In this episode, we talk to a mom-to-be who had her first baby at 37 years old. She talks about the challenges of getting pregnant in your late 30s and early 40s, and how she and her husband, Doug, managed to have three kids in their late 40s.
00:02:28.480So, you know, it was a fast turnaround once I met my husband.
00:02:31.360I had a shorter first marriage that ended in divorce.
00:02:35.220We ended our relationship amicably and thankfully with no children because that's a whole sticky wicket, right, when you end a marriage and there are children involved.
00:02:45.060We got married pretty quickly, and we tried to have a baby very quickly because we saw that clock ticking, and we both really wanted to have children with each other.
00:02:52.540To be honest, I wasn't feeling that urge prior to Doug.
00:02:55.680In my first marriage, I kind of knew I didn't want to.
00:02:58.340I just, I think I might have had a sense, like, this wasn't going to work out with all due respect to my first husband, who is a great guy.
00:03:04.900And now I was happily married to another woman with kids of his own.
00:03:08.100In any event, so my husband and I met.
00:03:11.220And pretty early on in that first year of trying, I went to the OB-GYN to see whether I was okay.
00:03:18.560You know, just before we went down this exasperating path that everybody goes down in their mid-30s are women who wait.
00:03:24.460And the eggs, as it turned out, were very youthful and fine.
00:03:27.880My eggs were great, so I wasn't suffering from what you can suffer from at that age, for sure, 37, of, like, old eggs that are really not that fertile.
00:03:35.840That's a very real risk you're taking.
00:03:38.060To me, it wasn't even, like, on my mind because I wasn't really focused on children.
00:03:42.080But I was glad to hear that the eggs were in great shape, but I, not to get too detailed, but I have what's called a T-shaped uterus.
00:03:54.880And so I did use IVF for all three of my pregnancies, and it worked like a charm.
00:03:59.380And I had three beautiful babies, and it worked out perfectly.
00:04:01.980So, look, I'm lucky, and I realize that if children are important to you, and hopefully they are.
00:04:08.000I mean, honestly, like, I, too, am alarmed about the birth rate.
00:04:11.500We're not going to have a society if we don't start repopulating.
00:04:15.180But anyway, if they're important to you, you definitely should know you're taking a risk if you wait.
00:04:20.540And I think people need to be actively searching for partners, and we need to do better about helping connect them.
00:04:26.800It's, like, one of my missions in life to, in my personal role as a human on this earth, be active about introducing men and women to each other who are single.
00:07:42.060And here he is or here she is completely dependent on you, completely in need of you, and only you can solve it.
00:07:49.060It's a beautiful feeling where you feel incredibly needed, important, and bonded to this incredibly beautiful creature who knows nothing other than love for you.
00:09:59.280I went to see my daughter at a talent show.
00:10:01.400And these girls were out there having the time of their lives.
00:10:05.040Many of them were just being silly, happily and intentionally making fools of themselves, like in big costumes that bump into the other girls.
00:10:11.980And then they fall down into fun music.
00:10:14.040And I cried like a small school girl myself because it was this feeling of camaraderie and they were rooting for one another.
00:10:21.960And you see your child get up there, whatever she's doing, and just give it her all.
00:10:26.120Just stand in front of a microphone and try and ask the world to give her a shot, right, to give her a chance, to see what she can do.
00:11:00.200It brings into your life such positivity and promise and possibility and socialization for sure because you're going to be not just with your kids but with your kids' friends' parents and interacting at school.
00:11:11.160And the same way a dog gets you out into the world times X by a child and then more and more children and you'll have even more and more of it.
00:11:19.620So even though people know me as a career woman and I am and I love my career, as we talked about on the other part of the interview, I love my career.
00:11:27.660It completely energizes me and excites me.
00:11:31.120And some days coming out in front of this microphone is like a therapy for me.
00:11:34.340Just the chance to say what's real and correct the record for people out there who are being misled.
00:11:41.980If you said, MK, you can go back and live these same 54 years over again, but one thing's not going to happen, either your children or your career.
00:11:52.740As much as I adore this career, it doesn't hold a candle to my motherhood, my relationship to my children, my family, the core five, as we call ourselves, and the experiences we've had together through these last 15 years since I was 16, technically, since I became a mother for the first time as I got pregnant with my eldest.
00:12:12.120So I want, my thing is, Jordan, I want people to know that.
00:12:20.620But I also, but I also want young women who feel that budding love for their career, whatever it is, whether it's journalism or it's as a doctor or whatever, whatever it is that's like really grabbing them, that that's okay too.
00:12:33.140You know, I worry about the conservative movement not making room for those women who've got that thing that I had, which is like, I've got to do this.
00:12:43.280I love it, you know, and I am a better person and actually I'm a better mother too for the fact that I did become a journalist and I did all the things that I've done over the past whatever years before I had them.
00:12:53.840So I, my, my main point in speaking like to young conservative women today is, yes, valuing motherhood and understanding it alone is a valid choice and a really fulfilling one.
00:13:07.340But if you are somebody like I was, who does feel a fire lit under them to pursue a career, that's okay.
00:13:15.660These are questions that take cultures thousands of years to answer.
00:13:21.280During Answer the Call, I take questions from people just like you about their problems, opportunities, challenges, or when they simply need advice.
00:13:29.220How do I balance all of this grief, responsibility?
00:13:32.320How do you repair this kind of damage?
00:13:34.180My daughter, Michaela, guides the conversations as we hopefully help people navigate their lives.
00:14:18.020And I know that countries that have tried to go to war, so to speak, with Bitcoin have seen damaging consequences for their currency, which I think is extremely interesting and telling.
00:14:28.480Then I'd like to know what you see for the future in relationship to Bitcoin, let's say, over a five or 10-year period.
00:14:35.360And I'd like to know what your advice would be for young people, practically speaking, in relationship to ensuring their financial future.
00:14:46.200I think the last 10 months have been extraordinary for Bitcoin and the entire crypto ecosystem.
00:14:52.180An inflection point was in Nashville last July when Donald Trump, the presidential candidate, showed up, gave a speech, embraced Bitcoin, embraced the community, told everybody that if he was elected, the United States government would never sell their Bitcoin.
00:15:10.760And, in essence, endorsed it as apex property and legitimate property that he respected.
00:15:17.640The entire crypto industry and the Bitcoin community were extremely active.
00:15:22.640And there are a lot of people that think that they tipped the election in favor of the red sweep.
00:15:28.400They were definitely very significant actors in November.
00:15:32.440And so, November 5th, there was a red sweep.
00:15:34.320The House, the Senate, and the White House went Republican.
00:15:39.120What followed next is an orange cabinet.
00:16:04.300He created a cabinet position for David Sachs, as the crypto czar, who is a Bitcoin believer.
00:16:09.640And so, what you saw was the administration flipped from being—I would say, before this administration, they grudgingly accepted Bitcoin and were hostile to everything else.
00:16:23.440And Bitcoin was accepted under protest because they couldn't stop it.
00:16:26.660And then, after November 5th, the administration moved aggressively.
00:16:32.460They established an executive order to develop a digital assets policy.
00:16:47.580And they established a strategic Bitcoin reserve, okay?
00:16:50.640And the most important thing that happened is David Sachs went on public record saying the Trump administration recognizes Bitcoin as the one decentralized crypto network in the world, an asset without an issuer, digital gold, a commodity, special.
00:17:13.720That's very, very important to unlock.
00:17:17.020A commodity, an asset without an issuer, has legal superiority, ethical superiority.
00:17:24.640A public company can capitalize on a commodity.
00:17:28.240Under the SEC 40 Act, a public company cannot capitalize on securities.
00:17:32.800You can't have more than 40% of your balance sheet invested in securities.
00:17:36.060So, a commodity means it's like soybeans or gold or land, and no one actor can manipulate it, and that makes it global property.
00:17:47.100So, that only happened just in the past few months.
00:17:51.160But what's happened since is you could say the United States has gone from being very regressive to being the most progressive digital assets nation in the world.
00:18:04.460And the agenda of the United States is to normalize the use of digital currencies, digital tokens, digital securities, and digital commodities on digital exchanges trading 24-7, 365.
00:18:22.660It is the reserve asset or the capital base of the entire crypto economy.
00:18:26.720Okay, when these other—when other jurisdictions are speaking—I'm thinking about the WEF types in particular—when they're speaking about digital—central bank digital currencies, they're generally not thinking about—they're not proposing that that's going to be founded on a Bitcoin standard.
00:18:44.060Yeah, that is viewed as anathema by the crypto community.
00:18:48.660But here we get to this basic philosophical observation, which is, do I want all of the money and power in the world to be controlled centrally by one banker or one politician who will then decide what I can buy, what I can do, what I can think?
00:19:08.420Or do I want all of the money and the power of the world to be held by individuals apart from a corporation or a bank or a government where they have privacy, where they have sovereignty, where they have dignity, where they have power?
00:19:26.520You know, my author, Heinlein, he said, you know, an armed society is a polite society, right?
00:19:33.480And the idea is, you know, a hundred people have guns in the room and, you know, you watch your step, you know, and you show civility.
00:19:42.140Well, the significance of Bitcoin is, for the first time in the history of the human race, we have found a way to tightly bind economic energy to the individual, cryptographically bind it.
00:19:55.800If you know a secret in your head, it could be a billion dollars of power.
00:20:00.500Thinking about fantasy, I know it, I can cast a billion dollars spell.
00:20:08.380If you want to go back a hundred million years, the big breakthrough for mammals was when they could bind organic energy to their frame, and we call that fat, right?
00:20:19.700If you have fat cells, you can eat a lot and go without food for 30 days.
00:20:24.220Take away the fat, you're a type 1 diabetic.
00:20:27.080You know, you last a few days, you're dead.
00:20:28.700And so this idea that I can bind organic energy is what makes human beings.
00:20:33.660This idea that I could bind cryptographic, cryptographically bind economic energy, that gives sovereignty to the individual.
00:20:43.880Eight billion people could have their own energy, but also 400 million companies.
00:20:49.020And the traditional central banking system of the CBDC and fiat currency is there's one bank, you know, the U.S. Reserve that controls everybody, and then there's a hundred big banks.
00:21:03.860And if they give you permission, you're allowed to do stuff.
00:21:06.840And if they take away your permission, you can't.
00:21:08.780I think the Trump family ran into that when they got debanked.
00:21:27.080And if you look at the history of Austrians, they all lamented that the money is broken, and that is the source of so many of our economic ills.
00:21:36.300And if you look at the history of libertarians, they say government intervention, government policy, and medicine, and commerce, and foreign policy, and domestic policy, and monetary policy, and education policy is generally counterproductive, iatrogenic.
00:21:55.700They both had a philosophy, less government, more civil liberties, more economic liberties, more freedom.
00:22:04.440We took a shot at that in the United States during the Revolutionary War, and we did it with the Constitution, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
00:22:12.700We found out in 2020 that sometimes your rights get suspended because they're inconvenient to someone with more power than you.
00:22:20.200But the truth is your civil rights have been suspended every 30 years for the last 30,000 years by someone, and that's the story of civilization, rights being suspended for the normal by the more powerful.
00:22:35.880The crypto revolution and the Bitcoin ethos is Satoshi found a way to give power back to the people by combining cryptography with semiconductors, with the Internet.
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00:24:06.320Was it Watson or Crick who proposed an extraterrestrial origin for DNA because he couldn't understand how it could have possibly evolved?
00:24:17.160I don't remember which of the two co-discovers of DNA it was, but...
00:24:22.320Well, there's two interesting papers that came out.
00:24:24.360One was looking at the half-life of DNA complexity as a Moore's Law equivalence.
00:24:35.560Right, right, yeah, I saw that paper, yeah.
00:24:37.880And where if you extrapolate in a straight line back to the time at which DNA would have first been evolved, it actually goes back about 12 billion years ago, between 9 and 12 billion years.
00:24:58.440And yet Earth has only been around for 4 billion years.
00:25:01.560So, it basically means that we got a jumpstart because it came from somewhere else.
00:25:07.240And people say, well, how could it come from somewhere else?
00:25:09.720Well, I said, just look at your watch if it's made of metal.
00:25:14.060Every piece, every atom in that metal came from an exploded star several billion years ago that coalesced in a cloud and, you know, created the planetary ring that eventually became Earth.
00:28:02.760Because maybe that's the one thing we can do that might hurt them in some way.
00:28:08.880And if we're about to break out into the local galactic arm and, you know, and we're a bunch of angry monkeys, maybe they want to basically keep an eye on what the angry monkeys are up to lately and what they can and can't do.
00:28:30.620But because they're more observed with credible camera systems, right, and with credible observers, then it's more – you know, then it's more credible.
00:28:47.840Here's an interesting thing that happened.
00:28:49.240So, about two years ago, we pushed to what we call open the filters on the – you know, so the U.S. defense system has a number of sensors.
00:29:03.260And as it turned out, when somebody looked, it turned out that our sensors are only – because we're collecting so much data – are so narrowly focused.
00:29:13.300We're looking for signatures of rockets, signatures of planes.
00:29:20.100And there's a lot of other information that's being collected, but it's being dumped in the garbage immediately.
00:29:24.340So, we pushed to say, you know what, maybe there are capabilities of some of our, you know, near-level adversaries that we need to pay attention to, like hypersonic rockets from Putin.
00:29:38.800So, let's open the filters, and guess what they found?
00:29:41.920The first thing they found were the Chinese balloons.
00:29:43.660So, the Chinese had found a loophole in our sensor systems.
00:29:50.740But because we in the UAP community said, you need to open your sensors, maybe something's missing, the first thing they found were those Chinese balloons, and they closed the loophole.
00:30:01.600So, you know, for all one wants to say that this lobbying has no effect, it actually had a perfectly good outcome that prevented the Chinese from overflying these, you know, quiet drones, which were basically just high-altitude balloons with sensor systems.
00:30:24.160But all of that data is still there waiting to be processed, and so I'm part of other initiatives to get some of the data processed in a secure manner to look for signatures of UAP.
00:30:42.520But, you know, you don't even have to wait for me.
00:30:44.700Just look at what this guy Tim Phillips has been saying publicly.
00:30:47.780And what even Sean Kirkpatrick, the former head of Arrow, has said is that, yes, he's the one who talked about the Mosul orb.
00:30:58.160We're seeing these things all over the planet.
00:31:00.920And the orbs, are they – is that a standard sighting?
00:31:27.460So there are several – let's call them legacy photos of UFOs going back 50 or so, 60 years.
00:31:37.640And somebody noticed that these – in these legacy photos, there's, of course, the central UFO.
00:31:47.900But there are three or four round orbs in each of these pictures.
00:31:55.380So that leads to an interesting problem, right?
00:31:59.340Here you have things that some people claim were hoaxes, and yet they – even though nobody had even thought of it before, they thought to put these orbs in them.
00:32:10.960Or you have these multiple pictures, each of which have a central UFO, but then they have these orbs.
00:32:17.220It's almost like a signature of authenticity.
00:32:18.860And so it's these kinds of things that get me – that I just – as a scientist, I hate a problem that can't be solved.
00:32:31.860And so my mind is like always, okay, how do I solve it?
00:32:35.780How do I – you know, how do I get there?
00:32:37.160But then one of the other attributes that I think of myself as having is that I hate to see opportunity lost.
00:32:48.000And so the unprocessed data, the unrealized potential of what these things might mean, I've done enough for humanity with the technologies that I've developed for patients and whatever.
00:33:04.480So in my spare time, if you will, this is something that none of my colleagues are interested in, or at least fewer previously than they are today, that it's like, well, gee, a grain of silicon changed our civilization.
00:33:25.480Our civilization is based on silicon and germanium.
00:33:28.200Imagine if any of this stuff is real, it represents thousands of technology revolutions.
00:33:34.620If we can just scrape one new idea off the top, what could we do with it?
00:33:58.200We'll find the right life insurance policy, because some opportunities are just too important to regret later.
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00:34:57.080I've been thinking a lot about foundational principles and I wrote in my last book a lot about sacrifice and that catalyzed a realization for me, which was that, well, this is what I want to run by you.
00:35:12.480So, Judaism is predicated on the philosophy of upward sacrifice.
00:35:21.100So, you aim at the good, which would be the opposite of hell, let's say, and then you swear, vow, to shed everything that's not in keeping with that aim.
00:35:59.180The spirit of your nation, let's say, or the spirit of the upward aim of your nation, it taps out in some transcendent good.
00:36:08.360Christianity extends that by making, it stunned me, this realization, by making voluntary self-sacrifice in the face of death and hell the foundational principle.
00:36:20.780And then that's laid out in the architecture, as you have the crucifix at the center, on the altar, in the center of the church, at the center of the town.
00:36:33.060We've acted out the idea that voluntary self-sacrifice is the proper foundation of the world for 2,000 years without making it explicit, right?
00:36:44.000Because it didn't need to be made explicit, because it already was explicit.
00:36:48.020Well, we acted it out, at least, and that was sufficient, right?
00:36:51.480It was sufficient, but now it seems to me that we have to be conscious of it.
00:36:54.940And there's alternative foundations, power, but it's unstable, pleasure, but it devours itself.
00:37:04.300Faithlessness, that's nihilism and antinatalism, cannot be sustained.
00:37:08.260And so, okay, so, then one further issue.
00:37:13.900One of the sticking points between Islam and Christianity, let's say, is conceptions of the death of Christ and the resurrection, right?
00:37:35.900It isn't obvious to me that in the Islamic world that the spirit of voluntary self-sacrifice upward is the foundation.
00:37:45.860It looks to me more like it's something approximating power.
00:37:49.100Now, I say that with trepidation, because I've been watching the UAE and Saudi Arabia and the signatories of the Abraham Accords warn the West about radical Islamism,
00:38:00.080which they seem to regard as a form of dangerous psychopathy.
00:38:03.680And it seems to me that it would be a wonderful thing if the Islamic world, the sane Islamic world, could formulate a definition of psychopathic Islamism that would be applied universally and adopt.
00:40:03.940In Christianity, in what T.E. Hume might have called spilt Christianity, you get it in the language of human rights and so on.
00:40:13.300But again, it doesn't understand the water in which it's been swimming.
00:40:18.300So, this has been the case for, you might say, 200 years in the West.
00:40:24.520You might draw the line at different dates.
00:40:27.180But the interesting thing to me, which is the dangerous moment for our societies, is when these forms of very weak, sort of spilt religion, encounter a religious fervor that is not weak, is not guilt-ridden, loves the fact that we are.
00:40:48.000It's very keen to push it on us where it advantages it, and which, in the House of Islam, has, to put it quite frankly, not got its house in order.
00:40:59.960There are those who've told me for a quarter of a century.
00:41:03.260As evidenced by the almost complete absence of functional societies in the Islamic world.
00:41:14.540I'd add one on the more personal level, which is, why is it that even in every Western society where there are Muslim reformers who are outspoken as reformers and who are the most virulent opponents of the death cult, jihadists and extremists, even the not at the moment violent but Islamist movements within their midst, why is it always the reformers who are at risk?
00:41:55.440We wouldn't have the problem if you hadn't identified it.
00:42:00.000Endless, I mean, I think I have a pretty good grasp of the extraordinarily brave individuals who in Western countries, never mind in Muslim countries,
00:42:11.000who have put their head above the power of it and been shot at a hell of a lot, sometimes quite literally.
00:42:16.240Why is it the case if the House of Islam is in any decent order that it would be that way round?
00:42:25.080Why would it be that again and again the men of violence keep on being able to say, we have the truth on our side?
00:43:37.260They can, instead of propagandizing for the worst versions of Islam, they can try to do something different.
00:43:42.240You see that, I would argue, in the Emirates.
00:43:45.900You see a very dangerous example of a 1980s, 90s-era Saudi Arabia in Qatar at the moment.
00:43:54.520Which, although putting out a very materialistic pro-Western face, certainly with a lot of money to pump into the West and pollute a lot of people, are playing with...
00:44:14.140The same ideology that the Saudis were pumping out in the past.
00:44:19.980But I would come back to this central thing, which is that the big problem for Islam, as a faith, is, can they deal with this problem within the House of Islam or not?
00:44:31.460Well, that's a very old problem, you know.
00:45:02.560And I always get myself into trouble when I say this, but I say it anyway because it's true.
00:45:07.980Everybody in the West who looks at this problem can identify endless examples in our own history and in the Western past where religious fundamentalism has erupted and gone very badly wrong.
00:45:48.040And if you want to talk about voluntary self-sacrifice for the highest possible good, you do have the Christ on your side.
00:46:01.860So, it sounds like the findings from the genetic research, correct me if I'm wrong, are complex like the genetic findings in relationship to intelligence.
00:46:15.320That there's a plethora of contributing factors.
00:46:19.880There's no simple one-to-one correspondence between a genetic marker.
00:46:25.460It's more like a symphony of notes than a single causal factor.
00:46:31.860So, I mentioned over 100 rare genetic variants.
00:46:37.040So, that already tells our listeners that autism isn't a single gene.
00:46:42.520But when we factor in the common genetic variants or variation in the population, where autistic and non-autistic people may simply differ in the frequency of particular forms of a gene and the combinations of those genes,
00:46:58.680we may be talking about hundreds or thousands of genes.
00:47:42.680I mean, back in 2015, our group was the first to demonstrate that autistic people are exposed to higher levels of prenatal testosterone.
00:47:54.200And then later, we found oestrogens too, prenatal oestrogens.
00:47:58.000So, in all likelihood, the hormonal environment in the womb that the baby is exposed to is interacting with the inherited genetic predisposition that the fetus or the baby is born with.
00:48:18.560But that's just the kind of beginning of the research.
00:48:21.460I mean, you're asking, you know, would it be possible to look at discordant twins, where one is autistic and the other one isn't, to see whether hormones might explain, hormone exposure might explain why they're not both autistic.
00:48:37.120You know, those kinds of experiments or studies could be done, but they're challenging because twins themselves are quite a rare occurrence.
00:48:46.300I think it's like one in 80 in the population.
00:48:49.100You know, autism itself is not completely rare, but it's only like 2% or 3% of the population.
00:48:56.780So, it's kind of looking for needles in haystacks.
00:49:00.220And what do you make of the claims that, well, certainly rates of diagnosis of autism have skyrocketed?
00:49:09.180Now, my understanding as a clinician is that decreases in the diagnosis of other so-called developmental disorders account for at least some of that.
00:49:21.000So, many people who would have been classified using the archaic terminology of mental retardation are now shunted into the autism category.
00:49:31.580And so, I can't make heads or tails out of the claims that the prevalence of autism is increasing.
00:49:45.540So, if we just take the prevalence data from the year 2000 up to today, so that's the last 25 years, the prevalence of autism has increased over 800%.
00:50:01.860So, when I started in this field, autism was considered relatively rare.
00:50:06.460All the textbooks back in the 80s said that autism was 4 in 10,000, and today it's 1 in 30, right?
00:50:15.460So, you know, our listeners would be quite reasonably asking, what is causing the increase in the prevalence?
00:50:24.940I don't think it's just the explanation you gave, which is that people that we used to call learning disability or having a learning disability or an intellectual disability, we no longer use words like retardation because they're stigmatizing.
00:50:43.620You know, is it simply that they've been reclassified as autistic?
00:50:48.040That turns out not to be the explanation because the rate of autism in autistic people with a learning disability or an intellectual disability hasn't increased that much over 25 years.
00:51:01.720Rather, it's the other group, autistic people without a learning disability.
00:51:07.040And that can be explained because back in the mid-90s, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, DSM, that's the American Psychiatric Association's classification system, they introduced a new diagnosis of Asperger's syndrome.
00:51:56.900You know, what you, in our previous conversation, you referred to as more severe autism.
00:52:02.900In the U.S., they're using a term called profound autism to describe, you know, individuals who were autistic, but who've also got many other disabilities, like intellectual disability and language disability and motor disabilities.
00:52:19.680But the real increase seems to be in people whose IQ is in the average range or above, but who are seeking a diagnosis of autism.
00:52:29.560That's where the increase has come from.
00:52:32.560And I think that's because of things like social media.
00:52:37.100If we think about what's happened over the last 25 years, the internet has really taken off and social media has really taken off.
00:52:48.42025 years ago, autism was still not very well known about.
00:52:52.800There's been this huge increase in awareness and recognition, and particularly amongst people without a learning disability, who might start thinking, hmm, I wonder if I'm autistic, or I wonder if my child's autistic.
00:53:06.920So there's been kind of just an interest in pursuing a diagnosis if a child is maybe having social and communication difficulties, or even in an adult who was overlooked in their childhood, never received a diagnosis at the age when it might have been particularly useful.
00:53:27.880Well, but they struggled right through their teens, but they struggled right through their teens, and have made it into adulthood, but feeling, I've never really felt like I've fitted into social groups.
00:53:37.940I've always had difficulty making friends.
00:53:40.940But maybe those are individuals who show the other side of autism, the very positive side of autism, which is that laser focus on understanding how things work, understanding systems.
00:53:54.660So they may be doing very well in music, or drawing, or chess, or activities, or domains that are very predictable and highly structured and rule-governed, even if they find it very stressful to have a conversation.
00:54:13.960So is there a generalist-specialist dichotomy there as well?
00:54:18.140Is it that the—because it seems to me that the systemizer types, their advantage is derived from a proclivity to hyperspecialize.
00:54:30.560And you could think of social intelligence in the way that we've defined it, with its focus on high-order abstraction in the social domain and a tendency to—what?
00:54:48.240To operate in the social world primarily.
00:54:51.320It looks like a social-slash-generalizer proclivity compared to a thing-oriented—
00:54:58.560Yeah, and that's also that systemizer-empathy dichotomy.
00:55:07.560How is that associated with interest in people and interest in things?
00:55:11.900Yeah, I mean, it broadly splits along those lines.
00:55:58.980And, you know, so when we think about autistic people, they do prefer detail rather than generalities.
00:56:08.440And it's, you know, and these different kinds of brains or minds, it's not that one is better and one is worse.
00:56:15.380We need people in the population who are good at the detail.
00:56:20.300You know, that's, you know, that's why the cameras that are, you know, we're talking through right now.
00:56:24.880That's why they work is because the engineers have made sure that every component are fine-tuned in this particular system to work.
00:56:34.360You know, engineers famously say that when they're developing a new tool, they put it on repeat a million times to make sure it works reliably.
00:56:44.620Think of a plane taking off and landing.
00:56:47.920A million takeoffs and a million landings happen without anything going wrong.
00:56:53.060And that's how they, so that's the standard that engineers want.
00:56:56.860For this very specific plane, you know, will it repeat the operation a million times?
00:57:05.840Yeah, well, you can see there that that proclivity to be sensitive to abnormality, to anomaly, is actually very useful in that regard because it has to work.
00:57:18.140Well, many of our systems are like this.
00:57:20.380They work so reliably that it's truly a kind of miracle.
00:57:26.660I mean, in a reasonable country, the lights are on essentially 100% of the time, right?
00:57:34.240Your car doesn't blow up 100% of the time.
00:57:38.100Your natural gas fittings and pipes don't ever leak.