The Neurodivergent Professor

Have you ever felt like everyone understands the rules except for you? Me, too. And I’ve spent over a decade in therapy trying to figure it out. The main reason I sought help from therapists, counselors, and coaches is because I have always felt different. Like everyone else got the ‘Manual to Human Life’ except for me. As a result, I have always felt like an outsider. I think feeling different al...

Are you a religious person? An atheist? Agnostic? I consider myself to be agnostic. Mostly because I Don’t Know .  If I had to choose any belief system to attach to, I would be a Darwinist. By this, I mean that I believe that Natural Selection is a meaningful explanation of life. When I think about ‘why we are here’, I can’t help but recognize how life persists through time. In short, I believe Da...

Have you ever felt like the only person who didn’t receive a ‘How to Live Life’ handbook? Did you think everyone else understood what was going on except you? I’ve felt like that my whole life.  And it isn’t that I don’t like myself. I love myself. Everything breaks down when I move from my ‘inner world’ to the ‘outer world’. I struggle to understand human interactions. I always feel like I’m diff...

If you are in therapy or considering psychoanalysis this episode is for you. This episode is also for you if you have been wondering about neurodivergence, autism, or ADHD. This is the beginning of what I think will be a long quest and potentially a new direction for this podcast and blog. In this episode, I lay out my experience with psychoanalysis and my recent foray into learning about ASD (Aut...

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Have you ever thought about how complex our brains are? Or about how little we seem to really know about the way we think? Like, how can we simultaneously love our family but also they annoy us to no end?  I think this dissonance, this capacity to hold to two seemingly oppositional thoughts at the same time is just something we are able to do. What’s weird it that we try to not do this. When we ha...

Have you ever felt like scientists were assholes? Or at least super arrogant?  I often hear scientists sound this way. And when I was in academia it seemed they surrounded me. Being an academic seemed synonymous with being so arrogant that you turned people off. I think many of us have experienced this and it does academia and science a disservice. It’s like a medical doctor with no bedside manner...

Do you ever think about what life was like for early humans once we had our basic needs met? You know, once we figured out how to procure victuals and maintain a shelter. What was life like?  Experts including historians, anthropologists, and scientists seem to disagree. Some say we were ignorant savages (I’m looking at you, director of Pocahontas ) whereas others claim we actually didn’t work tha...

Do you ever feel like what you want to do goes against what society ‘wants’ you to do?  Like, maybe you want to be a painter, but your parents and your school tell you that you’ll never make any money. Maybe you want to take a gap year after high school but your parents fear you’ll never go to college and, thus, never ‘amount to anything’.  Maybe you are attracted to people of your same sex but yo...

you remember the term ‘coping mechanisms’? We used to hear this phrase often, usually when people were referring to our bad habits.  Like, smoking is a coping mechanism for stress. Avoiding conflict is a coping mechanism for people who don’t want to get involved. Denial is a popular coping mechanism for avoiding hurtful truths. Though the term ‘coping mechanism’ has sort of gone out of style, we s...

If you’re familiar with me or craft beer (or maybe both?) you may be familiar with the phrase, “The brewing industry is 99% asshole free”. This quote became famous when Sam Calagione, founder of Dogfish Head Craft Brewery published his book “ Brewing Up a Business ”. This book was an inspiration to my brewery and a big part of the craft beer explosion. The quote suggests that the beer business is...

What matters to you? What is important ? What do you value ( Episode 46 Values )? We say things matter to us when we put energy into developing, protecting, and thinking about them. Our families matter. Our relationships matter. Things that matter have meaning to us. What is meaningful to me might not be meaningful to you. But as I have said before, I think there are some things that have universa...

You're probably not old enough to remember, but a commercial in the 70s reminds me of this episode. In the commercial, a woman who represented Earth informed the viewer,  "'It's not nice to fool Mother Nature." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDkiq5jD5Hc I don't know if this ad made an impression on me, but my adult self agrees with it. I don't think we consult M...

Are humans inherently evil?  There’s a popular hypothesis that says we are. It’s a great excuse for bad behavior. But believing we can’t help ourselves has never set well with me. Kind of like when some guys use ‘millions of years of evolution’ as an excuse to not be monogamous. My hypothesis is that humans aren’t inherently evil, and I’m going to tell you why. In Rutger Bregman’s ‘ Humankind: A H...

Lately, I’ve been wondering about capitalism and competition. As I have mentioned in other episodes (links below), competition only occurs when resources are limited. Also, capitalism requires competition to protect consumers from monopolies. While I argue in older episodes that this protective feature often doesn’t work, the fact remains that capitalism requires competition. That competition is a...

I’ll just come out and say it. I’m sick of academic arrogance. Academic. Scientific. Intelligence mafia.  I don’t know why authority seems to be the foodstuffs of ego. But it sure seems like it is. I am so tired of being talked down to — as a society member — by those who are supposedly smarter than me. And it isn’t just the false dualism of ‘I’m smart and you’re not’. Or even that other people mi...

Would our ancestors be proud of us? When I think of the problems humans face today: suffering, anxiety, inequality, social justice issues, war, pollution . . . I try to put things in an evolutionary context.  On the one hand, we have come so far. We have created many wonderful ‘science’, ‘technology’, and ‘engineering’ elements that benefit individuals and society. Clean water. Sanitation. Medicin...

Much of our lives seem haphazard and disorganized. Sometimes doing our best simply means being able to get out of bed and go through the motions. As we gain awareness we learn how to better navigate life's obstacles. We learn to see the obstacles as the way. It is possible - I am living proof. As my journey - specifically the work I am doing here on my podcast - evolves I go back and forth be...

We can’t live without water. It comprises most of our bodies and planet. Water does so many cool things. Water is pretty weird. Even though particle physics tells us we are mostly space, we seem to be mostly water. We can’t live very long without it and it surrounds us and all we do. We live on a planet that has tons of water. Literally. As ice, and liquid water, and water vapor. Water travels aro...

One of the most influential papers from my former career described the ‘River Continuum Concept’. Though quite basic, this paper revolutionized how we thought about streams and rivers. Specifically how freshwater systems changed from their springs where they began to the oceans into which they drained. This paper introduced me to systems thinking and changed how I think about the world and nearly...

Do you ever think about your comfort zone? You know, the thing that keeps you doing the same things over and over. And helps you stay calm, minimize anxiety, and do the things you need to do.  I think of the comfort zone as being like a cocoon that surrounds our bodies. When we get into situations where we are uncomfortable, scared, or unfamiliar we start to experience negative emotions. Sometimes...

Do you remember common sense? That people just kinda know stuff. What’s right and what’s wrong. Do you remember Common Sense? The document by Thomas Paine that was a precursor to the Bill of Rights and the Constitution?  The first thing is something we think everybody we agree with has, and everybody we disagree with doesn’t have. The second thing basically said government is a necessary evil. Thi...

There was a time when my relationship with my father was pretty good. But during my teenage years I pretty much avoided him. During that period he gave me a lot of advice I didn’t want nor listen to. One of the things he told me was that I needed to ‘Walk the Talk’. The essence of this advice is that we need to live a life of integrity. After living half my life on this planet I see the wisdom in...

Here is Part 1 of this two-part series. In it, I focus mostly on the Growth part of the equation In Part 2, I want to focus on the Smaller portion. As I said, I used to be an entrepreneur. In my small town, I struggled to generate enough traffic to amount to any significant income. Believing I couldn’t manipulate revenue, I instead focused very carefully on the expense side of the balance sheet. ...

The fourth of July makes me ashamed. I’m ashamed of myself because I can’t seem to match the patriotism that surrounds me. In the USA, people get almost spiritual about their fireworks, hot dogs, and freedom worship. Behind all of this, for me, is a whole lot of weirdness. The whole Independence thing is fine. We fled a plutocratic government to have the ‘freedom’ to worship any god we wanted only...