FIELD REPORT [004]

THE AUTISTIC CULTURAL ARCHIVE

ARTIFACT: ROBBIE WILLIAMS
ARCHIVE NO.: ACA-004-ROBBIE-WILLIAMS
PERIOD: 1990 / Present
CLASSIFICATION: AUTISTIC CULTURE
PRIMARY PILLARS: Rhythmic Communicating · Boldly Creating · World Building · Predictably Comforting · Passionate Superfanning
ADDITIONAL TRACES: Norm Challenging · Bottom-Up Processing · Pattern Matching · Game Changing · Justice Seeking
LEAD EXCAVATOR: Simon Scott
ACCOMPANYING EXCAVATOR: Dr Angela Kingdon

LISTEN TO THE EXCAVATION

This Field Report accompanies our excavation of Robbie Williams on This Week in Autistic Culture.

The Archive segment presents the case.

The Field Report contains the evidence locker.

Listen to the full excavation on the Autistic Culture Podcast Network.

Watch the excavation on our YouTube channel.

THE DISCOVERY

What happens when someone becomes one of the most recognisable entertainers in Britain, but that person the world recognises isn’t quite who they believe themselves to be?

• The swagger.

• The jokes.

• The extraordinary confidence.

• The outrageous performances.

• The stadiums filled with tens of thousands of people singing every word.

• The cheeky grin.

• The carefully rehearsed banter.

And the character called Robbie Williams.

Because behind that character is somebody else. Robert Williams.

A man who has spoken about anxiety, agoraphobia, masking, difficulties with everyday social interaction and spending extended periods of his life finding the outside world profoundly uncomfortable.

And there’s something particularly interesting about that distinction.

Robbie Williams can stand in front of 80,000 people and command their attention.

Robert Williams has described struggling to leave his bed.

How do those two experiences exist within the same person?

That’s the question at the heart of this week’s excavation.

In August 2026, Robbie publicly disclosed that he had recently discovered he was Autistic.

And when I heard that, I began looking back through his music, performances, interviews and creative projects.

What I discovered was that Robbie Williams had been talking about identity, masking, belonging and the experience of feeling different for decades.

Sometimes directly. Sometimes through the characters he created.

And sometimes through songs that millions of people had been singing without necessarily considering what those songs were communicating.

When I brought Robbie Williams into the Autistic Cultural Archive, I wanted to examine something beyond his disclosure.

I wanted to know whether his work and the extraordinary cultural world surrounding it could be understood through the Ten Pillars of Autistic Culture.

And during our excavation, Angela identified something I hadn’t fully appreciated.

The connection wasn’t simply in the lyrics.

It was in the rhythm.

The performance.

The relationship between the entertainer and the audience.

And the way Robbie Williams had constructed an entire character through which to communicate.

There was also a discovery that connected this excavation directly to one of our previous artefacts.

The Rocky Horror Show.

Because it turns out that Robbie Williams has been telling us who he wanted to be since he was young.

We just needed to know where to look!

THE ARTEFACT

Robert Peter Williams was born on 13 February 1974 in Stoke-on-Trent, England.

His childhood was surrounded by entertainment.

His father, Pete Conway, worked as a singer and comedian on the cabaret circuit, and Robbie grew up with a particular appreciation for performers who could do more than simply sing.

• People who could entertain.

• Tell jokes.

• Hold an audience.

• Create a character.

And make an entire room feel as though it was participating in the performance.

In 1990, at just 16 years old, Robbie joined Take That.

Alongside Gary Barlow, Mark Owen, Howard Donald and Jason Orange, he became part of one of Britain’s biggest pop groups.

But in 1995, Robbie left the band.

His departure became an enormous story in British popular culture.

And it created something of a template for the boyband member who breaks away, develops a new identity and becomes an enormous solo star.

During our excavation, I mentioned how frequently British entertainment journalism has compared subsequent performers with Robbie.

Harry Styles, for example.

To do a Robbie Williams has become a recognisable cultural idea.

1. Leave the group.

2. Become the individual.

3. And establish a career on your own terms.

Robbie’s solo career began in 1996, and his breakthrough came with Angels.

That was followed by an extraordinary succession of records.

• Let Me Entertain You.

• Millennium.

• Rock DJ.

• Strong.

• Feel.

• Come Undone.

• She’s the One.

And many more.

In 2003, he performed three concerts at Knebworth, attracting approximately 375,000 people across the weekend.

He became one of Britain’s defining entertainers.

Not simply because of his records.

But because of what happened when he walked onto a stage.

The audience became part of the show.

And that’s an important distinction for this excavation.

Because during the recording, Angela described watching footage of a huge crowd singing Angels at the Women’s Rugby World Cup.

She didn’t know Robbie’s catalogue particularly well.

But she knew what she was seeing.

Thousands of people communicating with one another through a song.

And she immediately recognised something in that collective experience.

Rhythmic Communicating.

But before we reach the music, we need to understand the person who created it.

THE EXCAVATION

ROBBIE WILLIAMS IS A CHARACTER

WORLD BUILDING · BOLDLY CREATING

One of the most revealing statements Robbie Williams has made about himself concerns his name.

Not his stage name.

His actual name.

“My name is Robert Williams, it’s not Robbie Williams. Robbie Williams gets on stage, Robert Williams raises his kids.”

That is an extraordinary distinction for somebody whose entire career has been built around being recognisable.

Robbie Williams is the entertainer.

Robert Williams is the person who goes home.

And the difference between those two identities is something he has discussed repeatedly.

In October 2025, Robbie described his ability to mask in particularly striking terms.

“I mask, like I’m an Olympian at masking.”

Now, this is where I became interested in World Building.

Because when we discuss World Building in Autistic Culture, we’re not only talking about fictional universes.

We’re talking about constructing environments, identities and systems that operate according to their own internal rules.

A character can be a world.

A performance can be a world.

And a stage can become a place where somebody knows precisely who they are supposed to be.

Robbie has described his stage persona as something approaching a superhero.

A version of himself capable of doing things that the private person finds much more difficult.

And that made me think about the distinction between confidence and performance.

We often assume that somebody who behaves confidently must feel confident.

But those are not necessarily the same thing.

A broadcaster can adopt a presenting voice.

An actor can step into a character.

A comedian can develop a stage persona.

And an Autistic person might learn a repertoire of behaviours that make particular social situations more manageable.

The fact that a behaviour is practised doesn’t necessarily make it dishonest.

It might simply make it possible.

A FIND FROM THE EXCAVATION

During our conversation, Angela made an interesting comparison with Taylor Swift.

She described the distinction between the public performer and the private individual, and the way a person experiencing enormous fame might construct a character to manage it.

That led us to a question.

What happens when the social world somebody inhabits becomes so overwhelming that they need to build another one?

Robbie Williams has spent much of his adult life in environments where people already have expectations about who he is.

• They know the jokes.

• They know the songs.

• They know the character.

• And they expect that character to appear.

But what happens when Robert Williams doesn’t feel like Robbie Williams?

What happens when the person the audience wants to see is somebody you have to become?

That’s where World Building and Boldly Creating begin to interact.

The character is the creation.

And the creation becomes a means of navigating the world.

THE MAN WHO WANTED TO BE FRANK-N-FURTER

PASSIONATE SUPERFANNING · BOLDLY CREATING

This was my favourite discovery in the research.

Because it connects Robbie Williams directly to another artefact already sitting in our Archive.

The Rocky Horror Show.

Robbie has spoken about seeing Tim Curry perform as Frank-N-Furter and being profoundly influenced by what he saw.

He didn’t simply admire the performance.

He wanted to become that kind of performer.

And he has described his own stage identity as an expression of Frank-N-Furter.

When I presented that discovery to Angela, her response was immediate.

She recognised the connection between the extravagant stage persona and the act of constructing a character.

She described Robbie as performing a version of what he imagined a rock star should be.

And suddenly, a great deal of his career began to make sense.

• The costumes.

• The theatrical gestures.

• The exaggerated expressions.

• The comedy.

• The audience participation.

• The enormous personality.

Robbie’s influences weren’t confined to Tim Curry.

He grew up admiring Frank Sinatra, Tommy Cooper, Morecambe and Wise, the Two Ronnies and the entertainers he encountered through his father’s work.

And he brought elements of those performers together.

Not simply copying one person.

But assembling a recognisable performance identity from an entire collection of cultural influences.

That is where I see a particularly strong connection with Passionate Superfanning.

WHEN THE THINGS YOU LOVE BECOME PART OF YOU

One of the ideas we return to regularly on the Autistic Culture Podcast is that a passionate interest doesn’t necessarily remain separate from somebody’s identity.

Sometimes it becomes part of who they are.

• The films you watch.

• The music you listen to.

• The characters you admire.

• The jokes you repeat.

• The voices you imitate.

• The performances you return to again and again.

Over time, those cultural artefacts can become part of your own way of communicating.

And Robbie Williams offers a particularly interesting example.

His admiration for entertainers didn’t simply lead him to become a fan.

It helped him become an entertainer.

He took the things he loved and made something new from them.

Which is why this connection is more interesting than simply saying Robbie likes Rocky Horror.

He has described Rocky Horror as part of the foundation of the person he becomes onstage.

And during the excavation, Angela recognised another important distinction.

The character itself belongs to Boldly Creating.

The familiar language, rhythms and interactions of the performance belong to Rhythmic Communicating.

They’re connected. But they’re not identical.

That distinction becomes particularly important when we reach the songs.

THE STADIUM BECOMES THE INSTRUMENT

RHYTHMIC COMMUNICATING

I have spent much of my working life around broadcasting, music and performance.

And one of the things I’ve always admired about Robbie Williams is his ability to make an enormous audience feel involved.

He doesn’t simply perform a song.

He creates an exchange.

A familiar introduction.

A recognisable rhythm.

A pause.

An invitation.

And then the audience responds.

Sometimes he barely needs to sing.

He can hold out the microphone and let thousands of people finish the song for him.

During our excavation, I talked about how his songs seem designed for that experience.

Not just for listening.

For singing together.

Angels is probably the clearest example.

But it appears throughout his catalogue.

And Angela took that observation somewhere I hadn’t expected.

She argued that I had undersold the connection to Rhythmic Communicating.

Because it wasn’t only about the words.

It was about the collective rhythm.

The way the audience knew what came next.

The way a musical phrase could carry meaning beyond its literal content.

And the way thousands of people could participate in a shared communicative experience.

THE COMMUNICATION IS IN THE RHYTHM

Angela connected this to the framework of gestalt language processing and echolalic communication.

In the excavation, she explained that familiar phrases and repeated rhythms can communicate something beyond their literal meaning.

The words might refer to one thing.

But the rhythm, repetition or cultural context might communicate something else.

And that gives us a different way of thinking about Robbie’s stadium performances.

When thousands of people sing Angels together, they aren’t simply reciting lyrics.

They’re participating in a familiar emotional and cultural experience.

They know the melody.

They know when the chorus arrives.

They know when the performer will step back.

And they know when their voices become the performance.

There is predictability within that exchange.

There is rhythm.

There is repetition.

And there is a shared understanding that doesn’t require every participant to explain what the song means to them.

That doesn’t establish Robbie’s own language-processing profile.

But it does make his performances an interesting artefact for examining Rhythmic Communicating.

A FIND FROM THE EXCAVATION

Angela also made a connection I found particularly interesting.

Football.

Robbie is a lifelong Port Vale supporter.

And football crowds have their own extraordinary tradition of collective rhythmic communication.

• Chants.

• Repetition.

• Call and response.

• Familiar melodies.

• Thousands of people communicating belonging through a shared rhythm.

Once Angela mentioned it, I could hear the connection.

Many of Robbie’s biggest choruses have something of that quality.

They sound as though they belong to a crowd.

And perhaps that’s part of why they work so well in stadiums.

A football terrace and a Robbie Williams concert are very different cultural environments.

But both can turn a collection of individuals into a group communicating through rhythm.

YOU THINK THAT I’M STRONG

RHYTHMIC COMMUNICATING · PREDICTABLY COMFORTING

During my research, I returned to Robbie’s 1998 song Strong.

It’s a song I’ve known for years.

But this time I found myself listening to it differently.

The central refrain is simple.

“You think that I’m strong, you’re wrong.”

It’s a remarkable thing to sing in front of an enormous audience.

Because the audience is watching somebody who appears to have everything.

• Fame.

• Success.

• Confidence.

• Money.

• Recognition.

And he’s telling them that their perception of him is wrong.

During the recording, I talked about the way the song builds towards its chorus.

The verses are full of detail.

Everyday experiences.

Contradictions.

A sense of life becoming increasingly difficult to manage.

And then the chorus arrives.

Suddenly the song becomes enormous.

The audience joins in.

The words are repeated back to him.

And the apparent confession becomes a stadium anthem.

Angela recognised something painful in that contradiction.

WHEN A CRY FOR HELP BECOMES A COMPLIMENT

During our excavation, Angela spoke about experiences of being in serious distress and trying to communicate that she needed support.

And being told that she was strong.

That she would get through it.

That everything would be fine.

Even when that wasn’t what she was trying to communicate.

She recognised something similar in Strong.

Here was a performer telling an audience that the confident person they believed they were seeing wasn’t necessarily how he experienced himself.

And the audience loved it.

They sang along.

They celebrated him.

They told him how wonderful the song was.

But what if the words were also communicating something much more difficult?

What if the performer was trying to explain that he wasn’t coping?

That doesn’t mean we can establish Robbie’s private intention from a song.

But it raises an important question.

How often do we mistake somebody’s ability to communicate distress beautifully for evidence that they don’t need help?

And how often does visible competence prevent people from recognising invisible difficulty?

That question took us to another song.

I JUST WANT TO FEEL

RHYTHMIC COMMUNICATING · BOLDLY CREATING

Feel was released in 2002 on the album Escapology.

And it’s one of Robbie’s most recognisable songs.

During the recording, I explained that this was the song that had particularly affected me during my research.

Because I’d known it for years.

I knew the words.

I knew the melody.

I knew exactly when the chorus arrived.

But I wasn’t sure I’d ever properly considered what it was saying.

It’s a song about loneliness.

Uncertainty.

Wanting connection.

Trying to understand your own thoughts.

And wanting to experience love without the fear and confusion that can accompany it.

What struck me was how closely some of those themes resonated with my own experience of being highly masked during my twenties.

Always preparing.

Always anticipating.

Always imagining how an interaction might unfold before it had even happened.

A FIND FROM THE EXCAVATION

Angela asked me about one particular line in Feel.

The idea of seeing yourself arriving somewhere before you’ve actually arrived.

What did that mean to me?

My answer was scripting.

Because I recognised the experience of mentally rehearsing a situation before entering it.

Imagining the conversation.

Anticipating the response.

Planning what I might say.

And sometimes preparing for a relationship or interaction to go wrong before it had even begun.

That was how I experienced much of my twenties.

And hearing those themes in a song I’d grown up with was unexpectedly emotional.

But there was another part of the discovery.

When I sing along to Feel, I’m not simply listening to Robbie Williams express something.

I’m expressing something too.

The song becomes a shared language.

He sings about an experience.

I recognise something of my own experience.

And we meet somewhere in the middle.

That’s cultural evidence.

Not diagnostic evidence.

Not proof of what Robbie was thinking when the song was written.

But evidence of how a piece of culture can provide a language for experiences that might otherwise be difficult to communicate.

THE CASHMERE KAFTAN AND THE KETTLE CHIPS

PREDICTABLY COMFORTING

Now we come to one of the more unusual items in the evidence locker.

A cashmere kaftan.

A packet of Kettle Chips.

And a bed.

For somebody associated with enormous stadium performances and extravagant public behaviour, Robbie has spoken remarkably openly about finding ordinary life difficult.

He has experienced severe agoraphobia.

He has described spending extended periods away from public life.

And he has talked about the extraordinary comfort of remaining in familiar surroundings.

One of his descriptions of that period involved wearing a cashmere kaftan, eating Kettle Chips, growing a beard and staying indoors.

He has also described his bed as his comfort zone.

And the world outside it as his discomfort zone.

There is something very recognisable here.

• Familiar clothes.

• Familiar food.

• Familiar surroundings.

• Reduced uncertainty.

• A place where the demands of the outside world become more manageable.

And I immediately saw a possible connection with Predictably Comforting.

But Angela complicated that interpretation.

WHEN COMFORT BECOMES COMPLICATED

During the recording, Angela described Robbie’s relationship with comfort and predictability as something shaped by trauma.

That distinction matters.

Because the purpose of Predictably Comforting isn’t to celebrate distress.

It’s to recognise the importance of familiarity, repetition and reliable environments within Autistic Culture.

There can be genuine pleasure in eating the same food.

Wearing the same clothes.

Returning to the same place.

Knowing exactly what to expect.

But there is a difference between choosing a familiar environment because it brings you joy and feeling unable to leave that environment because the world outside has become overwhelming.

Robbie’s agoraphobia is a significant part of his publicly described experience.

We shouldn’t simply reclassify it as an Autistic preference for staying home.

And we shouldn’t assume that every familiar behaviour has the same motivation.

But his story does invite us to consider what happens when somebody’s need for comfort becomes entangled with anxiety, fame, public scrutiny and the extraordinary pressure of maintaining a character.

THE STADIUM AND THE STRANGER

This is perhaps the strangest contrast in the entire excavation.

Robbie Williams can perform for tens of thousands of people.

Yet Robert Williams has described finding ordinary social interaction profoundly difficult.

And I think part of the answer may lie in the structure of performance.

• A concert is rehearsed.

• There is a set list.

• There are familiar musical cues.

• There are repeated jokes.

• There are recognisable audience responses.

• And everybody knows why they’re there.

An unexpected encounter with a stranger offers none of those guarantees.

During our conversation, I mentioned Robbie’s return to Take That.

He described initially being able to hide in plain sight, behind the other members of the group.

That is a particularly interesting description.

Because returning to an enormous stage might seem like an unlikely way to escape social pressure.

But the structure of a group performance could also provide something that an individual performance doesn’t.

1. Other people sharing the attention.

2. Familiar roles.

3. A predictable format.

4. A way to participate without always being the sole focus.

Once again, the question isn’t whether these experiences establish autism.

Robbie has already spoken about discovering he is Autistic.

The question is what his experiences tell us about the relationship between public confidence, private difficulty and the importance of predictable environments.

THE POP STAR WHO BECAME A CHIMPANZEE

WORLD BUILDING · BOLDLY CREATING · NORM CHALLENGING

In 2024, Robbie Williams’s life became the subject of the film Better Man, directed by Michael Gracey.

But this wasn’t a conventional musical biopic.

Because Robbie wasn’t represented onscreen by an actor who looked like him.

He was represented by a CGI chimpanzee throughout the film.

Now, I find that an extraordinary creative decision.

Robbie Williams is one of Britain’s most recognisable entertainers.

His face.

His mannerisms.

His expressions.

His public persona.

All of those things have been central to his career.

And yet the film tells his story through a character that doesn’t look human.

During our excavation, Angela was immediately interested in that choice.

Because the experience of feeling different from the people around you can be profoundly familiar to Autistic people.

Feeling as though everybody else understands a social world that you somehow missed the instructions for.

Feeling like an outsider.

Or feeling as though you are performing humanity rather than simply participating in it.

The film offers an extraordinary visual metaphor through which to explore those feelings.

But there’s another part of this discovery.

Robbie has described finding it difficult to see himself represented directly in his own story.

The chimpanzee created a degree of separation, and that distance became part of the storytelling.

THE MONKEY WAS ALREADY THERE

One of the discoveries that fascinated me was that more than twenty years before Better Man, Robbie released a song called Me and My Monkey.

It’s on Escapology.

And it is a wonderfully strange piece of storytelling.

A man.

A monkey.

A journey to Las Vegas.

A collection of detailed images, characters and increasingly surreal events.

It isn’t a conventional three-minute pop song.

It’s an extended narrative with its own internal world.

And that makes it a particularly interesting example of World Building.

Robbie takes a strange premise and follows it.

He creates characters.

Places them in a setting.

Gives them dialogue.

And builds an entire story around the relationship between them.

Then, two decades later, a chimpanzee becomes the central visual device in the film about his life.

The two works aren’t necessarily intended to form a single narrative.

But the connection is too interesting to ignore.

And it offers a particularly useful reminder about the Archive.

Sometimes an artefact becomes more interesting when we place it beside another artefact.

A song from 2002.

A film from 2024.

And a performer who has spent decades exploring the difference between himself and the characters he creates.

A FIND FROM THE EXCAVATION

During the conversation, Angela connected the film to the experience of feeling fundamentally different.

And that led us into a discussion about the cost of living without understanding why the world feels so difficult.

There is a temptation to look at an unusual creative decision and immediately celebrate its originality.

And Better Man certainly deserves attention as an unconventional piece of filmmaking.

But the emotional material behind the story is considerably more complicated.

Which is why Boldly Creating doesn’t necessarily mean that the person doing the creating is happy.

Sometimes the art is a way of expressing something difficult to live with.

And sometimes the most imaginative work emerges from an attempt to make sense of experiences that don’t yet have an adequate explanation.

THE PASSIONS THAT NEVER WENT AWAY

PASSIONATE SUPERFANNING

There were several pieces of research I couldn’t explore in detail during the recording.

And this is where the Evidence Locker becomes particularly useful.

Because Robbie’s passionate interests extend well beyond the entertainers who influenced his stage persona.

PORT VALE

Robbie grew up in Stoke-on-Trent.

And his relationship with Port Vale Football Club has remained an important part of his life.

He has supported the club since childhood.

He became a shareholder.

He has held an honorary position with the club.

And he has continued to celebrate its place in his life.

One of the most revealing things he’s said about Port Vale concerns the Railway Paddock at Vale Park.

He has described it as part of the community that raised him.

And I think that tells us something important.

Because a passionate interest isn’t always simply a hobby.

Sometimes it is connected to memory.

Identity.

Belonging.

A particular place.

And the person you were before the rest of your life changed.

Robbie Williams has experienced extraordinary fame.

He has lived a life that most people can barely imagine.

But Port Vale connects him to Stoke-on-Trent.

To his childhood.

And to a community that existed before the enormous public character of Robbie Williams was created.

UFOs AND THE UNUSUAL

Robbie has also spent years exploring UFOs, unexplained phenomena and paranormal subjects.

This isn’t simply a passing celebrity interest.

He has pursued the subject through research, interviews and involvement in discussions about unusual experiences.

He has described himself as a student of the unusual.

And this gives us another example of Passionate Superfanning.

A sustained curiosity.

A desire to investigate.

An interest that continues despite other people’s expectations about what a famous pop star should be interested in.

We don’t have to share somebody’s conclusions about unexplained phenomena to recognise the intensity of their interest.

And we don’t have to assume that every intense interest is Autistic.

But taken alongside Robbie’s relationship with performers, football and other cultural artefacts, it adds another dimension to the picture.

THE THINGS THAT GROUND US

During our excavation, I suggested that Robbie’s childhood cultural influences might provide a connection to the person he was before fame.

• The comedians.

• The cabaret performances.

• The music.

• The football.

• The places.

• The familiar voices.

And the people whose work he admired.

Those things didn’t disappear when he became famous.

They became part of the character.

And perhaps part of what helped him remain connected to Robert Williams while the world became increasingly interested in Robbie.

THE EVIDENCE WE DIDN’T FULLY EXCAVATE

BOTTOM-UP PROCESSING · PATTERN MATCHING · JUSTICE SEEKING

There are several additional items worth keeping in the archive.

THE BOY WHO THOUGHT HE WAS STUPID

Robbie has spoken about growing up with dyslexia, dyscalculia and ADHD.

He has described leaving school believing that he wasn’t intelligent.

And he has discussed wanting to return to education and demonstrate that those early judgements didn’t define his abilities.

I find this particularly interesting.

Because the experience of being misunderstood by an educational system can remain with somebody long after they have demonstrated extraordinary abilities elsewhere.

Robbie Williams has achieved things that very few people in the world will ever achieve.

But that doesn’t necessarily erase the experience of being a child who believed he was stupid.

This raises questions about Bottom-Up Processing, different learning styles and the assumptions we make about intelligence.

It also raises a possible connection to Justice Seeking.

Not necessarily in the sense of a public campaign.

But in the desire to challenge a judgement that has followed somebody for decades.

THE NETFLIX DOCUMENTARY

In 2023, Netflix released the documentary series, Robbie Williams.

The production drew on a vast archive of footage documenting his career.

And one of its most interesting features is the way Robbie revisits his own history.

Watching.

Remembering.

Reconsidering.

Trying to understand what happened.

The production reportedly had access to approximately 30,000 hours of archive material. That does not mean Robbie personally watched 30,000 hours.

What interests me is the process.

Returning to individual experiences.

Looking for connections.

Examining how events that once seemed isolated might fit into a larger story.

There are possible connections here to Bottom-Up Processing and Pattern Matching.

But there’s also a rather wonderful parallel with what we’re doing.

Robbie is excavating his own past.

Looking through the evidence.

And attempting to make sense of the person he became.

THE ART BEYOND THE MUSIC

Robbie’s creative work also extends into visual art, different musical genres and projects outside the conventional expectations of a mainstream pop career.

There are connections worth exploring here to Boldly Creating and Norm Challenging.

He hasn’t remained inside a single artistic identity.

And perhaps that’s another important part of the Robbie Williams story.

The character might be familiar.

But the creative work has never been entirely predictable.

FIELD NOTE — THE ROSETTA STONE

During our previous excavations, we’ve begun to recognise that the Ten Pillars don’t always appear in isolation.

They interact.

One cultural pattern can support another.

And sometimes the interaction produces something we wouldn’t have recognised by examining the individual Pillars separately.

Robbie Williams gives us a particularly interesting example.

Passionate Superfanning provides the influences.

Tim Curry.

Frank Sinatra.

British comedians.

His father’s cabaret performances.

Those influences help create a character.

That’s Boldly Creating.

The character becomes an entire performance identity.

That’s World Building.

And the performance relies on familiar rhythms, musical structures and audience participation.

That’s Rhythmic Communicating.

Then we find something else.

The person behind that character has spoken about needing familiarity, comfort and predictable environments.

That’s where Predictably Comforting enters the picture.

But Angela identified a complication.

What happens when the familiar environment is no longer simply a source of pleasure?

What happens when it becomes a refuge from a world that feels impossible to manage?

And what happens when the character somebody has created is capable of extraordinary things, but the person maintaining it is struggling?

That was the discovery I found most significant.

Because the Pillars don’t simply help us identify familiar cultural behaviours.

They also help us distinguish those behaviours from the pain that may surround them.

Boldly Creating isn’t the same thing as masking out of fear.

Predictably Comforting isn’t the same thing as being unable to leave the house.

Rhythmic Communicating isn’t the same thing as having no other way to ask for help.

And Passionate Superfanning isn’t simply a distraction from distress.

Those cultural experiences can exist independently of suffering.

But for somebody who has spent much of their life without understanding their neurotype, the two can become entangled.

Angela described Robbie’s relationship with comfort as something shaped by trauma.

And that led us towards the most important finding of the excavation.

Trauma is not a Pillar of Autistic Culture.

The culture is the creativity.

The communication.

The passion.

The world-building.

The familiar rituals.

The joy of recognising something that makes sense to you.

The pain may be part of somebody’s experience.

But it isn’t what makes that experience Autistic Culture.

And perhaps the Rosetta Stone helps us separate those things.

Not perfectly.

Not in every case.

But enough to ask a different question.

What might Robbie Williams’s life have looked like if the person behind the character had understood himself earlier?

And what might the next chapter look like now that he does?

THE AUDIENCE BECOMES PART OF THE ARTEFACT

RHYTHMIC COMMUNICATING · PASSIONATE SUPERFANNING

There’s one more part of this story that deserves attention.

The audience.

Because Robbie Williams isn’t simply somebody who creates cultural artefacts.

He’s somebody whose work has become part of other people’s lives.

During the recording, I realised how deeply his music was connected to my own childhood.

I had been researching his songs for days.

Listening.

Reading.

Watching performances.

And repeatedly finding myself knowing every word.

Even songs I hadn’t consciously thought about for years.

Eventually, I spoke to my mum.

And she reminded me that Robbie’s CDs had been part of our journeys to school.

His music had been there all along.

In the car.

In the background.

Part of the everyday culture I grew up with.

I’d forgotten the circumstances. But I hadn’t forgotten the songs.

And I found that unexpectedly moving.

Because I began the excavation by researching somebody else’s cultural identity.

And ended up discovering something about my own.

THE SONG BECOMES YOUR SONG

This is one of the things I find particularly interesting about music.

A song begins with its creators.

But once it enters the world, it becomes part of other people’s experiences.

They attach memories to it.

Relationships.

Places.

Emotions.

Different stages of their lives.

And sometimes the meaning they find in the song is not identical to the meaning its creators intended.

That doesn’t necessarily make their interpretation wrong.

It makes the song part of a shared culture.

When I listen to Feel, I recognise something about my twenties.

When Angela hears Strong, she recognises the pain of telling people you need help and being told how strong you are.

And when thousands of people sing Angels, they participate in a collective experience that belongs to all of them.

That is what I meant during the recording when I described Robbie’s music as collaborative.

He’s expressing something.

We’re expressing something.

And the song gives us a shared language.

There is also Passionate Superfanning on the audience’s side.

I mentioned an Autistic friend from Stoke-on-Trent for whom Robbie is a significant interest.

Someone who follows his career and attends his concerts.

And that made me think about the extraordinary relationship between the person creating the culture and the people who find themselves within it.

Robbie’s passion for other performers helped create Robbie Williams.

And Robbie Williams has become a passionate interest for other people.

The cultural influence continues.

One generation of performers inspires another.

One artefact becomes part of another person’s identity.

And the archive keeps growing.

WHAT THE EVIDENCE DOESN’T TELL US

There are important distinctions to preserve.

Robbie Williams has publicly described discovering he is Autistic.

That is different from our previous excavation of Elizabeth Holmes, where we had no evidence that the person we were discussing identified as Autistic.

But Robbie’s disclosure doesn’t mean every aspect of his life can be explained through autism.

We cannot assume that his agoraphobia was caused by autism.

We cannot establish the precise motivation behind his stage persona.

We cannot know whether a particular performance routine was developed for emotional regulation, artistic effect, professional convenience or some combination of those things.

We cannot determine his language-processing profile from the structure of his songs.

And we cannot treat lyrics as direct evidence of the private experiences of their performers.

Songs are creative works.

Many have multiple writers.

They can contain autobiographical material, invented characters, metaphors and perspectives that don’t necessarily belong to one person.

Nor can we assume that unusual artistic decisions, intense interests or a preference for familiar environments are exclusively Autistic experiences.

The Pillars are a cultural framework.

They are not diagnostic criteria.

There is also an important distinction between recognising distress and celebrating culture.

Robbie has spoken about addiction, anxiety, depression and agoraphobia.

Those experiences deserve to be taken seriously on their own terms.

We shouldn’t romanticise them because they appear in the life of an extraordinary artist.

And we shouldn’t suggest that suffering is necessary for creativity.

The purpose of the Archive isn’t to turn somebody’s pain into a cultural achievement.

It’s to examine the culture that exists alongside that pain.

And to ask what might become possible when the two are no longer treated as inseparable.

CLOSING THE EXCAVATION

When I began researching Robbie Williams, I thought I was going to be examining the life of a British pop star who had recently spoken about discovering he was Autistic.

I expected to find some interesting connections.

Perhaps some familiar routines.

A few intense interests.

Some unusual creative decisions.

And songs that might resonate differently when considered through the Ten Pillars.

What I found was considerably more complicated.

I found somebody who had spent decades creating a character.

A character influenced by the entertainers he loved growing up.

A character who could command an enormous audience.

A character who could make thousands of people sing together.

And a character whose extraordinary confidence existed alongside a private life that Robbie has described very differently.

I found The Rocky Horror Show hiding inside Let Me Entertain You.

I found the collective rhythm of football crowds inside stadium choruses.

I found a song about apparent strength that Angela recognised as a possible expression of distress.

I found a song about loneliness that reminded me of my own twenties.

I found a cashmere kaftan, Kettle Chips and a bed.

And I found a chimpanzee.

But perhaps the most important thing I found was the distinction Angela made towards the end of our conversation.

She could see the Pillars.

Clearly.

• Rhythmic Communicating.

• Boldly Creating.

• World Building.

• Predictably Comforting.

• Passionate Superfanning.

But she could also see the pain.

And she didn’t want us to confuse the two.

That is an important distinction for this Archive.

Because we are trying to understand Autistic Culture.

Not simply collect examples of Autistic suffering.

Robbie Williams has created an extraordinary body of work.

And his music has become part of the lives of millions of people.

But perhaps the most interesting chapter of his story is the one that comes after understanding himself.

When Robbie spoke publicly about discovering he was Autistic, he described loving that discovery because it explained so much.

I hope that explanation brings him more than an understanding of the difficult experiences.

I hope it brings him the opportunity to recognise the joy in the culture he’s already been creating.

Because perhaps Robert Williams doesn’t need to stop being Robbie Williams.

Perhaps he can simply understand the relationship between them differently.

And perhaps the next chapter doesn’t need to involve quite so much pain.

ACCOMPANYING EXCAVATOR’S NOTES

Dr Angela Kingdon

What struck me most about Robbie Williams wasn’t simply the number of Pillars Simon identified.

It was the way they interacted.

The character.

The performance.

The music.

The audience.

And the enormous difference between the person the world sees and the person Robbie has described himself as being.

I was particularly interested in Rhythmic Communicating.

Because when Simon showed me the stadium performances, I could see something that went beyond ordinary audience participation.

The communication wasn’t simply in the lyrics.

It was in the rhythm.

The repetition.

The familiar musical phrases.

And the way thousands of people were communicating together.

That is a powerful cultural experience.

I also saw Boldly Creating in the construction of Robbie Williams himself.

The accents.

The characters.

The theatricality.

The influence of Tim Curry.

The decision to take elements of admired performers and create a new identity from them.

And I could see Predictably Comforting in Robbie’s relationship with familiar environments.

But that was where I became uncomfortable.

Because I don’t want us to confuse the things that make Autistic Culture joyful with the things that happen when Autistic people spend their lives feeling misunderstood.

There is a great deal of trauma in Robbie’s story.

And I think that matters.

Not because trauma is a Pillar.

It isn’t.

But because the experience of living without understanding your neurotype can have enormous consequences.

I would love to see Robbie embrace the cultural parts of himself.

The creativity.

The passions.

The communication.

The things that make him who he is.

Because when I look at his story, I see so much pain.

And I would love to see more Autistic joy.

CLASSIFICATION

After examining the evidence, we’re filing Robbie Williams in the Autistic Cultural Archive.

Not because every aspect of his career can be explained through autism.

And not because every song contains a hidden Autistic message.

But because his performances, creative work, cultural influences and publicly described experiences reveal substantial connections to the Ten Pillars of Autistic Culture.

The strongest evidence isn’t a single behaviour.

It’s the way the connections interact.

Passionate Superfanning.

The performers who shaped his understanding of entertainment.

Boldly Creating.

The character he built from those influences.

World Building.

The identity and performance environment in which that character exists.

Rhythmic Communicating.

The songs, familiar phrases, musical structures and extraordinary collective communication of his audiences.

Predictably Comforting.

The importance of familiarity and the complicated relationship between comfort, withdrawal and distress.

And through all of it, a person who has spent decades trying to understand the difference between how the world sees him and how he experiences himself.

The archive also contains a complication.

Autistic Culture and Autistic trauma can exist within the same story.

But they are not the same thing, and recognising that distinction may be the most important discovery we’ve made.

ARTIFACT: ROBBIE WILLIAMS
CLASSIFICATION: AUTISTIC CULTURE
PRIMARY PILLARS: Rhythmic Communicating · Boldly Creating · World Building · Predictably Comforting · Passionate Superfanning
ADDITIONAL TRACES: Norm Challenging · Bottom-Up Processing · Pattern Matching · Game Changing · Justice Seeking
ARCHIVE NO.: ACA-004-ROBBIE-WILLIAMS
LEAD EXCAVATOR: Simon Scott
ACCOMPANYING EXCAVATOR: Dr Angela Kingdon
STATUS: Excavation Complete

Robbie Williams: An Autistic Culture Artefact.

SUBMIT YOUR EVIDENCE

An archive is never finished.

So now we’re handing the brushes to you.

What did we miss?

Were you a Robbie Williams fan growing up?

Have you watched Better Man or the Netflix documentary?

Did either change the way you understood Robbie Williams?

Have you ever felt as though you needed to create a character to navigate a particular part of your life?

Do you recognise the distinction between somebody who can perform confidently and somebody who finds everyday social interaction difficult?

Have you ever used music to communicate something you couldn’t explain in ordinary conversation?

And what about Robbie’s songs?

Does Strong resonate with your experience of being told you’re coping when you’re actually struggling?

Does Feel remind you of a particular time in your life?

Do you hear something different in those songs after listening to our excavation?

What do you make of the connection between Robbie Williams and The Rocky Horror Show?

And do you see the relationship between Passionate Superfanning, Boldly Creating and World Building in the character he created?

There’s also a more difficult question.

How do we recognise Autistic Culture in somebody’s life without confusing it with the trauma they may have experienced?

And what might Autistic joy look like in the next chapter of Robbie Williams’s story?

Which Pillar do you think appears most strongly here?

And is there another Robbie Williams song, performance or cultural artefact that belongs in our evidence locker?

Leave your field notes in the comments.

The Archive is never finished.

Welcome to This Week in Autistic Culture

This week, Angela and Simon tackle one of the most divisive subjects in the creative world: Artificial Intelligence. With the launch of our new AI and Autism series sparking passionate messages from listeners, they explore the complicated relationship between AI, accessibility and Autistic creativity.

Drawing on Angela’s experience as a writing coach and her book ‘The Equalizing Quill’, they discuss new research on how AI can improve employment opportunities for marginalised groups — and why better access to technology doesn’t stop discrimination.

For this week’s excavation into the Autistic Culture Archive, Simon introduces Angela to one of Britain’s biggest pop stars: Robbie Williams.

After Robbie’s public revelation of an Autism diagnosis of his autism, Simon and Angela use the Ten Pillars of Autistic Culture to look beyond the music and ask what his career, creativity and relationship with fame might reveal about Autistic identity and expression.

Is Robbie Williams Autistic culture?

As always, we’ll take you through everything coming up across the Autistic Culture Podcast Network this week!

This Week’s Topics:

• Neurodiversity and Generative AI in Higher Education: A Sequential Multi-Method Qualitative Study of Students’ Interactions, Motivations, and Strategies

• AI skills are not enough to level the playing field – Research

• Angela’s Article: https://www.fastcompany.com/91606699/i-use-ai-to-save-time-so-why-am-i-working-more

📻 On Air This Week:

Monday 26th October

Mindful Mondays with Ashley Dupuy

Ashley returns with another mindful reflection and guided meditation to help neurodivergent listeners begin the week with intention and regulation.

Tuesday 27th October

AI and Autism - Episode 3: What Happens When You Unleash Your Autism on AI?

In this episode of AI and Autism, Bre Ransome is joined by Francois Dabriel, an AI consultant and neuro-affirming coach working with late-diagnosed AuDHD adults. Together, they explore Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), emotional and nervous-system regulation, and how AI might reduce some of the everyday friction experienced by neurodivergent people.

Creative Becoming - Season 2 Premiere - Episode 1: Roots to Recording

In the opening episode of Series 2 of Creative Becoming, Helen and Elizabeth return to where it all began, reflecting on the friendship, conversations and creative experiments that brought their podcast to life. From Helen’s PhD research and her search for new ways to develop ideas, to Elizabeth’s initial doubts about stepping behind a microphone, they explore how an unlikely collaboration became a meaningful part of both their lives.

Wednesday 28th October

Autism Help - Season 2, Episode 2: Why Language Matters | Autism, Labels and Identity

In this episode of Autism Help, Heather McKay explores the relationship between autistic identity, language and mental health, and how the words used to describe autistic people can influence the way they are understood and treated.

Heather discusses the debate around identity-first and person-first language, the introduction of terms such as profound autism, and the importance of autistic people having a voice in conversations about their own lives. She also examines the role of advocacy, the impact of discrimination and dehumanising language, and the political decisions affecting autistic communities, including changes to disability support in Australia.

Thursday 29th October

The Neurodivergent Experience - Rerun

Jordan James and Simon Scott return for a conversation about the Neurodivergent Experience!

📚 From the Archive - Friday 30th October

Autistic Culture Podcast Rewind – Wikipedia is Autistic

In this episode of The Autistic Culture Podcast, hosts Dr Angela Kingdon and Matt Lowry, LPP, explore the hidden role autistic people play in making Wikipedia what it is today. While the platform thrives on autistic strengths like information organisation, data hunger, and special interests, there’s also a darker side: exploitation, harassment, and ableism inside Wikimedia’s culture.

Please rate, share and review our shows, as it helps them grow and reach more people! ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

🎧 Autistic Culture Radio

Looking for a different way to experience ACPN? Autistic Culture Radio is our curated Spotify listening experience, blending music with every programme released across the Autistic Culture Podcast Network.

Updated daily, each episode pairs carefully chosen songs inspired by its themes, a continuous soundtrack to Autistic culture. Save the playlist to your Spotify library and dip in whenever you want to discover new conversations, music and voices from across the network.

Want bonus content, early access, and ad-free listening across the entire network?

Join Autistic Culture Plus to support autistic creators and help us commission even more shows from our community.

Join Autistic Culture +

Welcome to This Week in Autistic Culture

This week, Angela and Simon explore social media's role in Autistic identity and community. From the early days of Wrong Planet to finding your people through Instagram and YouTube, they discuss how online spaces have helped Autistic people understand themselves, connect with others and discover their culture. But as governments introduce new restrictions on social media access for young people, could we be making it harder for the next generation of Autistic people to find their community?

For our third excavation into the Autistic Culture Archive, Angela is taking Simon back into the extraordinary story of Elizabeth Holmes. Using the Ten Pillars of Autistic Culture as their guide, they dig deeper into the Theranos founder’s world, exploring communication, intense focus, innovation, ambition and the complicated relationship between recognising Autistic patterns and making assumptions about somebody’s neurotype.

By the end, there’s one particularly uncomfortable question left: could Elizabeth Holmes be an artefact of Autistic culture?

If this week’s excavation leaves you wanting to dig deeper, you can explore the full Elizabeth Holmes Field Report in the Autistic Culture Archive, where Angela brings together the research, evidence, rabbit holes and connections to the Ten Pillars that couldn’t fit into the show.

As always, we’ll take you through everything coming up across the Autistic Culture Podcast Network this week!

This Week’s Topics:

• Autism and ADHD: people need support before diagnosis, but getting one can change their lives

• Social media provides valued community spaces for autistic young people

📻 On Air This Week:

Monday 19th October

Mindful Mondays with Ashley Dupuy

Ashley returns with another mindful reflection and guided meditation to help neurodivergent listeners begin the week with intention and regulation.

Tuesday 20th October

AI and Autism - Episode 2: Can AI Translate Between Two Different Minds?

In this episode of AI and Autism, Bre Ransome speaks to Jon Mick, an AuDHD product manager and founder of AIs & Shine. Jon shares how experimenting with ChatGPT grew into something much bigger: a detailed AI-supported “life model” that helped him explore his neurodivergence, understand patterns in his marriage and reconsider how he communicates with his wife, Charlotte.

Wednesday 21st October

Autism Help - Season 2 Premiere - Episode 1: Hobbies, Special Interests and Autistic Burnout

In this episode of Autism Help, Heather McKay explores the importance of hobbies and special interests for autistic people, and what happens when we lose interest in the things that bring us joy.

Heather discusses the differences between autistic and ADHD hobbies, including the emotional impact of losing a deeply meaningful interest, the financial cost of abandoned hobbies, and the relationship between hobbies, depression and burnout.

Thursday 22nd October

The Neurodivergent Experience - Episode 132

Jordan James and Simon Scott return for a conversation about the Neurodivergent Experience!

📚 From the Archive - Friday 23rd October

Autistic Culture Podcast Rewind – The Good Place is Autistic

In this episode of The Autistic Culture Podcast, hosts Dr Angela Kingdon and Matt Lowry, LPP, dive into the afterlife with NBC’s hit show The Good Place—unpacking its autistic-coded characters, neurodivergent themes, and the profoundly autistic joy of moral philosophy.

Please rate, share and review our shows, as it helps them grow and reach more people! ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

🎧 Autistic Culture Radio

Looking for a different way to experience ACPN? Autistic Culture Radio is our curated Spotify listening experience, blending music with every programme released across the Autistic Culture Podcast Network.

Updated daily, each episode pairs carefully chosen songs inspired by its themes, a continuous soundtrack to Autistic culture. Save the playlist to your Spotify library and dip in whenever you want to discover new conversations, music and voices from across the network.

Want bonus content, early access, and ad-free listening across the entire network?

Join Autistic Culture Plus to support autistic creators and help us commission even more shows from our community.

Join Autistic Culture +

FIELD REPORT [003]

THE AUTISTIC CULTURAL ARCHIVE

ARTIFACT: ELIZABETH HOLMES
ARCHIVE NO.: ACA-003-ELIZABETH-HOLMES
PERIOD: 2004 / Present
CLASSIFICATION: AUTISTIC CULTURE
PRIMARY PILLARS: Rhythmic Communicating · Predictably Comforting · Passionate Superfanning
ADDITIONAL TRACES: World Building · Norm Challenging · Game Changing · Boldly Creating · Bottom-Up Processing · Pattern Matching · Justice Seeking
LEAD EXCAVATOR: Dr Angela Kingdon
ACCOMPANYING EXCAVATOR: Simon Scott

LISTEN TO THE EXCAVATION

This Field Report accompanies our excavation of Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos on This Week in Autistic Culture.

The Archive segment presents the case.

The Field Report contains the evidence locker.

Listen to the full excavation on the Autistic Culture Podcast Network.

Watch the excavation on our YouTube channel.

THE DISCOVERY

What happens when someone becomes one of the most recognisable figures in modern business, and almost everything about the way they behave becomes evidence against them?

• Their clothes.

• Their voice.

• Their eye contact.

• Their food.

• Their routines.

• The way they speak.

• The people they admire.

And the way they respond when somebody challenges their understanding of the world.

That’s the question at the heart of this week’s excavation.

Elizabeth Holmes is best known as the founder of Theranos, the blood-testing company that promised to revolutionise healthcare, attracted enormous investment and ultimately collapsed amid revelations that its technology did not work as advertised.

Holmes was convicted of defrauding investors and sentenced to 11 years and three months in prison.

That’s the story most people know.

But when Angela brought the new documentary You Can See Everything into the Autistic Culture Archive, she wanted to examine something else.

What happens when we look at this story through the Ten Pillars of Autistic Culture?

There’s an important distinction between identifying someone’s behaviour and understanding what that behaviour might mean.

• An unusually deep voice becomes evidence of deception.

• Repeated phrases become evidence of manipulation.

• An unusual relationship with eye contact becomes something sinister.

• An obsession with a particular person becomes proof of an elaborate performance.

• And an extraordinarily repetitive lifestyle becomes another strange detail in an already strange story.

But some of those behaviours may also be familiar to Autistic people for entirely different reasons.

That doesn’t tell us why Holmes behaved as she did.

And it certainly doesn’t overturn the evidence presented at her trial.

But it does raise questions about the assumptions we make when interpreting other people’s behaviour.

And that’s where this excavation becomes particularly interesting.

We’re not attempting to diagnose Elizabeth Holmes. We have no evidence that she identifies as Autistic.

We’re examining the public record, the culture around her, and the ways that familiar patterns can be interpreted differently depending on who’s looking.

Because sometimes the most interesting archaeological discoveries aren’t the things we expected to find.

They’re the things that make us reconsider what we thought we already understood.

THE ARTEFACT

Elizabeth Anne Holmes was born in Washington, D.C., in 1984.

From an early age, she expressed an interest in invention and changing the world.

According to accounts of her childhood, at seven she designed a time machine and kept the notebook.

At nine, she wrote to her father about wanting to discover something that humanity didn’t already know was possible.

She later attended Stanford University to study chemical engineering, leaving in 2004 to establish the company that became Theranos.

Her ambition was enormous.

She wanted to replace conventional blood testing with technology capable of performing extensive medical tests using only a tiny sample collected from a finger prick.

No conventional blood draw.

No large collection of vials.

Potentially faster, more accessible testing.

And, in theory, a fundamental change in the relationship between patients and their healthcare information.

Theranos attracted hundreds of millions of dollars in investment. By 2014, the company had been valued at approximately $9 billion.

Holmes became one of the most recognisable young entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley.

• Magazine covers.

• Interviews.

• Conference appearances.

• A distinctive black turtleneck.

• A remarkably deep speaking voice.

And comparisons with another famous technology founder.

Steve Jobs.

But behind the extraordinary promises, serious problems were emerging.

In October 2015, The Wall Street Journal published an investigation questioning Theranos’s technology and testing practices.

The company eventually collapsed.

In January 2022, Holmes was convicted of three counts of wire fraud and one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud relating to investors.

She was acquitted on four patient-related counts. The jury could not reach verdicts on three other counts, which were subsequently dismissed.

In November 2022, she was sentenced to 135 months in federal prison.

And now, years after the collapse of Theranos, her story continues to attract extraordinary interest.

• Books.

• Podcasts.

• Dramatisations.

• Documentaries.

And the latest artefact to bring her back into the cultural conversation:

You Can See Everything, the documentary involving Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim.

Angela’s proposition during our excavation was that we could examine the same public record through a different cultural lens.

Not to rewrite what happened.

But to see what else might be visible.

ARTIFACT RECOVERED: ELIZABETH HOLMES

THE EXCAVATION

THE VOICE

RHYTHMIC COMMUNICATING

One of the most recognisable things about Elizabeth Holmes is her voice.

Deep.

Measured.

Deliberate.

Sometimes described as robotic.

Sometimes described as unnatural.

And frequently presented as evidence that she was performing a character rather than being herself.

But why?

In 2014, journalist Ken Auletta described a distinction between Holmes’s quiet conversational voice and the deeper, more formal cadence she adopted onstage.

That distinction is interesting.

Because many people communicate differently depending on their environment.

Politicians adopt public-speaking voices.

Broadcasters change their delivery.

Actors learn to project.

People rehearse difficult conversations.

And Autistic people may use scripts, practised rhythms, familiar phrases and particular vocal patterns to navigate demanding social situations.

During our excavation, I suggested an alternative interpretation of Holmes’ distinctive delivery.

What if some of what audiences interpreted as performance could also be understood through Rhythmic Communicating?

She raised the possibility of vocal regulation.

The sensation of producing a low voice.

The physical vibration.

The predictable cadence.

The familiar words.

The ability to repeat something that has already been practised.

None of this establishes Holmes’s motivation.

But it gives us another way to think about the behaviour itself.

A FIND FROM THE EXCAVATION

This was one of the moments when Simon recognised something from his own experience.

I’m somebody who hums and uses my voice as a form of stimming.

I can find the physical sensation of vibration in my larynx regulating.

And after years of working in broadcasting, I also recognise the desire to adopt a voice that sounds authoritative.

There are times when I’ve deliberately lowered my voice because I’ve wanted to sound more official.

A broadcasting voice.

A presenting voice.

A voice that communicates authority before I’ve even said anything.

That doesn’t mean I was trying to deceive anybody.

It means that the way I communicate changes according to what I’m doing.

And that leaves us with an interesting question here…

Why do we accept a practised voice as professionalism in one person, but interpret it as evidence of dishonesty in another?

There are other questions, too.

• Could repetition help somebody regulate themselves?

• Could a familiar cadence make a demanding public appearance easier?

• Could somebody rehearse their words so thoroughly that their delivery begins to sound artificial?

Absolutely.

Does that mean this is what Elizabeth Holmes was doing?

We don’t know.

And that’s an important distinction.

THE SCRIPT

Holmes was also known for returning to familiar phrases.

During the controversy surrounding Theranos, she repeatedly presented the company through the language of innovation, disruption and changing the world.

One particularly memorable statement followed a familiar three-part structure:

1. First, people think you’re crazy.

2. Then they fight you.

3. Then you change the world.

It’s a compelling narrative.

It has rhythm.

It has progression.

And it’s easy to repeat.

Angela connected this to the way scripts can become part of communication.

But there’s another side to the discovery.

A familiar script can make communication easier for the person using it.

It can also make communication more difficult for the person trying to get an answer.

Journalists questioning Theranos’s technology encountered repeated explanations that did not adequately address their questions.

So the presence of scripting doesn’t resolve the issue.

The content matters.

The context matters.

And whether somebody is answering the question matters.

FIELD NOTE: A communication pattern and the truthfulness of the information being communicated are two different things.

That’s a distinction worth keeping in the Archive.

BECOMING STEVE JOBS

PASSIONATE SUPERFANNING · PREDICTABLY COMFORTING

When I think about Elizabeth Holmes, the first image that comes into my head isn’t a blood-testing machine.

It’s the black turtleneck.

And I suspect I’m not alone.

During our excavation, I mentioned that I might struggle to identify Holmes from her name alone.

But describe the blonde woman wearing the black turtleneck?

Immediately recognisable.

And Angela knew exactly where she wanted to take that observation.

Steve Jobs.

Holmes was an admirer of the Apple co-founder.

The comparisons between the two became part of her public image.

The black turtleneck.

The carefully constructed product announcements.

The language of technological revolution.

The secrecy.

The idea that an extraordinary individual could fundamentally change an established industry.

But the connection went beyond superficial resemblance.

Holmes recruited people who had worked at Apple.

Former Apple designer Ana Arriola joined Theranos.

Former Apple executive Avie Tevanian joined its board.

Accounts of Holmes’s working life describe an intense interest in Jobs and his approach to business.

And then there’s a particularly unusual piece of evidence.

THREE WORDS AND A DASH

During Holmes’s trial, a note she had written to herself in 2015 entered the public record.

“Becoming Steve Jobs -”

Three words.

And a dash.

During our excavation, I was particularly interested in the reaction to this note.

Because the existence of an unfinished note is hardly unusual.

I have an enormous collection of notes.

Some are fully developed ideas.

Some are half a sentence.

Some are a title that seemed important when I wrote it down.

And some make absolutely no sense when I return to them.

We don’t know what Holmes intended to write.

It might have been a personal ambition.

A research note.

A potential article.

A reminder.

Or something else entirely.

But in the context of the public story surrounding Theranos, the note became another piece of the puzzle.

And I see an interesting connection with Passionate Superfanning.

WHEN A HERO BECOMES PART OF YOUR IDENTITY

One of the things we’ve explored repeatedly on the Autistic Culture Podcast is that a passionate interest isn’t necessarily something separate from a person’s identity.

Sometimes it becomes part of who they are.

The music you listen to.

The films you watch.

The books you study.

The people whose work you admire.

The ideas you return to over decades.

They become part of the way you understand yourself.

I have often and continue to talk about my longstanding connection with Neil Finn’s music.

Simon shared his relationship with his tattoos.

Lyrics.

Album artwork.

Pieces of culture that have become so personally significant that he literally had them incorporated into his body.

And I think that illustrates something important.

Sometimes we don’t simply admire an artefact. We carry it with us.

Holmes’s admiration for Steve Jobs is well documented.

But what makes it interesting through the Pillars is the relationship between that admiration and the methods she adopted.

The clothes.

The public presentation.

The company culture.

The language of innovation.

The ambition to replace an established system.

Passionate Superfanning may provide a template.

And that template can influence the way somebody constructs their own identity.

THE COMPLICATION

There’s an important question here.

What happens when somebody studies a hero so closely that they begin to copy their methods?

• Which methods do they copy?

• The creative ambition?

• The discipline?

• The attention to detail?

• The willingness to challenge convention?

• Or the appearance of genius?

• The secrecy?

• The presentation?

• The belief that an extraordinary vision justifies extraordinary demands?

Can you reproduce the visible characteristics of a successful person without reproducing the systems that made their success possible?

And this is where Passionate Superfanning becomes a particularly interesting lens.

It can help explain how people learn from the cultural figures they admire.

But it doesn’t guarantee that the lessons they take away are the right ones.

The hero becomes the template. The question is what gets copied.

A BAG OF NOODLES, SUPPLIED IN ADVANCE

PREDICTABLY COMFORTING

Now we come to one particularly detailed item I wanted to bring into the evidence locker.

Dinner.

Specifically, spaghetti.

In a 2014 profile of Holmes, Roger Parloff described her visiting an Italian restaurant where the staff already knew what she wanted.

Oil-free spaghetti.

Whole-wheat noodles.

And not simply noodles the restaurant served.

Holmes reportedly provided the noodles herself in advance.

• Same restaurant.

• Same meal.

• Same preparation.

• Same expectations.

And I immediately recognised a possible connection with Predictably Comforting.

Because for many Autistic people, familiarity isn’t simply about liking something.

It can be about reducing uncertainty.

Reducing the number of decisions.

Avoiding unexpected sensory experiences.

And preserving attention for something else.

THE COST OF DECISIONS

During the recording, I wanted to explore something we often overlook: the cost of everyday decisions.

If you’re intensely focused on a project, even ordinary daily decisions can become interruptions.

• What should I wear?

• What should I eat?

• When should I eat?

• Where should I go?

• Will the food agree with me?

• Will I be able to return to work afterwards?

Sometimes the easiest answer is to make one decision, and then repeat it indefinitely.

That doesn’t necessarily mean the food is your favourite meal in the world.

It might simply be something that works.

Something familiar.

Something reliable.

Something you don’t need to think about.

Before we broadcast, I often have a cup of Dole peaches.

I know what to expect from them.

They’re familiar, and I don’t have to spend energy worrying about whether they’re going to upset my stomach

Simon described something related but different.

When he’s concentrating on work, even deciding what to eat or managing a meal during a conversation can become difficult.

He talked about how much easier life would be if somebody could simply bring him a familiar sandwich without interrupting his focus.

Neither experience tells us why Holmes supplied her own noodles to a restaurant.

But it changes the questions I ask about that detail.

From the outside, supplying a restaurant with your own noodles might appear eccentric.

But from the perspective of Predictably Comforting?

It could also be a way of removing one uncertainty from the day.

THE UNIFORM

The same principle may help explain the appeal of wearing similar clothes every day.

Holmes’s black turtleneck became her signature.

But her clothing habits were also discussed as a way of simplifying daily decisions.

There’s a familiar idea associated with Steve Jobs and other technology founders.

Reduce the number of unimportant choices.

Save your attention for the work that matters.

I connected that approach with the Autistic experience of Predictably Comforting.

And this is where two Pillars begin interacting.

Passionate Superfanning → Predictably Comforting.

The admired person supplies a model.

The model becomes a routine.

The routine reduces decisions.

The decisions no longer interrupt the work.

It’s a compelling connection.

Although, once again, we can’t establish from the outside precisely what motivated Holmes’s clothing choices.

THE PRISON ROUTINE

My research also explored Holmes’s daily life in prison.

In a 2025 interview, Holmes described an established routine.

1. Waking early.

2. Exercise.

3. Breakfast.

4. Work in the education building.

5. Regular calls with family.

A structured day.

Now, prison is an environment in which routines are imposed as well as personally chosen.

So we shouldn’t treat that routine as straightforward evidence of an individual preference.

But it adds another dimension to the public record.

Across very different environments, accounts of Holmes’s life contain repeated references to structure and routine.

The businesswoman with a carefully managed schedule.

The founder with a recognisable uniform.

The restaurant that knew her order.

And the prisoner describing the organisation of her day.

FIELD NOTE: Predictability can be a practical tool for managing daily life. Its presence does not tell us why a particular person relies on it.

THE DREAM OF CHANGING EVERYTHING

NORM CHALLENGING · GAME CHANGING · BOLDLY CREATING

One of the most striking things about Elizabeth Holmes’s story is the scale of her ambition.

She didn’t want to make conventional blood testing slightly more convenient.

She wanted to replace it.

That distinction matters.

During our excavation, I returned to Holmes’s childhood ambition to discover something humanity hadn’t previously thought possible.

And then to her decision to leave Stanford and pursue the company that became Theranos.

According to her professor, Prof. Channing Robertson, when he encouraged her to complete her degree, Holmes questioned why she should wait when she already knew what she wanted to do.

That is a recognisable expression of Norm Challenging.

Why follow the established path?

Why accept the existing system?

Why spend years doing something because of societal expectation?

And there’s a Game Changing connection too.

WHY ARE WE STILL DOING IT THIS WAY?

Holmes publicly questioned the experience of conventional blood testing.

• Why should somebody have to sit and watch blood being drawn through a needle?

• Why couldn’t the experience be less invasive?

• Why couldn’t patients access more information about their health?

• Why couldn’t the system be redesigned?

These are legitimate questions.

And the ambition to improve medical testing is not inherently problematic.

But an ambition and a functioning technology are not the same thing.

Theranos claimed capabilities that its technology did not reliably deliver.

And that distinction became central to the fraud case.

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN AN IDEA AND A CLAIM

This is where the excavation becomes uncomfortable.

Because there are two very different statements.

“I believe I can create technology that will transform blood testing”.

And:

“I have created technology that can perform the tests I’m promising”.

The first is an ambition.

The second is a factual claim.

And investors, medical professionals and patients need to know the difference.

Holmes argued that Theranos had failed rather than committed fraud.

But the jury convicted her of knowingly misleading investors.

We cannot use the Ten Pillars to determine somebody’s private intentions.

Nor can we use them to replace the findings of a court.

What we can do is examine how a commitment to a particular vision may interact with the other patterns in the story.

Game Changing can begin with a refusal to accept the existing system.

Boldly Creating can involve enormous commitment to an idea.

Norm Challenging can mean questioning established authority.

But none of those things establishes that the proposed alternative works.

The desire to change the world is not evidence that the world has been changed.

THE WORLD INSIDE THERANOS

WORLD BUILDING · PASSIONATE SUPERFANNING

Theranos wasn’t simply a company with an ambitious product.

It developed an entire identity.

A name.

A mission.

A visual language.

A distinctive founder.

Specialist terminology.

Devices with names such as Edison.

The nanotainer.

The miniLab.

Secrecy.

Prestigious board members.

Carefully presented demonstrations.

And an extraordinary promise about the future of healthcare.

What struck me in the research was how much of this resembled the construction of a self-contained world.

One with its own language.

Its own expectations.

Its own rituals.

And a central narrative that explained why everything mattered.

In the Archive, we’ve already seen how World Building can emerge from a deeply interconnected fictional universe.

We explored that with Dune.

But Theranos presents a different kind of world.

Not an imaginary universe designed to entertain readers.

A real organisation that made claims about real technology.

And that’s where the stakes change.

WHEN THE STORY AND THE SYSTEM DON’T MATCH

Theranos’s public narrative described a technological revolution.

But inside the company, employees and laboratory professionals were raising serious concerns about the equipment and testing practices.

The external story and the internal reality were not consistent.

And this creates an important distinction for our Archive.

A coherent story is not necessarily an accurate account of the world.

A fictional universe can invent its own rules.

A medical laboratory cannot.

Its technology must produce reliable results.

Its claims must correspond with evidence.

And the people relying on those claims must be able to trust them.

World Building can help people imagine a different future.

But when a constructed narrative becomes more important than the evidence contradicting it, the consequences can be serious.

THE WORLD PEOPLE WANTED TO BELIEVE IN

One of the things I find fascinating about Theranos is how many influential people became invested in its story.

The idea was extraordinary.

The founder was compelling.

The promise was enormous.

And the company appeared to represent the future.

People wanted to believe.

That doesn’t make the technology work.

But it helps explain why the narrative was so powerful.

And perhaps this is where World Building and Passionate Superfanning begin interacting again.

A founder models herself on a celebrated technology pioneer.

A company adopts the language of revolutionary innovation.

Investors and supporters become attached to the possibility of what that company might achieve.

The story reinforces itself.

Until somebody begins asking questions that the story cannot answer.

THE PEOPLE WHO NOTICED

BOTTOM-UP PROCESSING · PATTERN MATCHING · JUSTICE SEEKING

This is one of the most important parts of the excavation.

Because the Ten Pillars don’t appear only in the story of Elizabeth Holmes.

They also offer a way to examine the people who challenged Theranos.

Erika Cheung.

Tyler Shultz.

Laboratory staff.

Former employees.

Journalists.

People who noticed that the claims being made about the technology didn’t match what was happening.

And who refused to ignore the difference.

THE DETAILS THAT DIDN’T FIT

Erika Cheung testified about problems with quality control and testing practices.

Tyler Shultz questioned the capabilities of the Edison machine.

Other employees raised concerns about the organisation’s priorities and its handling of laboratory results.

These concerns eventually became part of the wider investigation into Theranos.

And I connected them with three Pillars.

1. Bottom-Up Processing.

Look at the individual details.

What does the machine actually do?

What do the results show?

What happens when the same test is repeated?

2. Pattern Matching.

Compare the evidence.

Identify inconsistencies.

Recognise that individual problems may form part of something larger.

3. Justice Seeking.

When something is wrong, challenge it.

Even when the people you’re challenging are powerful.

Even when you’re being told to stop asking questions.

Even when the consequences of speaking up are considerable.

We’re not claiming that the whistleblowers were Autistic.

We’re recognising that their methods can be examined through the cultural framework.

And this produces a particularly interesting finding.

THE SAME PILLARS, DIFFERENT DIRECTIONS

Throughout this excavation, we’ve been identifying possible cultural connections in Holmes’s behaviour.

Her routines.

Her scripts.

Her intense interests.

Her desire to change an established system.

But when we examine the people who challenged Theranos, we find other Pillars.

Attention to detail.

Pattern recognition.

A commitment to confronting something that appears wrong.

And suddenly the Archive is asking a different question.

What happens when the same cultural framework helps us understand people on opposing sides of a conflict?

That doesn’t make their actions morally equivalent.

It means that the Pillars are not a substitute for examining what people actually do.

They don’t automatically make somebody right.

They don’t guarantee that somebody is trustworthy.

And they don’t excuse behaviour that harms others.

The Pillars help us recognise patterns.

We still have to evaluate the evidence.

JUSTICE SEEKING — AND WHO DEFINES JUSTICE?

There’s another complication in this story.

Elizabeth Holmes has continued to maintain that she did not commit fraud.

And my research explored her reported involvement in work supporting other prisoners, including women who have experienced sexual violence.

During our recording, I discussed Holmes’s involvement in prison education, legal assistance and criminal justice reform.

I also discussed Holmes’s continuing interest in invention and her efforts to challenge her conviction.

This introduces another dimension to Justice Seeking.

People can hold a sincere belief that they’re pursuing justice while others strongly disagree with their interpretation.

Holmes has described her mission at Theranos in terms of making healthcare information more accessible.

She has also presented her own conviction as an injustice.

Those are her positions. They do not negate the evidence that led to her conviction.

And her reported work supporting others does not erase the consequences of Theranos’s actions.

But it would be incomplete to examine Justice Seeking only in the people who opposed her, without also examining the values and causes she has publicly described as important.

JUSTICE SEEKING ISN’T INFALLIBILITY

One of the questions this raises is whether a strong sense of justice necessarily means having an accurate understanding of a situation.

Of course it doesn’t.

People can be mistaken.

They can misunderstand evidence.

They can become so committed to a particular interpretation that they struggle to recognise competing explanations.

And sometimes people can pursue what they believe is a good outcome through actions that cause harm.

The strength of a conviction doesn’t establish its accuracy.

That’s an important distinction.

Justice Seeking describes a relationship with perceived fairness. It doesn’t automatically establish that somebody’s understanding of fairness is correct.

And this is something we’ll need to remember in future excavations.

WHEN A PILLAR BECOMES A COMPLICATION

FIELD NOTE — THE ROSETTA STONE

During our excavation of Dune, we encountered an unexpected idea.

Predictably Comforting might have an extreme expression that becomes Predictably Uncomfortable.

Paul Atreides could see so many possible futures that his relationship with predictability became a source of distress rather than reassurance.

That led us to ask whether the Pillars could interact in ways that weren’t always straightforward.

This excavation takes that question somewhere else.

What happens when a cultural pattern is recognisable, but the outcome is harmful?

Passionate Superfanning can inspire somebody to learn from a hero.

But what if they copy the wrong lessons?

Predictably Comforting can help somebody create a stable environment.

But what if the environment becomes resistant to new information?

Rhythmic Communicating can provide familiar language and structure.

But what if a repeated script prevents meaningful questions from being answered?

World Building can help people imagine something extraordinary.

But what if the world being presented doesn’t correspond with reality?

Game Changing can challenge a broken system.

But what if the proposed replacement doesn’t work?

And Justice Seeking can inspire people to challenge wrongdoing.

But what happens when people fundamentally disagree about what justice requires?

A Pillar is not a moral verdict.

That’s perhaps the most important distinction in this excavation.

The Ten Pillars help us understand patterns in Autistic Culture.

They don’t replace ethics.

They don’t replace evidence.

And they don’t establish whether an individual is Autistic.

We can recognise a pattern without endorsing an action.

We can understand a behaviour without knowing its motivation.

And we can acknowledge a cultural connection while recognising serious harm.

The Rosetta Stone helps us interpret what we’ve found. It doesn’t tell us that everything we find is good.

THE AUDIENCE BECOMES THE INVESTIGATOR

PATTERN MATCHING · PASSIONATE SUPERFANNING

There’s one final part of this story that I think deserves attention.

The audience.

Because Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos have become subjects of extraordinary cultural fascination.

John Carreyrou’s Bad Blood.

The Dropout.

Alex Gibney’s The Inventor.

Television dramatisations.

Countless articles.

Podcasts (yoohoo)

And now You Can See Everything.

The story has been examined and re-examined.

People have studied the timeline.

Analysed the technology.

Compared interviews.

Examined Holmes’s voice.

Investigated the company’s relationships.

And debated what she knew, when she knew it and why she continued.

There’s something very familiar about that kind of cultural engagement.

The detail hunting.

The desire to understand the entire system.

The fascination with contradictions.

The urge to go back to the beginning and see what was missed.

But there’s an important distinction between researching a subject and becoming an admirer of that subject.

Not every intense interest is a celebration.

Sometimes people become fascinated precisely because something doesn’t make sense.

And the more they investigate, the more questions emerge.

The story itself becomes an artefact that people keep excavating.

Which is a rather appropriate discovery for the Autistic Culture Archive.

Because here we are.

Doing exactly that.

WHAT THE EVIDENCE DOESN’T TELL US

There are some important gaps in the evidence locker.

• We don’t have evidence that Elizabeth Holmes has been diagnosed as Autistic or publicly identified herself as such.

• We don’t know why she adopted her distinctive speaking voice.

• We don’t know whether her food routines were motivated by sensory preferences, health concerns, convenience, personal philosophy or something else.

• We don’t know precisely what she intended when she wrote her unfinished Steve Jobs note.

• We can’t infer her private intentions from the presence of recognisable behavioural patterns.

And we shouldn’t interpret the existence of those patterns as evidence that Autistic people are more likely to behave dishonestly.

The fraud conviction rests on evidence about her statements and conduct, not on whether she spoke unusually, wore the same clothes or preferred a particular meal.

These distinctions matter.

Because the point of the Archive isn’t to collect people who behave differently and declare them Autistic.

It’s to investigate cultural patterns, examine the evidence and understand what those patterns might tell us.

Sometimes that produces a celebration.

Sometimes it produces a complication.

And sometimes it raises questions that we aren’t able to answer.

An archive that only keeps the comfortable evidence isn’t much of an archive.

CLOSING THE EXCAVATION

When I brought Elizabeth Holmes into the Archive, I knew this would be an uncomfortable excavation.

I knew the history of Theranos and the fraud conviction.

I also knew how much public attention had settled on Holmes’s voice, her clothes, her eye contact and her routines.

What I wanted to investigate was whether the Ten Pillars might reveal something about the way we interpret those details, without pretending they establish her neurotype or excuse her actions.

And what interested me during the conversation with Simon was how many different questions those details opened up.

• The voice.

• The scripts.

• The admiration for Steve Jobs.

• The routines.

• The food.

• The ambition.

• The world built around Theranos.

• And the people who eventually challenged it.

But the thing I’ll take away from this excavation is that recognising something familiar doesn’t necessarily mean understanding why it’s happening.

A behaviour might look familiar to me because I’ve experienced something similar.

But that doesn’t mean the other person is experiencing it for the same reason.

And it doesn’t tell me whether the consequences of their behaviour are acceptable.

Recognition isn’t explanation.

I think that’s an important discovery for the Archive.

Because we’re trying to understand Autistic Culture through the patterns that appear in the world around us.

And the more artefacts we examine, the more complicated those patterns are going to become.

Rocky Horror gave us a community that created belonging through shared scripts and rituals.

Dune gave us an interconnected world that rewarded pattern recognition and intense curiosity.

Elizabeth Holmes gives us something rather different.

A story in which the same cultural framework can help us ask questions about ambition, identity, performance, power, truth and accountability.

And perhaps the most important thing we’ve found is that the Pillars don’t remove those complications.

They give us another way to examine them.

ACCOMPANYING EXCAVATOR’S NOTES

Simon Scott

The thing that surprised me during this excavation was how much of the discussion I recognised from my own life.

Not the billion-dollar company.

Not the blood-testing machines.

And certainly not a criminal conviction.

But the everyday things.

The desire to wear something familiar.

The appeal of knowing exactly what you’re going to eat.

The way a deep interest can become part of your identity.

And particularly the way somebody might change their voice depending on what they’re doing.

I’ve worked in broadcasting for years.

And I’ve absolutely used different versions of my voice depending on the situation.

I’ve also found myself humming or using vocal vibrations because I find the sensation regulating.

So when Angela started talking about the possibility of Holmes using her voice in that way, I immediately recognised the behaviour she was describing.

That doesn’t mean I know why Holmes spoke as she did.

I don’t.

But it did make me think about how quickly we assign meaning to somebody else’s behaviour.

We see something unusual.

We decide what it means.

And then everything else gets interpreted through that assumption.

I think the other thing I’ll remember is the noodles.

Because if I had the money to make every meal predictable, have somebody bring it to me and never have to think about what I was eating while I was working?

I can see the deliciously beige appeal.

Although I probably wouldn’t choose oil-free spaghetti.

And I definitely wouldn’t be bringing my own noodles to a restaurant.

Well. Probably not.

CLASSIFICATION

After examining the evidence, we’re filing Elizabeth Holmes in the Autistic Culture Archive.

Not because we’ve established that Elizabeth Holmes is Autistic.

We haven’t.

And not because the cultural patterns we’ve identified excuse or explain away the fraud for which she was convicted.

They don’t.

We’re filing the artefact because the public record provides an opportunity to examine the Ten Pillars in a particularly complicated cultural context.

What began as an ambition to transform blood testing became a company, a carefully constructed public identity, a technological promise and eventually a criminal case.

And around that story, we found familiar patterns.

• Routines.

• Scripts.

• Intense interests.

• Admiration.

• World Building.

• Norm Challenging.

• Ambition.

And people determined to examine the details when something didn’t add up.

The strongest evidence isn’t simply what the record contains.

It’s what examining that record through the Pillars invites us to do.

• Notice the detail.

• Question the assumption.

• Listen to the voice.

• Recognise the script.

• Examine the routine.

• Follow the interest.

• Understand the system.

• Compare the claim with the evidence.

• Listen to the people who noticed something was wrong.

• Keep the uncomfortable findings in the Archive.

And when something looks familiar?

Don’t assume you know what it means. Keep digging.

ARTEFACT: ELIZABETH HOLMES
CLASSIFICATION: AUTISTIC CULTURE
PRIMARY PILLARS: Rhythmic Communicating · Predictably Comforting · Passionate Superfanning
ADDITIONAL TRACES: World Building · Norm Challenging · Game Changing · Boldly Creating · Bottom-Up Processing · Pattern Matching · Justice Seeking
ARCHIVE NO.: ACA-003-ELIZABETH-HOLMES
LEAD EXCAVATOR: Dr Angela Kingdon
ACCOMPANYING EXCAVATOR: Simon Scott
STATUS: Excavation Complete

Elizabeth Holmes: An Autistic Culture Artefact.

SUBMIT YOUR EVIDENCE

An archive is never finished.

So now we’re handing the brushes to you.

What did we miss?

Have you watched You Can See Everything?

Did the documentary change your opinion about Elizabeth Holmes?

Or did our excavation change the way you might approach the documentary?

Have you ever had somebody interpret your voice, eye contact or mannerisms as evidence of something you weren’t actually feeling?

Do you have a particular meal, outfit or routine that helps you preserve your attention for other things?

Has a passionate interest ever influenced the way you dress, work or communicate?

And what do you make of the more uncomfortable discovery in this excavation?

Can we recognise the Pillars in a person’s behaviour without knowing their motivations or endorsing their actions?

Which Pillar do you think appears most strongly here?

And should the Archive be examining cultural patterns in complicated figures as well as the people and artefacts we celebrate?

Leave your field notes in the comments.

The Archive is never finished.

FIELD REPORT [002]

ARTIFACT: DUNE
ARCHIVE NO: ACA-002-DUNE
PERIOD: 1965 / Present
CLASSIFICATION: AUTISTIC CULTURE
PRIMARY PILLARS: World Building · Pattern Matching · Passionate Superfanning
ADDITIONAL TRACES: Bottom-Up Processing · Boldly Creating · Predictably Comforting · Rhythmic Communicating · Justice Seeking · Game Changing
LEAD EXCAVATOR: Simon Scott
ACCOMPANYING EXCAVATOR: Dr Angela Kingdon

LISTEN TO THE EXCAVATION

This Field Report accompanies our excavation of DUNE on This Week in Autistic Culture.

The Archive segment presents the case.

The Field Report contains the evidence locker.

Listen to the full excavation on the Autistic Culture Podcast Network.

Watch the full excavation on our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@AutisticCulturePodcast

THE DISCOVERY

What The Lord of the Rings is to fantasy, Dune is to science fiction, but what happens when we examine Dune through the Rosetta Stone of Autistic Culture?

It becomes really interesting. Special interest-interesting.

Frank Herbert’s Dune is an enormous world. But what fascinates me isn’t simply the size of the world Frank Herbert created. It’s how that world works.

There’s World Building everywhere. There’s Pattern Matching and Bottom-Up Processing built into the way the book actually asks you to read it. There’s Predictably Comforting, Justice Seeking, Game Changing, Passionate Superfanning — and even Rhythmic Communicating, when we get into things like Fremen ritual and the Litany Against Fear.

Everything is connected.

Ecology connects to politics.

Politics connects to economics.

Economics connects to religion.

Religion connects to psychology, language and history.

And Herbert expects you, as the reader, to gather these individual pieces, hold onto them, recognise the patterns and gradually understand the enormous system underneath it all.

THE ARTEFACT

Frank Herbert’s Dune was published in 1965, after first appearing in serial form as Dune World and Prophet of Dune. It went on to win the inaugural Nebula Award for Best Novel, share the Hugo Award and become one of the most successful science-fiction novels ever published.

And it started with sand.

In 1957, Herbert travelled to Florence, Oregon, where the US Department of Agriculture was experimenting with ways of stabilising moving dunes using grasses.

Herbert planned to write a magazine article about what he found.

The working title was “They Stopped the Moving Sands.”

He never finished it. Instead, the research became something much bigger.

Sand led Herbert towards ecology. Ecology led towards questions of resources and scarcity. Those questions opened into politics, religion, power, psychology and the relationship between human beings and their environment.

Eventually, the unfinished article became part of the foundations of Dune.

And I think that’s an appropriate place for our excavation to begin, because Dune is a story in which almost nothing can be understood on its own.

You can’t really understand the spice without understanding the desert.

You can’t understand the desert without understanding the great sand worms.

You can’t understand the worms without understanding the ecology of Arrakis.

And once you understand why the spice matters, you’re suddenly dealing with economics, politics, religion, colonialism and the balance of power across an entire civilisation.

Pull one thread, and you discover another.

Which is also a fairly accurate description of what happened when I started researching this episode.

I’ve always loved worlds with depth. I want to know what’s behind the door the story doesn’t open. I want to understand why something works, where it came from and what connects it to everything else.

Dune doesn’t punish that instinct.

It rewards it.

The further down you go, the more there is to find.

So when Angela and I decided to begin this new expedition into Autistic Culture, there was something wonderfully appropriate about making our first artefact a book that began because one man went to look at some sand...

and kept digging.

ARTEFACT RECOVERED: DUNE

THE EXCAVATION

PATTERN MATCHING + PREDICTABLY COMFORTING

“There is in all things a pattern that is part of our
universe. It has symmetry, elegance, and grace - these qualities you
find always in that the true artist captures. You can find it in the
turning of the seasons, the way sand trails along a ridge, in the
branch clusters of the creosote bush of the pattern of its leaves. We
try to copy these patterns in our lives and in our society, seeking
the rhythms, the dances, the forms that comfort. Yet, it is possible
to see peril in the finding of ultimate perfection. It is clear that
the ultimate pattern contains its own fixity. In such perfection, all
things move towards death.”

Herbert’s passage finds patterns in seasons, sand and plants and describes humans reproducing patterns in our lives and societies, seeking rhythms and forms that provide comfort. But then Herbert warns about what happens when a pattern becomes completely fixed.

This gives you two pillars almost explicitly:

Pattern Matching

Finding structures and relationships within apparently disconnected
information.

Predictably Comforting

Creating repetition, rhythm and familiar structures because they provide security. But Herbert immediately complicates it:

What happens when the pattern becomes too fixed?

Keep that question open. Because it becomes Paul’s entire story!

DUNE TELLS YOU WHAT’S GOING TO HAPPEN

Every chapter opens with an epigraph from fictional historical writings
--- frequently Princess Irulan.

Biography. History. Philosophy. Religious commentary. Quotations. But these texts are written after the events we’re currently reading.

So the reader frequently knows where Paul’s story is going - again, the pattern is fixed. The epigraphs deliberately foreshadow events and create a gap between knowing an outcome and understanding how that outcome occurs.

MY OBSERVATION

Paul experiences the present while seeing possible futures. We experience Paul’s present while reading information written in his future. We’re almost being trained to read like Paul.

The question isn’t always: WHAT happens?

It’s: HOW do all these pieces create what we already know is going to happen?

That’s Pattern Matching!

THE BOOK EXPECTS YOU TO LEARN IT

At the beginning of Dune, Herbert throws terminology at you. You don’t
necessarily understand it. He doesn’t always stop the story to explain it. But eventually:

You’ve heard Bene Gesserit enough times.

You’ve encountered Kwisatz Haderach enough times.

You understand Mentats.

You understand the Landsraad - the assembly of noble Great Houses in the Dune universe.

You understand the cultural and ecological significance of Shai-Hulud to Arrakis and the Fremen.

THE EXPERIENCE OF READING

First: What the hell does that mean?

Then: I think I understand this.

Then: OH --- THAT’S WHAT THAT EARLIER THING MEANT.

And suddenly I wanted to go backwards. And I did!

Brian Herbert said his father believed readers could follow one layer of the novel, then reread it concentrating on an entirely different layer. Herbert intentionally left pieces that would keep readers thinking after finishing.

PASSIONATE SUPERFANNING

The book is effectively designed to reward: rereading; research;
memorisation; pattern recognition; lore; obsessive attention.

THE APPENDICES --- THE STORY ENDS, THE RESEARCH BEGINS

You finish Dune... and Herbert gives you appendices.

Ecology. Religion. History. The Great Houses. Terminology.

IMPORTANT EFFECT:

The world suddenly feels bigger than the story we’ve just read.

Scholars are studying this universe.

Historians are recording it.

Ecologists are analysing it.

Religious texts.

Books referenced by other books.

The novel feels like one surviving document from a civilisation that
actually existed.

You’re no longer simply consuming a narrative.

You’re researching a fictional culture.

And this produced one of my favourite reactions from Angela during the excavation.

When I explained that some of these appendices effectively contain scholarship written from inside Herbert’s fictional universe, she stopped me:

“He wrote books inside the world?”

Yes!

And when I explained that we’re getting ecology, history, religion and even material on sandworm biology, her response was essentially:

That might be the most Autistic thing we’ve found.

Which rather beautifully demonstrates the point.

The story has finished.

The world hasn’t.

Instead, Herbert effectively says:

If you’d like to know considerably more about all of this, I’ve prepared some additional reading.

For a reader inclined towards deep interests, that isn’t merely an appendix.

It’s an invitation.

You’re no longer simply consuming a narrative.

You’re researching a fictional culture.

That’s World Building becoming Passionate Superfanning.

APPENDIX I --- KYNES AND SYSTEMS

Ecology is not background decoration. It’s arguably Herbert’s model for how everything in Dune works.

The father of Kynes says:

“The thing the ecologically illiterate don’t realise about an
ecosystem is that it’s a system.”

The passage describes ecosystems as possessing a fluid stability and explains that disrupting one niche can cause consequences throughout the wider system. It concludes that ecology’s highest function is understanding consequences.

THIS COULD BE THE THESIS OF DUNE

Arrakis is a system.

Spice is a system.

The Imperium is a system.

CHOAM is a system.

The Space Guild is a system.

The Bene Gesserit are a system.

Religion is a system.

The Missionaria Protectiva is a system.

Paul is inserted into all of them.

And then Herbert asks: What are the consequences?

”A process cannot be understood by stopping it. Understanding must
move with the flow of the process, must join it and flow with it.”

AUTISTIC CULTURE FINDINGS

Bottom-Up Processing + Pattern Matching + World Building

Individual details matter because every detail belongs to something larger.

THE PILLARS DON’T EXIST IN ISOLATION

Something Angela noticed during our excavation was that we weren’t really finding the Pillars one at a time.

We started with World Building.

That was obvious.

It’s Dune.

But the deeper we excavated the World Building, the more we kept finding Bottom-Up Processing and Pattern Matching underneath it.

Individual details accumulate.

Relationships between those details emerge.

Patterns become visible.

Patterns become systems.

Systems become worlds.

Bottom-Up Processing → Pattern Matching → World Building.

Angela also pointed out that World Building isn’t always connected to Boldly Creating — which made its presence here more interesting rather than less.

And I think there’s something important for the Archive in that.

The Ten Pillars aren’t ten boxes we’re trying to tick.

They interact.

One can reinforce another.

Sometimes one may even appear to produce another.

Perhaps the Rosetta Stone becomes most useful not when we ask:

Which Pillars are here?

But:

How are the Pillars interacting with each other?

That’s something we’ll be watching for in future excavations!

BOTTOM-UP PROCESSING --- EVERYONE IS COLLECTING DATA

Look at how many groups understand their world through details.

MENTATS

Data → analysis → conclusion. Thufir Hawat effectively performs the role a computer might perform in another science-fiction universe. However, the book proves that incorrect conclusions can be drawn from false information and a predetermined assumption — Jessica as the traitor of the Atreides.

FREMEN

The desert looks empty to outsiders. The south is widely believed to be uninhabitable, and the estimated population is in the tens of thousands across the whole planet.

The Fremen see information.

Sand. Spice Beds. Drum Sand. Movement. Water. Wormsign. Weather. Rhythm. Environmental change. They can interpret details outsiders don’t even recognise as information.

BENE GESSERIT

Breathing. Voice. Muscle tension. Facial movement. Language. Physiology.
Genetics. Behaviour. There’s a Bene Gesserit axiom:

“If you rely only on your eyes, your other senses weaken.”

They’re trained to notice things most people filter out.

PAUL MUAD’DIB ATREIDES

Paul gets multiple systems of training. Bene Gesserit perception.
Mentat-style analysis. Political education. Combat. Then spice. The way of the Fremen. He is raised in a culture that has harnessed Sea Power and Air Power. Now he masters desert power. Then prescience. And there’s a brilliant Irulan description:

“Muad’Dib learned rapidly because his first training was in how to
learn. And the first lesson of all was the basic trust that he could
learn. It’s shocking to find how many people do not believe they can
learn, and how many more believe learning to be difficult. Muad’Dib
knew that every experience carries its lesson.”

Paul isn’t simply taught what to know. He’s taught how to learn.

Observe.

Collect information.

Recognise patterns.

Update understanding.

Adapt.

THE MISSIONARIA PROTECTIVA --- PLANTING THE SEEDS OF PROPHECY

Possibly the single strongest example of Pattern Matching in the book.

The Bene Gesserit deliberately plant myths and prophecies within cultures. Not because those prophecies are necessarily true. Because a future Bene Gesserit might need them.

Generations later: Jessica arrives on Arrakis.

Jessica recognises the religious pattern.

The Fremen recognise Jessica and Paul through the pattern.

Jessica knows what responses the pattern expects.

Paul eventually occupies the role of Lisan Al-Gaib.

The prophecy surrounding him was planted generations earlier by the Missionaria Protectiva.

THE CHAIN

Create pattern ↓
Repeat pattern culturally ↓
Pattern becomes familiar ↓
People derive meaning from pattern ↓
Jessica recognises pattern ↓
Jessica exploits pattern ↓

= Paul becomes the pattern.

This is Pattern Matching being WEAPONISED.

PREDICTABLY COMFORTING --- PROPHECY

And there’s another layer. Why does prophecy work?

Because it provides a structure for interpreting uncertainty. Something strange happens.

Instead of: We don’t know what this means.

You have: We’ve been told this would happen.

That’s Predictably Comforting.

The Bene Gesserit understand that. They manufacture familiar narratives into
which future events can be placed.

Paul doesn’t just call any sandworm worm; he calls a grandfather worm - the Fremen then recall it as the largest ever seen in the retelling of the events - as it was written.

PAUL’S PRESCIENCE --- WHEN PREDICTABILITY BECOMES HORRIFYING

Herbert writes:

“Deep in the human unconscious is a pervasive need for a logical
universe that makes sense.”

That’s almost the philosophical version of Predictably Comforting.

We want: cause → effect. Pattern. Logic. Certainty.

Paul gets closer to that than almost anybody. And discovers that it’s a curse.

Paul doesn’t simply see THE future.

He perceives possible futures - in certain key moments in the book, he states he has never seen this before, which will alter what happens next - and this terrifies him. Choices create different paths. But the more he acts upon what he sees, the more possibilities can narrow.

The thing that should provide ultimate comfort --- knowing what’s coming --- becomes a trap.

Herbert writes:

“Any road followed precisely to its end leads precisely nowhere.”

And Paul resists choosing the completely clear and safe course because he associates it with stagnation and what could result in the jihad against the universe he fears creating.

Big question that needs further investigation…

What happens when predictability stops being comforting?

An inversion of a Pillar.

Paul is trapped within Predictably Uncomfortable.

Can a Pillar become disabling when the environment or circumstances invert it?

This became one of the more unexpected discoveries during our excavation.

I asked Angela whether one of the Pillars could effectively become disabling when the environment or circumstances push it far enough in the opposite direction.

Because Paul has reached something approaching Predictably Uncomfortable.

He doesn’t suffer because he can’t identify the pattern.

He suffers because he can see too much of it.

Angela pointed out that Autistic experiences frequently seem to exist at extremes. Sensory input, for example, can be desperately avoided or intensely sought.

So perhaps Predictably Comforting has an extreme at the other end.

Predictability can regulate.

Knowing the pattern can create safety.

But what happens when you can’t escape the pattern?

What happens when knowing what’s going to happen doesn’t give you control over it?

What happens when certainty itself becomes overwhelming?

Paul gives us an extraordinary fictional version of that problem.

Predictably Comforting → Predictably Uncomfortable.

And that raises a much bigger question for future excavations:

Can a Pillar become disabling when the environment or circumstances invert it?

THE LITANY AGAINST FEAR --- SCRIPTING AS REGULATION

Now take the most famous quote in Dune and look at it differently.

“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past, I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”

There is another Dune passage that fits the Gom Jabbar and the Litany
particularly well:

“The mind can go either direction under stress---toward positive or toward negative: on or off. Think of it as a spectrum whose extremes are unconsciousness at the negative end and hyperconsciousness at the positive end. The way the mind will lean under stress is strongly influenced by training.”

That makes the role of the Litany Against Fear more interesting.

Paul’s response to overwhelming stress is not presented simply as an
innate superpower.

Training, preparation, and practice matter.

The Bene Gesserit have given him a rehearsed cognitive structure to use
when the body and mind are under pressure.

Everyone knows the Litany Against Fear. But what actually is it?

A memorised sequence.

Repeated in moments of distress.

Predictable words.

Predictable rhythm.

Something to focus upon while experiencing overwhelming emotion.

AUTISTIC CULTURE FINDINGS

Rhythmic Communicating + Predictably Comforting.

This is an interesting way of reading this as scripting used for regulation.

Fear arrives. ↓
Recite familiar words. ↓
Follow familiar rhythm. ↓
Move through the experience. ↓
= Return to yourself.

The content matters. But so does the repetition.

JUSTICE SEEKING — THE FREMEN

One of the strongest connections to Justice Seeking in Dune is the Fremen themselves.

And something important to remember — particularly when we start talking about Paul as the apparent hero of this story — is that the Fremen struggle doesn’t begin when Paul arrives.

They already have a history.

A culture.

A religion.

Extraordinary ecological knowledge.

Political ambitions.

Generations of trauma and oppression.

And resistance to the people exploiting their planet.

Paul doesn’t create any of that.

He enters their story.

Arrakis is enormously valuable to the Imperium because it is the only source of spice. Yet those who actually live there exist under a succession of outside powers primarily interested in extracting that resource.

The planet is valuable.

The spice is priceless.

As Baron Vladimir Harkonnen famously puts it in the 1984 Dune Film

”He who controls the spice, controls the universe”

The Fremen themselves are largely treated as something to be controlled, underestimated or ignored.

And Herbert gradually reveals just how badly the Imperium has underestimated them.

There’s a powerful line:

“They’ve discovered they’re a people. They’re awakening.”

In this part of the story, that awakening is collective.

The Fremen aren’t simply the population that Paul arrives to rescue. They already possess the knowledge, organisation, culture and capability to become an extraordinary political force.

And I think that’s important when we’re looking at Justice Seeking, because Dune doesn’t give us a particularly simple version of justice.

There is genuine oppression.

There is exploitation.

There is colonial power.

A population with legitimate reasons to resist all of those things.

But resistance also becomes entangled with religion, prophecy, revenge, charismatic leadership and eventually enormous violence.

So Dune gives us something much more complicated than:

Oppressed people + heroic leader = Justice.

And that’s really important for what happens next.

Because Paul increasingly appears to fit the pattern of the person who’s going to deliver that justice.

The betrayed son ↓
The exiled Duke ↓
The outsider accepted by the Fremen ↓
The leader who can overthrow the Harkonnens and the Emperor ↓
The hero ↓
= The Lisan Al-Gaib.

And that’s exactly where Frank Herbert wants us to start becoming suspicious.

NOW WE HAVE TO TALK ABOUT PAUL

Up to this point, Paul looks remarkably like the classic hero. It’s almost the archetypal hero’s journey.

Except Herbert gives us this:

“No more terrible disaster could befall your people than for them to
fall into the hands of a Hero.”

And suddenly the entire story looks different.

RULERSHIP --- THE PERSON AND THE SYSTEM

Another passage worth holding beside Herbert’s warning about heroes is:

“Grave this on your memory, lad: A world is supported by four things... the learning of the wise, the justice of the great, the prayers of the righteous and the valour of the brave. But all of these things are as nothing... without a ruler who knows the art of ruling. Make that the science of your tradition!”

This creates an interesting tension inside Dune.

The novel repeatedly warns about surrendering judgement to heroic
leaders, while also taking the mechanics of leadership and rule
extremely seriously.

Learning.

Justice.

Religion.

Courage.

None exists politically in isolation; all become part of the system of
rule.

Paul is trained not merely to be extraordinary, but to understand how power operates.

That makes Herbert’s later warning about heroes complicated, not unimportant: a ruler can understand the system brilliantly and still become the centre of something catastrophic.

PAUL ISN’T NECESSARILY THE ANSWER

Herbert was explicit outside the novel that he was suspicious of heroic leaders. He described Dune in terms of the “superhero syndrome”, and later said the underlying lesson was to beware of heroes and rely upon one’s own judgement. He was deeply concerned with the mistakes of leaders becoming amplified through the number of people following them.

HERBERT ON WHAT HE WANTED READERS TO NOTICE

Herbert later stated the warning in unusually direct terms:

“Don’t give over all of your critical faculties to people in power, no matter how admirable those people may appear to be.”

That sits very naturally beside the novel’s warning about falling into
the hands of a Hero.

The important distinction is that Herbert is not simply saying, leaders
are bad.

The warning is about what happens when followers stop exercising their own judgement because the person leading them appears exceptional, admirable, destined or necessary.

MY THOUGHTS:

Maybe Dune isn’t: Look at this extraordinary hero.

Maybe it’s: Look how badly human beings want an extraordinary hero.

And look what happens when they find one.

PAUL BECOMES A PATTERN

Herbert writes that greatness depends partly upon humanity’s “myth-making
imagination”

“Greatness is a transitory experience. It is never consistent. It depends in part upon the myth-making imagination of humankind. The person who experiences greatness must have a feeling for the myth he is in. He must reflect what is projected upon him. And he must have a strong sense of the sardonic. This is what uncouples him from belief in his own pretensions. The sardonic is all that permits him to move within himself. Without this quality, even occasional greatness will destroy a man.”

And the supposedly great individual has to reflect what other people project onto them. That’s Paul.

The Bene Gesserit creates the pattern.

The Fremen inherit the pattern.

Jessica recognises the pattern.

Paul fits the pattern.

The Fremen recognise Paul through the pattern.

Then something happens: Paul stops simply being Paul Atreides.

He’s Muad’Dib. He’s Lisan al-Gaib. He’s the Mahdi; he’s a Messiah.

At what point does Muad’Dib stop belonging to Paul? Paul even acknowledges that Stilgar, the leader of the Fremen, his mentor in the ways of the Fremen and his father figure within the culture, goes from being a friend to a follower, and this saddens him.

Once thousands/millions of people believe in the symbol, does the person
inside it still control what it means?

RELIGION + POLITICS — THE MACHINE OF THE JIHAD STARTS MOVING

“When religion and politics travel in the same cart, the riders
believe nothing can stand in their way.”

Herbert’s passage then describes the movement becoming faster until
those involved cannot see the precipice. Look at Paul’s journey:

Missionaria Protectiva plants pattern ↓
Fremen recognise Paul ↓
Paul uses prophecy ↓
Religious authority grows ↓
Political revolution grows ↓
Muad’Dib becomes larger than Paul.
= Paul can no longer control what happens - and through Princess Irulan’s quotes, we see the result.

At the end, Paul understands that Fremen belief in him has become so powerful that he cannot prevent the jihad. That’s the tragedy.

The person apparently controlling the system has become trapped inside the
system.

GAME CHANGING --- PAUL UNDERSTANDS THE SYSTEM

Paul does ultimately break the existing political order. But not simply because he has the best army. He understands the dependency beneath everything.

“The people who can destroy a thing, they control it.”

The Imperium believes: Spice = wealth.

Paul sees: Spice = civilisation’s dependency.

Control of Arrakis isn’t ultimately enough.

The ability to destroy spice production creates leverage over the entire Imperium.

Pattern Matching → Game Changing

Paul sees the system. Identifies its weakest point. Changes the rules.

But in doing so, he complicates the Pillar itself.

Game Changing in this context isn’t inherently good.

Someone can recognise that a system is broken. Someone can understand exactly how to dismantle it. Neither guarantees that what replaces it will be better.

That’s an interesting complication of Game Changing itself.

PASSIONATE SUPERFANNING

Dune didn’t remain a single novel.

Herbert wrote five sequels, and after his death the universe continued expanding through further novels, films, television, games and other adaptations.

But the more interesting Autistic Culture connection is what readers do with Dune.

They learn genealogies.

They learn the Houses and political factions.

They learn terminology, religions and histories.

They debate the ecology of Arrakis and the biology of the sandworms.

They compare adaptations.

They trace Herbert’s influences.

They argue over interpretations of events that happened thousands of years before the first novel even begins.

And eventually they start building their own reference works.

Willis E. McNelly’s Dune Encyclopedia became a 500-plus-page attempt to catalogue the universe.

Before continuing his father’s universe, Brian Herbert compiled a roughly 600-page, single-spaced “Dune Concordance” organising the material Frank Herbert had created.

Herbert’s readership became so intensely engaged that he reportedly found himself being asked whether he was actually trying to start a cult — something he firmly rejected.

This is where Dune feels almost purpose-built for Passionate Superfanning.

The deeper you go, the more there is to know.

And there’s something wonderfully circular about all of this:

Frank Herbert couldn’t stop researching.

That research created Dune.

Dune created readers who couldn’t stop researching.

Those readers created encyclopaedias and concordances about Dune.

And now we’re making a podcast episode about all of it.

THE ADAPTATION PROBLEM

And then there’s another enormous part of Dune fandom: trying to film the f****** thing.

The history of adapting Dune stretches across more than fifty years.

Producer Arthur P. Jacobs, who had produced Planet of the Apes, acquired the film rights in the early 1970s but died before production began.

Then came one of the most famous films never made: JODOROWSKY’S DUNE

In the mid-1970s, Alejandro Jodorowsky developed an extraordinarily ambitious adaptation.

The planned film was reportedly going to run somewhere around 10–14 hours.

I’d watch it!

His proposed collaborators and cast included:

• Salvador Dalí as Emperor Shaddam IV — reportedly demanding $100,000 an hour.

• Orson Welles as Baron Harkonnen (Ooooft, what a choice)

• Pink Floyd contributing music (Dark Side of the Moon’s of Arrakis, anyone?)

• Moebius working on visual design.

• H. R. Giger, years before Alien, creating designs for the Harkonnen world

Herbert reportedly described the enormous collection of script and storyboard material as being “the size of a phonebook.”

Around $2 million was reportedly spent on pre-production, but the financing ultimately collapsed.

And yet even an adaptation of Dune that was never made had a cultural afterlife.

Jodorowsky and Moebius later collaborated on The Incal, while the entire failed production eventually became the subject of the 2013 documentary Jodorowsky’s Dune.

Which feels very Dune….

Even the failed adaptation has lore.

WHY IS DUNE SO DIFFICULT TO ADAPT?

The problem becomes obvious when you think about everything the novel has asked us to pay attention to.

• Internal monologue.

• Politics.

• Religion.

• Ecology.

• History.

• Terminology.

• Prescience.

• Genetic memory.

• Thousands of years of backstory.

• Appendices.

And, perhaps most importantly, information whose significance you aren’t necessarily supposed to understand when you first receive it.

A novel can simply tell you what Paul is thinking.

It can stop for a paragraph of history.

It can give you an epigraph written decades after the events you’re currently reading.

It can introduce the phrase Kwisatz Haderach and allow you to spend another hundred pages figuring out what that actually means.

Film doesn’t have those same tools.

So the adaptation problem isn’t simply:

How do you film Dune?

How do you put all of that information on screen without stopping the film every five minutes to explain it?

Or perhaps:

Can you adapt Dune without infodumping?

DAVID LYNCH’S DUNE — 1984

Which brings us to David Lynch.

And I don’t think the interesting conversation is:

Lynch’s Dune = bad. Villeneuve’s Dune = good.

Because Lynch is attempting to solve exactly the problem we’ve just identified.

How do you communicate Paul’s internal thoughts?

How do you explain terminology?

How much does an audience need to know about the Bene Gesserit, Mentats, Guild, Spice, Houses and Emperor?

What information can you remove before the systems connecting everything stop making sense?

And what happens when you try to fit Dune into a single feature film?

Lynch’s film was released in 1984, with Kyle MacLachlan as Paul.

Its original US reception was largely negative, and it disappointed commercially. Angela’s research notes that reception was strong in parts of Europe and Japan. It subsequently developed a cult following.

Lynch ultimately disowned the film, and some later television versions credited it to the traditional pseudonym Alan Smithee rather than Lynch.

But it’s so interesting to revisit it now.

Some of the elements that don’t work are attempts to solve genuinely difficult problems.

The internal voiceovers are trying to preserve Herbert’s interiority.

The exposition is trying to communicate an enormous amount of information.

The strangeness is, at least sometimes, an attempt to represent a book that is itself deeply strange.

And despite everything that happened to it, the film now has its own passionate cult audience.

Which is perhaps another example of Passionate Superfanning.

Even the adaptation widely regarded as a failure becomes something people preserve, reassess, defend, analyse and love.

WHY THE VILLENEUVE FILMS STICK THE LANDING BETTER FOR ME

This is where the Villeneuve films ultimately work better for me personally.

Because if you describe the ending of Dune: Part Two purely in terms of plot, it sounds like the ending of an incredibly conventional hero story.

Paul defeats the Harkonnens.

He kills Feyd-Rautha.

The Emperor is defeated.

Paul takes control.

The oppressed Fremen have defeated the imperial forces occupying their world.

The exiled son has avenged his father.

The hero wins.

Emotionally, that’s not how Villeneuve allows the ending to feel.

Because Chani walks away.

The film doesn’t give us uncomplicated catharsis. Someone we’ve come to trust sees this supposed victory and knows that something has gone badly wrong. And meanwhile, the Fremen are preparing to take Paul’s holy war beyond Arrakis, to take the Universe to Paradise.

So the imagery of heroic victory is there. But the emotional language of the film tells us to be suspicious of it.

Which brings us back to one of the most important warnings in Dune:

“No more terrible disaster could befall your people than for them to fall into the hands of a Hero.”

Villeneuve makes that warning emotionally visible. Paul has completed the hero’s journey.

And that’s the problem.

CLOSING

Why was reading Dune such a powerful experience for me after discovering my own neurodivergence?

Maybe part of the answer is that Dune never tells you:

You’re too interested in this.

Instead:

Here’s a word you don’t understand. Learn it.

Here’s a political system. Figure it out.

Here’s an ecology. Understand it.

Here’s a religion. Research where it came from.

Here’s a prophecy. Work out who planted it.

Here’s something that happened thousands of years ago. Remember it, because it might matter.

Here’s the future. Now spend hundreds of pages understanding how we arrive there.

And when you’ve finally finished the story...

Here are the appendices.

HERBERT CALLBACK

And there’s a lovely circle back to Herbert himself here.

Brian Herbert described his father as someone who couldn’t open a reference book, find the information he needed on one page, and stop there.

He had to keep reading.

And that’s remarkably similar to the experience Dune creates for its most enthusiastic readers.

Herbert follows one question about sand until it becomes a universe.

The reader follows one unfamiliar word until it becomes an understanding of that universe.

Then fans build encyclopaedias and concordances to catalogue it.

And eventually we spend an entire podcast episode doing the same thing.

AWAKENING — AUTISTIC SELF-DISCOVERY

Dune keeps returning to this idea of awakening.

And since discovering that I’m Autistic, that word has acquired a very different meaning for me.

Because I didn’t become Autistic when I discovered my neurodivergence.

I discovered something that had always been there.

And suddenly experiences from completely different parts of my life started connecting.

Things I’d previously understood as individual quirks, difficulties or failures became part of a much bigger pattern.

Which makes that famous idea in Dune hit me very differently now:

“The sleeper must awaken.”

Because that’s much closer to how my own self-discovery felt.

Not becoming someone else.

Understanding the person who had always been there.

But there’s another line in Dune that takes that idea somewhere even more meaningful for me:

“They’ve discovered they’re a people. They’re awakening.”

Because discovering I was Autistic wasn’t only a process of discovering myself.

It was discovering other people.

My people.

Discovering that experiences I’d thought were uniquely mine were being described by other Autistic people.

Discovering shared language.

Shared experiences.

Shared ways of understanding the world.

And eventually discovering the very idea we’re exploring with this archive:

Autistic Culture.

So there are two kinds of awakening there for me.

I understand myself differently.

And:

I understand that I’m part of something larger than myself.

“HERE I AM, HERE I REMAIN”

And there’s one more line — this time from Villeneuve’s film — that triggered a surprisingly emotional response in me.

Duke Leto says, as he uses his last dying breath against the Baron:

“Here I am, here I remain.”

And I can’t separate that line from my own experiences of unmasking.

Discovering I was Autistic was partly about finally understanding who I had always been. Unmasking has been about accepting myself as the person I truly am.

When I’m not constantly changing myself to meet somebody else’s expectations.

When I’m not automatically hiding the things I’ve learned I’m supposed to hide.

When I can say:

Here I am.

And:

Here I remain.

So perhaps that’s another reason Dune has meant so much to me at this particular point in my life.

I encountered a story obsessed with patterns at the exact moment when I was beginning to recognise the patterns in myself.

A story about awakening as I have passed through an awakening of my own.

And a story containing this incredibly simple statement of remaining who you are, while I was beginning to understand what unmasking might actually mean for me.

And maybe that’s why the most Autistic thing about Dune isn’t any particular character.

Maybe it’s what Dune invites its audience to do.

Pay attention.

Collect information.

Notice patterns.

Learn the terminology.

Understand the systems.

Research the history.

Reread.

Analyse.

Argue about interpretations.

Become intensely interested.

And eventually...infodump about Dune to somebody else.

Which means that after spending an entire episode doing exactly that on This Week in Autistic Culture...

This episode itself has become an example of Passionate Superfanning.

ACCOMPANYING EXCAVATOR’S NOTES

Dr Angela Kingdon

What surprised me during this excavation wasn’t the World Building. What I wasn’t expecting was how quickly World Building started connecting to the other Pillars.

Bottom-Up Processing.

Pattern Matching.

Boldly Creating.

Justice Seeking.

Game Changing.

And then we got into Predictably Comforting becoming Predictably Uncomfortable — the idea that recognising the pattern can provide comfort, but being unable to escape the pattern might become disabling.

That felt like a genuinely different way of thinking about that Pillar.

But the thing that sealed the deal for me was Passionate Superfanning.

Because you finish Dune...

and there are appendices.

Not just a glossary.

Ecology.

Religion.

History.

Political structures.

Books written inside the world.

And apparently that’s just the beginning.

The deeper you go, the more there is to know.

And Dune seems completely happy for you to keep going.

Which means Simon can spend an entire podcast explaining sandworm ecology to me and claim it’s research.

Which is convenient!!!

CLASSIFICATION

After examining the evidence, we’re filing Dune in the Autistic Culture Archive.

What began with Frank Herbert researching sand became an extraordinarily interconnected fictional world.

And that world invited generations of readers to do exactly what Herbert had done.

The strongest evidence isn’t simply the enormous amount of information Dune contains.

It’s what Dune invites people to do.

1. Pay attention.

2. Collect information.

3. Learn the terminology.

4. Notice the pattern.

5. Understand the system.

6. Research the history.

7. Reread.

8. Follow the rabbit hole.

9. Become intensely interested.

10. Tell somebody else absolutely everything you’ve discovered.

And when you think you’ve finally finished? Here are the appendices.

ARTIFACT: DUNE
ARCHIVE NO: ACA-002-DUNE
PERIOD: 1965 / Present
CLASSIFICATION: AUTISTIC CULTURE
PRIMARY PILLARS: World Building · Pattern Matching · Passionate Superfanning
ADDITIONAL TRACES: Bottom-Up Processing · Boldly Creating · Predictably Comforting · Rhythmic Communicating · Justice Seeking · Game Changing
LEAD EXCAVATOR: Simon Scott
ACCOMPANYING EXCAVATOR: Dr Angela Kingdon
STATUS: Excavation Complete

Dune Is Autistic Culture.

SUBMIT YOUR EVIDENCE

An archive is never finished.

So now we’re handing the brushes to you.

What did we miss?

If Dune has become one of your deep interests, what pulled you into the universe?

How is the world built?

The ecology?

The politics?

The religions?

The sandworms?

Did you finish the book and immediately start reading the appendices?

Did one unfamiliar word send you into a research rabbit hole that ended three hours later with you knowing considerably more about the Bene Gesserit than you intended?

And if you’re Autistic or otherwise neurodivergent, is there something about the way Dune asks you to learn its world that particularly works for your brain?

What do you make of Predictably Uncomfortable?

And which Pillar do you think appears most strongly here?

Leave your field notes in the comments.

The Archive is never finished.

Welcome to This Week in Autistic Culture

This week, Angela and Simon dive into a growing debate about neurodiversity language. Are terms like neurodivergent, neurodiverse and Autistic becoming blurred together — and does that matter? Responding to new research questioning how broadly neurodiversity terminology is used, they explore why umbrella terms can be incredibly useful, where specificity still matters, and what we lose when very different neurotypes and experiences are treated as interchangeable.

For our second excavation into the Autistic Culture Archive, Simon is taking Angela to Arrakis. Using the Ten Pillars of Autistic Culture as their guide, they dig into Frank Herbert’s Dune, uncovering extraordinary world-building, systems within systems, pattern-matching, passionate superfanning and a fictional universe that rewards you for wanting to know absolutely everything about it.

By the end, there’s only one question left: is Dune Autistic culture?

And if our trip to Arrakis leaves you wanting to dig even deeper, you can explore the full Dune Field Report in the Autistic Culture Archive, where Simon brings together the research, evidence, rabbit holes and connections to the Ten Pillars that couldn’t fit into the show — and, as always, you can add your own field notes, because the archive is never finished!

As always, we’ll take you through everything coming up across the Autistic Culture Podcast Network this week!

This Week’s Topics:

• Using ‘neurodivergent’ as a catch‑all term is problematic – here’s why

• Should you say ‘autistic person’ or ‘person with autism’? Here’s how language has changed

📻 On Air This Week:

Monday 12th October

Mindful Mondays with Ashley Dupuy

Ashley returns with another mindful reflection and guided meditation to help neurodivergent listeners begin the week with intention and regulation.

Tuesday 13th October

NEW SHOW - AI and Autism

Episode 1: Can AI Keep Up With an Autistic Brain?

In the first episode of AI and Autism, Bre Ransome is joined by writer Madison Kirby (Madii Bee), who recently identified as Autistic while navigating several major changes in her life — the loss of her stepfather, the end of a relationship and moving back into her childhood home at 30.

Together, Bre and Madii explore the possibilities and limitations of using AI as a neurodivergent person. They also discuss using AI during periods of isolation, wearable technology such as the Oura Ring to better understand stress responses, and the pressure to reach some imagined “rock bottom” before allowing yourself to recognise your needs or seek support.

Wednesday 14th October

The Neurocomplex Creative - Season 2 Episode 6: The First Pancake

In this episode of The Neurocomplex Creative, Vicki Peterson reunites with playwright and theatre educator Jared Eberlein, whom she met as part of the very first cohort of a low-residency MFA program in New Hampshire.

Together, they look back on becoming friends while raising young children, developing their craft and navigating the intensity of an experimental new program. Vicki also reflects on that experience through a neurocomplex lens, recognising how hyperfocus allowed her to meet its creative demands while her need for downtime, regulation and support remained largely invisible.

Clinical Misfits - Season 2 Episode 4: Why Is Chronic Pain So Common in Neurodivergent People?

In this episode of Clinical Misfits, Dr Mary explores chronic pain and its relationship with the neurodivergent nervous system. She breaks down different types of pain, from superficial and deep pain to visceral and nerve pain, and considers the role of interoception and the autonomic nervous system in how pain is experienced and processed.

Thursday 15th October

The Neurodivergent Experience - Episode 131

Jordan James and Simon Scott return for a conversation about the Neurodivergent Experience!

📚 From the Archive - Friday 16th October

Autistic Culture Podcast Rewind – Comedy is Autistic

In this episode of The Autistic Culture Podcast, hosts Dr Angela Kingdon and Matt Lowry, LPP, explore the powerful memoirs of two acclaimed autistic comedians: Hannah Gadsby (10 Steps to Nanette) from Tasmania and Fern Brady (Strong Female Character) from Scotland.

Please rate, share and review our shows, as it helps them grow and reach more people! ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

🎧 Autistic Culture Radio

Looking for a different way to experience ACPN? Autistic Culture Radio is our curated Spotify listening experience, blending music with every programme released across the Autistic Culture Podcast Network.

Updated daily, each episode pairs carefully chosen songs inspired by its themes, a continuous soundtrack to Autistic culture. Save the playlist to your Spotify library and dip in whenever you want to discover new conversations, music and voices from across the network.

Want bonus content, early access, and ad-free listening across the entire network?

Join Autistic Culture Plus to support autistic creators and help us commission even more shows from our community.

Join Autistic Culture +

This framework shaped the questions the researchers asked, the people involved in interpreting the answers, and the understanding of Autism that emerged from the work.

One First Nations parent described taking her Autistic son to a longhouse ceremony. She had brought him only once. The singing, dancing, and the number of people had overwhelmed him.

For the family, the difficulty extended beyond managing a sensory environment. The longhouse was a place of cultural belonging. Its ceremonies connected the child to a community, a history, and traditions that his family wanted him to inherit.

The account appears in a study published July 28, 2026, in the journal Autism, examining the experiences of 14 caregivers in two Canadian First Nations communities: Maskwacîs in Alberta and Six Nations of the Grand River in Ontario.

The researchers found that families were navigating familiar difficulties with diagnosis, education, and healthcare. They also documented understandings of Autism that rarely appear in conventional clinical research.

In some families, Autistic children were understood as gifts from the Creator, with spiritual connections and responsibilities to their communities.

Research rooted in community

Maskwacîs comprises four First Nations in Treaty 6 territory: Samson Cree Nation, Ermineskin Cree Nation, Louis Bull Tribe, and Montana First Nation.

Six Nations of the Grand River is a Haudenosaunee community in southern Ontario, comprising Mohawk, Seneca, Onondaga, Cayuga, Oneida, and Tuscarora peoples.

These communities have distinct languages, histories, and cultural traditions. The researchers were careful to preserve those differences.

The project was co-led by an Autism Community Research Circle that included Autistic people, caregivers, Elders, educators, clinicians, and community researchers.

The circle helped develop the research question, recruit participants, interpret interviews, and decide how findings would be shared.

The research team also participated in ceremonies in Maskwacîs, following community protocols and seeking guidance from Elders and knowledge keepers.

These practices reflected the study’s underlying principle: research about a community should be accountable to that community.

Eight caregivers from Maskwacîs and six from Six Nations participated in interviews. All 14 children represented in the study were recorded as boys, and most were between seven and twelve years old. The small sample limits how widely its findings can be generalised.

The interviews nevertheless provide detailed accounts of how cultural knowledge influences the ways families understand their children.

Autism as a gift from the Creator

Several caregivers described teachings that placed Autistic children within a spiritual understanding of human difference.

In some nêhiyaw accounts, children were understood as having a particular connection to the Creator. Caregivers described Autistic children as possessing spiritual insight and bringing something valuable into the community.

One participant recalled being taught that young children remain especially connected to the Creator and that their words should be taken seriously because they may possess wisdom adults have lost.

These accounts are culturally specific. They do not establish a universal First Nations understanding of Autism, and the researchers found differences between the participating communities.

The idea of Autism as a gift appeared more frequently in interviews from Maskwacîs than in those from Six Nations.

It is also worth distinguishing this understanding from the familiar popular claim that Autism is a superpower.

The caregivers were describing spiritual relationships, cultural responsibilities, and teachings about the place of children within their communities. Their accounts emerged from Indigenous traditions with histories and meanings of their own.

The study’s participants also described exhaustion, uncertainty, and difficulties accessing services. A spiritual understanding of Autism did not eliminate practical support needs.

What it offered some families was a way to understand their children that included identity, relationships, and cultural belonging.

When ceremony becomes inaccessible

The study’s most revealing accounts concern the difficulty of participating in cultural life.

Families wanted their children to experience ceremonies, drumming, dancing, language learning, and community gatherings. These were important ways of maintaining relationships with their cultures.

Yet some of the environments presented significant sensory challenges.

Longhouse gatherings could involve sustained singing, dancing, crowds, and expectations about remaining seated. Other ceremonies could be difficult for children who needed movement, quiet, or opportunities to leave and return.

The families described uncertainty about whether their children would be welcomed or whether the events could accommodate their needs.

These experiences complicate a familiar assumption about cultural inclusion.

A child may belong to a community through family, ancestry, and identity while still encountering barriers to participating in its traditions.

The researchers argue that accessible cultural spaces should allow for different sensory needs, communication methods, movement, and flexible participation.

That might mean considering the length and structure of gatherings, creating quiet spaces, or allowing children to participate without meeting conventional expectations about sitting still.

The issue is especially consequential because cultural participation can be part of how knowledge passes between generations.

When an Autistic child cannot comfortably attend a ceremony, the family may lose an opportunity to share language, relationships, and teachings that are central to their identity.

The study also identified positive experiences. Families described children enjoying drumming, dancing, cultural education, and helping roles within their communities.

The question for those families was how to maintain those connections as their children grew.

Two communities, different experiences

The researchers found meaningful differences between Maskwacîs and Six Nations.

Caregivers in Six Nations generally described greater access to formal Autism services. Several had used applied behaviour analysis, or ABA, which has been a significant component of Ontario’s publicly funded Autism service system.

None of the Maskwacîs caregivers in the study reported accessing ABA.

The researchers connected some of these differences to provincial policies and geography. Families in rural Maskwacîs described substantial barriers to obtaining assessments and services.

One caregiver who had used ABA described discontinuing it because the approach felt oppressive. The participant objected to the commanding language used with children and the way practitioners spoke to them.

Other caregivers reported helpful experiences with professionals, including occupational therapists and speech-language therapists who supported alternative communication.

These differences matter because the families were seeking practical support while evaluating whether that support respected their children and their cultural values.

The study also documents the consequences of Canada’s divided responsibilities for First Nations services.

Federal and provincial governments have overlapping responsibilities for healthcare, education, and disability supports. Families described difficulty navigating those divisions, particularly when services required travel or were unavailable locally.

Some families faced a difficult choice between obtaining specialised services and remaining close to the people and traditions that sustained them.

Travel or relocation could improve access to clinical support while weakening connections to extended family, language, ceremony, and community.

Racism added another layer of difficulty.

Caregivers described professionals who appeared uncomfortable visiting reserves and school systems that failed to recognise their expertise. Several participants also reported bullying, discrimination, and misunderstanding of their children’s communication or behaviour.

The researchers argue that these experiences cannot be separated neatly into disability issues and Indigenous issues. They occur together in the lives of the families involved.

Who gets to define Autism?

The study makes an important contribution to a growing body of research examining Autism through Indigenous knowledge systems.

Clinical descriptions of Autism are generally organised around diagnostic characteristics, support needs, and functional differences.

Those categories remain consequential for accessing services. The caregivers in this study frequently wanted earlier diagnosis, better assessments, and more reliable professional support.

Their accounts also described dimensions of Autistic life that diagnostic categories alone could not capture.

A child’s relationship with Elders, participation in ceremony, knowledge of language, connection to land, and place within a family all contributed to how that child’s life was understood.

The research team made a deliberate choice about language, using identity-first terminology such as Autistic while also respecting the cultural language of the participating communities.

That decision reflects a wider development in Autism research: growing recognition that Autistic people and their communities should participate in defining the concepts used to describe their lives.

For First Nations researchers, that question also involves Indigenous self-determination and the long history of research conducted on Indigenous communities without adequate community authority.

Bruno and his colleagues describe their approach as relationally accountable. The community research circle was involved throughout the project, including the interpretation of findings.

The study’s conclusions call for First Nations-governed Autism services, culturally appropriate diagnostic pathways, local support, and greater recognition of caregiver knowledge.

Those recommendations emerge from specific communities and should be understood within their distinct traditions.

The researchers also identify questions that remain unanswered. Their interviews focused on caregivers, and the study included a small group of families whose children were all recorded as boys. Further research could explore the perspectives of Autistic girls, adults, and people with different communication and support needs.

For now, the study preserves accounts that are rarely represented in Autism research.

Among them is a caregiver describing the expectations she communicated to her son’s teacher. She wanted his comfort and stress levels respected, and she wanted him taught within his limits.

The teacher listened. The caregiver remembered that her son learned a great deal during that year.

She had also explained something she considered fundamental to his education: he was in charge of his own life.

Primary source: Bruno, G., Ahmad, M., Cutknife, C., Littlechild, H., Ertman, T., Smith, J., Zwaigenbaum, L., & Nicholas, D. (2026). Exploring the experiences of First Nations caregivers of Autistic children in Canada: A qualitative community-based participatory research study. Autism, 30(9), 2288–2300. https://doi.org/10.1177/13623613261464661

First of all, I just want to say I loved this book. It is just really well-produced and beautifully written. The pacing is good. The characters are incredibly well developed. They are funny and lonely and complicated, and nobody seems to exist merely to teach the reader something about autism. I found myself caring about these people as people, which sounds like an embarrassingly low bar until you consider how often Autistic and intellectually disabled characters in books exist primarily to facilitate somebody else’s character development. I listened to the audiobook and the acting was just incredible.

Upward Bound takes place largely inside a California adult day program for people with developmental disabilities. Its central character, Walter, is nonspeaking and Autistic, and, like Woody Brown, he attends college and communicates through spelling. Brown has said that the book is loosely autobiographical, and I found myself constantly wondering how much of what I was reading came from actual people he knew in day programs. I do not know the answer to that, but the characters certainly feel observed rather than invented from stereotypes.

What broke my heart was how bored they were.

There is something particularly awful about imagining a person with a complicated intellectual life spending day after day in an environment where other people have drastically underestimated what they understand. For nonspeaking Autistic people without intellectual disabilities, that mismatch can be enormous. Someone can be thinking about literature, sex, politics, another person in the room, what happened yesterday, what they want to do tomorrow, or how much they hate the activity somebody has just put in front of them, while everyone around them assumes they are content because they cannot easily say otherwise.

The part that got me the most was the locked cabinet.

There are toys, craft materials, and other objects kept in locked cupboards at the program. The participants know they are there. Some of them desperately want particular things inside. One character has a love for Mr. Potato Head, I could feel in my spleen. Being separated from Mr. Potato Head left him with such an ache.

These are their comfort items, their interests, the things they want to hold or play with or have near them, and another adult has decided when they are allowed to have them.

In the Ten Pillars of Autistic Culture, we talk about Passionate Superfanning and Predictably Comforting. Autistic people can have extraordinarily deep relationships with things other people consider insignificant. It might be a character or a collection or a stuffed animal or a television show or a particular object you have carried around for years. It might look completely irrational to somebody else, but it is familiar and predictable and yours, and sometimes having it with you is the thing that allows your nervous system to settle down.

There is just no reason to deny us our comfort items. Ever.

If an Autistic adult has something that makes them feel safe or regulated or simply happy, I do not understand why another adult should get to decide when they can have it. I especially do not understand taking that thing away as a means of managing someone’s behavior and then returning it when they behave the way you want them to behave. Once you understand how important predictably comforting objects can be to Autistic people, that starts to feel unbelievably cruel.

And the cruelty in Upward Bound is rarely cinematic. Nobody needs to be a monster. Somebody just has the key.

That is what I kept thinking about after I finished the book. We spend a lot of time in Autistic advocacy talking about schools and employment and healthcare and representation, while there are Autistic adults living entire lives inside systems where other people control hundreds of tiny decisions every day. Someone else decides where they go, what activity they are doing, when they eat, when they leave, who they spend their day with and whether they can get the thing they know will make them feel better.

I think Autistic advocates should be fighting for the liberation of these people.

And Upward Bound made me think about the nonspeaking Autistic adult sitting in a day program who may understand far more than anyone around them realizes. They may be bored out of their mind. They may hate the activity. They may be listening to the staff talk about them. They may have a crush on the person sitting across the room. They may have elaborate opinions about everybody there. They may desperately want to go home.

And they may really, really want the thing somebody has locked in that cabinet.

Start with the cabinet.

Give us our things.

FIELD REPORT [001]

AUTISTIC CULTURAL ARCHIVE

ARTIFACT: ROCKY HORROR
ARCHIVE NO: ACA-001-ROCKY-HORROR
PERIOD: 1973 / Present
CLASSIFICATION: AUTISTIC CULTURE
PRIMARY PILLARS: Rhythmic Communicating · Predictably Comforting · Passionate Superfanning
ADDITIONAL TRACES: Pattern Matching · Norm Challenging · World Building · Boldly Creating
LEAD EXCAVATOR: Dr Angela Kingdon
ACCOMPANYING EXCAVATOR: Simon Scott

LISTEN TO THE EXCAVATION

This Field Report accompanies our excavation of Rocky Horror on This Week in Autistic Culture.

The Archive segment presents the case.

The Field Report contains the evidence locker.

Listen to the full excavation on the Autistic Culture Podcast Network.

Watch the full excavation on our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@AutisticCulturePodcast

THE DISCOVERY

From the outside, a midnight screening of The Rocky Horror Picture Show looks like absolute chaos.

People shout at the screen.

They dress as the characters.

They throw rice and toast around the cinema.

People perform the film underneath the film.

Everyone gets up and dances.

There are people in fishnets.

There are people who have been coming every Friday night for years.

And somewhere in the middle of all of this, somebody will shout something apparently nonsensical at exactly the right moment and an entire cinema full of people will know precisely what they’re talking about.

But that’s the first clue.

Because once you start excavating Rocky Horror, you discover something strange.

The chaos has rules.

• There are established callbacks.

• There are expected responses.

• There are costumes.

• There are props.

• There are specific moments when those props are used.

• There are recurring screenings at recurring times.

• There are shadow casts.

• There are instructions for first-timers.

• There are rules about what can and cannot be thrown.

• There are local traditions.

• There are international traditions.

• There are lines which have been repeated for decades.

And there are even rules telling you that you don’t have to participate if you don’t want to.

What appears from the outside to be an environment in which everybody is doing whatever they like turns out to contain an extraordinarily elaborate social script.

And that script has been constructed not primarily by the people who created Rocky Horror.

It was constructed by the audience.

Over fifty years, the people who loved Rocky Horror built something around it.

• A language.

• A ritual.

• A set of traditions.

• A way of communicating.

• A way of participating.

And, for many people who had struggled to find one elsewhere, a community.

So perhaps the most interesting thing recovered during this excavation isn’t simply evidence of Autistic Culture inside Rocky Horror.

It’s what happened around it.

Because the audience didn’t simply become fans of Rocky Horror.

They built a culture.

THE ARTEFACT

Rocky Horror begins with Richard O’Brien.

Born in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, O’Brien spent part of his childhood in New Zealand before eventually returning to Britain as a young adult. Before becoming a writer, his working life included a collection of apparently disconnected attempts at finding somewhere he fitted: farming, barbering, driving lorries, stunt work and acting classes.

Then, at thirty, he wrote a small musical.

The Rocky Horror Show opened in London in 1973 in a tiny 63-seat space at the Royal Court Theatre.

Two years later, it became The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

The story itself is gloriously ridiculous.

Brad and Janet, an extraordinarily conventional young couple, suffer a breakdown on a dark and stormy night and seek help at a nearby castle.

Inside, they encounter Dr Frank-N-Furter and the Transylvanians.

There are aliens.

There is sex.

There is murder.

There is a man being created in a laboratory.

There is Meat Loaf.

There is a floor show.

There is an inexplicable amount of lingerie.

And there is, obviously, the Time Warp.

But the plot eventually became almost secondary to what happened around it.

The film initially struggled. Yet audiences began returning. And returning. And returning.

What developed around those screenings became a participatory culture which would survive for decades.

• Shadow casts performed beneath the screen.

• Audiences dressed as characters.

• Props became incorporated into screenings.

• People developed responses to lines in the film.

• Local clubs emerged.

And a film that could have disappeared became something else entirely.

Not simply a movie people watched. A ritual people performed.

ARTEFACT RECOVERED: ROCKY HORROR

THE EXCAVATION

THE CHAOS HAS A SCRIPT

One of the first pieces of evidence recovered from Rocky Horror is a contradiction.

It is simultaneously one of the least conventional cinema experiences imaginable and one of the most structured.

Midnight screenings developed repeated scripts, callbacks, costumes and rituals.

There are rules.

The official fan guidance discussed during our excavation explicitly tells newcomers that there is no expectation to participate if they are uncomfortable. Other groups have developed protocols governing what audiences can throw and how they should throw it.

That matters. Because the apparent chaos isn’t actually unpredictable.

If you know Rocky Horror, you know what’s coming.

• The same film.

• The same songs.

• The same moments.

• The same dance.

• The same characters.

• The same cues.

• Often the same theatre.

• Often at the same time.

• And increasingly, the same responses.

That gives us our first major finding.

AUTISTIC CULTURE FINDINGS

PREDICTABLY COMFORTING

Rocky Horror demonstrates that predictability doesn’t have to mean quietness.

Predictability can be loud.

It can involve fishnets and rice and people screaming at a cinema screen at midnight.

The comfort doesn’t necessarily come from the environment being calm.

It comes from knowing the pattern.

You know when the song begins.

You know when the audience responds.

You know when everyone stands up.

You know the dance.

You know what you’re allowed to do.

You know what everyone else is about to do.

And because the framework is predictable, something apparently contradictory becomes possible: the structure creates room for freedom.

You can be ridiculous because there are rules governing the ridiculousness.

You can participate without having to invent the social interaction from scratch.

And once you understand the system, you can play inside it.

SOMEBODY SHOUTS AT THE SCREEN

Perhaps the most extraordinary part of Rocky Horror culture is that nobody originally designed this audience language.

It emerged.

During the excavation, we traced one of the earliest famous callbacks to Louis Farese Jr., a Staten Island kindergarten teacher attending a screening in 1976.

Brad and Janet are stranded in the rain.

Janet is protecting herself with a newspaper.

Farese later described feeling compelled to speak to the characters.

So he shouted:

“Buy an umbrella.”

And people laughed.

Then something important happened.

It happened again.

The response was repeated.

Other responses appeared.

When a piece of repartee worked, audiences retained it.

Different cinemas developed their own lines. Some responses appeared independently in different communities. Others spread between them.

Eventually, what had begun as spontaneous interruptions became established callbacks.

Today there are published callback scripts.

There are lines shared internationally.

There are local variations.

The scripts continue to evolve as new references enter the culture.

During the excavation, Angela described what had happened with a phrase that deserves preserving in the Archive:

“gestalt language acquisition at a community scale.”

That might be one of the most important pieces of evidence we recovered.

Because Rocky Horror didn’t simply create fans.

Its fans collectively developed a language.

Someone notices something.

Someone responds.

The response lands.

Other people repeat it.

The repetition acquires meaning.

The community learns where the response belongs.

Eventually the phrase becomes part of the ritual.

And knowing the phrase identifies you as someone who understands the culture.

AUTISTIC CULTURE FINDINGS

RHYTHMIC COMMUNICATING + PATTERN MATCHING

Rocky Horror turns forms of communication frequently associated with Autistic experience into the mechanism through which a community communicates.

• Repetition.

• Scripting.

• Quoting.

• Echolalia.

• Call-and-response.

• Shared references.

• Timing.

• Pattern recognition.

And instead of repeating the same phrase making you socially unusual, repeating the phrase correctly demonstrates that you belong.

The pattern is the communication.

HOW DO THEY KNOW?

There is a wonderful moment in Angela’s own Rocky Horror story which demonstrates exactly how this system works.

As a teenager, she attended a screening in New Haven.

Everyone around her was shouting things at the screen.

Angela didn’t understand what was happening.

More importantly, she wanted to know:

How do they know?

So she did what any sensible cultural archaeologist would do.

She found the documentation.

Angela went to the record shop beside the cinema and bought Say It! The Rocky Horror Picture Show Audience Participation Album on vinyl.

Then she listened to it.

And read the liner notes.

And began learning the audience participation.

Encounter incomprehensible social ritual.

Realise there is a pattern.

Acquire documentation.

Study documentation.

Learn script.

Return equipped to participate.

It’s almost too perfect.

What initially appears to be an inaccessible social environment turns out to contain something incredibly useful: instructions.

Later, when Angela moved to George Washington University, one of the things she did was find her new Rocky Horror group. Friday at midnight became part of her life.

The confusing ritual had become a community.

THE FOURTH WALL IS AT THE DOOR

Rocky Horror’s World Building is unusual.

Because the audience doesn’t merely observe the fictional culture.

Eventually, it enters it.

The Transylvanians have their own behaviour, clothing, sexuality and cultural assumptions.

Tim Curry’s famous rule for understanding Frank-N-Furter makes the point beautifully:

“Never think about it as drag, because it’s not. It’s just what people wear in Transylvania.”

Within the culture of the story, the supposedly transgressive thing isn’t transgressive.

It’s normal.

But Rocky Horror audiences take this further:

• They wear the clothes.

• They learn the songs.

• They learn the dances.

• They speak the language.

• They bring the correct objects.

• They perform the characters.

They reproduce the story beneath the story through shadow casts.

During our excavation, Simon described it like this:

“The fourth wall doesn’t stop at the stage. It stops on the door on the way when you walk in.”

That’s World Building becoming participatory.

When you enter a Rocky Horror screening, you aren’t simply entering a cinema showing a fictional world.

You’re entering a temporary extension of that world.

The audience becomes part of Transylvania.

AUTISTIC CULTURE FINDINGS

WORLD BUILDING + BOLDLY CREATING

Most fictional worlds ask audiences to imagine themselves inside them.

Rocky Horror gives them something more practical.

• A costume.

• A script.

• A dance.

• A role.

The audience doesn’t simply consume the world.

It performs it into existence.

THE RULES ARE THERE TO BE PLAYED WITH

This produces another apparent contradiction.

Rocky Horror has an established script. But the script changes.

Callbacks evolve.

New jokes appear.

Contemporary references get incorporated.

Local casts develop their own traditions.

Successful improvisations can eventually become established parts of the ritual.

So the culture manages to hold two things simultaneously:

Everybody knows the script.

And:

Everybody is allowed to mess with the script.

This is where Predictably Comforting meets Boldly Creating.

• The repetition preserves the ritual.

• The improvisation keeps it alive.

• In effect, audiences have spent fifty years collaboratively modifying Rocky Horror.

• The original work remains recognisable.

• But the participatory culture around it belongs to thousands of people.

Rocky Horror became open-source theatre.

DON’T DREAM IT. BE IT.

Then we reach the most obvious excavation site.

Norm Challenging.

Rocky Horror is filled with characters who disregard conventional expectations around gender, sexuality, clothing and behaviour.

But the deeper evidence isn’t simply that Rocky Horror is queer or transgressive.

It is the way the culture treats categories themselves.

Richard O’Brien has spoken publicly about wishing forms offered an “other” option rather than simply male and female and has described himself as a “third sex.”

Frank doesn’t treat his clothes as an act of transgression.

They’re simply his clothes.

The Transylvanians aren’t spending the film anxiously comparing themselves with the social expectations of Brad and Janet’s world.

They have their own culture.

And then there is the phrase which has become almost inseparable from Rocky Horror:

Don’t dream it. Be it.

Tim Curry later described that idea as extending beyond sexuality: permission to become whatever it is you dream of becoming, provided doing so doesn’t harm you.

AUTISTIC CULTURE FINDINGS

NORM CHALLENGING

Rocky Horror doesn’t merely challenge individual norms.

It constructs an environment in which the categories imposed by the outside world temporarily lose some of their authority.

The question stops being:

How successfully can I fit myself into the available category?

And becomes:

Why does that category get to define me in the first place?

For people who have spent their lives being told they move incorrectly, communicate incorrectly, socialise incorrectly, dress incorrectly, love incorrectly or simply exist incorrectly, that is an enormously powerful proposition.

THE OUTSIDERS FIND EACH OTHER

And this is where Rocky Horror stops being merely interesting.

Because for many people, the culture around Rocky Horror became somewhere they belonged.

The screenings provided a place where people who felt unusual elsewhere could enter a room filled with other unusual people.

The difference wasn’t merely tolerated.

It was expected.

Jessa Blackthorne described encountering the Broadway revival at seven years old:

“As an autistic kid who struggled to find community, the second I went to see Rocky Horror, I knew I was at home.”

That word matters.

Home.

Because Rocky Horror fandom didn’t simply give people something to like.

It gave people somewhere to go.

• Every theatre could have its own club.

• Every club could develop its own lines.

• People met through performances.

• They joined shadow casts.

• They travelled to conventions.

• They found friends.

• They found partners.

• They found other outsiders.

  ---

AUTISTIC CULTURE FINDINGS

PASSIONATE SUPERFANNING

Passionate Superfanning here isn’t simply intense enthusiasm.

It becomes infrastructure for belonging.

Fans maintain the culture.

Fans preserve the language.

Fans teach newcomers.

Fans perform the work.

Fans modify the traditions.

Fans keep the screenings alive.

Fans document its history.

Fans create communities around it.

At some point, “fandom” doesn’t seem like quite a large enough word for what has happened.

The fans haven’t merely surrounded the artefact.

They have become part of it.

THE ARCHIVIST

And then we found another piece of evidence.

Richard O’Brien has described the creative process behind Rocky Horror in unusually appropriate terms.

Speaking about the American cultural references, advertisements, pulp fiction and imagery incorporated into the show, O’Brien said:

“I wasn’t so much a writer as I was an archivist.”

That immediately resonated during the excavation.

Because Rocky Horror itself is assembled from fragments.

• Science fiction.

• Horror films.

• Rock and roll.

• Advertising.

• Pulp imagery.

• Glam.

• Camp.

• Theatre.

• Popular culture.

O’Brien collects the pieces.

Recognises connections between them.

Recombines them.

Creates something new.

AUTISTIC CULTURE FINDINGS

PATTERN MATCHING + RHYTHMIC COMMUNICATING + BOLDLY CREATING

And then something wonderfully recursive happens.

The archivist creates Rocky Horror.

Rocky Horror attracts an audience.

The audience begins collecting phrases and references from Rocky Horror.

They repeat them.

Recombine them.

Add their own material.

Preserve the resulting culture.

Publish scripts.

Record albums.

Document traditions.

In other words:

The archivist created an artefact which created thousands of other archivists.

We feel strangely at home here.

THE FANDOM BECOMES THE EVIDENCE

This is perhaps the most important distinction uncovered during this excavation.

If we were only examining the text of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, we could make a perfectly reasonable Autistic Culture case.

There is repetition.

Pattern.

World Building.

Norm Challenging.

Bold creation.

But the strongest evidence doesn’t exist entirely on the screen.

It exists in what people did with it.

They turned repetition into ritual.

They turned quotes into language.

They turned costumes into participation.

They turned screenings into recurring gatherings.

They turned fandom into community.

And they did it without a central authority deciding what the culture should become.

The culture emerged through participation.

Which means that the true artefact we’re excavating isn’t only:

The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

It’s:

The Rocky Horror Picture Show and the fifty-year participatory culture that grew around it.

That is the complete artefact.

AND THEN WE FOUND THIS

Near the end of the excavation, we uncovered one final piece of evidence.

Richard O’Brien’s son Linus has spoken publicly about neurodivergence within his family.

He described members of the family as neurodivergent “to some degree” and said this was something he had only come to understand in recent years.

But then he went further.

Linus said he believes many Rocky Horror fans are highly neurodivergent.

And when people describe feeling different or alienated from society, he argued that they may not only be talking about gender or sexuality:

“…but also about how their brains operate.”

That quote is significant precisely because we don’t need it to make the case.

By this point in the excavation, the cultural evidence is already lying all around us.

The scripts.

The repetition.

The callbacks.

The patterns.

The rituals.

The rules.

The intense fandom.

The shared language.

The outsiders finding one another.

The predictable framework allowing unconventional behaviour.

Then someone from inside the O’Brien family arrives at the excavation and effectively says:

We’ve noticed these people too.

CLOSING

Maybe that’s why Rocky Horror has lasted.

Not simply because people love the film.

But because eventually the film became something you could belong to.

You could learn it.

You could quote it.

You could repeat it.

You could dress as it.

You could perform it.

You could find other people who knew the same lines.

And if you didn’t know the lines yet?

There were people who would teach you.

Rocky Horror took people who often felt like outsiders and created a place where being different wasn’t merely tolerated.

Being different was the culture.

And then those outsiders did something extraordinary.

They built their own traditions around it.

They developed their own language.

They established their own rituals.

They created their own rules.

They passed those rules between generations.

They changed them.

They preserved them.

And fifty years later, people are still gathering in dark rooms and doing the Time Warp again.

Which, when you think about it, may be the most Predictably Comforting thing imaginable.

ACCOMPANYING EXCAVATOR’S NOTES

Simon Scott

The thing that changed for me during this excavation was realising that the Autistic Culture case for Rocky Horror isn’t really about whether Frank-N-Furter seems Autistic, or Richard O’Brien might be neurodivergent, or whether Autistic people disproportionately like the film.

It’s the structure people built around it.

I hadn’t understood before Angela explained just how much you’re expected to learn in Rocky Horror.

From outside it looks completely anarchic. Then you discover people know exactly when to shout, what to shout, what to throw, when to stand up and what everybody else is about to do.

And somehow that structure doesn’t make the experience less free. It seems to make people more free.

I think that’s the bit I’ll carry away from this one.

The fourth wall isn’t really the screen.

It’s the door of the theatre.

Once you’ve walked through it, you’re not simply watching Transylvania anymore.

For a couple of hours, you’re one of the Transylvanians.

And apparently there are instructions.

Which helps!!!

CLASSIFICATION

After examining the evidence, we’re filing Rocky Horror in the Autistic Culture Archive.

What began as a tiny stage musical became a film, and what began as a film became something much larger.

A community learned it.

Repeated it.

Quoted it.

Performed it.

Modified it.

Created rules around it.

Developed a shared language around it.

And passed those traditions between generations.

The strongest evidence isn’t simply what Rocky Horror contains.

It’s what Rocky Horror invites people to do.

1. Learn the script.

2. Notice the detail.

3. Recognise the cue.

4. Repeat the phrase.

5. Sing the song.

6. Do the dance.

7. Wear the costume.

8. Return next week.

9. Find the other people who know the words.

And if you don’t know them yet? Someone will teach you.

ARTEFACT: ROCKY HORROR
CLASSIFICATION: AUTISTIC CULTURE
PRIMARY PILLARS: Rhythmic Communicating · Predictably Comforting · Passionate Superfanning
ADDITIONAL TRACES: Pattern Matching · Norm Challenging · World Building · Boldly Creating
ARCHIVE NO: ACA-001-ROCKY-HORROR
LEAD EXCAVATOR: Dr Angela Kingdon
ACCOMPANYING EXCAVATOR: Simon Scott
STATUS: Excavation Complete

Rocky Horror Is Autistic Culture.

SUBMIT YOUR EVIDENCE

An archive is never finished.

So now we’re handing the brushes to you.

What did we miss?

If Rocky Horror has been part of your life, what brought you into the culture?

Was it the music?

The costumes?

The callbacks?

The repetition?

The community?

Did somebody teach you the rituals — or did you arrive at your first midnight screening with absolutely no idea why everyone was shouting at Janet?

And if you’re Autistic or otherwise neurodivergent, did Rocky Horror give you something you struggled to find elsewhere?

Which Pillar do you think appears most strongly here?

Leave your field notes in the comments.

The Archive is never finished.

Welcome to This Week in Autistic Culture

This week, Angela and Simon dive into new research about Autistic traits and romantic relationships — and find themselves questioning some of the assumptions behind it.

From attachment styles and relationship maintenance to masking, regulation and the need for connection, they explore what happens when Autistic experiences are measured against expectations that may not have been designed with Autistic people in mind.

It’s time to open the vaults for our brand-new segment: The Autistic Culture Archive!

Each week, Angela and Simon will become cultural archaeologists, excavating a film, book, musician, fandom, hobby or cultural figure and using the Ten Pillars of Autistic Culture to uncover the Autistic fingerprints hiding in plain sight.

First into the archive is The Rocky Horror Picture Show

And if our first excavation leaves you wanting to dig deeper, every entry in the Autistic Culture Archive will have its own Field Report, bringing together the research, evidence, rabbit holes and connections we couldn’t squeeze into the show — and inviting you to add your own field notes to an archive that is never truly finished

As always, we’ll take you through everything coming up across the Autistic Culture Podcast Network this week!

This Week’s Topics:

• Are autistic people more vulnerable to extremist content?

• People with higher autistic traits tend to avoid positive relationship-maintenance tactics

Strange Journey: The Story of Rocky Horror:

• Prime Video UK listing

• Apple TV UK listing

• JustWatch UK

• Prime Video US listing

📻 On Air This Week:

Monday 5th October

Mindful Mondays with Ashley Dupuy

Ashley returns with another mindful reflection and guided meditation to help neurodivergent listeners begin the week with intention and regulation.

The Still Growing Up Film Club - Episode 6: How to Be You and Find Your People with Matilda

In the Season One finale of The Still Growing Up Film Club, Cece Fanning revisits the beloved 1996 film Matilda to explore belonging, justice, community and the families we find for ourselves.

Growing up in a family that neither understands nor appreciates her, Matilda learns to rely on herself from an extraordinarily young age. But through books, school, friendship and eventually Miss Honey, she begins to discover something different: there are people in the world who will value you precisely for the things that make you different.

Tuesday 6th October

Autistic Standpoint Theory - Episode 4: Autism, Identity & the Science of Being Seen

In the final episode of Autistic Standpoint Theory, Isha Snow is joined by psychometrician, mixed-methods researcher and autistic self-advocate Scott Frasard, PhD, to explore what happens when an autistic researcher turns the tools of measurement back towards the systems attempting to measure autistic people.

Scott discusses how being autistic shapes the way he approaches research, including his ability to recognise patterns, contradictions and assumptions that others may overlook. Together, he and Isha explore psychometrics, research methodology, autistic participation in research and why lived experience matters when deciding what questions get asked in the first place.

Wednesday 7th October

The Neurocomplex Creative - Season 2 Episode 5: Lucy Lane’s Story

In this episode of The Neurocomplex Creative, Vicki Peterson sits down with her daughter, Lucy Lane, a young actor, singer and musical theatre performer beginning her professional career in New York City.

Lucy reflects on growing up as a child actor in Hollywood, discovering acting techniques that helped her feel more grounded, and what she’s learning about building a creative life around a brain and body that don’t always work like everyone else’s. She and Vicki discuss EDS, dysautonomia, advocating for invisible needs and navigating the physical demands of professional performance without allowing a medical record to define what’s possible.

Clinical Misfits - Season 2 Episode 4: What If Your Neurological Symptoms Can’t Be Explained? | Functional Neurological Disorder

In this episode of Clinical Misfits, Dr Mary explores functional neurological disorder (FND), a term used to describe neurological symptoms that can include changes in sensation, speech and movement, paralysis and seizure-like episodes. She questions the language historically used to describe these experiences and what happens when unexplained symptoms are too readily dismissed as psychological or “all in your head.”

Dr Mary considers the relationship between these symptoms, the autonomic nervous system and trauma, particularly for neurodivergent people whose lives may include experiences of bullying, rejection, chronic illness, pain and other forms of trauma. She also discusses approaches used to manage symptoms, from medication and trauma therapies to sensory regulation, movement and other forms of self-care.

Thursday 8th October

The Neurodivergent Experience - Episode 131

Jordan James and Simon Scott return for a conversation about the Neurodivergent Experience!

📚 From the Archive - Friday 9th October

Autistic Culture Podcast Rewind – Cats is Autistic

In this episode of The Autistic Culture Podcast, hosts Dr Angela Kingdon and Matt Lowry, LPP, draw connections between the behaviours and traits exhibited by cats and the common experiences of autistic individuals.

Please rate, share and review our shows, as it helps them grow and reach more people! ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

🎧 Autistic Culture Radio

Looking for a different way to experience ACPN? Autistic Culture Radio is our curated Spotify listening experience, blending music with every programme released across the Autistic Culture Podcast Network.

Updated daily, each episode pairs carefully chosen songs inspired by its themes, creating a continuous soundtrack to Autistic culture. Save the playlist to your Spotify library and dip in whenever you want to discover new conversations, music and voices from across the network.

Want bonus content, early access, and ad-free listening across the entire network?

Join Autistic Culture Plus to support autistic creators and help us commission even more shows from our community.

Join Autistic Culture +

This Week in Autistic Culture has been recognized by Eurowaves as one of the best podcasts in Europe.

Thank you to Eurowaves for recognizing This Week in Autistic Culture and for making space for independent European podcasts. It means a great deal to see an Autistic-led show included among the best being made in Europe.

Every week, we make this show with a very specific idea in mind: Autistic people deserve a place to hear the stories of our culture: The art we are making, the books we are writing, the shows we are creating, the research that helps us understand ourselves, and the Autistic people doing interesting, joyful, strange, brilliant things around the world.

Autistic life is so much bigger than diagnosis, deficit, and the things other people think need fixing. It’s culture. And week after week, we are building an archive of it in real time.

And apparently, Europe is listening. ❤️

Thank you to everyone who listens, shares an episode, sends us a story, tells a friend about the show, or helps us find another little corner of Autistic culture worth celebrating.

Thank you, Eurowaves.
Read Eurowaves’ Best European Podcasts feature

Welcome to This Week in Autistic Culture

Welcome to another edition of This Week in Autistic Culture, our magazine podcast that brings together the stories, conversations and ideas shaping Autistic culture each week.

This week, Simon is back from holiday and joins Angela to unpack new guidance from the National Autistic Society stating that autism is genetic and lifelong. They discuss why that message matters, the misinformation that still surrounds the causes of autism, and why something seemingly so straightforward can still provoke disagreement.

They also turn to controversial proposals for tackling England’s huge ADHD assessment backlog, asking what happens when access to diagnosis and support is increasingly reserved for those deemed to have the greatest clinical need.

There’s also big news from ACPN as Angela and Simon reveal the first trailer for Season Four of The Autistic Culture Podcast, with Simon joining Angela as co-host when the show returns in October.

As always, we’ll take you through everything coming up across the Autistic Culture Podcast Network this week, before heading to the Community Notice Board for books, research, events and opportunities from across the wider Autistic community.

🎧 Start Here: Autistic Culture Radio

Looking for a different way to experience ACPN? Autistic Culture Radio is our curated Spotify listening experience, blending music with every programme released across the Autistic Culture Podcast Network.

Updated daily, each episode pairs carefully chosen songs inspired by its themes, creating a continuous soundtrack to Autistic culture. Save the playlist to your Spotify library and dip in whenever you want to discover new conversations, music and voices from across the network.

📻 On Air This Week:

Monday 28th September

Mindful Mondays with Ashley Dupuy

Ashley returns with another mindful reflection and guided meditation to help neurodivergent listeners begin the week with intention and regulation.

The Still Growing Up Film Club - Episode 5: How to Graduate at the Top of Your Class AND Have Fun with Booksmart

In this episode of The Still Growing Up Film Club, Cece Fanning heads back to high school with Booksmart, following best friends Molly and Amy as they attempt to squeeze four years of missed parties, bad decisions and teenage chaos into one unforgettable night before graduation.

As their carefully constructed plans spectacularly unravel, Cece explores what the film can teach us about perfectionism, achievement, friendship and the danger of assuming we already understand the people around us. She also looks at the pressure to be known for one particular thing — whether that’s being smart, successful or neurodivergent — and what happens when other people see a very different version of us from the person we know ourselves to be.

Tuesday 29th September

Autistic Standpoint Theory - Episode 3: Autistic Cognition and Religious Trauma

In this episode of Autistic Standpoint Theory, Isha Snow is joined by AuDHD seminary student Willow Shirtz for a deeply personal conversation about autistic cognition, faith, identity and religious trauma.

Raised in a devout Mormon household, Willow reflects on entering missionary service with genuine belief and the experiences that eventually forced them to question both their faith and the expectations placed upon them. They discuss what it means to process belief, morality and contradiction through an autistic lens — particularly when the systems around you demand certainty and conformity.

Content note: This episode contains discussion of religious trauma, mental health, psychiatric treatment and difficult family experiences, as well as strong language.

Wednesday 30th September

The Neurocomplex Creative - Season 2 Episode 4: Your Seat Is Still Warm

In this episode of The Neurocomplex Creative, Vicki Peterson sits down with her executive producer Angela Kingdon, co-founder of the Autistic Culture Podcast Network, for a behind-the-scenes conversation about creating when your brain and body no longer allow you to work the way you once did.

Vicki and Angela explore skill regression, autistic burnout and the grief of changing capacity, alongside the importance of building creative practices around real human needs rather than conventional ideas of productivity.

Angela shares how her own experience of burnout changed the way she thinks about supporting creatives, and why podcasting can offer neurodivergent creators greater autonomy over how, when and where they work.

Clinical Misfits - Season 2 Episode 2: Are We Getting Neurodivergent Accommodations Wrong?

In this episode of Clinical Misfits, Dr Mary explores the relationship between dysautonomia, neurodivergence and the need for school and workplace accommodations. She questions whether current assessment processes adequately recognise physical symptoms such as fatigue, brain fog, dizziness, pain, sensory sensitivities and difficulties regulating heart rate, blood pressure and body temperature.

Dr Mary looks at how dysautonomia might be recognised and investigated in healthcare, and argues for greater involvement from medical professionals when determining the support someone needs. She also discusses practical routes towards better quality of life, from physical and occupational therapy to nutrition, movement and other forms of ongoing support.

Thursday 1st October

The Neurodivergent Experience - Episode 130

Jordan James and Simon Scott return for a conversation about the Neurodivergent Experience!

NEW SHOW - The Dialogues - Episode 1: Autistic Advocacy, History and the Neurodiversity Movement

New Episodes on the first of the month!

In the first episode of The Dialogues, Kassiane Asasumasu, Morénike Giwa-Onaiwu, Renae Martin, and Oswin Latimer explore the history, politics, and lived realities of Autistic advocacy.

Drawing on decades of experience within the Autistic and disability communities, the group discusses the growing use of terms such as “profound autism”, the complicated relationship between diagnosis and support needs, and what happens when disabled people are denied the resources and autonomy they need to live in their communities.

They also reflect on the history of Autistic-led organising, the early online communities that helped shape the neurodiversity movement, and the personal cost that advocacy has sometimes carried for the people doing the work.

📚 From the Archive - Friday 2nd October

Autistic Culture Podcast Rewind – McEnroe is Autistic

In this episode of The Autistic Culture Podcast, hosts Matt Lowry, LPP and Dr Angela Kingdon take a fresh look at tennis legend John McEnroe, reframing his legacy through a neurodiversity-affirming lens.

Please rate, share and review our shows, as it helps them grow and reach more people! ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

📌 Community Noticeboard

The Community Noticeboard is your space to share what’s happening across autistic culture. Whether you’re launching a book, hosting an event, releasing a podcast, starting a creative project, celebrating a milestone, or have something you’d like the community to know about, we’d love to hear from you.

Send your announcements, links and updates to autisticculturepodcast@gmail.com, and we’ll feature as many as we can in a future edition of This Week in Autistic Culture.

This Week’s Topics:

• The National Autistic Society finally says Autism is Genetic

• ADHD symptoms should not lead to automatic diagnosis, says review

• Plan to limit NHS diagnoses of ADHD attacked as ‘rationing’ healthcare

• Kennedy names new chair for US autism advisory panel

Books and Research:

• Overcoming the Wall of Awful: Why It’s Hard to Get Things Done with ADHD, Autism, and Anxiety (and how to do them anyway)

• “A Delightful Embodiment of Dichotomies”: A Qualitative Exploration of Self-Concept and Identity Among Autistic and Non-Autistic People

Events:

Want bonus content, early access, and ad-free listening across the entire network?

Join Autistic Culture Plus to support autistic creators and help us commission even more shows from our community.

Join Autistic Culture +

Have a Show Idea?

The Autistic Culture Podcast Network is always looking for new voices and new perspectives.

If you have an idea for a podcast grounded in Autistic lived experience, culture, identity, advocacy, creativity, or special interests, we’d love to hear from you.

Submit Your Idea

Coming Up in Autistic Culture

September 28–October 4, 2026

Sept. 29 | Autistic Collective: Board Games | Bromley, England — Free board-game night for Autistic adults 18+ at the Bricklayers Arms. 🇬🇧

Sept. 30–Oct. 1 | A Small Enclosed Room with Alfie Murphy | Oxford, England — Autistic artists Cian Binchy and Anna Constable perform a dark comedy about masking, identity and mental health at Oxford Playhouse. Every performance is relaxed and captioned. 🇬🇧

Oct. 1 & 4 | Joe Wells: Daddy Autism | UK — New stand-up show from Autistic comedian Joe Wells. Oct. 1: Truro; Oct. 4: Bristol. 🇬🇧
Note from Angela: I have been to a show on this tour in Bristol, and it was brilliant. 5 stars!

Oct. 1–Nov. 5 | Heart n Soul Choir | London + online — Six-week inclusive choir programme at The Albany, with both in-person and online participation. 🇬🇧

Oct. 2 | Good Chaos Party | London, England — Heart n Soul club night with DJs, live music and art for young people with learning disabilities and young Autistic people ages 10–25. £5 or pay what you decide. 🇬🇧

Oct. 2 | Being Michelle at Inthrive Film Festival | Richmond, Virginia — Screening of Being Michelle, about a Deaf Autistic woman, followed by a discussion of disability and the criminal legal system. ASL interpretation provided. 🇺🇸

Oct. 2–4 | Robert White: THAT Gay Autistic Keyboard Tanktop Comedy Guy! | UK tour — Autistic comedian and musician Robert White brings his musical comedy show to Aberystwyth Oct. 2, Leicester Oct. 3, and Salford Oct. 4, with two Salford performances. 🇬🇧

Oct. 2–Nov. 5 | Heart n Soul autumn programme | London, England — Heart n Soul’s autumn cultural programme begins this week, including choir, music-making and social events created with and for people with learning disabilities and Autistic people. 🇬🇧

Oct. 3 | Sensory-Friendly Family Morning at the Charles M. Schulz Museum | Santa Rosa, California — Early museum opening for disabled and neurodivergent families, with Peanuts films, art activities, DIY fidgets and sensory tables. Free with registration. 🇺🇸

Oct. 3 | Fiesta with Flor sensory-friendly performance | New Brunswick, New Jersey — Flor Bromley’s interactive Latin American music and storytelling show offers a noon sensory-friendly performance for children on the Autism spectrum and children with sensory sensitivities. 🇺🇸

Oct. 3 | Luxembourg Autism Foundation 30th Anniversary Jazz Concert | Sanem, Luxembourg — Luxembourg Jazz Orchestra and singer Magali Dahan perform at Artikuss to celebrate 30 years of Fondation Autisme Luxembourg. 🇱🇺

Oct. 4 | Family Autism Art Workshop | West Palm Beach, Florida — Free Norton Museum of Art programme combining gallery exploration and art-making with sensory-friendly materials, headphones, fidgets and quiet spaces. 🇺🇸

Oct. 4 | Sensory Sunday at Manitoba Museum | Winnipeg, Canada — The museum lowers or switches off gallery sounds, adjusts lighting and opens its Quiet Room for a sensory-friendly museum morning. 🇨🇦

Oct. 4 | Autistic Women & Non-Binary Friendship Groups | Portland, Oregon + online — Two Autistic social gatherings on Sunday: an in-person Portland group from 3:30–5 p.m. and a free online group from 6–7:30 p.m. The Portland group is currently full. 🇺🇸

Got an event you would like featured in our Autistic Culture Community calendar? Drop us a line at least 2 weeks before your event!

A new study asked a different question: What if some of those movements are part of who we are?

Amy Pearson of Durham University, Helen Knight of the University of Aberdeen, Ray Winter of Durham, Autistic researcher Kieran Rose and Jon Rees of the University of Sunderland interviewed 103 people about self-concept: 51 Autistic people, 10 neurodivergent people who were not Autistic and 42 neurotypical people.

Their study, “A Delightful Embodiment of Dichotomies”: A Qualitative Exploration of Self-Concept and Identity Among Autistic and Non-Autistic People, was published online September 1 in Autism in Adulthood. Pearson and Rose are identified as Autistic researchers by the Autistic Autism Scholarship Project. (Sage Journals)

The researchers were interested in something broader than Autistic identity. They wanted to know how Autistic people understand the self.

Participants could answer interview questions in writing or speech. They were also invited to submit an artifact, such as a photograph or drawing, representing who they were.

The researchers identified three themes.

One came from a participant who wondered whether “the idea of the self might be one of those neurotypical things.”

It wasn’t.

The neurotypical participants also struggled to define themselves.

Across groups, people described selfhood as complicated, changing and dependent on context. Neurodivergent participants generally considered knowing they were neurodivergent important to understanding themselves, although it was not necessarily the most important thing about them.

That finding aligns with Pillar 2 of Autistic Culture which is “Rhythmically Communicating.” Listen to the full podcast episode here:

In the study’s third theme, “Unapologetically me,” Autistic participants described authentic expression as embodied. Being able to stim freely could be part of being themselves.

The researchers make the significance of this finding unusually explicit in their community brief. Stimming and interests, they write, can be “core to autistic self-concept.” They say the role of stimming can extend beyond validation or self-regulation because it can be part of who an Autistic person is. (Sage Journals)

That places a familiar Autistic behavior in unfamiliar territory.

Stimming has acquired several explanations over the history of Autism.

Within a deficit framework, repetitive movement became one of the behaviors by which Autism could be identified. The clinical language survives in diagnostic descriptions of restricted and repetitive behaviors.

Autistic accounts have added considerably more information. People stim because it feels good. We stim when excited. We stim when distressed. Movement can help regulate sensory input or emotion. Some stims help us concentrate. Others express joy.

The Pearson study adds another possibility.

Sometimes the movement is us.

That distinction becomes easier to see outside Autism.

Nobody requires a dancer to demonstrate that movement serves a regulatory function before accepting movement as self-expression. We understand that people have characteristic gestures, postures and ways of inhabiting their bodies. People communicate identity through clothing, hair, voice, facial expression and movement.

Autistic bodies have often been interpreted through a different vocabulary.

A hand movement can become a symptom. Pacing becomes repetitive behavior. A sound becomes a vocalization. An intense attachment to an interest becomes a restriction.

The researchers found that Autistic participants’ ability to express themselves was also shaped by what happened when other people saw those expressions.

Social power runs through the study.

Autistic and other neurodivergent participants described negative judgments that affected their ability to know and express themselves. The consequences they feared were sometimes severe. The researchers report that participants considered how being judged by other people could affect employment, relationships and, for some, even the possibility of having their children taken away. (Sage Journals)

Authenticity therefore existed within constraints.

An Autistic person may experience a movement as an expression of self while simultaneously calculating whether the person watching considers it inappropriate, unprofessional, childish or evidence of incapacity.

That calculation is familiar territory for research on masking. Pearson and Rose co-authored Autistic Masking: Understanding Identity Management and the Role of Stigma in 2023, and the new paper builds on a body of research examining the social consequences of appearing visibly Autistic. (Sage Journals)

Here the question shifts slightly.

Suppressing a stim may remove something from view. If stimming forms part of self-expression, suppression can also alter how much of the self is permitted into the room.

The study does not establish that every stim carries identity meaning for every Autistic person. It does not claim that regulation has ceased to matter. Its participants cannot represent the full Autistic population; the authors specifically note the limited representation of Autistic people with learning disabilities. Qualitative research of this kind describes how participants understand their experience rather than measuring how universally those experiences occur. (Sage Journals)

There is another useful complication in the findings.

Autism was important to many participants without consuming their identities.

The researchers found that people understood themselves through multiple parts of their lives and social worlds. An intervention intended to foster positive Autistic identity, they argue, should allow people to explore what being Autistic means to them and how it fits alongside everything else that makes them who they are. (Sage Journals)

That is a more expansive idea of Autistic identity than exchanging a negative clinical description for a positive one.

People learn culturally intelligible ways of greeting, looking, touching, sitting, dressing, celebrating and expressing emotion.

Autistic Culture is expressed through our bodies.

UNSW is holding the screenings as part of its annual Diversity Festival and are followed by conversations with d/Deaf, disabled, and allied participants about leadership, representation, and equity. UNSW’s event listing is here. If you haven’t seen this yet and have a way to get Apple TV, I highly recommend viewing it. This film captures the event that is the greatest inspiration for my founding of the Autistic Culture Institute.

Deaf President Now! was a student campaign that “transformed a university and helped reshape disability rights around the world.”

If you aren’t familiar with this story, it was back in March of 1988, that the all-hearing Gallaudet University Board of Trustees selected another hearing president. Imagine a school of Autistic kids with a non-Autistic Board of Trustees, (it’s not so hard to imagine, because that’s most of them) selecting a neurotypical school principal or head teacher.

In this case, the Gallaudet students had had enough.

They shut down the campus and demanded a Deaf president. The protest became known as Deaf President Now.

For much of the twentieth century, Deafness (like autism) was framed primarily as a medical deficit to be corrected. Most people had hearing, those who didn’t were broken.

From the outside looking in, that could seem extremely difficult to argue with. Many people, including many deaf people, did not argue with it for a long time.

Clinical and educational systems treated hearing loss as a disorder, and the treatment was speech training, lip-reading, and technological intervention, often at the expense of sign language and Deaf social life. Deaf people were encouraged to understand themselves as having an impairment rather than as members of a linguistic or cultural minority.

That medical framing shaped institutions - as it does for Autistic people, too.

Back in 1988, however, the evidence began to catch up with what Deaf people already knew. Linguists demonstrated that American Sign Language is a fully developed natural language, with its own grammar, syntax, and expressive capacity, independent of spoken English. Deaf scholars and advocates increasingly articulated something larger: Deafness involved participation in a shared linguistic and cultural world.

Deaf Culture came to be understood through shared norms, values, histories, and social practices transmitted through language and community. Deaf identity was no longer defined exclusively by the absence of hearing. It could also be understood through participation in a Deaf social world organized around visual communication and collective experience.

The students were making a claim larger than one personnel decision. Gallaudet existed primarily to educate Deaf and hard-of-hearing students, yet hearing people remained in control of the institution.

The students were asking who possessed the authority to lead a Deaf institution.

They demanded Deaf leadership and institutional self-determination. The protest drew national attention and the Deaf students won. After days of demonstrations, the university appointed I. King Jordan as Gallaudet’s first Deaf president.

In Autistic Culture, I describe the movement as a critical moment in Deaf cultural reclassification because Deaf people asserted cultural authority over an institution that had long defined them through a medical or paternalistic lens.

Our essence has almost always been defined through the lens of the neurotypical. We are the “Others.”

Our culture includes practices and norms that foster safety, joy, and belonging in environments where sensory, social, and cognitive differences can be recognized and supported rather than suppressed. It includes direct communication, individuality, authenticity, stimming, scripting, echolalia, deep connections around special interests, and ways of understanding one another that often become visible only when Autistic people are together.

In many cultures, cultural knowledge moves vertically from one generation to the next. Parents teach children the language, stories, rituals, foods, expectations, and history of their people.

Autistic Culture, like Deaf culture, often travels horizontally.

We encounter other Autistic people and suddenly discover that something we thought was an individual eccentricity has a name. Someone explains masking. Someone else talks about scripting. We hear another person describe the way they experience sound, food, justice, routines, friendship, or special interests and recognize ourselves.

Autistic advocates, writers, musicians, researchers, podcasters, and artists become transmitters of Autistic Culture. We articulate shared experiences, name common practices, and make cultural knowledge available to people who may have spent decades without access to it.

The cultural recognition of Deaf people did not make deafness disappear. It did not eliminate medical care. It did not settle every disagreement within the Deaf community. It did not remove every structural barrier Deaf people faced, but it changed who possessed the authority to explain what Deafness meant.

Cultural recognition allowed Deaf people to understand themselves as members of a cultural minority rather than exclusively as patients or recipients of accommodations. Deaf studies scholars have documented the consequences for education, advocacy, identity formation, and community cohesion.

The cultural shift I am interested in does not require pretending that autistic people do not need support. Autistic people have widely varying support needs. Some of us require substantial medical, educational, communication, or daily-living assistance.

Cultural recognition asks a different question: Who gets to define us?

Autistic people have spent generations being described as obsessive, rigid, antisocial, rude, detached, impaired, and disordered.

Ask Autistic people to describe ourselves and different language begins to appear: passionate, systematic, precise, principled, detail-oriented, direct, thorough, connected, observant, sensitive, and, quite often, traumatically misunderstood.

The outsider and insider are looking at the same people.

They are interpreting what they see through different cultures.

Recognizing Autistic Culture creates space for Autistic people to participate in defining what our traits mean. It does not require declaring allistic ways of living wrong. Italian culture does not require Japanese culture to be wrong in order to exist. Recognition of difference allows each culture to become more visible, including the dominant culture that previously appeared simply to be “normal.”

The students who occupied Gallaudet in 1988 were not asking hearing people to understand them a little better.

They were demanding the authority to lead an institution built around their own lives. It’s the same demand we are making at the Autistic Culture Institute. By sharing our message, you can help us do just that.

In December of 2024, we made an episode of the Autistic Advocacy show on ACPN called Takiwātanga Tension which provided a break down of this term

Finally, a new study from Aotearoa New Zealand is challenging something that appears on government, health, education, and Autism websites: the idea that takiwātanga is simply the Māori word for Autism.

The study, published September 12 in the peer-reviewed journal Neurodiversity, looks at takiwātanga, a te reo Māori (Māori language) word meaning ‘in my/his/her/their own time and space’, as a way to think about autism without colonial ideas. The diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder can make autism seem like a problem, but takiwātanga comes from Māori ways of thinking that see difference as natural and important. Keri Opai coined the word takiwātanga in 2017 from older Māori words. Many people use the word, but there is not much written about what it means.

As we discussed on our episode, the term meaning “my/his/her/their own time and space” was coined by non-autistic Māori linguist and educator Keri Opai in 2017 while developing Te Reo Hāpai, a glossary for the mental health, addiction, and disability sectors.

The new paper develops that argument through what the researchers call a “polyvocal dialogic enquiry.” The four authors occupy different positions in the discussion. Newcombe is an Autistic Pākehā woman. Thomas is Māori and non-disabled. Tawa is Māori and takiwātanga. Amundsen is a non-Autistic Pākehā academic. “All authors agreed that takiwātanga is not a translation of autism,” they write.

Nicolina Newcombe, Tania Thomas, Maioha Tawa, and Diana Amundsen describe takiwātanga as a concept grounded in Māori understandings of difference, relationships, ancestry, and belonging. Autism, by contrast, entered Aotearoa through a Western medical system that classified particular characteristics as symptoms of a disorder.

They do not claim to speak for all Māori people or all people who identify as takiwātanga. They describe their work as a situated conversation in which Māori knowledge retains cultural authority.

“Takiwātanga has nothing to do with autism, and vice versa,” educator Dorothy Taare-Smith said in earlier research quoted by the authors.

While Opai is not Autistic, he consulted Autistic Pākehā, including his lifelong friend Peter Galvin and Autistic leader Matt Frost, as well as clinicians. According to the paper, he did not consult Māori people whom Western medicine would describe as Autistic.

From the perspective of Autistic self-advocacy, that can look uncomfortable. Autistic communities have spent decades arguing that language about Autistic people should not be created without us.

Newcombe raised exactly that problem during the researchers’ discussion.

Thomas offered a different cultural framework. In te ao Māori, she explained, creating a new Māori name is not necessarily a matter of asking the people being named to translate an existing Western category. Language specialists work from the values and meaning surrounding a concept and determine how it should be understood within Māori knowledge.

Opai put the question more directly in a May 2026 communication quoted in the study: “We, Māori people are the right ones to be making these decisions.”

Tawa, the Māori takiwātanga author, added another complication.

“The name is not for the disabled person; the name is for the one who is looking at them and saying they are different,” she said. “I am my normal.”

A medical diagnosis identifies characteristics located within an individual. The researchers describe takiwātanga as relational. The person exists within whakapapa, the network of genealogy and relationships connecting people to whānau, ancestors, and community.

The paper traces some of that difference to Māori understandings of disability before and after colonisation. Drawing on previous Māori scholarship, the authors describe Western disability categories as imported concepts that do not map neatly onto te ao Māori. Māori frameworks have historically understood wellbeing across physical, mental, spiritual, and relational dimensions rather than locating difference exclusively inside an individual body or brain.

Thomas describes Māori thought as allowing multiple truths rather than requiring every difference to fit opposing categories. Tawa illustrates this with Matariki, the star cluster whose number of recognised stars differs among regions and iwi. One account does not have to invalidate another.

“Takiwātanga is an acknowledgement of our differences,” she says.

The paper does not suggest that takiwātanga should simply replace Autistic everywhere.

Newcombe does not use the word for herself. Although she describes seeing its international appeal, including an American Autistic friend who has takiwātanga tattooed on her wrist, she continues to identify as Autistic because that is the community to which she feels connected.

The Māori authors nevertheless leave open the possibility that non-Māori people may use the term.

Thomas says she sees no reason to prevent people who connect with takiwātanga from embracing it. Tawa agrees, with a condition: people using it should learn where the word comes from and what it means.

That becomes more difficult as the word travels.

A Māori concept can be adopted internationally precisely because its English gloss, “in their own time and space,” is immediately attractive to Autistic people who have spent their lives being measured against someone else’s time, social expectations, developmental milestones, or ideas about normality.

Near the middle of the study, Tawa describes receiving her own assessment. She remembers its language as telling her that she was broken, and she did not want to tell people about it.

Takiwātanga gave her another way to name what the clinicians had named.

“If I were diagnosed as takiwātanga,” she said, “that would be something I would embrace instead of running away from.”

Reading Rainbow host, Mychal Threets was diagnosed as Autistic quite recently (in April 2026) and I am so happy he found a word explaining his diagnosis to fully embrace, but I still think understanding the background of this term is helpful context to have.

Welcome to This Week in Autistic Culture

Welcome to another edition of This Week in Autistic Culture, our magazine podcast that brings together the stories, conversations and ideas shaping Autistic culture each week.

With Simon away on a much-needed holiday, Angela is joined by ACPN’s Head of Finance — and her husband — Paul Kingdon. Together, they dive into journalist and broadcaster Scott Bryan’s story of discovering he was Autistic at 34, after experiencing sensory overwhelm while working at Eurovision. His lifelong love of the competition had already helped shape his career, bringing together late diagnosis, fandom and the power of special interests.

That leads into a wider conversation about what happens when a special interest becomes your job. Angela and Paul reflect on their own experiences of turning passions into professions, and ask whether something can still provide the same comfort, joy and regulation once deadlines, expectations and sensory demands become attached to it.

As always, we’ll also take you through everything coming up across the Autistic Culture Podcast Network this week, including Bridget Jones’s Diary on Still Growing Up Film Club, cultural mismatch on Autistic Standpoint Theory, sensitivity and belonging on The Neuro Complex Creative, the return of Clinical Misfits, another Neurodivergent Experience and a Friday rewind exploring Autistic productivity.

Plus, we head to the Community Notice Board for new books, research, resources and events from across the wider Autistic community, including a free programme for recently identified Autistic adults, new research into Minecraft and sensory regulation, and opportunities for Autistic young people.

🎧 Start Here: Autistic Culture Radio

Looking for a different way to experience ACPN? Autistic Culture Radio is our curated Spotify listening experience, blending music with every programme released across the Autistic Culture Podcast Network.

Updated daily, each episode is paired with carefully chosen songs inspired by its themes, creating a continuous soundtrack to Autistic culture. Save the playlist to your Spotify library and dip in whenever you want to discover new conversations, music and voices from across the network.

📻 On Air This Week:

Monday 21st September

Mindful Mondays with Ashley Dupuy

Ashley returns with another mindful reflection and guided meditation to help neurodivergent listeners begin the week with intention and regulation.

The Still Growing Up Film Club - Episode 4: How to Find the Love of Your Life and Yourself with Bridget Jones’s Diary

In this episode of The Still Growing Up Film Club, Cece Fanning opens the diary on one of the most beloved romantic comedies of all time, Bridget Jones’s Diary, and makes the case that Bridget’s story is also a coming-of-age film — just one where the person growing up happens to already be in her thirties.

From New Year’s resolutions and disastrous dates to career changes, embarrassing family gatherings and questionable romantic decisions, Cece follows Bridget as she tries to build the life she thinks she’s supposed to want. Along the way, she explores people-pleasing, masking, self-doubt, trusting your instincts and the uncomfortable feeling that everyone around you has adulthood figured out while you’re still making it up as you go.

Tuesday 22nd September

Autistic Standpoint Theory - Episode 2: Autism Is Not a Disorder, It’s a Cultural Mismatch

In this episode of Autistic Standpoint Theory, Isha Snow is joined by autistic advocate and technology professional Sam Farmer to explore what happens when autistic people are expected to navigate systems built around different ways of communicating, learning and relating to the world.

Drawing on Sam’s career in technology and his experience as an autistic self-advocate, they discuss neurodiversity-affirming support, accommodations and the importance of involving autistic people in the development of tools and services intended for their community.

Wednesday 23rd September

The Neurocomplex Creative - Season 2 Episode 3: Safe to Be Seen

In this episode of The Neurocomplex Creative, Vicki Peterson reconnects with her high school prom date and longtime friend Jesse Keene to explore sensitivity, intuition and the survival skills we carry with us from childhood into adult life.

Together, they reflect on growing up highly sensitive in difficult environments, learning to read the people around them, and how those early adaptations can develop into people-pleasing, masking and losing ourselves in order to feel safe. Jesse traces his own journey through corporate success, meditation and spiritual communities towards a more intentional life rooted in Ayurveda, healing and wellness.

Clinical Misfits - Season 2 Premiere - Episode 1: Why Are Neurodivergence, Dysautonomia and hEDS So Connected?

In this episode, Dr Mary revisits ideas explored in Season One before turning her attention to hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos syndrome (hEDS), dysautonomia and their relationship with neurodivergence. She explores the potential role of chondroitin sulfate in connective tissue and the nervous system, including its involvement in structures surrounding nerve cells known as perineuronal nets.

From there, Dr Mary considers how differences in synaptic pruning could influence the way neurodivergent nervous systems process and retain signals. Using pain and the body’s autonomic response as an example, she explores a possible connection between neurological development, heightened nervous-system responses and the complex physical symptoms experienced by many neurodivergent people.

Thursday 24th September

The Neurodivergent Experience - Episode 129

Jordan James and Simon Scott return for a conversation about the Neurodivergent Experience!

📚 From the Archive - Friday 25th September

Autistic Culture Podcast Rewind – Productivity is Autistic

In this episode of The Autistic Culture Podcast, hosts Dr Angela Kingdon and Matt Lowry LPP take on the self-help mega-hit Atomic Habits by James Clear—exploring why its behaviourist strategies fail for autistic people, and what actually works when it comes to productivity in Autistic Culture.

Please rate, share and review our shows, as it helps them grow and reach more people! ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

📌 Community Noticeboard

The Community Noticeboard is your space to share what’s happening across autistic culture. Whether you’re launching a book, hosting an event, releasing a podcast, starting a creative project, celebrating a milestone, or have something you’d like the community to know about, we’d love to hear from you.

Send your announcements, links and updates to autisticculturepodcast@gmail.com, and we’ll feature as many as we can in a future edition of This Week in Autistic Culture.

This Week’s Topics:

• Eurovision helped TV critic Scott Bryan discover he was Autistic at 34.

• Helen Edgar of Autistic Realms and Thriving Autistic has announced this week that The Discovery Programme for recently identified Autistic adults.

Books and Research:

• The Complete College Skills Guide for Neurodivergent Students Understanding the Science of Learning for Academic Success By Florencia Ardon

• Tailoring DBT for Autistic Clients by Amara Brook and Rachel Leah Kraus

Events:

• GROVE - Online Community for Autistic Young People is kicking off their autumn round of Being Me programs on October 5th.

• Jess Telling’s production of her play Chamelon - Friday, 25th September 2026 (7pm - 8pm)

Want bonus content, early access, and ad-free listening across the entire network?

Join Autistic Culture Plus to support autistic creators and help us commission even more shows from our community.

Join Autistic Culture +

Have a Show Idea?

The Autistic Culture Podcast Network is always looking for new voices and new perspectives.

If you have an idea for a podcast grounded in Autistic lived experience, culture, identity, advocacy, creativity, or special interests, we’d love to hear from you.

Submit Your Idea

Mason, a music tutor who has adapted instruction for Autistic students, and Witt, an Autistic researcher, published their systematic review online September 8 in Update: Applications of Research in Music Education. Out of 1,011 studies on autism and music only 21 texts that met their criteria.

That number tells part of the story.

Music and Autism have been studied together for decades. The relationship has frequently been therapeutic. Researchers have asked whether music might improve communication, social interaction or other characteristics associated with Autism.

Mason and Witt wanted to know what happens when the purpose of music is just music.

They write that music education has been “frequently overlooked” in discussions about supporting Autistic students and that existing research commonly approaches music as therapy or intervention. Their review instead adopts a neurodiversity-affirming framework, one that locates at least some of the difficulty Autistic people encounter in unaccommodating environments.

The distinction changes the child’s role.

A child receiving music therapy is participating in an intervention with goals beyond the music itself. A child in band, choir or music class may be there because she wants to play the trumpet.

The researchers found eight broad areas in which music educators could make that possible, including predictable routines, visual supports, adapted instruction, thoughtful repertoire choices, peer interaction and sensory-aware environments. They recommend clear and literal language, additional processing time and reducing unnecessary noise, visual clutter and physical barriers.

Some recommendations are strikingly ordinary.

Give students a printed schedule. Tell them when performances and deadlines are coming. Use visual clocks or timers to make transitions easier to anticipate. Allow additional time to process an instruction. Make music vocabulary available on a student’s AAC system.

The paper also notes evidence that the music itself usually does not need to be segregated. One practitioner source concluded that repertoire commonly used with non-Autistic students was generally appropriate for Autistic students, with adaptation where necessary.

That places the burden of adaptation somewhere interesting.

The violin does not have to become an Autism intervention. The classroom has to become accessible enough for the Autistic violinist.

Music classrooms present a particularly complicated test of that idea because sound is both the point and a potential access barrier. Ensembles can involve overlapping instruments, sudden changes in volume, fluorescent rehearsal rooms, verbal directions delivered over background noise and the social coordination of performing with other people.

Mason and Witt found recommendations including reduced sound levels, less visual clutter, softer lighting and access to noise-cancelling headphones. They also stress individual variation. Autistic sensory profiles differ, and a modification useful to one student may be irrelevant or counterproductive for another.

The review becomes more interesting when the authors examine who has been producing the knowledge.

Of the 21 texts that survived their screening, only ten were empirical studies. The others were practitioner guides. Among the empirical work, several studies examined educators’ experiences. Only a few incorporated the perspectives of Autistic students themselves. Among the literature reviewed, only one author identified lived experience as an Autistic researcher and music educator.

Mason and Witt therefore end up identifying a problem inside the research they are synthesising.

Researchers have been developing recommendations for Autistic music students without much evidence about how those students experience the recommendations.

The authors call for future research to use participatory and co-design approaches that meaningfully involve Autistic students and Autistic researchers.

There are other reasons to be cautious about turning the review into a rulebook. The evidence base is small. Many recommendations come from practitioner literature rather than large empirical studies. The authors say the existing evidence does not allow them to compare the relative effectiveness of the different strategies, and they call for larger longitudinal and mixed-methods research.

For much of Autism research, creative activity has attracted scientific attention because of what it might reveal, teach or change about an Autistic person. Art becomes art therapy. Theatre becomes social-skills practice. Music becomes a tool for producing another outcome.

There is nothing inherently wrong with therapeutic uses of music for people who want them. The cultural question changes when therapy becomes the principal lens through which Autistic participation is imagined.

An Autistic child can also want to be in orchestra because orchestra is where the cellos are.

The review contains a small detail that captures the difference. Mason and Witt recommend putting music-related vocabulary into the AAC systems of students who use them: symbols and words for instruments, songs and classroom activities, so the student can communicate during music class.

The communication system is being adapted so the Autistic student can participate in the music.

The music does not have to fix the Autistic student.

The curb slopes down to meet the street.

Curb cuts became widespread because wheelchair users needed them. Disabled activists in Berkeley, California, campaigned for them in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when a few inches of concrete could determine whether someone using a wheelchair could cross a street independently.

Then other people started using them.

Parents pushed prams over them. Travelers rolled suitcases across them. Delivery workers used them for carts. Cyclists used them. People who found steps difficult used them.

The phenomenon became known as the curb-cut effect: remove a barrier for disabled people and the resulting environment may work better for people who were never considered its intended beneficiaries.

The curb cut became one of the most familiar examples of universal design, an approach that considers accessibility when something is being designed instead of modifying it afterward for people who cannot use the original version.

We still do an extraordinary amount of the latter.

We create the standard workplace, classroom, hospital, website, event, or performance. A disabled person encounters a barrier. Then we create an exception.

A new theatre production coming to Oxford this month offers a small example of what happens when you reverse that order.

The relaxed performance is the performance

On September 30, A Small Enclosed Room with Alfie Murphy opens at Oxford Playhouse.

Created and performed by Autistic artists Cian Binchy and Anna Constable, the 65-minute dark comedy follows Alfie through a world in which reality, fantasy, and masking blur. Oxford Playhouse⁠ promises rock stars, gurus, cardboard cut-outs, a shark, and a rap about Devon.

With Alfie Murphy, there is no separate autism-friendly performance.

Every performance is autism friendly.

Audience members can arrive late, leave and return as needed, and make noise or move during the show. The production also provides visual guides and programs for people with access needs.

This is What Theatrically Authentically Looks Like

That makes particular sense for a piece created by Autistic theatre-makers. It also connects with questions Sarah Atherton-Knight and Simon Scott explored throughout the first season of our Autistic Culture Podcast Network show Theatrically Authentic⁠.

Theatre can be intensely attractive to Autistic people while theatre culture can also demand masking, rapid social interpretation, sensory endurance, and adherence to unwritten rules. Across eight episodes, Sarah and Simon examine performance, backstage life, fandom, auditions, masking, hyperfixation, and what it is like to make a life in theatre as an Autistic person.

What if We Did this Elsewhere?

The same principle could be applied without redesigning civilization.

A workplace could make written instructions, advance meeting agendas, flexible communication, and consideration of noise and lighting ordinary practice. A school could use explicit instructions, predictable schedules, advance warning of changes, opportunities for movement, and quiet spaces without waiting for a child to acquire a diagnosis. A hospital could provide important information in writing as well as verbally, explain procedures before touching patients, communicate what happens next, and provide quieter places to wait.

Autistic people would use those things. Plenty of other people would use them too.

An employee working in a second language may appreciate written instructions. An anxious child may benefit from knowing that Tuesday’s timetable has changed. A frightened patient may remember very little of a doctor’s verbal explanation. Someone with a migraine may need the quiet waiting room.

Which version is the normal one?

The accessibility is part of a larger shift in who gets to make theatre and whose assumptions determine how theatre works.

Cian Binchy and Anna Constable are Autistic artists making a piece about identity, masking, and mental health. On Theatrically Authentic, Autistic theatre-makers examine the culture of their own industry. Autistic people are participating in theatre as artists, workers, critics, fans, and audiences, with enough authority to question some of its inherited rules.

Sometimes that changes what happens on the stage.

Here, it has changed what is expected of the people sitting in front of it.

My diagnosis explained some things, but did not come with an Autistic life. That didn’t come until I started to get to know other Autistic people.

It took me a decade to figure out what being Autistic meant when nobody was assessing me: how I worked, what exhausted me, why certain interests consumed me, what I needed from other people, and which parts of myself I had spent decades treating as problems because other people did.

New research on adults diagnosed after 50 suggests that process is what determins whether you are thriving or surviving as an Autistic person. In a study published this month in the journal Autism, Jennifer A. Kirton, Angela Tod, and Tony Ryan interviewed 14 people between the ages of 50 and 73 about their lives after diagnosis. While all of these people considered their diagnoses beneficial, their subsequent experiences differed considerably depending on whether or not they connected with an Autistic community.

The researchers identified two broad patterns, which they called “surviving” and “thriving.” People in the surviving group continued to describe themselves through self-blame and deficit-based understandings of autism. People in the thriving group described a deeper sense of self-compassion and, most importantly, they had reorganized their lives around an understanding of themselves as Autistic.

The people who were thriving had positive connections with people who had a strong Autistic identity, they had connected with Autistic communities, and they continued making sense of themselves through that knowledge.

For some, like for me, that process took years.

Community Without Having to Enter a Room

The age of the participants in Kirton’s study makes the question of access particularly interesting. All were over 50.

Finding an Autistic peer community at 55 or 65 can present practical problems that are different from finding one at 20. Someone may have spent decades building a life around non-Autistic expectations. They may live somewhere without an Autistic social group. They may have mobility, sensory, communication, work, or caring constraints. Walking into a room full of strangers may itself be inaccessible.

There is also no requirement that somebody who has just discovered they are Autistic immediately become a joiner.

That is part of the reason and I created the Autistic Culture Podcast Network (ACPN). Podcasts offer another kind of commuity. One we think is more accessible to some people.

On ACPN, you can listen to Autistic people talk about music. Writing. Theatre. Creativity. Spirituality. Hobbies. Identity. Health. Relationships. Sports. Film. You name it!

You can listen alone.

You can listen while driving, walking the dog, lying in bed, cooking dinner, or recovering from a day in which you have already spoken to enough people.

Nobody asks you to introduce yourself.

Nobody asks for eye contact.

Nobody notices if you pause halfway through an episode and return three days later.

You can simply have Autistic people in your ears.

Why We Built a Podcast Network

The network does not teach a newly diagnosed person the correct way to be Autistic. There isn’t one, obvi.

What we can do is supply examples.

Currently, we have more than 25 Autistic hosts who offer dozens of different ways of being an Autistic person. With co-hosts, guests, and network growth, those examples multiply. Different countries, genders, ages, interests, communication styles, professions, politics, senses of humor, support needs, and obsessions begin accumulating into something much harder to mistake for a diagnostic stereotype.

Our listeners get to notice where recognition happens for them.

The subject changes completely from one show to another, but they are all created with Autistic people at the center. Creating shows by and for Autistic people is an antidote to a lifetime of content that is created about Autistic people by people speaking for us.

Only 30% of our shows are directly about autism, and that distinction is fundamental to our work at the Autistic Culture Institute. If the only time you encounter another Autistic person is when somebody is discussing the symptoms, difficulties, treatments, or politics of Autism, you might be learning about a diagnostic category. We are MORE than our diagnosis, more than our neurotype even.

Being Autistic is part of our culture, but it’s not all of it. Being Italian-American and wearing clothes with the Italian flag on it is a PART of my Italian-American culture, but it’s not all of it. Cannoli, Mt. Vesuvius, and Italian Horn necklaces and dancing the tarentella are all parts of our culture that I love that extend beyond my Italian DNA.

Culture also happens when people talk about the things they love.

I can learn something about another Autistic person from hearing how intensely they know a musician’s catalogue, how they construct a fictional world, how they approach writing, what they notice in a piece of theatre, or the particular rabbit hole that has occupied them for six months.

Nobody has to stop the conversation and explain, “This is an example of Autistic pattern matching.”

They are simply doing it.

This is part of what it means to encounter positive constructions of Autistic identity. Autistic people appear as hosts, critics, artists, writers, experts, fans, interviewers, storytellers, and extremely enthusiastic people with microphones.

Autism does not disappear, it just stops being the only interesting thing about us.

Put Autistic people in your ears

Someone who discovers at 55 that they are Autistic may have no idea where to find another Autistic adult. There may be no local group. An available group may not feel right. Work, caring responsibilities, disability, geography, or sensory needs may make attending one difficult.

A person may simply have no desire to walk into a room full of strangers and discuss their autism. A lot of that is because of internalised ableism, but undoing that doesn’t come with a diagnosis. It’s a process.

A podcast asks considerably less of you. You can listen while driving or cooking. You can listen in bed. You can stop halfway through an episode if it gets uncomfortable or just boring. You do not have to introduce yourself or explain why you are there.

You can have Autistic people in your ears before you are ready to have Autistic people in your living room.

For someone who has spent five or six decades assuming that almost everyone around them experiences the world more or less as they do, repeated exposure to other Autistic people can provide a different reference point.

Our Community Changes the Stories Available to Us

We need information about ourselves before we can shift our perceptions of who we are. We need opportunities to reconsider the explanations we’ve carried for decades. We need to encounter Autistic lives that are recognizable without being identical to their own.

This matters because many people diagnosed after 50 have spent half a century receiving other explanations.

Too sensitive.

Too intense.

Too difficult.

Too obsessive.

Too antisocial.

Too much.

A diagnostic assessment can replace some of those explanations with a word.

Autistic.

Then you have to discover what that word can contain.

The point of a cultural network is not to produce a model Autistic person. It is to make the variety harder to miss.

This new study describes positive Autistic narratives as part of the process associated with thriving. I think the word positive can be misunderstood here. A healthy Autistic narrative does not require every Autistic person to be happy, successful, or inspirational. It leaves room for disability, difficulty, dependence, burnout, loneliness, and frustration. It also leaves room for an Autistic person to spend an hour talking about theatre.

The researchers argue that adults need more support after diagnosis. They recommend identity-affirming information, opportunities to connect with the Autistic community, and continuing opportunities to make meaning from a newly understood identity.

They specifically point toward Autistic-led programs combining peer support and psychoeducation.

For a newly identified Autistic person, ordinary Autistic lives can be surprisingly difficult to find.

I know what it is like to spend decades without an explanation and finally receive one. I also know that the life I have now did not arrive with my diagnostic report.

I had to meet Autistic people.

With ACPN there is another way to hear those voices and meet those people while you are still in the chyralis phase.

Just put on your headphones and listen to Autistic people talk about something they love.