Emma: Welcome to Positive Disintegration, A Path to Authenticity. In this episode, we're going to be covering the second half of a two-part conversation with Nth Bar-Fields and Joi Lin. And this is a conversation around the experiences of being profoundly gifted. In this episode, we're going to talk about health differences in the gifted population, both physical and mental. We'll talk about overexcitabilities and the impact that that can have on the lives of the gifted. I'm also be talking about making a difference in the world, collaborating together and also working in small ways to make the world a better place. Thanks for rejoining us and I hope you enjoy this episode.

Hello, listeners. Welcome back to Positive Disintegration Podcast. I'm your host, Emma Nicholson, and with me is my co-host, Dr. Chris Wells. Hi, Chris.

Chris: Hi, Emma. Nice to be back with you again.

Emma: So this conversation is the second part in a two-part series about experiences of being profoundly gifted. So in this second conversation, we're rejoining our guests, Nth Bar-Fields, the founder of Elysian Trust, and Joi Lin, PhD student of Gifted Education Leadership at the University of Denver.

Joi: I think let's talk about the question about interesting mental issues and health issues that we've dealt with. I already shared how college really started a disintegration moment for me with my friend coming out. But I really struggled through some stuff. I overrode my intuition and got my way and transferred to Colorado for college for a boy that lasted, so it was so quick, but I was happy to end up in Colorado. But while I was here, I had a lot of trouble and I had this crushing depression and was diagnosed, went to the mental health clinic, went to a psychiatrist, was diagnosed with anxiety, was given some meds that did not feel good to take.

And a couple things. One, most of my depression tended to clear up when I made big life changes to fix it. And for example, I said I moved here for a boy. I was not supposed to be with that boy forever. And ending that relationship helped me not be as depressed. But that anxiety, it was still strong. And I remember going to the psych and the psychiatrist saying, you're vitamin D deficient. And I was like, huh, whatever. I made a joke. Sunshine. I just didn't understand how critical that was at the time, because I'm an indoor cat, you see. And I kind of blew that off.

And off and on, I had these health issues as a young adult and in my 20s, and eventually was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. And that was like in a March one year and the month before I'd been diagnosed with vitamin D deficiency. And I actually went in and picked up my prescription on the day of my MS flare up, my first flare up. And when I went to the neurologist later, I said, OK, I can't really walk. What do I do? Do I need a handicap sticker? Do I need a cane? You know, I was very dramatic and upset and having all of the feels. And he was like, well, just stick with your vitamin D for a minute. And I was like, what? What? And I did. And it really, really made a huge difference.

But it's not just sun. It's also like water and hydration and nutrients. I've really had to break, disintegrate the messages I've received in childhood in particular around what is a healthy meal? What should I be eating? And media tells me I should be eating Doritos. I should be eating, I don't know, in my childhood was like Sunny D and stuff like that. But breaking down those messages and then reconstructing with other knowledge, what is good nutrition like? What are good electrolytes that I should be consuming? And that has been a lot of work for me.

And I think that anxiety really helped me disintegrate some stuff that was stressing me out and making me worry. And I did have phases of suicidal ideation in the sense of, well, if I'm going to ever do that, I'm going to do it effectively and not messily and not ineffectively. So I would think about it sometimes, especially more like in high school, but I've never actually felt actually suicidal or that I wanted to actually end things for myself, which helped.

And then I think that my openness to experience has also led to a willingness to try different things, different substances. And my rational side reigns me in a little, and there are things I haven't tried, not meth, not even once, for example. But that willingness to taste the world butts up against the world's definitions of what is and isn't a drug, what is and isn't a crime, what is and isn't legal this year, where I live, et cetera. So those are some things I've dealt with personally. And I think that gifted people in particular, but anyone who works inside, they really need to make sure that they have good vitamin D, either by sunshine or supplement or something. You need to have it somewhere.

Chris: Joi, talking about anxiety, you made me wonder, while you're talking about that issue, since you brought up openness to experience, just say something about your experience of overexcitability, please.

Joi: Oh, I have them all. And I took the OEQ too. I think I scored a five on everything. I probably would have scored more than a five if the scale had gone higher on a few of them. Intellectual, imaginational, emotional, psychomotor, sensual. I have them all. And I thought, initially I thought, oh, I don't have psychomotor. I'm not athletic, but it's more than that. It's more than athleticism. And my motor mouth, my chatteriness, my complex rules to problems or games that I create, you know, those all show that psychomotor. And I've had a lot of fun on like yoga ball as my desk chair, for example, or other high paced, high clicky things like video games. Sometimes I really enjoy that.

But, you know, I know there's some research around like emotional, imaginational and intellectual overexcitability sort of trending with giftedness. But that sensual for me has been I'm going to say a problem because my sensual overexcitability and my openness to experience have led me to experience as many things as I can in different arenas, and I think that had I known about overexcitability in younger adulthood, had my counselors, therapists, educators, parents been more aware, maybe some of that could have been reined in and I could have had a more healthy experience stimulating my sensual overexcitability. But rather I hit exploration with the same intensity I can lean into any of my passion areas and was able to try all sorts of things in new and creative ways with that intensity.

And it was funny because when I went through the overexcitability, I was like, oh, yeah, I got this. I got this bad. And now I try to sometimes positively stimulate my overexcitabilities and make sure I have a nice way to vent to them in a healthy, productive, beneficial way, not just a self destructive “my life doesn't matter anymore. Why not try this” to whatever this is.

Chris: When you were just saying that I was thinking of like bleeding a radiator, you know, like you're venting your overexcitabilities, but sorry, that just was my imaginational, which is like, I'm always picturing things. Although we've had multiple people on this podcast who have aphantasia. So I realized that that's, you know, a thing like the opposite. So what interesting things do you have to share about health?

Nth: So, I can share a couple of observations. Before I do, I will share some personal things that overlap with Joi. She and I have discussed this before, but it was such a surprise. So, she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, so was I. She has a vitamin D deficiency, so do I. So, take what you will from that. In terms of, I always wind up talking about the Elysian, but it's on my mind a lot and it plays a huge role in my life.

And in terms of Elysian, what I've noticed is that health issues, they seem to be more of a thing with people who score really really high on any test, be it IQ or intuition or critical thinking or creative thinking. I've seen plenty of studies that suggest, if not confirm, that there is a positive correlation between health and longevity and what they call intelligence, where they're really talking about IQ. But it's only up to a certain point. The tests generally only seem to show a positive correlation up to around 120, 125 maybe. Beyond that, you're looking at the law of diminishing returns. It seems to be the higher up you go, the more likely you're gonna have allergies, the more likely you're gonna have stress-related illnesses. Definitely mental health issues, if not in you, then in your family line.

It's been eye-opening for me, and I've been trying to figure out how to use that information to better fulfill our mission. And it's not, to some extent we have to carve out our own path, because I love to work with peer-reviewed studies, but what I'm seeing over and over again is a lot of them they have, I'm not going to say they're sloppy, but they're missing a lot of information, or their methodology is just it's wrong, and sometimes it just seems like the researchers already had a conclusion, and they were just looking to confirm it. And that's not it's not really working to extrapolate the findings from the various studies on the topic and apply them to people I know in real life. So we're more or less forging our own path here and trying to figure out what to work with here.

I'll give you an example. What we're noticing is there's quite a few drugs that simply do not work on people in our groups the way they're supposed to or the way they work for the average person. That's not a surprise because medicine, again, I've been in plenty of studies. I've been in over a hundred of them as a test subject. They purposely screen out people who are outliers. So it's not a surprise if, you know, a headache medicine works differently for this subpopulation that we're talking about because we weren't the focus. They were looking at what works for 99.9% of the human population. They're not particularly concerned about the 0.1% of the population unless the effects are so detrimental that it costs a pharmaceutical company money. And that sounds horrible to say. You'd think it'd be something more humanitarian, but that's what it boils down to.

So the question becomes, what should we do for the people in our group? And what we're often doing, and Joi, you and Chris are both in Elysian. I don't know if you saw the recent thing where one of our members has this medical mystery that doctors can't solve. Are the people in the group work together to solve it? And we've done that over and over and over again. We'll probably have to continue until there's a phenomenal change in the way we view health and its intersection with, for lack of a better term, intelligence.

In terms of overexcitability, there are some social things that I've never seen addressed but I know they need to. A lot of gifted kids fall into different sub-categories. They're introverted, they're happy with books and just being alone and stuff like that. They're never gonna really get into trouble. But there are some gifted kids who are the exact opposite. And their brain is looking for external stimulation in ways that could put them at risk. And unless you're addressing why that's occurring, unless you're addressing that, oh, yeah, this type of sensation, they're feeling it differently. Their brain is wired in such a way that they are feeling this physical sensation differently than the average person is. So you have to address that this is almost like a drug addiction for them to the first time they experience sex or the first time they take a drug or something like that. You have to take that into account to figure out how to carve out the wisest and healthiest path for them and unfortunately most cultures I've seen they are not well equipped for that it's an uncomfortable topic for them and I'm seeing a it's a I'm not gonna say a sliver a small but very significant portion of gifted young adults fall through the cracks and they're crashing hard because they do not have an adequate support network. The support network that is in place just isn't designed to handle the way their minds work.

Similar to how the medical community is not really equipped to address how intelligence, at least high intelligence, and I hate using that term because I do think intelligence is more than just an IQ score, but when you're talking about people whose IQ scores are 135, 145, 155, 165, and so on, it's not just like comparing hot water to steam, right? It actually is steam. It's no longer just hot water. And the properties change. And I just see it over and over again. I'd love to see something phenomenally change and soon. It would definitely help. And it wouldn't just necessarily help the profoundly gifted or extremely gifted community. I think it would help all of humanity because every time we finally make a breakthrough that accommodates outliers, there's always discoveries from that that benefits the rest of humanity. I see no reason why this would be an exception. I'm going to get off my high horse because I could keep preaching about this over and over at length, but that's the gist of what my views are regarding that subject.

Joi: I think that STEAM analogy, which I love, by the way, I think was that Linda or Michael? Someone wrote about that, right?

Chris: I think it's Linda. It was Linda. She presented that at the Triple Nine Society meeting, I think, in 2018.

Joi: It's just such a good analogy.

Nth: Yeah, it really is. No, it's applicable.

Joi: It really highlights the social environment. It's the pressure and the environment we're in that allows some people to become STEAM, I guess. Too much pressure, maybe we'd stay droplets.

Chris: I just have to say like, and I mean, the way you just wrap that up, I mean, you're really like talking about, I mean, that's what happened to me. Like, when I was a kid had this enormous need for stimulation, you know, of multiple ways, but really, I was so drawn to drugs. Just this morning, I was on Jen Harvey's podcast, conversations on gifted trauma. And I was talking about, you know, when I was a kid, like, I became like a drug addict in my mind before I ever tried them in reality. But the fact is, like, I mean, when I did them, I could tell that I responded to them so much more strongly than other people. And it was just like, that's how my overexcitability is kind of, you know, like, it's exactly what you were just talking about. And you're right about like, just falling through the cracks. Because I mean, for me, I just ended up in the mental health system and I was like addicted to drugs and I've been addicted to more than one drug and I've been addicted to gambling and I've overcome like so much addiction in my life that it's like ridiculous. And so I know that there are other people like me, I know because like I was in the mental hospital with them and you know, like I know how many like profoundly gifted people populate mental hospitals, like more than you would think.

Nth: And prisons, unfortunately. I got to tell you, I am so happy to hear that you overcame that. And truly, to me, it's awesome that you're in the position to where you can help others who are going through that as well. So yeah, my hat's off to you.

Chris: Oh, well, thank you. I mean, it's very important to me to try and like give back what I've figured out from these things. And one of the things that I figured out is that this theory is for that kind of person. Because, I mean, that's what's like, when I came to positive disintegration, I was like, Oh, my God, I've been through this a million times, you know, like, I've disintegrated and reintegrated so many times from like just these struggles and I don't know it's just a framework that I didn't find anywhere else. Yeah, but yeah, so I just want to say again like I did that podcast with Jen this morning and she's a PG person and we ended up talking quite a bit about that, you know, and I'm thinking to myself as we're meeting and doing this recording tonight that like I know a lot of PG people and being in your group and like the conversations there are really incredible and compared to a typical Facebook group. It's like such a privilege to be able to connect with other PG people. And I'm excited that we're having this conversation because I know that there are going to be so many people who are just going to be thrilled to be able to hear about these experiences and resonate and feel like, you know, mirrored by us.

Nth: I'm hoping that that is the case. I'd love to know that we've maybe opened some minds and also maybe helped some people who felt lonely realize, oh, I'm not alone in this regard.

Joi: I think that you are doing such good work to help the world now, Chris, be it individual clients through therapy, be it the impact you and Emma are having with this one podcast, not to mention your other work around Dabrowski stuff. I mean, I guess I hope for this grace for myself as I continue to be vulnerable and share my own stories and experiences, but I think it's so critical to not throw people away, to not discard people based on a past experience, especially a person with high openness to experience who tried things. I don't understand the desire to elect politicians who have never tried anything in their life versus someone who has tried and has overcome and now has a well-rounded perspective. And I just appreciate that your childhood, your youth does not fully define who you are now. It's a part of the journey, but it's not, oh, Chris is a druggie. We shouldn't listen to her. You still have good stuff to say. And you've, I don't know, that growth, I think, is more important.

My other big idea that's been hit a few times tonight is the concept of exposure. When I took gifted tests, I took the Wonderlic, for example, and I could tell it was more crystallized. And as I went through and answered most of them fine and not all of them exactly in the time limit, sometimes I could remember learning some of those concepts in school. And then some of the other questions, I remember never having learned that. I never learned that. I don't know. We talked about exposure around intuition type one. If you haven't had that exposure to all those different eggs, chicken eggs, then you are going to have less success at choosing which egg is male and which egg is female. But the more exposure you have, you know, the more you can grow.

And I get concerned about the influence of media on our populations, all of humanity right now. But thinking about Dabrowski and how social and environmental factors are part of that influence, part of that pressure that makes up the world we live in. And if you're not exposed to different discourses, if literally everyone in your whole life and whole education and whole workplace and whole community and whole family are all in lockstep with some ideology, and you never hear anything else, you are going to have a hard time challenging that. And you're going to, I think you're going to feel more distress. But that moment you encounter a different perspective, you realize that things can be created, that there's more autonomy to this than it seems, that you can take a step to increase your exposure to something. And even, you know, in talking about the health diagnoses within Elysian, you know, that's exposure. People have an idea of other diagnoses and they can share them. Oh, absolutely. No one had ever heard of any. They aren't going to magically come up with the answer. And I think about how we have to invest in gifted education to ensure that all of our students, but and our gifted students are receiving a breadth of education that allows them access to these different topics and concepts, such as even knowing intuition exists.

Chris: Even though I was struggling with drugs and mental health issues when I was young, I was also so focused on helping people. And I just knew, even when I was in high school, that I was supposed to use my story somehow to help people. And it was weird because I didn't understand it. It was like an intuition thing I realized now that I just knew that I had to learn how to do public speaking and I had to write my, like I've been writing a journal since I was 16. And it was like I had this whole mission and I knew that I was meant to help heal people somehow, but I had no idea how that was supposed to look. And so like at the end of high school, after I went to drug treatment, I wrote a book, like my autobiography at 18, which is such a bad idea. Nobody should publish an autobiography when you're that young because you have this whole rest of your life and it's just too early. But anyway, I did that and it's because I wanted to share my story to help other people and I've always had this drive to like use my experiences to help.

And it's so weird that, you know, all that time in my 20s, when I was like, in and out of the mental hospital, I was like, God, why did I end up with this life? I was supposed to be like a genius, you know, and I ended up like, a mental patient by the time I was in my 20s. And it's like, now that I discovered this theory, and I have like this framework for understanding this experience that I had, I know that I'm meant to talk about it and bring it to other people because they need to know about it and they're never going to hear about it in gifted ed. I mean, that's the thing. I know that there are so many people out there suffering because they're listening to the podcast and they're letting us know the difference that it's making in their lives. I'm just grateful to be here and to give you both the platform to talk with us and share your experiences too. But so tell me or tell us about like your, I mean, saving the world is kind of the final topic I had in mind for today. But, you know, that's kind of mine. Like it's so it's been this weird drive that I didn't understand until I was in my 40s. So what about you, whoever wants to go first?

Nth: I definitely always had that drive. It's probably in no little part to learning how to read from comic books, so you can pretty much thank the X-Men for why I could read at all. And similar to you, I had a really strong empathy for others and even the sympathy as well. I always wanted to help to the point to arguably a people pleaser. And as I got older I think that instinct never went away but it did refine itself a bit and it did evolve to some extent. So to this day I have a very strong drive for quote-unquote, I wouldn't call it saving the world, but doing my part to make the world better.

It's chiefly the Elysian Trust is how I figured it would be the easiest route and the most natural route for me to do that is to find other people who were doing something phenomenal. Like, I could go down the line. We have one member, his name is Edmund Williams. He's fine with me mentioning him by name. He's working on food scarcity. We have another member, her name is Monica Anderson. She's working on I would call humane artificial intelligence. And it's just, again, I'd be here all day just running down the list, but it's been really my honor to figure out how I can help them personally. And that's not necessarily in the big way, but and also how the organization can help. Because helping them is, putting them in a position where they can truly do something phenomenal for humanity as well.

I don't know if there is a huge overlap or connection between, say, being profoundly gifted and having that urge. Because I gotta tell you, I've run into a lot of people in the profoundly gifted community who are cut from that cloth of wanting to make things better. I've also run into a lot of narcissists. And so it's, yeah, I mean, it's not a secret. It may be a secret to people on the outside, but yeah, there is a thing. Like Keith Reniere, he made the news recently. He was in one of my groups. Not Elysian, he never belonged there, but one of the groups I belong to. And there's others out there. Yeah, it's a thing.

So we're trying to figure out I don't think we're in the position or we even necessarily, thankfully, need to be in the position where we have to force the gifted people on this planet to do something to help make the world better. I think there's enough of us out there with that drive to take care of that. One thing I would love to see occur is for the society to support them when they have that spark to do something that can help a wide swath of humanity or the world or just the planet itself. What I see a lot of times, especially when I worked for the Think Tank Idea Connection, it was like someone would throw a problem, it was like, okay, yeah, we messed up, go fix it. I mean, wouldn't it be great if we listened to people who had those insights and had those, for lack of a better term, genius. And I'm using genius in the sense that there's that saying, talent hits a target no one else can hit, genius hits a target no one else can see. So I'm talking about the people with that kind of vision, where they could see the problem before it even occurred. Wouldn't it be nice if they were at the table to prevent it to begin with, instead of always playing catch up to fix the mistakes. I'd love to see that occur. I think Elysian, we're working towards that. We're not fully there yet. We would need to partner with other organizations to do that. We definitely need more private funding to do that. But at least we're marching there, right?

So yeah, overall, I think a lot of us have an urge and a lot of us don't. I'm not sure it's a wise investment to spend time on trying to create that drive in people who don't have it. It's not to say that it's a waste of time. It is to say that there's only so many hours in a day. I'd rather invest them in the people who already want to do that anyway. You'll probably get farther with them. And thankfully, there's lots of gifted people who will do it.

Chris: What you just made me think of, and that was so beautifully said, and I couldn't agree more. And it just reminds me of something that I was talking with Michael Piechowski about. We had the transcript made for our first episode, and I shared it with Michael, and he gave me some feedback about things that I didn't get quite right in the first episode. And one of them is like, you know, was about overexcitabilities. But anyway, we started talking about the kernel of inner transformation, like what is it that separates people who are in multi-level development from other people? And I feel like it's what you just described. And it's what we experienced, where it's this drive to help people, like it's something to focus on that's bigger than ourselves, you know, and that if you have that, then, you know, you have the potential to make a real difference to the world. I don't know maybe that's the kernel of inner transformation like that that empathy that's there or you know again like being able to focus on a problem outside of yourself

Nth: I wouldn't be surprised. I don't know. I'm still in the process of learning myself. But I think there's something there that what you're saying, I can feel it. But fleshing it out, that's going to take time for me. Yeah.

Chris: That's the hard part. Yeah. And you know, I mean, yeah, that's, that's my question, though, right now is, you know, like, nurturing that when you find it, like, however it is. And I think that that's how you help people out of addiction. And I think it's how you, you know, help people like take the steps to change their life.

Joi: Anecdotally, people have said to me, oh, you get along with the people about plus or minus one standard deviation from where you are kind of vibe. And they said that's why managers should be like at the 80th percentile so they can connect with the employee population. And that person was sort of implying that's why I would not be a good manager, because I would not connect well. But I think even with my 148 or whatever, I do care. I care about other people that are not me. But I see some high IQ groups and people that are very selfish, very “I'm hot shit and no one else” kind of vibe. I also see socially, societally, how we're about 50-50, like half of America would get rid of the other half and pick an issue. And that's frustrating to me because once again, we're throwing away people without having a path back to the community, a path back to connection.

I've gotten involved a lot. A lot of my childhood, especially growing up in religious organizations, spent a lot of time with community service and giving back. And I enjoyed that. And as an adult, I frequently joined committees and clubs and organizations and boards to hopefully do something positive. And I've been working to kind of streamline that down and try to find areas where I want to actually exert my effort. Because with getting involved in community organizations, oh my gosh, there came so much frustration and exhaustion. Maybe I could try it again now that I know myself more, but trying to communicate creative connections and ideas with people that are not on my level did not work. The amount of energy people have to spend to tell me that we have to do the status quo is hilarious. People are always telling me that, oh, we can't do, we can't do. I am over that. I don't want to spend time in a pretend position not actually doing anything. Why would I do that? I could have the same effect by not participating and spending my energy on something else.

Personally, I'm also so concerned about our exploration across the galaxy. And I am more interested in saving the galaxy than just our world, because I think we have huge potential to mess up galactic governance. There you go. Galactic governance, if we aren't careful. And we certainly have not figured everything out here on Earth. So I don't understand what policies, procedures, practices, status quo we're taking up to the galaxy. But I really worry about that a lot. And I'm trying to find my place in saving the world, I suppose.

And I think some people saving the world could be very small radius, very localized. Maybe they are caretaking and raising their own children or nurturing their friends and community at a strong level. I think it's burdensome to act as though people with high IQ are obligated to do some world saving solution. But I think everyone should be encouraged to nurture your local community and help your community thrive. Even if that's like cooking good food and nutritious meals for your family, I think there are ways that some of that can express at a smaller level. But then if we have all of this PG-ness, let's do something grand. Let's do something great. And it's always so inspiring as I've gotten involved with this profoundly gifted community to see how many people are doing things. And I feel inspired and while I still flicker with that imposter syndrome, it feels more possible than ever to actually do, to actually do in the field. And we'll see where I end up with that.

Emma: It's interesting, Joi, you're talking about acting locally, because I think sometimes when we view saving the world, we think of it as that, you know, superhero comic book looking one person or one team just goes out and saves everybody and we don't see it as a collective effort because if there's one person in each community doing their part and each of those communities are helped then by default the entire world's being saved and you're right, there's this pressure on sometimes gifted people like you've got to single-handedly go out there and save the entire planet when it's not. It's like if you go out there and save your community and everybody else is doing the same thing, then we'll get there in the end. The other thing that I wonder about is whether that mentality then more relates to people who have been through disintegration and had those experiences than it does just directly to their IQ. So it would be interesting to see if the people that have that drive are the ones that have developed that empathy and have developed that view of others outside of themselves.

Joi: I am a big fan of collective action. But you have to have a community. You have to have a goal that you're working on together. It's rare for anything magical to happen from one sole individual. It's usually a team and partnerships and supports and funders. And I think encouraging PG people to nurture that community, that tribe, that helping someone who's not yourself, I think that that'll make all the difference as we continue to create a better world, hopefully.

Emma: And I'd even go beyond that and say we don't all necessarily need the same focus. We don't have to be an army. You can help the world in the way that matches with you and your gifts and your passions. So one person might be working on something to do with the environment, someone else is working on something to do with homelessness.

Joi: And even when one person has the breakthrough, you know, it takes a team to implement that. And I think I'm a big fan of just encouraging that community and connection.

Chris: Yeah, at the end of the day, all of the work starts from us as individuals. And, you know, you have to do your own work to be able to, you know, make the difference that you want to make. I mean, if there's one lesson that I've learned, it's that like, all of the suffering that, you know, we go through is, is how we learn how to, to have empathy and, like, cultivate that. And, you know, I think it goes back to exposure, like what, you know, you were talking about earlier,

Nth: Now, so I did want to mention one thing, something Emma said prompted the memory. One of the groups in Elysian is called Hard Problems Club. Very on-the-nose name for the group, but it lives up to it, especially back in the heyday, things have slowed down recently. But the group itself, I think the majority of the members, I don't think they would even qualify as what you would call profoundly gifted. Their strengths, I mean, some of them are, I need to make that clear, but not all of them or even most. I think what the most common trait they have is that they demonstrate a really high amount of tenacity. So they'll stick to, they'll find a problem that they really really care about or just piques their interest or whatever and they'll stick to it until they get a solution. And when they decide to work in teams they demonstrate a really high level of collective intelligence.

One of the projects we worked on a few years ago, it was a MIT Solve challenge and we just, just a few of us, it was only four or five of us, we decided, hey, let's see what we can do to come up with a solution. And we wound up in the semifinals of the MIT Solve. And it was a beautiful illustration of what can happen when there's an emerging property, a synergistic type of intelligence that emerges from people collaborating and doing it well. And I've also noticed in some of the higher IQ groups, the ability to work together is amazingly absent. And the few times that you do see it demonstrated is they're almost using their collaborations to stab each other and someone else in the back or something like that. It's very disturbing to me.

So, I would say, at least from what all my experience is, I would say that everyone has a role that they can choose to pursue or not to help make this world better. It could be as a collaborator, it could be just someone with an incredible amount of tenacity or empathy, or it could be what we can call a quote-unquote genius. I've met people, I've went to some of the finest universities in the world, so I've been around Nobel Prize winners and everything like that. It's awesome, it's amazing, it's whatever, but it doesn't necessarily blow me away as opposed to, say, one of the directors of another member of the Elysian Trust, his name is Theodore Henderson. He's been making dramatic changes for the homeless community in Los Angeles. I think, honestly, there's days where I'm more in awe of what he's accomplished and what Maria Holt has accomplished than any one of the people I know who has a Nobel Prize.

What I find even more fascinating than all that is seeing how these folks can be connected to each other to create a pipeline to accelerate a solution to some problem that we're facing, big or small. Because honestly, I gotta say, in my opinion, all the problems are connected anyway. So it's awesome to have to address it at different points.

Chris: You're doing such great work. I mean, your Elysian is amazing. I can, I've seen it like so many times already just in the group. And you know, these stories, like, of course, I got to hear you talk about this stuff at the panel in March.

Nth: So yeah, so Elysian Trust is the organization. It was a 501c3 nonprofit we revamped earlier this year, we are officially a for profit now. And it's made all the difference in the world. The organization itself fosters a lot of what we call social clubs or in terms of grant writing and social programs that support some type of cognitive ability. I've mentioned them multiple times now, IQ, critical thinking, intuition, so forth and so on. People can join Elysian Trust through one of those groups, including Hard Problems Club, which has nothing to do with any type of IQ test or any type of cognitive ability test. It has to do with the mindset.

And what we've learned after a few years is that the members in certain groups they wanted to know what the members in other groups were like so we decided to create a discussion forum that was an umbrella for all of them and that's called Elysian Fields. So Elysian Fields is where people from Volant which is the high IQ club can talk to people from Trishula which is the intuition club and so forth and so on. It can be eye-opening for many people who they discover they're all speaking English or sometimes Spanish or whatever the language is, but even though they're all speaking English, they discover they're actually speaking a different language for the first time in their life. They're like, oh, okay, this is different.

And a lot of times there's these cross-sections. Autistic people in Interrobang, which is the creative thinking group, they find out they have a lot in common with autistic people in Volant, the high IQ group as an example. To join, you just have to reach out to Elysian Trust. The email is info, I-N-F-O, at ElysianTrust.org. And tell us which groups you would like to apply to and definitely promise to do two things that we are absolutely serious about. One, you'll be civil. Two, you'll participate at least once a year. It's not a crazy request, but you'd be amazed how big of a screener those two things are.

Yeah, come meet your neurodivergent tribe and other people who are like you and quite a few people who are not. And still find that unity and that bond across the internet. Currently, we all hang out largely on the Facebook groups. We are building our own website. Well, actually our website already exists, but we're building the discussion forum for it. It's item number six on our list. We have so many other things we have to take care of first. But it's coming and once it's off of Facebook we're hoping more people will participate because quite a few people, they're waiting. They aren't so crazy about Facebook for various reasons. So hopefully once it's set up that we can get even more people there and more importantly we can get more projects fostered and supported because we're really really really passionate about finding people who they don't just have a brain. They want to do something with it specifically to help others and improve things we absolutely would love to find you and support you and help you discover what all you can do

Chris: It's making me so happy to hear you describe this and, you know, like recruit for your organization. I just I'm, yeah, do it. If you're listening to this and you're drawn to this, go for it. Like, we are your people. And so yes, join us.

Nth: Yes, absolutely.

Chris: I feel very blessed to have spent four hours today talking with PG people about the PG experience. And so it's been wonderful.

Nth: This has been an absolute pleasure. You and Emma have made this incredibly comfortable for me. And that says a lot. I'm not crazy about social interactions like this, but you made it extremely worthwhile.

Chris: I'm so glad. I'm so glad that you joined us. And thanks to you both for sharing because this is it's not easy to talk about being PG is special to get to connect like this. Oh, absolutely. But it's also like, misunderstood is what I'm saying. Like, you know, it's, you spend so much of your life not being around people who get you that it's, you know, it's a big deal when you can do it.

Nth: Yeah, and honestly, that does result in a little bit of awkwardness for a lot of people who are totally new to all of this when they first join, but that's okay. So many of us have been there in the past. And before you know it, they, yeah, for a lot of people, it's like, alas, I finally found my tribe. That is what we hear over and over and over again.

Chris: It's cool. And I know that that's what we're doing with the podcast. And it's, it's exciting, because this is like what I'd hoped for with it. But it's cool to see it actually happen. So thanks so much for being with us.

Emma: And absolutely. Also want to thank both of our guests. I think it's been a great set of conversation. And we really appreciate it. And Chris, thank you, too, as well, as always, for co hosting with me. Thank you. Thanks, everyone. And I'd also like to thank our listeners for joining us in the second part of this two-part journey. And we hope that you've enjoyed the conversation as much as we did. Positive Disintegration Podcast is funded by the Dabrowski Center. If you like what you've heard, please consider donating through the link in the show notes. And if you're listening to us on Apple or Spotify, give us a rating or leave a review. If you want to get in touch with us, you can email positivedisintegration.pod at gmail.com or find us on Twitter or Instagram. And until next time, keep walking the path to your authentic self.