thing to watch is is to see as we're seeing
in many countries around the world. Is this relentless obedience
(53:54):
to a regressive thoughts to you know, again to I mean,
I don't want to keep going back to the US,
you know, seeing some of the people who are having
their history are raised, you know, because they've gone, oh well,
this must have just been because of diversity. You don't
become an astronaut and go into space merely by dint
of your diversity. You've got to have a really great
(54:15):
set of skills. And I think what we're seeing in
some ways at the moment, and what worries me a
great dealer in the UK, is this return to a
kind of male white supremacy which in which all of
the visions of the differences are turned into we are
right and everything else is naborration. There's a book I
must plug. I always love plugging this book. It's by
(54:36):
Alexis Pauline Gunns, who is the most brilliant poet and writer,
and it's called Undrowned Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals,
And that's exactly what it is. It is the most
wonderful book. And at one point she says in the book,
who is this book for? This book is for you?
Otherwise known as everyone who knows. A world where queer, black,
(54:59):
feminine fo are living their fullest, most abundant and loving
lives is a world where everyone is free. And that,
to me is the beautiful vision. That is the vision
of the true inclusivity that is possible if we are
not perpetually afraid of those who are not like us.
Speaker 2 (55:20):
Beautifully said. I would actually like to leave with that sentiment,
because I think it's so beautifully said, Robin, and thank you,
And if I may actually and with that sentiment, and
a quote of yours that further punctuates that sentiment. You say,
your transformation can also transform other people. Just as they
may see something new and new, you may see another
(55:42):
side of them revealed. And it is not always a
positive change. And it is not always a positive change.
Wait wait, wait, is that good or bad?
Speaker 1 (55:51):
What's going on? Finish the sentence. I'm worried? Have you
found the typo? Oh?
Speaker 2 (55:57):
Hell wait a minute, Oh, I.
Speaker 1 (56:01):
Think do you know what I think it is? It's
not always the positive, I reckon whether.
Speaker 2 (56:05):
In the workplace or in a friendship.
Speaker 1 (56:07):
You say, yeah, by that, I mean that sometimes the
change will feel like a negative change, because sometimes it
will be a change in your friendships. Sometimes it will
feel like a change in your relationships. It might change
in your romantic.
Speaker 2 (56:20):
You had a beautiful moment here, let me redo it
and end with of them revealed. I'm just gonna I'm
just gonna.
Speaker 1 (56:27):
I'm going to turn to that and then I'm going
to rewrite the book.
Speaker 2 (56:31):
Rob and then you'll rewrite the this is this is hilarious. Wait,
I want to get back in the moment. We had
a beautiful ending moment. Let me get back in there. Okay, Okay,
here we go. Your transformation can always transform other people.
Just as they may see something new, and just as
they may see something new and new, you may see
(56:52):
another side of them revealed. Robin is so great chatting
with you today on a psychology podcast, and I just
love your energy and wish you all the well with
this book tour.
Speaker 1 (57:04):
Oh and you have a fantastic time down at the
Comedy Seller as well. It is it's such a wonderful
space to be in, and let us keep our communication going.
I would not like to live in a world without
ADHD minds and autistic minds and all of these what
I want to live in a world because the problem
is not those people. The problem is the limitations of
the society around.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
Hello and welcome to the Psychology Podcast. In each episode
we talk with inspiring scientists, thinkers, and other self actualizing
individuals who will give you a greater understanding of yourself, others,
and the world we live in. We even hope to
give you a greater glimpse into human possibility. Today we
feature English comedian, actor and writer Robin Intce. Robin is
known for presenting the BBC radio show The Infinite Monkey
(00:42):
Cage with physicist Brian Cox, as well as his stand
up comedy career. Today's conversation focuses on his new book
called Normally Weird and Weirdly Normal Adventures of Neurodiversity. We
discuss the importance of appreciating neurodiversity and the happiness that
can happen when people embrace who they truly are. He
argues that there are normal ways we are expected to
behave and think, and many people are terrified of breaking
(01:05):
those social norms. However, he argues that living in a
world that expects us to abase such a rigid set
of rules ultimately deprives us of a far more interesting
place to live, of innovation and creativity, of love and friendships.
Of innovation and creativity, of love and friendships. This conversation
was very near and dear to my heart. So with
(01:26):
great pride I bring you this conversation with Robin Ince.
Robin Ince, it is so good to have you on
the Psychology Podcast.
Speaker 1 (01:35):
Oh, it's an absolute joy to be here. And of
course for those who are listening at home, they won't
know that it's been an absolute nightmare for you because
I have done the full ADHD traditional thing of getting
an email from my publisher and me going what I'm
on a train now though, and so I've dragged you
through the maya of attempted organization.
Speaker 2 (01:55):
I'm really sorry to hear that. So that's the first
time you heard that this interview was happening was when
we were on the train.
Speaker 1 (02:00):
No, I think I knew but weeks ago. And of course,
as you know, you only have to literally see the
movement of a blackbird or the scuttling of a beatle,
and an ADHD mind entirely just revises all information.
Speaker 2 (02:15):
Well, all wells it ends well, And I'm really glad
I've be chatting with today. You're a really interesting character,
and I'm very interested in neurodiversity. I'm I've been a
big advocate of nerdiversity in my whole life. And you
wrote this book called Normally Weird and Weirdly Normal, My
Adventures in Neurodiversity. Why do you write this one?
Speaker 1 (02:35):
Well, this one was I kind of it started almost
I wrote a book when I'm a Joke and so you,
about seven or eight years ago, and in it, I
interviewed a lot of therapists and at the end of
every interview, the therapist would say, I presume you're in therapy, Robin,
and I would say no, and they would say oh.
(02:56):
And so that kind of led to me going into
therapy just for a little bit, and that was kind
of the start of it. I suddenly realized that a
huge number of different things were anxiety. Yeah, like so
many disparate things that I thought were separate, both physical
and psychological. And then I was very lucky because I
would not have gone looking for a diagnosis, but an
(03:19):
autistic stranger called Jamie and Lyon Jamie is a young
autistic man. Lion is the squishy that goes everywhere with
him got in contact with me via social media and said,
I'd really like to talk to you about the neurodivergent model.
And that's how I found out about ADHD.
Speaker 2 (03:38):
I see, so you're a elite diagnosis. You weren't diagnosed
when you're a kid. But yeah, that's happening a lot
these days. I feel like I thought, there's even like
a trend for like lots of adults to suddenly view
themselves as a neural divergent. How do you feel about
that trend? Is that a good thing?
Speaker 1 (03:55):
Oh? Yeah? I mean the point is I've done in
the last month, I'd probably done forty to fifty gigs
around the UK, and I meet people every single night
who are late diagnosed autistic, dyspraxic dyslexic ADHD. I also
meet kids who have just started that journey, who are
eight or nine years old sometimes, and to have the
(04:18):
knowledge of why your mind works in the way it
does is enormous.
Speaker 2 (04:23):
It is.
Speaker 1 (04:24):
You know, in the UK, there's a lot of people
who go on about why do you want a label?
And I always explain. It's not a label. It's a
user's guide, it's a roadmap. It is. And it's interesting
because however, like you know, for years, I've had people
coming up to me after gigs saying, hey, I'm Adhd too,
and I've gone, oh, I don't think I am. I
(04:44):
just think it's the way that I perform. And it
required this particular outside voice to make everything so apparent.
Speaker 2 (04:53):
Yeah, I really appreciate that perspective. I've been wrestling with
something because of this increased trend for especially a lot
of young people too on TikTok, to call themselves neurodivergent.
You know what, well, first of all, what is what
does it mean to be normal? Does that word even
have a meaning? Second of all, kind of a message
(05:17):
of your book is that we're all weird. I feel
like that's a very common thread. So then, third of all,
if you can keep all these things, yeah.
Speaker 1 (05:27):
As long as the blackbird doesn't go past or I
see a beat all scuttling, we are fine. We are fine.
Speaker 2 (05:32):
Okay, Okay, stay with me, Rabin, stay with me. And
you know you say that, like you know, we're all weird.
Third of all, do you think like the word nerdivergent
still has meaning. If everyone is neurodivergent.
Speaker 1 (05:47):
Well, I think it's going to change over time. All
of the labels are quite lumpy. We look at the
history of twentieth century psychology. It's filled with all manner
of kind of errors and misunderstandings and people believing that
everyone's mind is like their mind. And what I think
first of all is what to me is neurodivergent is
(06:08):
where the way that society is framed is working directly
against you, and that you are feeling you need to
conceal yourself. So one of the things that I think
is very important is the disparity between who you present
yourself as and who you actually are. The greater the
(06:29):
gap between those two, the greater your amount of unhappiness.
And what we have in a lot of our kind
of social worlds is a terrible level of concealment. So
no one knew about my anxiety, no one would have
known about my suicidal ideation. I was able to mask
all of those things while at the same time appearing
(06:52):
to function fine. So there might be a point. You know,
we do have people who are more typical than others.
I think everyone you know, to be human in itself
is a weird thing to have this mind where we
have two tracks. We present ourselves and we have an
inner monologue that is a peculiar thing, and the problems arise,
(07:13):
like you know, the further we go down with neurodivergence.
You know, for instance, so many things that are so
simple to make the lives of autistic people easier to
be aware of, whether it's sensitivity to certain kind of
tactile things, fabrics, whether it's a certain sensitivity to light
or background noise. We wouldn't have a lot of the
(07:35):
issues we have if it wasn't just decided there is
one way of working this office, there is one way
of this particular place being. There is one way of
behaving as a human being, and of course it's a
great threat. I think you see people like, you know,
someone like Donald Trump, I think thinks he's both normal
and an alpha male, which is, you know, just merely
from his cheating at golf and everything else. You know,
(07:56):
it's kind of ridiculous. But there are people, I think
who not believe that they are normal, but also insist
that everyone else must obey the laws and the rules
that they have placed upon society.
Speaker 2 (08:11):
Yeah, you say, quote I am Now you say you say, quote,
however normal you think you are, you are weird. Yeah,
the probing would be certainly read more of your quote.
I was going to quote continue calling you. The problem
with being human is that we judge everyone else from
their exterior and ourselves from the interior. And that's also
(08:31):
a very that's a very interesting social psychology bias of
what we do. And I think just like combining those
two things, I think it's just so interesting. Like your
your argument, I mean, what would you say is the
central argument of your book? If you had to tell
me what the central argument.
Speaker 1 (08:45):
Is, I'm not sure whether it's an well I would say,
if there is a central argument, it's that the courages
of normality need to be far wider than they are.
That the society that we have is not fit for
purpose for an enormous number of minds, and minds that
are can be quite brilliant. You know this is I mean,
I found it fascinating when recently, when I say fascinating,
(09:08):
I mean horrible, disturbing, and grotesque. When Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Talked about the fact that autistic people would never write
poetry or pay taxes, and obviously pay taxes was the
main interest I imagine for him. But this idea that
in our society we still don't realize there are plenty
of autistic people writing poetry. The book the book is,
(09:29):
amongst other things, the book is dedicated to a shop
on the south coast of England which is this incredible
kind of thrift store which is predominantly run by autistic people,
and the window is always filled with their poetry, and
the shop is always filled with their art. And until
we try and realize also that what we currently define
(09:51):
as disorder is very often different, it is not disorder.
It is a difference, a different way that our mind
might be as it filters the world and moves through it.
Speaker 2 (10:06):
So autism is one form of neurodiversity, but it's what
else you consider ADHD another part of it?
Speaker 1 (10:15):
Right, Well, I would say the general kind of definitions
would be neurodivergencies, dyspraxia, dyslexia, ADHD, and autism. And then
we have in separate section which is kind of mental
health rather than neurodivergence, would be things like bipolar. Now,
of course, the problem with that is that the labeling
(10:36):
of our mind is it makes it just a little bit.
It's like that bits autism, that bits ADHD, that bits dyspractical.
But of course it's a far more tangled web than that.
There are many people who have suffered depression who are
given antidepressants and then eventually some of them are finding
(10:58):
out their ADHD. Now that doesn't stop the depressive thoughts,
but it means that the reasoning can be seen as
a little bit different. There is a lot of behavior
of autistic people which is very similar to ADHD people.
You know, we have a lot of crossover there. You know, dyspraxia.
I was banned from using an ink pen when I
was at school. I was always tangled in my own laces.
(11:20):
My socks never stayed up, my hair was never flat.
I am chaos. I have a natural force of entropy.
It seems that explodes out of me. And so there's
a lot of crossovers. And I think one of the
difficulties can be when if we make it too specific
is I know from talking to therapists that some people
when they're diagnosed, will say, I'm trying to work out
(11:41):
was that the genuine me is that the me behind
the mask or is that the masked me? Or is
that adhd me? Now there is ultimately one me. The
meanness of me and the unice of you is the
truth that lies in our mind and is how we
(12:02):
genuinely experience the world, not the affectation. The affectation is
part of what we construct, so it comes from us.
Speaker 2 (12:11):
Mm. I mean, it sounds like you'd be a big
fan of Carl Rogers's notion of congruence.
Speaker 1 (12:20):
Yeah, I think, you know, like everything that's a while
ago and things get you know, picked up and moved on.
And but I think, you know, some of the seeds
that are in those kind of works can be very useful.
But as long as we're always looking at its seeds
as we continue to get you know, I think one
of the big bits of understanding that comes with autism
ADHD et cetera is that understanding that it's not something
(12:42):
on the outside. It's not something like it's not just
your trauma and once you get over your trauma, it's
all gone. It's also the fact that the trauma will
have affected your neural pruning, will have affected the way
that you know. In particular, as we see that kind
of you know, the executive function of the brain, all
(13:03):
of that bit that is meant to be managing emotions
and managing the order of the things that we're meant
to be doing on a day to day basis, All
of those things they have now been properly affected by
that trauma. And it's not just a case of oh,
I've got rid of the trauma and it's gone now.
It's much like you know, this is a very lumpy description,
but I'm sure you know those many stories of children
(13:24):
that have sometimes just been kept in a cellar without
any kind of real language or wild you know, the
wild boys and the wild girls that were found in
woods that after a certain period of time, it is
impossible for them to ever learn the grammatical rules of
speech because that bit of pruning has occurred. Now this
is no longer accessible. And in the same way, I
(13:47):
think you know some of the ways that we react
to the world. It really is a great way. It
can improve enormously with understanding. But we should not berate
ourselves when we still might occasionally have a meltdown, or
we might forget a meeting, or things are a little
bit more in disarrayed than they should be.
Speaker 2 (14:04):
M Yes, you think trauma can be a contributor to
neurodivergent nerdivergent mind.
Speaker 1 (14:11):
Yeah, I think we're at quite an early stage. I
know there's a big debate about this, especially with ADHD.
You know, autism is seen as being genetic, but of
course trauma will play a part because by being autistic
you've then very often experienced more trauma in childhood because
of the way that you are treated, the way that
you can received and perceived. And then with ADHD from
(14:32):
my own perspective, so merely anecdotally, I see the trauma
I experienced just before I was three years old, when
I was in a major car crash that led to
many changes in my mum and a car crash that
I thought I was responsible for, because of course, when
you're three, you think you control the world, don't you know,
(14:52):
in terms of the bad things that happen. And I
think that played a major part, both for me and
also for my elder sisters.
Speaker 2 (15:01):
I'm really sorry to hear about this. Touch So did
someone die in that accent?
Speaker 1 (15:06):
No, what happened was my mother would have died actually
if my dad hadn't been three cars behind. There was
a car on the wrong side of the road, small
country lane. It was speeding. It smashed into us, and
my mum was then in a coma for quite a while,
and she suffered a certain amount of kind of physical damage,
lost the sense of smell, paralysis on the side of
(15:27):
her face, and various other things. But also then it
really affected. In fact, last week I was doing an
event and someone came to the event who had not
I had not seen since I was six years old.
They were the Baptist minister in the local village, very
kind person, and I said to him, I've not seen
you since I was six, but I want to tell
(15:48):
you now that I know how important your help was
to my dad when there were a lot of struggles
with my mum's mental health. And I said, I know
she was changed. And he suddenly had the saddest moment
mournful look, and he said, yes, she was changed. And
I think you know now I look back and I
realize I never knew the person that my mother was
(16:11):
before the accident. There's a there's a beautiful line in
a series called Mystery in Between. Yeah, it's very so
I think that's had. But now I can have that
all open and out. You know, now I understand, and
I can sit with my sisters. And of course my
sisters had a separate experience because they were older and
they saw a woman coming out of the hospital who
(16:32):
was very different to the woman who had climbed into
the car that night.
Speaker 2 (16:38):
Wow, tell me about your change and happiness about being
alive over the course of your life, because there was
a big transformation for you.
Speaker 1 (16:49):
Yeah, it really was.
Speaker 2 (16:50):
It was.
Speaker 1 (16:50):
It was basically the moment that because I used to
have pretty much perpetual anxiety, occasionally lost in a flow
state of doing a comedy gig for the Little Heckler
would appear in my head again, and a lot of
kind of I had a lot of rejection sensitivity this
for it. So it would just take the tiniest turn
of a phrase and they would make me crash. And
(17:15):
so all of those things were very dominant, and I
never you know, I could count on the fingers of
one hand the number of times that I've walked off
stage happy with a gig. I might have a standing ovation,
I might get an encore, but within three minutes I
would be dismantling it. You know, if someone comes up
to you afterwards and they say, hey, I really enjoyed
that gig. It would always be oh sorry, it wasn't
so good tonight actually, and then you slowly dismantle it.
(17:36):
And so someone comes up to say thank you, I
enjoyed it, and you say no, no, no, you stay there.
Let me explain how I've given you the worst night
of your life, you know that was. And then the
combination of a diagnosis out of nowhere from Jamie and Lyon,
and then also taking anti anxiety medication, the combination of
those two things has given me. I mean, I've always
(17:58):
been very energetic into terms of the number of things
that I've done, but I think that was an energy
that also came from anxiety, whereas now I have all
the energy that I had. You know, as you know,
anxiety requires an enormous amount of energy. You are hyper vigilant,
looking at the world all of the time, You're looking
for threat, and then once that goes you are still able.
(18:21):
I mean, I had someone in a gig the other
day and she asked, after my talk, she said, do
you ever miss your anxiety? I said no, And I said,
but you obviously asking me for a reason. Can you
tell me while we're in the audience. Do tell me later.
I can tell you now. She said, I've had anxiety
my whole life, and I really worry that if I
got rid of my anxiety, would I know who I was?
(18:43):
And I realized that can be a threat. And I said,
from my not only my personal position, but from the
position of the hundreds of people I interviewed for this book,
the loss, you are not your anxiety. You have this
separate you know, you have this thing that is above
and beyond all that. And when you lose that looming shadow,
when you lose that that terrible thick fog, you will
(19:08):
find freedom and you will find the self that you
can be. And I don't And I think a lot
of people worry. You know, my depression, whatever it might be,
has been so much part of my life. What am
I without it? And I would like to say to
everyone listening now, Yeah, I can't say for sure. All
I can say is every night I meet people who,
especially like late diagnose women who've been diagnosed with autism
(19:30):
when they're like seventy three or seventy four years old,
and they walk up to me, and as they walk
up to me, I know they're walking in a different
skin to the skin they were walking in four years
before they have. They're higher, they're mightier, they are smiling
in this you know, this beamish way that says things
(19:51):
are different now.
Speaker 2 (19:53):
Wow ah, and that's really powerful. So you So what
I'm hearing here is you're saying that by embracing the nerds,
the neudiversent label and identifying your ADHD, it kind of
unleashed an authentic version of you that quelled your anxieties.
Speaker 1 (20:10):
That's yeah. And I think also what happens very often
is the things that are actually your incredible strengths you
batter way and considered to be a frippery the things
that are the negative side. So, for instance, when I
was writing this book, I had one afternoon it was
five point fifteen PM. I wanted to check what time
I was doing a gig the next day. I suddenly
(20:31):
realized I got it wrong. It was that night. It
was in seventy five minutes time. I was interviewing an
author eighty miles from where I lived. I don't drive
a car. I had a kind of big meltdown of
my stupidity, my bad timekeeping, and I managed to get
there one minute after the show was meant to start,
and I sat down with someone who had only just
(20:52):
started reading her books. I always read it immediately before events.
And we spoke fluently and fluidly for ninety minutes, and
people came up to me and said, oh my god,
I didn't know you were friends with Sarah. How long
have you known her? And I said ninety three minutes. Now,
before I would have only seen my mistake. I would
(21:14):
have thought you screwed up, but you got away with it,
Whereas now I go, I screwed up, But then I
have this very special ability that means you throw me
into something and I will find a way to build
an event out of it. I will find a way
to connect with people. And realizing that it's not just
like kind of oh I'm lucky I can do that.
That's part of the same brain that leads to the
(21:36):
meltdown and led to the fact that I got totally
the wrong day.
Speaker 2 (21:43):
Heill. I want to take a moment to make a
few important announcements that I'm really excited about. As you
all know, I'm committed to helping people self actualize. In
the service of that, I just had a new book
I'm out called Rise Above. O'llver become a victim mindset,
empower yourself and realize full potential. In this book, I
offer a science backed toolkit to help you overcome your
(22:05):
living beliefs and take control of your life. Are you
tired of feeling helpless? This book will offer you hope,
not by identifying with the worst things that have happened
to you, but by empowering you to tap into the
best that is within you. Rise Above is available wherever
you get your books. Are you a personal coach looking
to take your coaching to the next level. I'm also
excited to tell you there are Foundations of Self Actualization Coaching.
(22:27):
Three day immersive experience for coaches is back by popular demand.
Foundations of Self Actualization Coaching is a course offered to
enhance your coaching practice by offering you evidence based tools
and insights to equip you to more effectively help your
clients unlock their unique creative potential. You can learn more
about the course and register by going to Center for
(22:48):
Human Potential dot com slash SAC. That's Center for Human
Potential dot com slash SAC. Okay, now back to the show. Yeah,
there's a theme running throughout your book, which, by the way,
I loved your book. I should have said that first.
I should have said that hitting the getting out of
(23:10):
the Gate, I should have said that, really loved your book,
and huge congratulations on these publication is a very important book.
There was one thread that really resonated with me throughout,
which is this idea of loneliness among people who are
no NERD aversion kind of finding your people. But at
the same time, you know, you also talk about, I mean,
(23:31):
there are a lot of paradoxes in your book. Have you
noticed that, Yeah, you know, Like, I mean, one big
paradox I already touched on, which is NERD I've not
work you know, uh nerdi virgin tends to be autism
and dyslexi ADHD. However, we're all weird. So that's one paradox.
But then another one that I picked up on in
(23:52):
reading your book is this idea that well, a lot
of people who are not nerdive vision are actually quite
content being a little you know, in a lot of
situations you talk about how you know you're You're like,
I think you're talking about being in the movie theater
or alone or something, and you're like, I'm totally fine
with that. So how do you see that paradox being resolved.
Speaker 1 (24:14):
Well, I think what it is is the difference between
being content with your own company and being alone and
feeling the threat of the world around you. So it
doesn't mean that you want to you need to be
gregarious or surrounded by friends. And that's the fault of
you know, your neurodivergence is hindering that. It's the fact
that when you are in the world before you really
(24:36):
necessarily understand yourself, and when you sometimes see that there
is a normal world that can be so relentlessly normal
that anyone who is other will be You know that
so many people that I spoke to had had horrible
bullying at school and things because there was a little
bit about them. This was their weakness, their otherness. Once
you're able to realize your otherness is your strength.
Speaker 2 (24:56):
Like I think I.
Speaker 1 (24:57):
Mentioned the book, I can't remember, but one of the
things that I loved is if I'm forced to go
to a party because I'm not a party person, there's
too much noise. I want to hear the conversation. I know,
I know you would think that I was there no
and I am.
Speaker 2 (25:10):
I am actually genuinely sharp because I feel like, let
me tell you why, I think. I feel like unwillingly
and unh and you don't really want it, but you're
probably the life a very party. Like I bet like
even without you trying, you know, I bet other people
probably get a lot more out of you being at
the party then you get out of being at the party.
Speaker 1 (25:29):
Yeah. Well, what I try and do if I go
to a party is I try and make sure that
everything's moving and everyone's you know, they've reached that point
where everything's kind of working. And then I go and
stand in the garden and look at the stars and
things like that, and it's like and it's that bit
where but yeah, I think so so the lonely It's like,
one of my favorite things to find out about in
(25:50):
the book was finding out about the friendship degradation curve.
That and it's certainly true. So for myself and my
new are divergent friends. We don't necessarily communicate all the time,
we don't go out all the time. We actually may
have long periods of time where we don't see each other,
but the moment we see each other, the fireworks go
(26:10):
off and we are straight into either the middle of
the conversation that was the last conversation we had before
we last saw it, Yeah, when we last saw each other,
or about some new crazy idea that we'd find out about.
There's no kind of preamble. And I think that's an
interesting part of neurodivergence for a lot of people, which
is your love for your friends does not dim by
(26:32):
a failure to see them every Tuesday or whatever. And
I think that plays its part as well, the confidence
that comes of saying I'm happy to spend a lot
of time alone in the world because I don't also
feel like I'm in a glass case where people are
looking at the freak or the weirder.
Speaker 2 (26:48):
Yeah, I really love that. I really do love that.
I'd love to hear more about how your unique mind works.
What are some of the main characteristics of that plays
out that's like a common part of your own inner drama.
Speaker 1 (27:04):
Well, I suppose that the commeding is just the speed
of thoughts. It is. There's there's so many thoughts. You know,
if you ever saw me live, you would just see
the like tangent up to tangent, up to tangent up
to tangent and I start telling one story, and then
that reminds me of something else, so I just go
off on that tangent, which leads to another tangent, and
then very often I often have people coming back night
(27:26):
after night if I'm in the same town, because they'll say,
last night, you didn't tell that story that you said
you were going to say about Apollo eight or Apollo nine,
or about universal horror movies, and so could you try
and do that tonight? And I'll go, okay, I'll make
a little note on the back of my hand. So
I think that's the And I think before with the
racing thoughts, because we're kind of evolved to really note
(27:49):
the negative. When you're having one hundred thoughts in a
very short amount of time, some of them will be
the negative ones. So they are the ones that burn
most brightly in the most unpleasant way, and they so
you know, that moment, that possible thought of that person
who's looking at you from across the train or whatever,
the negative thought, that's the one that sticks. Whereas now
(28:13):
the thoughts are nearly all, if not but benevolent. The
ones that aren't, I can back them away very quickly.
I mean I used to have if I had a
gig that I wasn't happy with, and that's most of
the gigs, but if I had one that really was
in my guts and I just felt that was a
bad gig and I'm not happy with that, and I
don't feel that I connected, that would then just stay
(28:36):
with me. And a few months after the diagnosis and
the anti anxiety, I did a gig that I was
not at all happy with and I was really unhappy
like so, and the friend of mine who had driven
me to the gig, I said, let's just leave, Let's
just get straight out here. And for half an hour
I still felt sick in the pit of my stomach,
(28:56):
but within forty five minutes that had gone. Where as before,
so I haven't lost my critical faculty. I can still
look at a gig and go that wasn't good enough
for me, but I don't relentlessly seek go what is
the imperfection here? What is the failure here? And you know,
And so that also makes me far more honest, both
(29:18):
as I think as a human being and a friend,
and also as a performer. I allow myself to take
risks the whole time. I've always been a bit of
a risk taker. But now I'm just like And my
friend Joanna Neary, who I talked to in the book,
she's similar. She's always been one of the most wonderful,
creative human beings and now but she would always at
(29:40):
the end of a gig just feel, oh dear. That
was her letdown for everyone. And now she walks out
there and she does these wonderful, strange things and she
walks off and she goes, yeah, I tried. I gave
that a go, and I think they liked it. I
think they did. I think some of the people didn't
like it, but I think overall and to have that positivity.
And then also it is that thing which is once
you reveal and what may lie behind the mask, because
(30:01):
I'm sure you know suddenly you find out that nearly
all of your closest friends are neurodivergent, because that's why
you made that bond in the first place. Oh definitely,
it's really and it's once one person's diagnosed in a
kind of you little gathering of friends, and it means
that I think you can also express yourself in a
(30:23):
totally Like my friend Joe Turbert, who I met first
watching her tap dance and it was fantastic. And I
look back now and both of us have been through
a lot of changes over twenty years, and now we
still look the same from the outside. In the pub,
if we own the bar, we're laughing and we're throwing
out ideas at speed. What we don't have is inside,
(30:46):
where we're heckling ourselves. And She's thinking, Robbie must be
really bored by this story I'm given about choreography, and
I'm thinking, she must think this guy's so old and stupid,
you know what I mean, all that stuff that's not
there now. So now again we can, you know, just
glow and thrive. And that's another reason that I wrote
(31:07):
this book, basically, because when I wrote I'm a joke
and so are you, in particular, I think he gave
people a sense of permission to approach me and tell
me the battles they had, which I love. I love
the fact people will share those stories after a gig
and they trust me. But I found out how many
people were living lives where they had created a fantastic
smoke screen. But deep down, we're not even deep down.
(31:30):
Every day they would leave their apartment, they leave their house,
and they would be going right here we go, then
I've got to put my armor on. I've got to
try and survive another day. And it's not good enough,
you know. It's that that idea that you go, well,
if you're not, you know, damaging society, and if you're
able to still move through it, then just keep quiet.
(31:50):
And that's a lot of people's kind of opinion is well,
why are you bothering to find out? It's like there's
a woman I mentioned in the book who when she
was she went to a doctor to ask she said,
I think I'm more stick and the doctor said, why
do you want to know? It's not as if there's
a cure. And again that level of ignorance. I would
not like to live in a world without ADHD minds
(32:12):
and autistic minds and all of these what I want
to live in a world because the problem is not
those people. The problem is the limitations of the society around.
Speaker 2 (32:24):
Yeah, that's really well said, And yeah, Robin, I share
multiple interests with you. I don't know if you know
who I am at all? Do you know who I am?
Speaker 1 (32:33):
I don't. I want to know more. I love your
surname because your surname immediately reminds me of a series
of films from the nineteen eighties. So that's one thing.
Speaker 2 (32:44):
Beautiful beautiful. Well, I mean, I'm a cognitive scientist, psychologist,
psychology professor, have been hosting this podcast for eleven years
now at this point, trying to.
Speaker 1 (32:53):
I know that stuff.
Speaker 2 (32:54):
Yeah, oh good, okay, cool, But okay, So here's the thing.
I'm also really into carming. So right in fact, tonight
I'm performing at the Comedy Cellar here in New York City.
Speaker 1 (33:03):
Oh I love that on McDougall Street.
Speaker 2 (33:06):
Yes, on McDougall Street.
Speaker 1 (33:07):
That, Yeah, what a great I used to the moment
I got to New York. I would always Thursday nights
used to have every single act that was going to
play New York that weekend all coming down there doing
like kind of ten minutes, and you would get to
see so many people, and yeah, I love that. It's
a great venue, wonderful venue.
Speaker 2 (33:28):
I well, yes, it's a wonderful venue. And I love comedy.
And in fact, I'm going to be talking about my
new book tonight at the Comedy Stour with nicoll Espie.
But but this is not about me. It's not about me. Basically,
I just want to emphasize that we have a mutual
love of comedy. That's that's all I wanted to say.
And and and my own neurodivergency, I think unintentionally has
(33:50):
made me funny my whole life, and recently I embraced that,
so that and more intentionally done because I do also
do like open mic nights and some but Rabin, I
wanted to discuss this with you, you know, like, to
what extent do you think, you know, you really can
harness this because I don't. I don't know. I still
I'm still trying to fare out exactly my label.
Speaker 1 (34:11):
You know.
Speaker 2 (34:11):
But whatever, whatever my sugna is going on in my
own head. You know, people have found it funny throughout
my whole life, and I'm like, wait, why do you
find that funny? I'm just saying what I'm thinking, you know,
And I was wondering, has that happened to you too? Rabin?
Speaker 1 (34:24):
Oh? Yeah, I mean it's it's it's that thing where
you know Brian Cox, who's a scientist that I do
a lot of work with, he will often say he's
a particle physicist, and he'll say to me, what you're
talking about? No one understands you and I always think
that's kind of in that's that not being understood is
the very oddity that allows us to you know, because
(34:46):
I think one of the things that often comes with
neurodivergence is you don't really take anything. If someone says
something to you, you don't immediately just accept it. Your
brain goes, why why? Why? Why? Why am I thinking that?
You know, it's a lot of what we see in
gender and stuff like that, which is going when someone says, ah,
you know, there's just men and women, it's all binary.
And I see a lot of similarities there with neurodivergence,
(35:08):
because a spectrum world has far more rainbows than a
binary world as far as I'm concerned. But I see
that bit which means you look at everything going why
is that like that? So there is that, you know,
what we often call the child's voice, but I think
is actually the best kind of voice to have, which
is going, why is that like that? Why are we
doing this? Why are the flowers growing in that way?
(35:31):
Why is the person on the subway moving in that way?
And you see, you're always because you've got a perpetually
questioning mind, you're always creating. Like we had I don't
know if you know the producer and musician Brian Eno,
who produced David Bowie and you two, Well, the thing
I want to say about his curiosity and about questions
(35:53):
that So we had him on a show and I
started to ask a question where I could see the
more neurotypical elements the panel. We're like, this is a
weird question to ask, because he's an amazing producer. I said,
do you ever walk past like trash can and look
in it and think, oh, I'm going to get that
out of the trash can because I wonder what noise
(36:16):
it makes if you bang it? And he said all
the time. So it's having this thing, which is so
everyone else was like, why is he asking Brian Ino,
this one of the greatest producers of the you know,
of modern music, this stupid question about trash cans. And
then they go oh. Brian Eno is replying by saying, yeah,
(36:37):
I'm always wondering. I look in something and I think
that's a weird bottle, that's god nod shape. I wonder
what that would sound like if you bang it. And
I think that's part very often of the kind of
the process within a neurodivergent mind, which is you do
things which are not specifically designed to go. If I
do this, I will make money. If I do this,
(36:59):
I will be rich and I will be successful. You
do it because you must, because you're intrigued, and you
are fascinated, and you're curious, and of course what I
generally find, you know, it's a very loose rule. A
lot of ADHD people, you become incredibly hyper focused for
a very limited amount of time, and it's always best
to if you can work with one of your friends
(37:19):
who's also autistic, because they will sometimes manage to keep
the focus going for some time longer than you can.
Speaker 2 (37:27):
Yeah, for sure. You know you talked about in your
book about there's a lot of cool morbidity between autism
and ADHD. Do you have a dash of autism as well?
Speaker 1 (37:36):
Or always wonder that, because I definitely see a lot.
But the other day I was doing a thing with
a wonderful autistic poet and writer called Kate Fox, and
I was not late that I was nearly late, and
I just went straight into this bookshop, straight into the
back room. And I've never met Kate before. We've done
some zoom stuff, and I just immediately I went, oh, hey, Kate,
(37:57):
we've never actually met. Oh man, I loved it assume interview.
Oh if you read that book up there, that is
such an incredible and strange book and is it possibly
had a coffee and I was just like, And she
said to me afterwards, she went, I'd always wondered whether
you were also, you know, autistic to some extent. But
I've never seen such an adhd entrance to a room before.
(38:17):
But I love the fact that you know, the moment
when you're all together. It's one of the things that
I do. You call it banter as well, that kind
of bit where people are Yeah. And you might notice,
by the way, during this I've been translating every now
and again. I suddenly went, I can't say bin bin
means nothing to the majority of people here, so that's
(38:39):
why I said trash can I couldn't say charity shop.
I suddenly went, it's thrift store. So this is like
a duo lingo episode as well.
Speaker 2 (38:48):
Thank you, But we do have a pretty orange UK audience.
Speaker 1 (38:53):
I just thought, I'm gonna so UK US audience, this
is duo lingo that we're going for. Here can thrill
to charity shop if you have a bunch of new
and divergent people together. They you don't have that normal
thing which often happens when like a group of guys
hang out in a bar and they're all kind of
(39:14):
everyone's trying to win the conversation. Everyone's trying to, you know,
pull the other person down so they win. And I
find one of the things that's very healthy in a
lot of neurodivergent meetings and gatherings and just hanging out
together is everyone thrives on being excited to be in
the world, and me excited to be in the company
of people, and no one wants to win. They want
(39:37):
to have a great time with everyone. So I find
it very interesting where again, in a lot of the
gigs that I've been doing on this tour, there's a
room where, like I said, you know, you've got a
nine year old who's autistic, you've got a seventy two
year old who's ADHD, you've got dyspraxia and dyslecture in
that room. And what you have is also no great
(39:59):
age gaps. If you've got a bunch of people who
are vibrating at different speeds of curiosity, but filled with curiosity,
you don't have to go how do I get the
old person? How do I keep them in the show?
And how do I keep the ten year old? You
can kind of It's something that I find very beautiful,
whereas I think very often in a more neurotypical environment,
(40:19):
you kind of go. You'll watch certain comics and you go,
this is a comic who is specifically playing to thirty
to forty year olds. A lot of their references are those,
you know. I was doing a show at the Edinard
Fringe Festival a couple of years ago which opened with
me punching a melon, then singing Mustang Sally, and then
(40:41):
it became chaotic after that very traditional theatrical opening, and
I had a beautiful thing where a seventeen year old
trans man came up to me with his dad and
just said, I've never felt more seen than I did
tonight in this kind of show that appeared to be
crazy and chaotic and a lot of references to stuff
that he won't have understood, but what he was seeing
(41:04):
was It's like sometimes when I have nights where people
will come up to me and they'll say, I've never
heard my head on stage, and you realize how much
people are hiding themselves and you just go, yeah, and
that's and that's a real joy. That sense of camaraderie,
that sense of kind of you know, marching together is great.
Speaker 2 (41:29):
That's that's a real big theme of your book. Here's
another call I have lots of I pulled out some
of my favorite colts from your book. Living in a
world that expects us to obey such a rigid set
of rules ultimately deprives us of a far more interesting
place to live, of innovation and creativity, of love and friendships.
So it's like, I feel like there's another call in
(41:49):
your book is not just to embrace and appreciate the
weirdos amongst us, but also there's like a there's like
a system kind of call as well, you know, to uh,
maybe allow allow a little role bending in a in
a in a legal legal way, but in a way
(42:10):
that's you know, that's conduci creativity, you know, allow people
take a lot more cargnate risks.
Speaker 1 (42:16):
Is that Oh, definitely, definitely, Because I think that it's
so many different spaces from places and education and workplaces
and even socializing and dating, there's this very rigid set
of expectations of how we are meant to be, and
I think that will always limit you know, Jamie in
(42:36):
the book talks about the way that his mind works
needs a tremendously creative person who's able to do a
lot of things that no one else will be able
to do in the room, but he needs to do
it in what he calls kind of flowy attention patterns. Right,
So it's not that kind of had someone come up
to me at an event and they said, we've got
this guy who works for our company. He's ADHD. He's
(42:56):
absolutely brilliant what he does, but he's not very good
at making the nine o'clock meeting. I don't know what
to do about it. And I said, what's so important
about the nine o'clock meeting? He said, well, you know,
is when we all kind of get together and it's
just the start of the day. I said, it sounds
like something that's just not important. And if he's bringing
something that is rare to this space and you are
allowing him to go, right, this is the way I'm
(43:18):
going to work, then that's much better than you go.
This person is fully obedient of the timetabling that we've made.
I mean, you know, it's like with school, where so
many of those things. Don't fidget look me in the
eyes when I'm talking to you. All of those things, God,
they're so unimportant. Like if I look I think I
mentioned it in the book. You know, if I look
(43:39):
in someone's eyes when I'm talking to something, I often do,
but sometimes I'm concentrating so much i'm looking their eyes,
I'm not hearing a word they say. And actually, quite often,
if I'm talking to someone and I'm also writing at
the same time, and someone go, can you pay attention,
I go, oh, I'm paying full attention. In fact, if
I was only paying attention to you, I'd be hearing
far less.
Speaker 2 (44:00):
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I mean, look,
for a lot of people on the spectrum, they say
that looking in the eyes they can do it, but
it's just very distracting because there's so much information that
the eyes convey is that they can't ignore. And it's
interesting if ADHD it's a similar sort of issue. You
can't you get so distracted by all that information being
presented in the eyes. I mean, it's a lot of information,
(44:22):
far more than we're really aware of. You know, the
eyes evolved in a very complex way, it's oh.
Speaker 1 (44:29):
Yeah, the possibility of seeing something within that eye, which
then entirely you turns what you're you're hearing. And again,
I think that's why why these lumpy terms that we've
got aren't fit enough. It's not merely the fact that
disorder should be different, but it's also the fact that
attention deficit and you go, oh, it's quite the opposite.
It's attention overload. You know, for most people, it's the
(44:51):
fact that you are paying attention to so many different
things and excited by so many things, but you're not
able to have that. What's actually required is the linear
route of attention.
Speaker 2 (45:02):
So yeah, I'm really glad you said that. I've I've
written articles about ADHD as a creative gift, and I've
argued that ADHD is really more of an issue of
an overactive imagination m M and because of this default
brain network that tends to be overactive among people ADHD
I call the imagination brain network. And then and then
(45:26):
you you pair that with executive dysfunction, and uh, and
then it's hard to like keep your inner stream of
consciousness out of the out of it, out of it. Yeah,
but that's different than attention death. I mean it's a
different framing, different framing right.
Speaker 1 (45:43):
Yeah, again, it's a framing that sees the advantages within
it and sees what is brought with it, as opposed
to going, why are you letting down society because you're
not doing this? And if you look at it the
other way and you go, hang on, what are you
bringing to society? Oh, you're bringing a set of skills
that other people in the room don't have. But you're
(46:05):
very often hiding those skills because you've been so framed
around going this is this is a problem. This is
an issue, and I think society is very good at
making people pariahs. It is at only focusing on what
you break and not what you build.
Speaker 2 (46:25):
It's beautifully said, and I think that's a big, a
big spirit of the neudiversity movement for sure, you know,
seeing the gifts as well as the challenges. I struggle
with this notion that we're all we're all weird.
Speaker 1 (46:39):
Well we're not. You know what we're not? Right, Yeah,
I'm going to I'm going to clear this up. What
we are is we're all weird by dint of being human,
which is a weird thing to be in the way
that you look at that that in itself. You know,
we are a creature that doesn't live within our environment.
It builds around our environment. You it disturbs the environment.
(47:01):
We have this, you know, I think chimpanzees and some
of the great apes and other creatures may well have
some sense of an inner monologue of something, even though
it won't be necessarily the language that we understand it.
But I think, you know, we're very rare in that way,
We're very rare. You know, we've talked about comedy. What
a rare thing is to have a creature that requires
jokes to survive and needs jokes and like shows. So
(47:24):
in that way, that's why I say we're all weird.
But I do not think that weirdness is the same
as what is then seen as the neurodivergent difficulty aguating
the world. So I think the first thing is I
just I wanted to start the book by basically saying,
(47:45):
just say, you know, we are a very odd species.
You know, I think I think Kurt Vonnegut would probably
have has probably written far better books than me about
the oddness of what it needs to be human. But
so just you know, don't ever think I think the
to go. Don't ever think you're normal. That's impletant, because
once you start going, hang on, how normal am I?
(48:07):
Maybe that will allow you to start to just empathize
a little bit more with those who are more abnormal
than you are. You know, it's the double empathy problem
of autism, which was you know, where people just went, oh,
autistic people can't really empathize, and actually what they were
failing to do those people was empathized with the way
the autistic mind may well work. And so it was
(48:29):
actually and again it's always looking at as you have
a fault because you don't think like me as opposed
to we both have different minds. And my it's what
I love about Jane Goodall's work with chimpanzees, which is,
you know when Jane Goodall she wrote a wonderful book
called Through a Window, which is about how we must
(48:50):
know and remember that we look through the human window.
We we and the other other species see through other windows.
And then that bit where you go, even that we
don't have a single window. When we are gathered together
in a room, we are also all looking through different windows.
And once we start to acknowledge that there is not this,
(49:11):
you know, objective truth in our perceptions that there is
you know, to always It's something I think I said
in the previous book, which is to always hold on
to your beliefs with a loose grip, to always be
ready and open. This is why you get all those
people who bang on about you know, the woke or whatever,
(49:31):
and you go, what's really happening there is? You are
not in any where allowing yourself just to go, hang
on a minute, what does it mean? What does it
mean to understand people differently based on culture, on ethnicity,
on sex, on gender, on all of those things? Stop
thinking you are the correct model and see yourself merely
(49:53):
as one of the ways we walk through the world.
Speaker 2 (49:58):
Wow. Wow, garntlet dropped Robin. Just as an aside, I'd
love to send you an article I just wrote from
my subject called aren't we all a nerd of vision?
What the heck does nerdiversity mean anymore? If we're all
nerdi vision? Can I I share my article with you?
Speaker 1 (50:14):
Please? Do? Please please share anything? I love you know.
One again, one of the things that I love about
touring around is I meet people who have had so
many different things happen, and I so often end up
in a bar afterwards and kind of you know, and
I find out more, and then also I end up
working with people. That's one of the things that I
love is because I've always tried to be kind of
(50:34):
receptive to people. There's people that I met just having
a drink after a gig, and then we've gone off
and written, you know, albums of poetry and music or
you know. Some of the people who've illustrated my books
are literally people that I just met at a gig
and we got on and then ten years later, go,
do you want to really strike my book? And I
love that. That's another thing that I love, which I
(50:55):
think can come with this kind of world, which is
that receptive thing that says, I don't just want to
be going, I don't want to be protective all the
time of my own little world. I want the web
to be as wide as possible. I love that way
that we can all keep kind of fertilizing each other's
minds and and and sharing ideas.
Speaker 2 (51:13):
That's beautiful. I would just really truly love to see
what you think of my perspective about this trend for
everyone to be neurodivers divergent now. I mean, there's a
recent article that came out in the UK with the
headline majority in UK now self identify as neurodivergent.
Speaker 1 (51:28):
Oh, that's absolutely great. Where was that that? That's just
not true.
Speaker 2 (51:35):
You'll see the article it was. It was in the Times.
Speaker 1 (51:39):
Oh god, you know what our newspapers in it's pretty amazing. Really,
our newspapers in the UK are so just terrible and
and they've been It's like how bad they've been on
things like, you know, the trans community, How negative they've been,
how on every single one of them has failed to
(52:01):
in any way really be received on anything that goes
things might be a little bit different to you expected.
It's like there's a book that came out which everyone loves.
It was all about you know, oh, I think it's
going to be I think this over diagnosis. And in
the book this person says anecdotally, I worry that the
majority of people diagnosed with ADHD see no palpable improvement
(52:24):
in their life, and then follows it with the sentence
though many of them say they're much happier. Well, I
don't know how you measure palpable improvement, but happiness is
definitely very high. On that kind of list.
Speaker 2 (52:35):
Yeah that counts. Yeah, yeah, so there's a It just
was an absurd in my view, it was an absurd headline.
It sounds like you agree with me, so oh yes.
So anyway, I just emailed the artic because I thank you,
you know, But then I start, you know, the way
my mind works, I started to think cheeky things like, well,
(52:56):
can you be so normal that it actually makes you
nerd divergent because you're so extreme in your normalness, you know,
Like you know what I'm saying, Like, there's some people
I meet who are like so not weird that it
bothers me and they're sore. They're such like rule followers.
They are such like everything they say, every word that
(53:19):
comes out of their mouth is so perfectly not not weird,
and it I'm like, that in itself is so extreme.
You're so extremely normal, you know, Like, like is it
could that be a form of neurodivergency? Yeah?
Speaker 1 (53:33):
I think you know. Also, I mean I always think
obedience is a very That's again why you find so
many social activists are neurodivergent, because the point the worst
thing to watch is is to see as we're seeing
in many countries around the world. Is this relentless obedience
(53:54):
to a regressive thoughts to you know, again to I mean,
I don't want to keep going back to the US,
you know, seeing some of the people who are having
their history are raised, you know, because they've gone, oh well,
this must have just been because of diversity. You don't
become an astronaut and go into space merely by dint
of your diversity. You've got to have a really great
(54:15):
set of skills. And I think what we're seeing in
some ways at the moment, and what worries me a
great dealer in the UK, is this return to a
kind of male white supremacy which in which all of
the visions of the differences are turned into we are
right and everything else is naborration. There's a book I
must plug. I always love plugging this book. It's by
(54:36):
Alexis Pauline Gunns, who is the most brilliant poet and writer,
and it's called Undrowned Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals,
And that's exactly what it is. It is the most
wonderful book. And at one point she says in the book,
who is this book for? This book is for you?
Otherwise known as everyone who knows. A world where queer, black,
(54:59):
feminine fo are living their fullest, most abundant and loving
lives is a world where everyone is free. And that,
to me is the beautiful vision. That is the vision
of the true inclusivity that is possible if we are
not perpetually afraid of those who are not like us.
Speaker 2 (55:20):
Beautifully said. I would actually like to leave with that sentiment,
because I think it's so beautifully said, Robin, and thank you,
And if I may actually and with that sentiment, and
a quote of yours that further punctuates that sentiment. You say,
your transformation can also transform other people. Just as they
may see something new and new, you may see another
(55:42):
side of them revealed. And it is not always a
positive change. And it is not always a positive change.
Wait wait, wait, is that good or bad?
Speaker 1 (55:51):
What's going on? Finish the sentence. I'm worried? Have you
found the typo? Oh?
Speaker 2 (55:57):
Hell wait a minute, Oh, I.
Speaker 1 (56:01):
Think do you know what I think it is? It's
not always the positive, I reckon whether.
Speaker 2 (56:05):
In the workplace or in a friendship.
Speaker 1 (56:07):
You say, yeah, by that, I mean that sometimes the
change will feel like a negative change, because sometimes it
will be a change in your friendships. Sometimes it will
feel like a change in your relationships. It might change
in your romantic.
Speaker 2 (56:20):
You had a beautiful moment here, let me redo it
and end with of them revealed. I'm just gonna I'm
just gonna.
Speaker 1 (56:27):
I'm going to turn to that and then I'm going
to rewrite the book.
Speaker 2 (56:31):
Rob and then you'll rewrite the this is this is hilarious. Wait,
I want to get back in the moment. We had
a beautiful ending moment. Let me get back in there. Okay, Okay,
here we go. Your transformation can always transform other people.
Just as they may see something new, and just as
they may see something new and new, you may see
(56:52):
another side of them revealed. Robin is so great chatting
with you today on a psychology podcast, and I just
love your energy and wish you all the well with
this book tour.
Speaker 1 (57:04):
Oh and you have a fantastic time down at the
Comedy Seller as well. It is it's such a wonderful
space to be in, and let us keep our communication going.
Popular Podcasts
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.