#1382 Meditations

Brian's journey with his son's diagnosis, family reactions, & personal growth through therapy.

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DISCLAIMER: This text is the output of AI based transcribing from an audio recording. Although the transcription is largely accurate, in some cases it is incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors and should not be treated as an authoritative record. Nothing that you read here constitutes advice medical or otherwise. Always consult with a healthcare professional before making changes to a healthcare plan.

Scott Benner 0:00
We are all together again friends for this next episode of The Juicebox podcast.

Brian is the father of a young child with type one diabetes who was diagnosed a few years ago, around Thanksgiving, he was anxious in the beginning of the diagnosis, and so Brian sought out therapy, which was helpful for him. We're going to talk about that and much more. Nothing you hear on the Juicebox podcast should be considered advice medical or otherwise, always consult a physician before making any changes to your health care plan. Don't forget, if you're a US resident who has type one or is the caregiver of someone with type one, visit T 1d exchange.org/juicebox right now and complete that survey. It will take you 10 minutes to complete the survey, and that effort alone will help to move type one diabetes research forward. It will cost you nothing to help. The holidays are coming up fast. Head to cozy earth.com. Use the offer code juice box at checkout to save 40% off of everything they sell. Cozy earth.com. Use the offer code juice box to save 40% this holiday season. If you're newly diagnosed. Check out the bold beginnings series. Find it at Juicebox podcast.com. Up in the menu in the feature tab of the private Facebook group, or go into the audio app you're listening in right now and search for Juicebox podcast. Bold beginnings, I'm having an on body vibe alert. This episode of The Juicebox podcast is sponsored by ever since 365 the only one year where CGM, that's one insertion and one CGM a year, one CGM one year, not every 10 or 14 days ever since cgm.com/juicebox. Having an easy to use an accurate blood glucose meter is just one click away. Contour, next.com/juicebox That's right, today's episode is sponsored by the contour. Next Gen blood glucose meter. Your kids mean everything to you, and you do anything for them, especially if they're at risk. So when it comes to type one diabetes screen, it like you mean it, because if even just one person in your family has type one, your child is up to 15 times more likely to get it. But just one blood test can help you spot it early. So don't wait. Talk to your doctor about screening tap now or visit screen for type one.com to get more info and screen it like you mean it. Hi,

Brian 2:40
Scott. Name is Brian. I'm glad to be here speaking with you today after listening to you for what seems like hours on end every day for a long time. So glad we finally meet. Oh, it's

Scott Benner 2:50
very nice to meet you, too, Brian. What's a long time? How long have you been listening you?

Speaker 1 2:54
Actually, you might find this a little humorous. So two thanksgiving to go is when my son was diagnosed. I got a little packet that included, actually, to your Arden's day blog. And I remember looking at that blog saying, What am I going to learn from a guy who stopped blogging 10 years ago or, you know, it was some outdated looking site that they sent me to right and by January, though, about a month and a half later, I actually found your podcast. I'm like, Oh, this is where you moved to and I basically been listening almost every day since, starting from the beginning. So it's been over a year listening almost every day. It's helped me get through a lot. So appreciate what you do.

Scott Benner 3:32
That's lovely. I'm also thinking that the Arden's day.com forward slash, blog doesn't exist. Hold on a second. What did you find

Speaker 1 3:40
it was, it was a printout. It thing was ancient looking. It had, I just remember, like, what was it? Yeah, they sent me to the blog, and I was like, I don't, this doesn't look like it's been updated in a while

Scott Benner 3:51
because, because martinsday.com forwards to Juicebox podcast.com

Speaker 1 3:56
Yeah, I don't like I said it was, it was a picture of you, and that listed the blog, and I remember typing in what it was so well it was almost I literally said to myself, What am I going to learn from this guy? He stopped talking about his, you know, anecdotes and how to work his way through things, you know, a while ago. And I was like, I guess he gave up, but you didn't. You just moved medium. So glad I found it regardless.

Scott Benner 4:17
I loved blogging, but this is what that is without all the typing and editing. But it's much better.

Speaker 1 4:23
I agree, yeah, much easier to consume. You can do two things at once while listening.

Scott Benner 4:28
You have type one of your child. I'm sorry, yeah, no, it's

Speaker 1 4:32
a great question. It's my son. He's 10. He was diagnosed when he was just after he turned eight.

Scott Benner 4:37
Was this literally on Thanksgiving or around myself.

Speaker 1 4:40
I guess diagnosis story is as good as any, right. My family came to town from a couple different states for Thanksgiving. I used to love hosting Thanksgiving. It's a bit of a traumatic process. Now, I'm sure it's still something we have to figure out how to work around. But the family come to town and my. A one of my in laws. My brother in law actually has type two and type two that's not particularly well controlled, would be something of an understatement. Hi

Scott Benner 5:08
to him, by the way, go ahead. Yeah, no. And he's, he's

Speaker 1 5:11
so well meaning. He's so great. But you know, there's definitely some denial about, you know, how he has to manage. So they were down for Thanksgiving, and my experience with with him is actually what tipped me off to my son's diagnosis. So he he drove down from where he was coming from, couple hours away. He ended up crashing the car. It sounds terrible, but it was like in trying to get into a parking lot, like, clip the curb and so you're going to disable the vehicle, okay? But he called us at like, 2am the day before Thanksgiving, like, Jimmy, like, Where'd you go? And he's like, Oh, I'm here. So I went picked him up, and I pick him up, and he's just like, chugging water and juice the whole time.

Scott Benner 5:52
Like, are you alright? You're

Speaker 1 5:53
really thirsty. He's like, Oh, it's a long drive. Like, all right, well, let's get home, get you settled, and, you know, we got a long day of cooking tomorrow. Well, the next day, it ended up being that my mother even noticed it that my son and he were kind of like queuing up to use the bathroom all day long. And I was like, what? That's a little unusual, but whatever, we didn't think too much more of it. Well, the next day, my brother in law, he was in such bad shape that he had trouble standing up, and the EMTs had to come and he did blood sugar test, and the Meter Reader was high. Like, just be like, hey, this one caps out at 500 like, oh, and I didn't almost know anything at that point, really about type one or type two. I just understood the glucose values were something out of range, for sure. So he ended up going to the hospital, and they ended up treating him. And a couple days, insulin dripped the whole thing and releasing him. So he was able to join us for Thanksgiving, but was obviously this kind of pale on the whole day. And it occurred to me that, you know, something might be off with my son, but I didn't know what it was at the time, and that night he wets the bed. And I think back, I said, Wow, this is like, the third time in two weeks, and it's like, this, this can't be, this can't be, right? This isn't someone gets sick. And, you know, wetting the vet isn't symptom of being sick in a classical like, I got an infection, right? Like a cold or something like that. I said, you just doesn't sit right with me. So especially after my brother in law's experience, and so I drove to CVS at 24 hour one at like 530 in the morning and bought a

Scott Benner 7:28
from the very beginning, your kids mean everything to you. That means you do anything for them, especially if they're at risk. So when it comes to type one diabetes screen, it like you mean it. Now up to 90% of type one diagnosis have no family history, but if you have a family history, you are up to 15 times more likely to develop type one screen it like you mean it, because type one diabetes can develop at any age, and once you get results, you can get prepared for your child's future. So screen it like you mean it type one starts long before there are symptoms, but one blood test could help you spot it early before they need insulin, and could lower the risk of serious complications like diabetic ketoacidosis or DKA. Talk to your doctor about how to screen for type one diabetes, because the more you know, the more you can do. So don't wait, tap now or visit screen for type one.com to learn more. Again, that's screen for type one com, and screen it like you mean it contour next.com/juicebox that's the link you'll use to find out more about the contour next gen blood glucose meter. When you get there, there's a little bit at the top. You can click right on blood glucose monitoring. I'll do it with you. Go to meters, click on any of the meters. I'll click on the Next Gen, and you're going to get more information. It's easy to use and highly accurate. Smart light provides a simple understanding of your blood glucose levels. And of course, with Second Chance sampling technology, you can save money with fewer wasted test strips. As if all that wasn't enough, the contour next gen also has a compatible app for an easy way to share and see your blood glucose results. Contour next.com/juicebox and if you scroll down at that link, you're going to see things like a Buy Now button. You could register your meter after you purchase it. Or what is this? Download a coupon. Oh, receive a free contour, next gen blood glucose meter. Do tell contour, next.com/juice box. Head over there now get the same accurate and reliable meter that we use,

Speaker 1 9:46
glucose tester. And I wasn't sure what to do. I didn't know what strips went with which device, you know, completely fumbling around. And just bought two of each. I was like, well, the two of these have to go ahead, you know, go together somehow. So I came back and. And I woke up my wife. I said, Look, whatever you do, don't let anybody eat or drink anything while I figure this out. She said, why? What's wrong? I said, Well, I just, I want to rule something out, because I'd done what everyone does. Probably at some point they web and do something, and sure enough, you put in the bed, wedding and the thirst, and it's, you know, one of the top symptoms that morning, we sat around the kitchen table, and I tested myself first. It was like 79 and then went to my wife, same kind of thing in the 80s. And then went to my son. It was 250 I was like, Oh, God, what do I do? Here am I said, No, it's got to be broken. Test, test again, and test the other kids. So we tested everybody, like two or three times, and his kept coming back in the mid two hundreds, and I kind of walked around the corner broke down, because I knew right down in there what it was, just given the symptoms and the scenario, and yet, I called the pediatrician's office and she said, Oh, what could be an anomaly? You should just head to the ER and rule it out. And I say, rule it out. I'm pretty sure we just ruled it in. Are you sure about that? Just tested

Scott Benner 11:01
everybody 33 times. I spent $197

Speaker 1 11:05
in test strips. Oh, my God, they're saying Yeah. It was like, Yeah. I think I spent 202 different machines with $100 of test strips each, because they only sold the massive packs or whatever. And I was like, No, I'm pretty sure that's what it is. And so that morning, we fed them, and then a lot of people might crane just said, let's have some breakfast before we go and before we go. And he had a bowl of cereal and a glass of orange juice, and then, like, you know, face palm, now that I know that we just sent him to the moon on the way to the ER. So we went to the ER, and we told him, I said, we're here for type one diabetes admission. And somehow, between that moment at the window and the intake nurse, someone put him in his type two. Now my son is almost five feet tall. Well, back to, you know, four and a half feet tall, skinny, eight year old kid doesn't quite fit the description. I know we're not trying to put everyone in a type there, but didn't really fit the what it might have expected. And so they intake nurse does another finger prick, and he's like, 575 say, Oh, God, what did I just do? And I'm looking at him, I'm like, you feel all right? He's like, Yeah, why? I don't understand. But I know this isn't good.

Scott Benner 12:06
Yeah, you caught it really early.

Speaker 1 12:10
We did, it turns out, because the flip side of that was he only spent about three weeks on regular MBI injections. We kept having to titrate down over and over and over again. Because for me, the horrific part, and you were actually one of the first people to respond to me, luckily enough, when I joined the Facebook group, was I said, I said, you know, I'm sitting outside my son's school every morning because I'm freaking out that he's going to crash low. And that's what would happen. We give him his food, his insulin, and within an hour, you know, he's in the basement, and the nurse has got him downing 35 4050, grams of carbs, and we can barely get him above 80. And it turned out that the honeymoon kicked in pretty quickly after the initial insulin, and we were just overdoing it like, you know, give a kid who's insulin sensitive and, you know, unit and a half, and you know, we're fighting. So he spent three hours a day in the nurse's office for the first two weeks of school. Was like this. I literally said to myself, I don't know how anybody does This is insanity, like, what is going on? And so finally, we met with our endo two weeks later, and she's like, Well, I'm glad you've been bringing down his insulin dosing. That's been smart. And we got to the point where she couldn't give him anything. It would just tank him. And we spent almost 10 months without him needing regular injections at all. The endos were confused, initially, thinking maybe Modi or something else, but we just caught his diagnosis, probably within the first three, four

Scott Benner 13:36
weeks, yeah. And then he had a really slow onset. He

Speaker 1 13:40
did. And when we had his antibody testing done, they did it right at the at intake. We didn't get the results for almost a month. He only had one antibody against zinc. And I was like, Okay, so maybe, maybe he doesn't have a normal onset. And sure enough, now we've gone through multiple antibody testing now he's up at three and we're on much more steady, but still inconsistent. Uh, honeymoon based, yeah, treatment. So like Pokemon,

Scott Benner 14:05
he's collecting them all. I'm gonna get all the antibodies before I'm done. Oh, my gosh. Well, how many other kids? Oh,

Unknown Speaker 14:14
this is what you'll like. I have four total.

Scott Benner 14:16
So does he have Are you done or, I mean, oh, I'm done.

Speaker 1 14:19
I told my wife, have as many kids as you want. I'm here for you. Oh, who

Scott Benner 14:23
did she have them with? No, no, I was just

Speaker 1 14:26
telling her. I said, You're in charge of how many you want, like my father's one to 10. Holy Hell, really? Yeah, I grew up with 45 first cousins. I mean, Christmas and Easter and all that stuff. Was always a massive house full of people, easily 100 plus people would come to every family event. Wow. Yeah, Irish, yeah, Irish Catholic. My dad married another Irish Catholic woman. So

Scott Benner 14:51
how many Michaels Are you directly related to?

Speaker 1 14:54
That's a great question. Probably at least seven at this point. Yeah.

Scott Benner 15:00
I say this as much as I can. My wife's father's name is Michael. He had a son. He named Michael. That man had a son and named him Michael. His daughter married a guy named Michael. They had a son. They named him Michael.

Speaker 1 15:14
Well, one of my in laws, same kind of thing. They had a Michael and then a Michael. And even the middle names were simpler, so the abbreviations are almost identical. And he's like, but I don't want him to be a junior. I'm like, wow, it's pretty close to being a junior.

Scott Benner 15:27
You're all by a letter. You're all juniors. So listen, this is the most distasteful joke, but when Arden was born, they asked us if we had names for babies, and I said, in front of my wife's family to them, not just in front of them, by the way, I directed this statement to them. I said, if it's a boy, we're gonna name him Michael. We love dad more than you, and then our last name. And everybody got so pissed. But I always just think that's what I mean. Isn't that what you're doing? All right? Just like, isn't it brown nosing, you know, I don't know. Oh,

Speaker 1 16:01
well, there. I mean, so after our first was was born, we chose some family names because we were frankly struggling with what else to do, yeah, like, wow. And my father's point was like, Oh, that's a very political choice of you. I'm like, what I agree. We took one name from one side of the family, another name from the other side of the family, and just kept doing that with all of our kids, and it was just because their names were familiar to us, though it wasn't. We weren't trying to earn family brownie points or anything, but that's, that's the way certain people took it, like that was very good of you. Yeah, honor the family.

Scott Benner 16:34
Nah. People get mad at anything. Kelly and I did the exact opposite. We took a when she was pregnant. Both times, we grabbed this big fat baby name book. Now a book, as you may know, is a grouping of paper, like bound together so that you can see words. And we would sit down every night, like after work, and we would read out I would read out loud a few pages of the book, and we would just go through, like, go through the A's, go through the bill. We kept going. We would just circle any names we liked, and then we went back, and then you'd be surprised. A couple weeks later, you'd go through and you're like, who put Aiden on here? No, like, like, that kind of stuff, like, you know, and eventually we just got down to call, we're gonna name name Cole. And then we did the same thing with Arden. And when people ask, like, who are they named after, we always say, like, I don't think I'm related to anybody, like, worthy of naming another person after not that, not that I know of. But anyway, all those Michaels out there making the world a better place. How many so these other three kids? Any chance they have antibodies? Have you tested them? We

Speaker 1 17:32
haven't tested them. There's some reluctance there. I mean, literally, I think we were home from the hospital maybe a couple days when T Z yield was announced by the FDA as being cleared, my wife and I were like, well, what do we do? Because if this really does delay onset, and some of the other kids have the antibodies, is that something we're willing to put them through. And then, you know, there's Facebook groups out there that have people who've gone through it, and it seems hit or miss too, and so we've not put our heads in the sand, per se. We're definitely aware of what, what's possible and likely in some cases, but, and you'll like this just as a stat, the reason why I juggle with it is, you know, they'll tell you, Oh, if family member has type one you're at, you know, 10 times increased risk of getting it yourself and then somewhere else, higher up in the statement about type one diabetes, say, and 90% of people who are diagnosed have no family history, like, not really sure how those two stats go together, where vast majority of people don't have it, relative, and then yet you tell them, we're at this massive increased risk. So I

Scott Benner 18:36
think they're making those numbers up. I also think I've heard people say 10% and 10 times. And I think, I just think they don't know which they were told. Like, I mean, and where does that number even come from? The back to that 10% 10 times. I've heard 5% five times. I mean, if there's data on it, great, like, but I mean, at what point are we just repeating something we heard someone else say? I mean, what I can tell you is that very frequently, there are other autoimmune issues in the family. That's a fairly frequent thing. I mean, I mean, I'll ask you, are there other autoimmune issues in your family? You guys gotta have celiac right?

Speaker 1 19:19
No. So that's that's been the interesting experience. So little tangent on that is, my mother is like a self taught amateur genealogist. Okay? So she ended up being for a while there probably had, like a top 20 contributor to ancestry.com Helping people put ancestry together. She traveled around, no kidding, the country she went to all the crap Mormons get. They have the best records. My mother would go out to Salt Lake all the time for church marriage records and that sort of thing. She'd come down near where I am, the National Archives. Same kind of thing. She flew to Europe a few times. So her experience was to document family trees for a lot of people. And so when my wife and I actually were married, she actually went back across my family, through my mother and my father, my wife's mother and my wife's father, as far as she could find records in two cases, they go back fairly far, probably almost 400 years in two family cases. And I said, Well, mom, after my son's diagnosis, who in the family has auto immune, or, even more appropriately, type type one. And I knew instantly after I asked the question, who she was thinking of. So one of her second cousins, I suppose, which is really, truly like once removed kind of scenario, both her kids have type one. So we had to go almost two and a half in family generations away to find a family tree component, a branch, if you will, that had type one in it. And that was just by sheer luck that we knew that and gave with them and we talked with them. This

Scott Benner 20:53
episode of The Juicebox podcast is sponsored by the ever since 365 get 365 days of comfortable wear without having to change a sensor. When you think of a continuous glucose monitor, you think of a CGM that lasts 10 or 14 days, but the ever since 365 it lives up to its name, lasting 365 days. That's one year without having to change your CGM. With the ever since 365 you can count on comfort and consistency 365 days a year, because the ever since, silicon based adhesive is designed for your skin to be gentle and to allow you to take the transmitter on and off, to enjoy your shower, a trip to the pool, or an activity where you don't want your CGM on your body, if you're looking for comfort, accuracy, and a one year where you are looking for ever since 365 go to Eversense cgm.com/juicebox to learn more. I still find that to be close in my approximation, though, I think if we went and found a bunch of people who don't have any auto immune stuff, like none, and I think it would be harder for you to find a connection in their family. And this is me again, doing what everybody else is doing. I'm just guessing based on the things I've heard. I don't actually know anything. We have

Speaker 1 22:18
other issues in the family. I suppose that we're not really clear as to what occurred. Perhaps, you know, we had, I had an uncle who passed very young when I was in his 30s from a rare form of juvenile brain cancer, which, at the time it happened, everyone's like, we don't understand this. This cancer develops in like, two year olds to four year olds, and here's a 35 year old man with it. How does that happen? And so we, there's family as big as my father's, you're bound to run into, yeah, people who have challenges across the board.

Scott Benner 22:49
Well, I mean, by the time you get to your temp, you're probably using some beat up sperm to make babies with, I would think

Speaker 1 22:58
they were in construction too. So, you know that? Well, my mother once said, so my father was right in the middle. My mother once said, after my grandmother stopped having children, she's, you're actually a pretty skinny woman, you know, not, not trying to be offensive, but

Scott Benner 23:10
nobody knew, because she was always pregnant, yeah, 23

Speaker 1 23:13
years, right? It was like a child every other year for for 23 years. Wow, my oldest cousins and my youngest cousin said being, I think there's almost a 40 year gap. Now, wait, that's something. It's, yeah, it now everyone's like, so who's who's an uncle, and who's a cousin and who's an Easter and nephew, it's like impossible. They have

Scott Benner 23:31
a lot of longevity, or a lot of them alive. Yeah, most of them are, wow, that's pretty

Speaker 1 23:36
much my bunch of my aunts and uncles made it into their their eldest now in their late 70s, actually, early 80s.

Scott Benner 23:43
God, now I think about it. So you could have an uncle in their early 80s that has a brother or sister in their 60s. Yeah. Wow. Jeez. All right, so when, when the diagnosis happens, what's the reaction in your family? Because you listed here in your in your notes to me that you'd like to talk about family reactions, and you said it was pretty far ranging. So what did you see and how did it impact you? Yeah,

Speaker 1 24:08
that was an interesting one for me. It kind of put me into therapy in a good way. I mean, I needed to process what was going on. I'd never done that personally. And so for me, I was, I was shook pretty hard, and I dove into it the only way I knew how, which was, as my therapist said to me, you know, you have this illusion of control, which is a very real symptom for people. And you know, he said to me, Brian, you made it 40 plus years with the idea that you were in control of anything. And this changed all of that because kids used to say, Oh, you're doctor, daddy. Why? Well, because I caught a lot of things. So for example, kid had pneumonia. We were struggling to figure out what it was. I watched the doctor diagnose it. I said, All right, I need a stethoscope. I have a stethoscope. I need a pulse ox. I got that too. And they're like, Well, why are you doing? I said, Well, I have four kids, and. And when we have problems, every time I come to pediatricians office or, you know, urgent care, you guys do the same, you know, six or seven tests every time to, you know, help establish a baseline. I said, I can do that at home and be better directed. So I used to have this idea that I could, you know, more or less figure it out. And then everything was always an acute issue, right? Type one being a chronic life, long thing. It was a total loop for me, and I accepted it by buying books. So I bought most of the books everyone in the Facebook group shares and others, maybe not so much, and threw myself into reading. So you were laughing that you know much of a reader, perhaps, but I'm a history major, so for me to pass history and get a major in it. You know, I read 1000s of pages of books a semester, if not weekly. So for me, reading was really easy to go through. So I read through a lot of the books of management, you know, the science of it, and I was accepting of it. And as much as my wife is currently, today, involved and engaged. She was a bit in denial, actually a lot, in denial that what occurred occurred, especially after he rolled off insulin. After that first month, it was kind of a it wasn't the whole idea of he's healed. It was more of a, well, his body is doing something on its own here. Let's not overthink it, and just take every day as it came. So you know, I was doing the crazy man thing, which is planning for the future. She was doing the rational thing, which was just do every step, one foot in front of the other. And if today doesn't need insulin, today doesn't need insulin. So those reactions were very wide ranging. And then same with my kids, my son's reaction, he usually at chronic ear infections. I have my whole theory as to that was part of the problem is that he was always in blamed from various foods that he would eat, that he doesn't eat now, but none of us eat now, stuff like fried foods, seed oil, for example. I don't mind if it's butter and that sort of thing, but like, we took him off all that, and he no longer gets ear infections. But he was good for two or three a year, easy. His response at diagnosis was, you know, laying on the ER table getting his first two injections. Was, well, so how long do I have to do this? Like, 10 days. Because he was thinking, you know, amoxicillin, that kind of thing, yeah. And the nurse kind of looked at me like, I don't know how to respond to that. Like he's asking how long he has to do these injections. And I kind of looked at him, I said, Well, only I could think of at the moment was for as long as you need to, until they're secure, and we'll just do it every day. As it happens, that was one of these. He looked at me, goes, well, what does that mean? Well, for a while, and it could be years, I don't know, but for right now, it's going to be every day. And he cried for maybe 30 seconds, and then moved on. I mean, the kid is resilient. That's again, reaction there being pod changes don't bother him. Sensor changes don't bother him. He did his own injections. I don't I don't know how he did it. It used to scare the crap out of me. My doing it right or wrong and that sort of thing. Yeah. And then my eldest daughter, she Dad, you're so so upset all the time. Why you're so sad? That's like, well, because your brother's facing this. And she goes, Yeah, but he's not doing anything any different. So here's another child observing that really grateful for that. She doesn't want to treat him any differently. She doesn't treat him like he's a glass object ready to break at any moment. She still beats up on him. Not that I enjoy that, but you know, again, another reaction. And my youngest, he's also got another sibling that's really close. So back to your thing about parenting. My two middle kids are 13 months apart, so one was born in summer, and then for Christmas, my wife dropped a pregnancy test in the stocking. Said, surprise. You know, well, we got one in diapers, followed by another one on diapers nine months later, and

Scott Benner 28:50
your dad's like, you're not going fast enough.

Speaker 1 28:54
Pick up the pace. So yeah, there's only six years between our four kids, so it's a pretty tight go out. But okay, my youngest was just like, she was kind of quiet about the whole thing, in awe, and she wanted to know how she could help. You know, little five year old girl at the time looking at her big brother. So it was just really interesting to see how no one really wanted to treat him differently. But I was like, trying to throw a protective bubble wrap around him, and it ended up being not the wrong thing at the moment was for me, it wasn't so much for him, right? I guess that's the best way to put

Scott Benner 29:28
it. You're still trying to figure out a way to stop all this and be in control of it,

Speaker 1 29:33
right? And so I realized, you know, I just can't. And so one of your favorite sayings has helped me a lot, which it's interesting to see a lot of the static thinking and in the healthcare setting, because we go to large Children's National Hospital, and one of the original big wigs in pediatric endocrinology runs to practice, and we've not ever met with that Endo. But I came up with all our basal settings. I came up with all of our Bolus settings, our insulin to car BA. Sensitivity, all that stuff, because listening to you mainly, and the podcast, and all your contributors, like Jenny, that sort of thing, the books as well. And I was like, Well, meet the need, right? And so, I mean, right now, while he's honeymooning, some people may be pulling their hair out. I've just had to roll with it. He needed four and a half units yesterday, and I think he's already up to four and a half units today. Like, I can't tell you why. It's not like, it's a major change in his food intake. It's just some days it's like, whoa, dial back to basal and dial back the amount we give him at meal time. And other times it's like, whoa, we didn't even put a dent in this. Like, what on earth is going on? So I've learned to just let go and let it happen and respond to it, because you'll drive yourself absolutely crazy into therapy like I did, trying to figure it out.

Scott Benner 30:48
I hope when I say that, I hope people like take it the way I mean it. Because I always worry that when I say meet the need, that it feels like an increase statement, but it could be a decrease statement. It could be whatever the need is, just meet it. Don't. Don't overthink it. Don't, you know, don't go, I don't understand. Why is it less today? Why is it like, who cares? Just just match the need with the resistance of insulin that that's required and move on. It's so weird. Like when you said a second ago, you're like, there's this saying you have the bot that that helps me, and then you kind of went into your story. It's so interesting to see what strikes certain people and how it ends up helping them.

Speaker 1 31:30
Oh, it does. So I'm in my analogy that that matches up with that is so I'm in sales and high tech software selling to enterprise and government, and

Scott Benner 31:41
that history degree really came in handy. When people ask me, what do you do with a

Speaker 1 31:45
history degree? I'm like, I don't know, whatever you want. I sold shoes at Nordstrom when I was, you know, in college to help pay for it. Afterwards, I was like, Well, what do I do with this? Went to go work on Capitol Hill, and they don't pay anything, by the way. People who are dedicated on the hill, that's a they're not doing it for the money, at least the members might be, but people work for them, definitely not. So I moved here to do that, and then decided to be in in software sales, because I understood technology Well, I'd love to tinker. I got in trouble with the FBI one time. Wait,

Scott Benner 32:16
hold on, you got in trouble with the FBI one time.

Speaker 1 32:21
So the Digital Millennium Copyright Act was just passed when I was in college, and I was doing, you remember Napster? I mean, wow, we're going back. Of course. There was alternatives to that for video and media and other things, software, etc. And this was, gosh, we're gonna go off on a tangent here. So my best friend's father was an intellectual property lawyer, and I'll never forget after I graduated, and this whole thing with the FBI stopped and whatever, and he said, your generation was right to be angry at the music industry. And I was like, that's not why I did it. It was free. I like, I was confused. I'm like, I wasn't thinking about it. But he's making the point. I spent $22 on that album listen to one song kind of felt like a rip off. And that's where the iTunes thing took off. The FBI thing was because I was, I was sharing huge volumes of pirated movies that had been ripped off of Hollywood Studios by insiders in Hollywood. Have you set up a server? Yeah, I was, I was one of the biggest sharing groups in the US at the time. It wasn't me personally, it was a group of us in a fraternity that I then went and hacked the school network, took all the firewall rules off and all the other fun stuff that stopped us from sharing. And, you know, I kind of had personal control of the network. This was the early days of a lot of cyber security. It wasn't very good. So, yeah, I had fun with it. And, you know, we'd literally that night, I'd be like, what do you guys want to work watch, right? And we'd go download something before dinner and come back, and by nine o'clock, whatever movie anyone wanted to watch, we downloaded it. And so that's that ended up being a problem for me, because the FBI traced my P Jess back to the school, and then from the school, they figured out where it's coming from, they sent this massive letter. It actually went home to and that's where my father was, like, you he wanted to kill me. You know, you're gonna risk everything. I said, Well, I laughed. I said, they didn't catch me for like, 99.9% of the stuff they found, like an Adobe installer file or something, you know, completely innocent, like, literally none of the stolen stuff. It was just the when I say stolen stuff, I mean, like, the pirate ape stuff that people were sharing. It was a legitimate file that I'd actually saved in the wrong file. Like, upgrading it and, like, okay, yeah, sure, I'll delete that file. And from there forward, I never did it, ever again. It was one of these, wow. That was a closed brush with with reality. Just,

Scott Benner 34:35
was it like a seasoned assist, and you just cease to desist, exactly, right? Yeah. You know, it's funny people like nowadays, I don't even think movie going to the movies doesn't have the same vibe as it used to, obviously, like you're talking about sharing films that weren't even released yet or or were literally in a theater, and young people listening don't understand, like a movie would come out in June, it would stay. In the theater for six months, like, like, you know what I mean? Like, it's not like right now, a movie comes out in a movie theater and, like, three weeks later you can watch it on like, Max or something like that. That's not, it wasn't like that. So you were, in their mind, stealing millions of dollars from them, if, if you were making it free, but you're lucky you didn't go down for that.

Speaker 1 35:19
Oh, here's, here's the the, I don't know. The funny part of the whole thing is, most of these movies were actually taken from the studios themselves by employees, because you'd get their screener discs. So if people have never seen Oscars from a while ago, the Oscar discs that they'd send out anytime they wanted a vote for given actor, actress, at least. This is what I was told back then. This could have evolved since then, but the disc itself for the scene they wanted someone to be nominated for. And these were always in the movie screeners that we downloaded at the bottom, it would scroll for your consideration in big block, white lettering. And they were like, what's that for? I'm like, the guys at Paramount, or the guys at whatever, thought this was the scene the actor should win Best Picture for, right? And people like, Wait, isn't this in the theaters now I'm like, yeah, they're already pushing, like, who should be nominated for something, and the Oscars aren't for six months, right? So the part for me that I was like, Look, this is just one big circle, like the studios are not paying their people well enough. They're not protecting your own property well enough. It's all being shared freely. I don't know what you're supposed to do. And, you know, I was a kid, and it was like, Hey, I just type in a word, and I find the movie and I download it like there was no, there's no limit, right? Same thing with the music, and

Scott Benner 36:34
you're not making money off it. It's all swagger, right? It's all just because I can, yeah, and it

Speaker 1 36:38
was all, it was all one of these things where it was all built on idea of the more shares you have, peer to peer, networking took off, right? And that's where the whole process just was, the more you share, the more you had access to and the more people downloaded from you, the higher your rating. It was just like Facebook before Facebook, how many shares you have, some likes, that's, that's, he's a good source of material. And,

Scott Benner 37:00
you know, just that was that crazy. No kidding.

Unknown Speaker 37:03
So I turned that somehow into a sales career.

Scott Benner 37:06
Well, I see the Connect. I see the through points, but and they let you graduate the school didn't make you bigger. Oh no kidding. Well, the school, the school, understood

Speaker 1 37:15
what we were doing, and we weren't, by any means, any violator anywhere. It was happening all around the country, and at the end of the day, everyone figured out how to shut it down. They went after the people who created the platforms, which is what they always do. They don't go after the users. They go after the dealers, right? The dealers are the guys that made the tech, like the guys that founded Napster and these other products that said, You got to stop doing it. It's making it too easy for piracy. I mean, I knew deep down at the end of the day, I said, this really isn't wrong, but it's so easy. So what are you going to do? But it taught me a lot about how how to talk to people around the technology, because people wouldn't understand. How did you do this? And I realized it was just a series of stepping stones, right? You just had to start questioning and start doing and start dabbling, and then you'd build on that experience. So it put me in a mindset of technology has to be conquered one step at a time. You don't become an instant expert, just like with what you do. I mean, I look at you and the way you talk about management, and I said, My God, what he's so confident. Clear. He knows what he's doing, why he's doing it, and if doesn't go as planned, doesn't bother him. I was like, that's the 10,000 hour rule, which, in a technology world, a lot of people know it, which is, you're an expert. After 10,000 hours, you can't really learn a whole lot more.

Scott Benner 38:26
Yeah, my secret to how I how I think about diabetes, is that I don't think about it any differently than I think about anything else, like I run my life the way I run diabetes. So I learn things I once. I know they're right. I do them. I never look back. I never question things once they work. And you know, if something goes wrong, you just wipe the slate clean and start over again. Like there's no reason to beat yourself up. There's no reason to overthink something has been thought through a million different times, like, this is how insulin works. You know, just use it like that. And if something goes wrong, there's a variable at play, you know, you can look back later and try to find it if you want. But in the moment, the moment passes, and so now you're in a new moment. Just go back to doing things the right way again, and it just works. Like everything works like what I say, something incredibly inflammatory. Life is really easy if you let it be most of the time. Like, where it gets difficult is when you bring other people into it, because they have their perspectives and ideas and what's important to them. And when that doesn't mesh with you, that's where things become. That's where they say. You know, relationships are are difficult, right? Because you have a way of thinking and somebody else has a way of thinking, and now you're trying to co exist without pissing the other one off too much. But if you just kind of put yourself in a white room with diabetes, you get your settings right, your pre bulls, your meals, you. Pay attention to implications like fat, protein, exercise, you stay flexible, you meet the need. You don't argue too much about why what's happening is happening. If you get stuck on that, you get stuck forever. It's like stepping it up, but a tar pit, you know, now you're now you're here having this argument. There's no answer to forever and ever and ever. So just don't step in it. Just go past it. And it sounds like that. It's funny, because the way you talked about going through the technology and figuring out the peer to peer and the whole bigger idea, that's really very similar. The only place you got stuck so far it sounds like is in the unreasonable idea that you could somehow impact this for your son in a way that's beyond you know what the natural world will allow? Does that make sense?

Speaker 1 40:51
Yeah, I, I mean, I, I feel myself happier today than I did when I used to tell people, I don't have a care in the world. Like I used to look back the summer before the diagnosis were really three weeks, three months prior to that, one of the businesses I was in, it's part of the reason why you do high risk startups is private equity came in and and bought the business and hey, like, that's nice little lump of change. Let's have a little vacation. So we took two weeks to go to the beach, something we wanted to do as a family for a while, and we so we did it. And I remember thinking, literally, I'm like, oh, life can't get any better than this, and blah, blah, blah, but I was still always on edge with kids still learning to swim. Two youngest were still running around the pool. I could not relax. Lots of other components, like, we'd go skiing. I grew up skiing in New England, teaching them to ski. It's like, oh my god, they're gonna careen off the trail and hit a tree. Like, literally, my mom would always race to the worst possible outcome of whatever the enjoyable event I was supposed to have, you know, like, the waves gonna take him out at the beach and sweep him out. I'd have to go save him. Like, save him. So I was never really capable of just letting go. And then once the diagnosis happened, I was like, I just I can't live like this. I have to let go and just let to your point, life happen. Just go with it. So

Scott Benner 42:15
there's nothing wrong, in my opinion, there's nothing wrong with being prepared for those ideas. It's being stuck in them. That's the problem. Yes, I

Unknown Speaker 42:22
was certainly stuck in them. Yeah, that was my problem. I

Scott Benner 42:24
once, I was having this conversation once with my brother in law, and I said, Wait a minute. I said, you have a two story house. And he goes, Yeah. I said, you don't know which window you jump out of if there was a fire and you couldn't get down the stairs. And he goes, what? And I said, one of your Windows is a lesser of evils. You don't know which one it is. And he goes, No. And I said, I do. I plan for stuff like that. He goes, you plan for what you'll do if your house catches fire and you can't get down the stairs? And I was like, I mean, plan is a strong word. I gave it 20 seconds of thought. I know which window I'd go to,

Speaker 1 43:00
yeah. I mean, I had the little ladder roll away, ladder tucked under your arm as you walked into the second

Scott Benner 43:05
story. Well, that's my in my mind, having the ladder is a bridge too far, but knowing which one goes to a little rooftop that would let me, like, kind of tumble down on the ground and probably not break anything, or put me in a position where I could make it longer till somebody got there. Like it's not a thing I've ever thought about since then, but I did think about it for four seconds. I'm freaked out when none of you think about anything. I'm also freaked out when you can't stop thinking about it. Like, I understand the kids don't swim, we're going to the beach, so we're going to pay attention. But after I've had the thought, then I execute it, I don't worry about it. Like, that's where, like worries, a waste of imagination, comes into my mind. You are genuinely making up a story about a thing that very likely won't happen, and then you're guarding against it. So do you have anxiety? I don't anymore, but you did, most certainly did. You gave it away for your son.

Speaker 1 43:56
I did. Yeah, I had to be able to enjoy life. I had to let him feel that it wasn't a barrier to him. And if he's watching his father constantly worry over every little thing, he's going to wonder, is there something I need to be worried about? And the reality is, you know, he's he was starting to transition some of his care to him, and he's gotten better with it. But, like, I didn't want him to see the anxiety that was very obviously on my face, like I was not eating. Well, I lost a ton of weight. When I say a ton, it sounds like a huge amount to lose, but I probably lost 30 pounds in two and a half months because I had to force myself to eat like I was just so anxious. And my wife one day was like, get a hold of yourself. And I was like, Yeah, I need to well

Scott Benner 44:41
she No, I'm not laughing. I'm just trying to imagine, if I told my wife to get a hold of herself, what would happen?

Unknown Speaker 44:49
Well, it was, it was warranted because, oh

Scott Benner 44:51
no, it would be warranted if I said it to my wife too. I'm just wondering what would happen if I said you got a hold of yourself, my wife would beat. Me with a stick and then leave me and take everything, get a hold. It was, that's

Speaker 1 45:06
where. That's why I said the reactions were so helpful. Like, I overdid it and she kind of underdid it right. And we both had to get to our, our balance and our where we were both at peace with like, hey, like, I'm accepting of

Scott Benner 45:18
it. Did you both find level is she, did she rise up and you came down?

Speaker 1 45:22
Yes, okay, yes, yeah. And she's still probably calmer about the whole thing than I am. Well,

Scott Benner 45:29
in fairness, Brian, you're worrying about it. Why did two of you have to worry about it? Well,

Speaker 1 45:33
no, that, hey, you know what that's that's probably a fair way to look at it. Um, we settled into that role a little bit like we still have. We still have, we still haven't been able to use any of the automation stuff, because he's just like, every day would be different. It's just not. You're not up to automation yet. Yeah, we're thinking at some point we'll be able to, but his needs are just too highly variable still. Yeah, so, so I'm the automation. That's me, but I enjoy it because I look at it from your perspective, which is, if I can better begin to see the patterns that are there, maybe some of them are imagined, and I just lucked out. But for the most part, I take it the way you look at it, which is, you know, it, it's very real in most cases. And I'm not tinkering with settings. It's more about responding in the moment to what's going on. But that process, she's slowly coming around to like I told her, Hey, listen to Scott. And I gave her the old beginnings and Pro Tip series said, listen through all of these and we'll be able to have a better conversation about what we're doing. She do that. Did it help? Oh, absolutely, I'm glad completely understands now, like yesterday, my son, we went to watch her voting day, I guess was yesterday, right Tuesday. So a bunch of schools were closed, so I took my son to have her he went to go watch her play a tennis match, and at the end of it, he's like, Dad, I want a cheeseburger. And I was like, I kind of was rolling my eyes a little bit, like these fat bombs, and just like whatever, you know, it's good. Let's go ahead. So we went ahead of cheeseburger. And, you know, this giant thing? I was like, God, I don't even know what the car count is on that. So I said, we have to wing it. We have to eyeball it, and we have to be ready to respond. And I let him make the judgment call. What do you think that is? And thankfully, I He did it on his own. I didn't do this at all. He's, I guess, to your point, like Arden, he overestimates it, not by a lot, not where I'd go, oh no, no, no. But he does more than I do. And I'm like, All right, let's go for it. I think he was only above like 180 for maybe 30 minutes. But of course, it came back three hours later, there was that rise again, and my wife said, Oh, the fat rise and the proteins going on, like, we need to knock it down. I didn't even see it. She saw it before I did. And I was like, we would not have been able to have that conversation. Earlier on. She'd have been like, I don't understand what's happening. What do we do? And there'd be freezing paralysis, like, and we'd watch it probably keep going up. Also,

Scott Benner 47:57
then there's an assumption you did something wrong, because if she doesn't know enough about it to understand that other impact, then the idea is, well, you guys just didn't Bolus well for this. And that's the thing that people get, forget you and your wife. But people get frozen that if they don't know the other implications, then they just go to, I did something wrong. And sometimes people shut down. You know what I mean? Instead of like, not everybody lurches forward. Some people just go, oh, I suck at this. And they kind of collapse. And then they sit with their 300 blood sugar forever. Yeah, I

Speaker 1 48:26
had that conversation with our, I guess, our our nurse practitioner that we see more than we see the end of and at one, back and forth over our they use a lot of electronic communication for the easy stuff. I say, Hey, I'm trying to dial in his ratio. And I made this change. She's kind of like, well, why did you do that? I said, Well, if I give him this much, he drops too far. This is how we ended up getting on a pump. Was he needs? We have to do things in temp of the unit on a regular basis, because trying to keep a tighter range. You just for his insulin sensitivity, like even a half unit will move them 80 move them like, 80 points. Yeah. So if he's at like, 130 I'm like, so we did this for a while. I'm like, All right, Rory, go grab your favorite whatever, ice cream, sugary thing. It was, like the idea you gave you'd Bolus for a juice box before sports like that way, if it doesn't work, just down the juice like, so we were always trying to match how much we could kind of catch it before it would drop, knowing that it would help bring him down. But not all the way down. We were doing this, like, feed the insulin thing. I'm like, This is insanity. Like, he doesn't need to eat an extra 500 600 calories a day in mainly carbohydrates and glucose related stuff, just so that I can bring them down to a number I'd like to see in that Yeah? And she's like, Well, okay, I see your point. I said, so can we get the Omnipod please? She's like, alright, you, you clearly have comfort level with this that most people don't. So yeah. And we had, we had it, like, three days later, but that was after a lot of trial and error, yeah. And that was my. First experience of trying to figure these things out on my own. I said, Ah, first confidence boost, right?

Scott Benner 50:04
I think for sure, when you are trying to make small adjustments like that, MDI is is harder, you know, like it's just there's all you can't get as fine with the amounts, and there's more poking. And did you think your wife just didn't want him to have a pump, or she just didn't feel like she knew enough about it right away? Like, so she saw your comfort with it, and thought, okay, that's fine. There

Speaker 1 50:29
was some level of resistance to the idea. But then, when I explained to her that, you know, when he has, like, his favorite breakfast, he has eggs and these two Kodiak waffles that he loves, like a unit ends up being a little too much, and half units not nearly enough. So we were, we were doing, like, split balls and constantly just trying to figure this out. I said, Hey, imagine we do this now with an extended Bolus, and we split the ratios. And then, you know, now he's not 225, going into school at, you know, 830 because the Bolus still hadn't hit from the second one. And, you know, and so it took this whole process, and she wrapped her head around the idea of, if you don't like his number going above a certain number, not that we need to make a number good or bad, but just what are we shooting for? Target wise, it's easier given his dosage. Needs to do it with a pump. And then when my son figured out that he only needs to put it on every three days, he's like, Oh, I'm in. I'm in. Okay? Because, you know, yeah, he'd do six or seven injections, maybe eight a day, just, you know, with everything he ate, and it didn't bother him. But he was kind of like, it's such a production. Like, lift up the shirt, Bob the area, so grab the pen, prep the pen, like he was doing all of that, because he would actually tell us, Mom, I can insert it without any paint. You believe me be and I was like, oh, okay, so he's, he's ready for this.

Scott Benner 51:58
Let's see about a pump. Yeah, well, it's, that's pretty great. Actually. Hey, I've decided on what I'm gonna call your episode, and it's, I'm gonna name it after the book I'm reading right now. That sounds fun. And as a history major, I feel like you're gonna know what I'm reading.

Unknown Speaker 52:13
It's called meditations.

Scott Benner 52:17
I don't know that book. Oh, it's a collection of Marcus Aurelius is writings.

Speaker 1 52:21
Oh, that sounds fun. Yeah, I actually have a book called hubris sitting on my desk, which is all about kind of the the pomp and circumstances that leave up to war and why wars typically don't go the way that people who start them think. And there's some, there's some uh, Roman battles of that book as well. I believe you

Scott Benner 52:45
haven't read it yet. Apparently, he used to sit down at the end of the day and just write down random thoughts, and they're all collected in this, uh, in this book called meditations. So and I feel like this is what we're doing with you right now. Like I feel like we're just hearing about the things that at the end of the day you were like, This is my takeaway from today. I'm gonna build on tomorrow with this. And I don't know anyway, that's my inclination.

Speaker 1 53:13
I like it. I I've my father used to quote the Beatles to me about that, which is life is what happens to you while you're making other plans. I think that's roughly the quote. He was a Beatles fan, not me, but I was always making lots of other plans. This obviously was not in, and I don't think type one's in anybody's plans. But that never really resonated with me until after this, actually speaking, going all the way back to one of your earlier questions about how people responded my parents, when I called them from the hospital room. I said, you know, Rory has type one. My father's response was, oh, everything will be all fine. And it took me about two weeks, but I called him back after I said, That's the absolute wrong response. I needed from you at that time, I needed someone to empathize with me, sympathize with me, just be present in that raw emotion of it sucks. It probably feels really shitty right now, and that's what's going to happen for a while. And I didn't get that, and that's where I was really grasping. So my heart goes out to all the newly diagnosed on a regular basis, and those are really, generally, the people I almost always respond to on the Facebook group, which is, you know, I've been in your shoes. It does suck, but just the longer on this component, my favorite podcast episode of yours is when you It's titled, I think the time I decided to share that put me at ease when I first heard it, because it puts the Scott today and the Scott of when you were not really newly diagnosed, but about as far back as you you would share those two pictures of you. It's kind of like newly diagnosed Scott struggled too, right? Like it's, it's no secret, but it's, you know, we're so far along in your podcast, I think some of that gets lost on people. But I was like, yeah, there's some really big gems in the background that you can say, hey, if Scott can. Be who he is today, and Arden can be the one she is today with this for 20 years. So can I, you know, why can't I, like, I'm listening to this person basically talk like an expert, but it didn't start there. No one starts there. And

Scott Benner 55:13
maybe, maybe I can let go of some of the angst that exist during the process too. I would hope, I would hope people can do that a little bit like just, I mean, not that the feelings aren't real, but that you don't have to live in them for so long that you can go, You know what? This is probably gonna pass. I have to tell you my favorite Beatles song. That's a message from a title is, let it be. I find that like a chant, almost when I listen to it. Just, there's so many things that happen, and they all seem so important, and you feel like there's something to do all the time, but the truth is that most of the time, the best thing to do is nothing, just let it be. I know I take a lot of comfort out of that. Usually, yeah,

Speaker 1 55:55
it's a good point. It's something. Occasionally I get a little jumpy on corrections, and my wife will look at me and she'll kind of say, Hey, can you can you give it one or two more Dexcom readings see if this is really a trend? And I would say probably 80% of the time, she's right. She's she's a good governor on the process for me, because otherwise I'm like, Cool. Overdid that. And then I got a text, Hey, cut the basal back and, like, we gotta make up for a little aggressive over correction. So she's a good governor on the Let It Be part two, which is sometimes you gotta let the decision you made play out and not second guess yourself, because then you'll just drive yourself crazy. Yeah,

Scott Benner 56:32
sometimes you need to see the process happen. It's not so much about controlling the number as it is seeing what your impacts did so that you can make better decisions. And I mean, listen, I've had, you know, back when I would, you know, texting Arden, when she was younger, I'd be like, temp basal increase 30% for an hour, and then five minutes later, I'd be like, shut that off. And then

Speaker 1 56:54
all the time, well, not to him directly, but when he's home, I'm always like, Oh God, I'll walk, you know, back into the bedroom, 10 minutes later, back. Well, don't need that temp, basal,

Scott Benner 57:03
temp, basal, the other way. Now, what we went too far. Do, uh, do 10% but for 45 minutes now, and like, it's fun to joke about, because it felt like such like these wild over corrections. But I'm telling you, the experiences were important. Like, I'm telling you like to see it happen now. Now it allows me, in present day, to say, I don't like this 170 blood sugar, but I see what's happened in the past here with this. You know, the algorithms pushed insulin, or we Bolus or something, and I'm reasonably sure that this 170 is going to be 90 in an hour. So I want to put more insulin in because of the number, but I got to trust the process, and I can trust it, because in the past, I've not trusted it, and then I've learned from it. So I think it's all important. But in the end, when you get to your zen place, and this is not just about diabetes. You sincerely apply this to your personal relationships, your jobs, how you feel about people driving in traffic. Often the best thing to do is nothing. I mean, if you can leave with more than that today, you've done really well, but most of the time you're just you, what's the the cooking saying? Right? Like, you just you touched it too many times and now it sucks, or something like that. Like, I forget what that idea is like. Just stop fiddling with it so much. Let it be what it is. I don't know. I find that getting up people get upset. I think if you just walked away from this, never thought about it again, it would go away. But instead, we're gonna spend the next six months being mad about this, you know. So anyway, I run my life on some very basic ideas. I run diabetes on my basic life ideas. Most of the time, things go on. Am I perfect? I'm not. Do people all agree with it. They don't. You know what I mean, but it works. It's working pretty well. Arden's alive. She's thriving. I just talked to her last night on FaceTime. She's at the end of her quarter. She's about to finish her sophomore year in college. She's sitting in a lab with a friend she made who somehow has diabetes like the first in person my daughter made her first in person friend with diabetes in her life when she was 20 years old at college, and she's never once known a person with type one personally in person, she has one online friend and one in person friend who has diabetes, and they're working together, and they FaceTimed last night, because they're, they got an extension on something, and they were, they seemed like very happy for a minute, so that, I think they face time to be like, we got an extension, And they're so relaxed and laughing. But yet, in the past week, they've both done all nighters, three nights in a row, nobody's had like, a crazy low blood sugar. They're managing themselves. It's nice, you know what? I mean, like, so I don't, I don't begrudge you your drill downs and you're over involved. Yes, and I'm really impressed at how you let them go. I'm sure plenty of people are like, how did he just let go of that anxiety? I'm going to assume you went to therapy. Is that how you did it?

Speaker 1 1:00:10
Yeah, I did. I did it with therapy. They were things that I had to accept, because the therapist would say to me that a lot of the anxiety was really a reflection of probably things that I had to acknowledge when I were younger, and so, I mean, I had to have a conversation with my parents. I said, Is there a trauma in my background that I don't know about? I mean, I had to be very serious about that. No, no, no, I know what you're talking about. At the end of the day, there was maybe not so little things, but they definitely had an impact me as a young, young kid, that it kind of had me put up walls around certain things that hadn't really face down. And through therapy, it was one of these, look, there's there's ways that you can respond to certain pressures in life, and just have to make that choice, and I'd been making the wrong one, essentially, very guarding, and I had to face them head on. So for me, a lot of it was, I had to be more upfront with what I was actually feeling. So I think, to your credit, in some ways, like not that you don't have a filter, but you don't like you you're speaking your mind, and you're very clear about that. I think there's a lot of people who don't like to speak their mind because they're afraid they're afraid they're going to upset somebody, when, in reality, there's something you're trying to work through, and there's maybe a communication gap between you and the other person, and someone might take offense, but there are ways that you can learn to talk about them and say, Look, this isn't me being offensive. This is me having an honest conversation about what I'm experiencing, what I'm feeling, and I hadn't really done that, you know, Were

Scott Benner 1:01:42
you mad at your parents or something because your debt, your reaction to your father was angry?

Speaker 1 1:01:47
It was, yeah, the reaction with that is, he's an on again, off again alcoholic. Oh, and so when I say that it's, it's he, he realizes that he's a much better person when he doesn't drink, and he's atrocious when he does and I don't, not physically at all. It's verbal it's terribly verbal abuse in more of the attempt to be funny, that's the painful part of the whole thing. It was not mean to be mean. It wasn't saying anything vicious, but it was just barbs and jabs like you wouldn't say that if you hadn't been drinking. And I noticed this, and I said at the end of the day, I said, I just the people who should, in your mind, love you most, and not say those things or saying them like I had to square up with that. And it was experiences as Kid where that was like something you'd see at the dinner table when the family would get together, is who can be wittier than the other person. And it almost invariably devolved into a rose peeking at each other. Oh yeah, the full roast thing. Could you imagine what Tom Brady just went through in this Netflix thing? Like, oh, it's

Scott Benner 1:02:46
fantastic. I loved it.

Speaker 1 1:02:48
I mean, I was like, Wow, you really have to be open minded about doing that. But imagine that, instead of those being comedians hired to pick at you, it's your closest friends and family. And suddenly that may not feel so good. So yeah, roasting constantly. They would cross the line a lot. I never acknowledged that, that that bothered me immensely, because I married into a family that doesn't do that at all. Oh, those people, they treat family, yeah, those people very differently. And you can be light hearted, but like, there's things you just like, Listen, I

Scott Benner 1:03:17
love humor. You can't be light hearted and humorous. It has to hurt or it's not funny. And your point is, you don't need your dad doing that to you.

Speaker 1 1:03:26
Right? Your your jerseys through I'm from Northern Jersey originally, so, like, I'm definitely familiar with the jersey approach to stuff New York City feel. But, yeah, it was, but for me, it was one of these things where he didn't drink for 20 years. I didn't know he had this problem until after I was growing

Scott Benner 1:03:40
Oh, no kidding. Your dad hid drinking from you through your first 20 years of your life.

Speaker 1 1:03:45
He didn't hide it. He'd quit cold turkey. Oh, he'd stopped for that

Unknown Speaker 1:03:49
long. Stopped for

Speaker 1 1:03:50
that long. I had no idea my father was the he's he'd go to a party, and it was, I just knew my dad is, he'd have a coke on ice. That was all you'd ever drink.

Scott Benner 1:03:57
Your dad was white knuckle on it through his whole life with this, yeah, for sure. No kidding, how about that?

Speaker 1 1:04:03
And then after my brother and I moved out of the house, I think he realized, for whatever reason, that he thought he could, you know, ease his way into it. And nope, so he's done the rehab thing twice, and it hurts now because he's got grandkids. I might do you want to spend a lot of time with him, like, I don't know what to tell you, like, what motivations you need not to pick up a drink you can't stop. So for me, it was facing that down. And people may say, Oh, I have problems in my life too, and I face it down all the time. But like for me, it was an unaddressed issue that, you know, if you idolize somebody and they're they're your rock because you saw them operate a certain way for 20 years, and then suddenly they're vulnerable, they're a mess. They're all these other things. It's like, well, my anchor point just flew off, like, I don't know what I'm supposed to do now, the person who I would have expected to drive down and, you know, stay at the house with us for a little while. You would never trust them to operate a vehicle. We

Scott Benner 1:04:53
have family members. Our kids have never been in a car with and we told them you can't drive our kids. So. Don't ever like if it ever falls that way, just know that you're not allowed to drive my kid somewhere no matter what. And we had to say that when we were pretty young to somebody, it was hard, yeah. But again, I don't really have trouble saying stuff like that to people, so no,

Speaker 1 1:05:15
yeah. And as it should be, though, like, that's, that's the thing that I had to do, is I had to learn to take the governor's off on the hard feelings, yeah, again, not to insult somebody or hurt them, but to make sure that I wasn't left in this anxiety ridden ball of, you know, what if? And that freaked me up, because the other option was medicate myself. And I talked to a few friends who'd done that, and they're like, it feels like you're driving somebody else's body. It's, it's really weird. It works. Like the anxiety goes away, but it's, it's they didn't, in their experience, think that going the SSRI route and others was was worth it to them. I got a prescription, looked at it on my desk, and said, If I go down this route and it works, I'm going to think that that's what I need my whole life. I want to try addressing the other underlying issues first and see if that works. Because if nothing works, then, hey, maybe I do need it. Like, I'm not judging at all. If you need it, you need it, yeah, but I decided that I would go the other way with it. And for me, it was, what summarizes it up is I used to come home every day from work, and then I'd say, all right, made it through another day. The kids are a little bit older, and I used to say to myself, well, at some point they'll all be old enough for like, it's not stressful. So I used to kind of do that to myself. I was like, because we had so many young kids, you know, under the age of six or seven. So for a long time, everything was, I mean, I've been to the ER on the same day with two different kids for two different injuries, with the same ER doctor looking at me, like, would you forget something? I'm like, nope. Here for a different reason, different kid like, that's that was kind of the chaos in the house.

Scott Benner 1:06:44
Were you finding problems that didn't exist? I thought they asked you this earlier, and I never did.

Speaker 1 1:06:49
No, I never, I never found problem that didn't exist. Okay, you know, it was, if it was an ear infection, it was an ear infection. If it was, you know, pneumonia, it was pneumonia, the flu, the flu, that kind of thing. So I never invented issues. But like that day of the ER trip, a friend of ours had given us one of these little sticker books for little kids. And my one daughter left it open, and my youngest, who was two at the time, put the stickers in her mouth, and they were these kind of hard plastic foil back things that, oh God, like, whoa. Like, so my wife is she hears her gag, and she's like, What the hell. So she's like, swooping out, and she thinks she's choking on it. And we're like, how many stickers were there? And we're like, we have no ideas. We've at this point, we're operating with the idea that maybe she swallowed one. And I'm like, Well, if it's sticker made of paper or plastic, no big deal. But these were, these were hard, like, we were thinking this might be a bit large or something, yeah, or get stuck. So we drove the ER, and the ER doc was was listening. There was no whistling, and he's no but we'll do a chest X ray, because he's like, these things will light up on a x ray machine, no problem, because they're made with some foil lining. It all came back clear. So in order to celebrate the ah, you know, we dodged whatever we went to the local park, and we're working on my older two daughters bike riding skills. And my second daughter wanted to try riding around the park with one of the training wheels off, following her big sister and I rode with them. They hit the brake. Oh, slow it down. Like we did this five or six times. And then the second time out. I was like, sit down, relax. They got it. I sat down and I watched her, and she's my speed demon, like risk taker one, no breaking. She keeps picking up speed. I'm like, Oh my God. She tries to make a turn, goes right over the handlebars, nearly hits the big post, goes down hard, and I hear crying, so I run to the other side of the field, and her arm is bent at a 35 degree angle. There's no bone sticking out, but you very clearly tell it's broken. So the day that was supposed to be relaxing for me, after the chaos, go back and the ER doc, like, oh, you forget something. You were just here three hours ago. I'm like, No, and I show him the arm. He's like, What the hell so,

Scott Benner 1:08:59
buddy, I told you, there's no sticker in the kid. What is wrong with you? No, no. Different kid. Different problem. Hold on, exactly. Oh,

Speaker 1 1:09:06
my look on his face was shock, like, oh, oh, you're serious. And then they had to do the standard thing with Child Protective Services, not because they were worried about us, but it was one of these two, yeah, kids on a bike, and were you wearing a helmet? And so these are all that stuff, and that kid's tough too. I mean, all my I said, all my kids are tough, but she, she never really was in too much pain throughout. And then, if you've never seen a kid on ketamine, it had a bone break set. It makes their eyes kind of go screwy. And I looked at my wife and said, I can't stay here for this while. They set the break. You have to do it. And now my wife worked in the medical field for 10 years as a rep, and she'd seen brain surgery, spine surgery, hips, like all sorts of stuff at a military hospital being worked on. So I was like, you have the fortitude for this? I do not. And so she stayed and watched him set the break. But she's like, Yeah, I don't ever want to watch that again either, because when it's your own kid, it's you don't disassociate you. Of that. So that's

Scott Benner 1:10:00
painful. Hey, listen, I, in case I forget, if you don't watch the entire Tom Brady roast, I'm not talking to the people who are listening. At least listen to Nikki Glaser, Tony Hinchcliffe and Sam Jay. They were particularly funny. Yes,

Speaker 1 1:10:15
Nikki was, yeah, wow. It just, she

Scott Benner 1:10:19
was just, she's her cadence is almost perfect for that stuff. Really fantastic anyway. And and to Tom Brady, who's now saying this didn't go the way he expected it to, or whatever bullshit he's talking about right now. Like, stop it, man. What'd you think was gonna happen?

Speaker 1 1:10:34
He didn't go to the after party. I'm like, Are you surprised? No,

Scott Benner 1:10:37
that I don't that I wouldn't go to the after party. He looked dazed at points, and with that plastic surgery, what I'm assuming is plastic surgery, he looked a little extra crazy at some points. But no, I thought those three comedians were hilarious. So if you're looking for an insight into what I think is funny in a roast situation, those three got me maybe, maybe Andrew Schultz, but I thought his cadence wasn't great, but I liked a lot of his content anyway, not the point, Brian, we've done a thing today that I think of as masterful. I asked you one question, and we talked for an hour and 15 minutes. That's perfect. There's other questions on here. You on your list here? Said family reactions, which I think took us through a great story. You did talk about your therapy, letting go illusion of control. You got through that. You talked about community a little bit, and how to support people and what they need in those situations. Maybe I yeah, maybe we did. Okay, actually. Well,

Speaker 1 1:11:36
there's, there's one thing I would add about the community part. Go ahead and I think it's, interesting, prior to my son's diagnosis, I'd only known one person prior to that, a good friend of mine, his wife, was diagnosed late in life, and that's kind of all I knew, and she lived a perfectly normal life and didn't think anything of it. One of the things that really helped me was finding people to talk to quickly. But one gentleman in particular did something great for me, and this is what I think everybody might need, which is he kind of represented what I envisioned my my son to be. And it's not unlike the story you had recently with another one of your guests that when she was diagnosed at 12 and she found herself later on with with someone else in the ER with her said, Oh, and you're perfectly normal, like, I kind of needed that experience. So a good friend of mine introduced me one of his best friends growing up. And he's like, oh, oh, your son is type one. Don't worry about it. I'm like, What are you talking about? Job? And he said, Well, you got to meet this guy, Tommy. I said, why he goes well, he was my best friend growing up. We did the JDR fund walks together. We went to college together. We played sports together. He's got a family. He's kids. He lives down the street. So I went and met him, and we had an hour and a half long conversation, and he did everything absolutely normal and nothing unusual about any of it. And he showed me off his Omnipod, and he said, Brian, I've been dealing with this for, you know, 28 years, and, you know, just got the Omnipod five. For me, this is about as close to a cure as I think I'll ever really need, because, hey, it helps minimize the risk for me, but I've gotten really good at this. And I was like, Oh, that's really interesting, great technology. And at the end of the night, as we were walking out of the restaurant, he turns and looked at me, because I know what you need. What's that? He goes, you want a hub, don't you? And I said, Yeah, dude. And I looked at him, and I said, you know you I have to look at you and say, That's what my son is capable of being and doing. Is his own grown man with his own family. And this won't prevent any of that, like I needed to see that in the flesh for whatever reason. Yeah, and it still gets me, and you say it on your podcast too, right? You will meet somebody, and I got a chance to see that as an embodiment in the flesh. And so for me, that community sense of and I still talk with Tommy on occasion. He's always asking how things are going. So it doesn't need to be this constant everyday thing, but there will be somebody you may meet that just if you can make them your spirit animal. That's what I call them anyway, and I joke about it, because they can be for me anyway, the reflection of my future son, right in that respect, or future daughter, if someone doesn't have the son that's diagnosed, right? And it doesn't have to be massive or impactful in that way. But for me, it was, it was almost freeing, like I don't have to think of my son as challenged or limited in any way, and and here's a person that I can relate to like that. So that's what it meant

Scott Benner 1:14:18
to me. So much of this path is having something that you can look to as aspirational, really important to have hope and a goal that is tangible, that has been embodied by somebody else already. That makes sense, absolutely, yeah, that's very, very important, because in the moment it all does feel terrible and insurmountable, and I'm different or broken, or my kid isn't what I thought they were going to be. And then people sometimes can be inclined to give up. You know, when they when they feel like, when they feel like, the aspiration is gone now, like. Know, then what's they're left to do, and why would I be trying? But that's just, it's just so patently not correct. I mean, I've talked to people with significant health issues on top of type one diabetes, who are maybe some of the happier people I've ever met in my life. Yeah? Well,

Speaker 1 1:15:16
you talk to the gentleman who's blind by his kind of mismanagement, by his own admission, just, you know, but got married, has kid, he's on the forums. And I said, Hey, I don't know how to contact you, but loved your episode, because, my God, the outlook you have on life, that was very freeing for me. You had another woman, I think it was Gloria, same kind of thing, you know, she's in her 70s, and it's like, I love horses, and she just decided to kind of move off into be with horses. And it was like, so for me, it was, hey, these people aren't at all saying it's a limitation, and for a long time, the medical community always wants to treat it that way. And that hurt most was that's kind of again, to your and I'll say you have a dislike of it, but the approach matters, right? They don't really know how to say it genuinely, because, unless they, as an endo, live with type one, how you're really supposed to take it seriously about when you're not living with that limitation, you know, that's like the guy walking around talking to someone you know, with inability to walk say, hey, everything could be fine. It's kind of like, kind of a weird, disjointed way to try to convince me, because you don't live with this, like, what am I supposed to

Scott Benner 1:16:20
do? What made you mad about your dad's statement isn't, I think that it was unfeeling, it's that it was unfounded. Like, and the thing he could have offered you, you know, I know you needed empathy in the moment, but like, at least that would have been honest from him. You know what I mean, like, it's going to be okay, from a person who doesn't really know if it's going to be okay is infuriating to me. It falls on the same level as God only gives these things to people who can handle it. Anytime anyone's ever said to me, God gave Arden diabetes because they knew you'd be good at taking care of it. I want to punch them in all of their faces with all of my hands, because the inference is that there's a God, first of all, and he looked at me and said, Hey, you're a thoughtful person. I'll give your kid diabetes. That doesn't make any sense to me at all. I understand the overall feeling I get what they mean, but the way you say it is really important. Do you know what I mean? Like, there's, oh, I do. There's another way to say something, like you can, you could pass that sentiment to me in a way that would be comforting, instead of a way that's infuriating, that goes for a lot of of different things. Hey, listen, I'm gonna, I don't usually do this at the end here, but here's a PSA, from me to you, if you grew up with alcoholic parents, go to therapy.

Speaker 1 1:17:39
Yes, yeah, even if you don't know until later in life

Scott Benner 1:17:42
for sure. Yeah, there's so much impact that comes from alcoholic parenting onto children, and there are probably a dozen things you do with your personality that you would be much happier without, and they all stem from your parents being drinkers. And I know that most people don't believe that, but wait, man, I see it over and over again. Go to a therapist and say, hey, my parents were drunks, and I need help, and a year later, you're gonna feel a lot better. So that's from me to anybody who cares. Yeah,

Speaker 1 1:18:16
well, the coup de gras for me on this whole thing of like, kind of letting go was, you know, I've done the big corporate America thing for a long time. I've done startups as well, all Silicon Valley kind of things, and it's been enjoyable, and I've learned a ton along the way, but I never really felt like any of it was mine. It was always working for someone else's benefit. And so you whether you call yourself an entrepreneur or not, you are, and you're doing it your way and the way you want to do it, and at some point, you may or may not retire on it, you know, God bless. Hope you do. But you know that's that's up to you or not. I can't tell it's up to you how far you take it, but I went so far as to say I have money in retirement that's sitting out there. I don't know what life's going to look like in 25 years when I can finally touch it. So I liquidated it and I went on a opportunity to go buy my way into a small business or start one, because I wanted to be in the here and now. I wanted to be more present in my kid's life. But more importantly, I wanted to be able to say, hey, but that's mine. Like I work on that with passion and enjoyment, like you do. I mean, I think people, if you listen enough, I mean, you clearly love what you do. It motivates people, hardest working people I know are also the longest lived people, not saying too much, but they love what they do, and I've stopped loving what I do, generally speaking, just being a salesperson for someone else. I said, Well, let me see if I can turn this inward and do something with it. Now I'm not telling people to liquidate your savings. There are ways to do it. I happen to have a cousin in the business that does these business startup where your retirement money is tax free. And it sounds like a scam, but it's not. It's called rollover for business startup. It's part of the IRS tax code, but essentially, you can tap your retirement savings early, so long as you don't benefit your current self for your future self. Big. Unquote there with the IRS. I said, You know what? Old me would have never taken this risk. But at this point, I'm like, got it all this stuff that's happened in the last few years. Screw it. How long are you going to

Scott Benner 1:20:12
I'm 42 okay. Oh, it's an early, early in life to come to that idea. Well, listen, I'll answer a couple things. You said I My goal is to do the podcast for 10 more years. I think I can. I mean, forget. I think I can. I could easily do that. It's all about if people still care to hear from me, if they care to hear from me, they'll listen. If the numbers are right, advertisers will buy ads, and then I can make a podcast. That's my goal. I hope it I hope it works that way. I'm putting my fingers in other things, a little bit with AI, with diabetes and some other stuff like that, that I think will help people now and after I'm gone and I stopped making the podcast, but my wife asked me the other day, in a really, like serious moment, she said, I say I'm gonna go record now. And she goes, you ever get tired of it? And I was like, what? She goes talking to people, is it exhausting? And I was like, oh, it's like, the best part of my day. And she's like, really, because my wife's pretty introverted. You wouldn't know it about her if you met her, but she's a fairly introverted person, and I think the conversating, it exhausts her a little bit. But this is the best part of my day, like getting to know you, but moreover, letting you tell your story, giving you a platform to tell your story on, and then to recognize that with some a little more work that I can share it with a bunch of other people, and then this experience that you've had listening to the podcast, somebody else gets to have it from you. Like, this is the building like you're a building block, Brian, you know what I mean? Like you're a building block of the podcast. Like, I started off going, Hey, this is my story, from my perspective, that the time I decided to share, I think is episode like two,

Unknown Speaker 1:21:48
right? It's early on, yeah, I think it's single digits, for sure.

Scott Benner 1:21:50
That's me just sharing, right? And then I meet a person. A person comes on, they share their thing. We build, we build, we build. Today. I think I put up episode 1200 and something today, 10 years from now, my expectation is that this is already a compendium of diabetes information, and now we have the ability for these large, large language models to absorb the text from the podcast and actually be able to like thoughtfully, go through it and and regurgitate it back to you in ways that are astonishing. Actually, before we go, I'll do this. Hold on a second.

Speaker 1 1:22:29
By the way, I'm in the AI space, so it's it. I'm following along what you're doing. I know who you're working with.

Scott Benner 1:22:35
Oh, do you really? Oh, that's crazy.

Speaker 1 1:22:37
Well, I mean, I saw, I saw when you request early on. I was like, Oh, I know him, but connected with him on LinkedIn for a separate reason, but so

Scott Benner 1:22:45
well here, let me show you. This is fascinating. Sure. Who

Speaker 2 1:22:50
is Scott Benner? Scott Benner is an author and diabetes advocate known for his book, Life is short, laundry is eternal, Confessions of a stay at home dad and his podcast, Juicebox podcast, he shares his experiences as a father of a child with type one diabetes and offers insights and support to the diabetes community. Watch

Scott Benner 1:23:11
this. What does he say about pre Bolus insulin?

Speaker 2 1:23:16
Scott Benner often emphasizes the importance of pre bolusing insulin on his podcast, he explains that pre Bolus helps manage blood sugar levels more effectively by giving the insulin time to start working before eating, this approach can help prevent post meal blood sugar spikes, making overall diabetes management smoother. Have you tried this method, or is it something you're considering for your podcast discussions?

Scott Benner 1:23:41
Anyway, there's nothing you can't ask this thing that it doesn't know about. What I've already said, it's fascinating.

Speaker 1 1:23:47
Yeah, it's amazing to do that. I'm so glad to see you do it.

Scott Benner 1:23:51
So that's open, AI, right? The thing that I'm involved in. Now, I just heard from the Creator last night. Here I'll read you a text from him, very quickly, the Pro Tip series has been integrated into vision. It is really awesome. I've been testing it right now. The responses combine visions, default reasoning with Juicebox knowledge. It can cite specifics if you ask for it, like say to it, which episode is this from? And even, hey, what timestamp could I find that at it goes on and on. But basically, not only can you ask it to provide you with key takeaways, like from an episode, but if your diabetes information is connected to the service, you can say, provide me with key takeaways from episode 1000 tailor the takeaways to my specific situation. Arden's account, which is the one I mess around with, is attached to her night Scout, so it knows all of her bolusing and all of her settings and everything else. Like, this is insane. Like, so, like, I was very concerned that I'd make this podcast for however long I made it, and it would have the impact on people that it had on you and your. Son and your family and other people like that. Then one day, I just would stop making the podcast, and it would just, it would just dissipate into the air, and it would really like, I know, but that's hard for people to think about. But if you don't make content, you don't know this flame on a stone, stone stays warm while the flames on the stone. You take the flame away, the stone gets cold. It's over. It dies. That's it. If I stop making this podcast, all the information dies with it, and so I had to try to find a way to keep it alive after I can't feed it every day. That makes sense, so I

Speaker 1 1:25:29
get it. Yeah, internet is not forever. A lot of people think it is. But having worked at a large internet firm, like at some point, stuff does fade away, and based on the way the algorithms and other things work, I mean, it's a perpetual motion machine. So if you're not moving, I get that entirely. This

Scott Benner 1:25:44
is 1000s and 10s of 1000s of hours of of real conversations that now we have a computer model that can pick through and then regurgitate it back to you like a human being. It's a repository at this point. So I'm trying to treat it like it's a, you know, like it's a library, as you should, yeah. So anyway, that's what I'm trying to get

Speaker 1 1:26:06
to. Well, the technology under that, the retrieval, augmented generation, I think, is what he's using in that process to limit the AI generation, to just the content you created. Is stuff I work with in government all the time where, like, hey, like, we have 80 years of building code. We need to update it, modernize it, help people be able to query it. Like builders, like, hey, what's the amount of square footage I need in order to, you know, not have to use a bathroom or add a bathroom in a giant office setting, etc, like that. Conversant process with AI is getting better and better every day. Yeah, well, we tell them, you don't even have to do anything crazy, like you can plug into existing models like llms from Google and chat GPT open AI, but if you generate internal like, but here's the data I want you to use from and only pull from and limit the model response to what's in it. It really doesn't hallucinate very much. I think that phrase gets used a lot, but it's not trying to make stuff up at that point. It's being directed to use the content, right? That it's it's working off of so it'll get better and better. I mean, I've seen some really, really wild stuff working in the space that I'm in now, where it's like, oh, that's an incredible use case, but like teaching people how to be more empathetic. Caseworkers was one I was just recently involved in where using intonation and voice modulation analysis, like, Hey, do they sound as well as saying the words that actually show empathy? Like, or do we have someone just going through the motions, right? And it's like, yeah, AI can now do that kind of stuff. Now it needs to be centered on that content. But I have really high hopes for you, and I think you're doing an amazing thing doing that because, gosh,

Scott Benner 1:27:46
I mean, wait till I, wait till I ask it to create a quiz that from the content that will help people broaden their understanding. And then once it creates the quiz, tell it to use the quiz to set up a course to teach the answers to the quiz. And that all happens in like a split second. Like, that's the kind of like, even the building code stuff. Wait till it gets calmed down and somebody thinks to say, Hey, can you identify redundancy in this code and things that we can eliminate? Yep, yeah, boom. And then the building code gets easier to understand. Of these codes, what really doesn't have an impact on safety, and it's stuff that people don't have the time or the I'm gonna say bandwidth, but I don't mean bandwidth like time. I mean bandwidth like actual intelligence to absorb the larger problem and to understand it and then spit back something like people don't have the bandwidth to go through things that are that big. You're gonna fix healthcare with this. You're gonna fix everything by being smarter and having a bigger memory base to work with while you're juggling all the different variables of a problem. And I'm not saying just like tell the machine to fix it, but you know, once it gives once it gives you suggestions, then you can have human beings sit down and go, Oh, wow, here's the here's the 20 years of thinking it would have taken me to get from A to B. Now we're at B. Now let's go back and be people again and reassess this. I see endless possibilities for this. So anyway, I'm, I'm super excited for it. Um, let me say goodbye to you, because at this point I I'm gonna have to ask you for 100 bucks so I can help. I can afford to edit this around. Yeah, poor Rob. Like Rob. I'm just, I'm just messing around. Man, don't feel bad. You're, you do a great job, and you're, you're paid very fairly. I'm not upset by how much I sent you.

Speaker 1 1:29:40
He does great. Your remastered series worked out so well. Like, it's not that it was bad, but, like, you can tell a difference. If you go back to the very beginning podcast, where it is now, you're like, Oh, right. Audio quality, everything.

Scott Benner 1:29:51
I'll tell you a secret. If you listen back to the last year of the podcast that Rob has edited, and then go the year back before that, you'll see there's finite. Little decisions and gaps and ums and things like that. I probably sound smarter today than I am because of Rob.

Speaker 1 1:30:07
Well, I've noticed that there is no dead air. So kind of back to my comment about, you know, who was a radio personality would have succeeded in their build major radio for sure, because you can go on, I don't wanna say forever. It's not, not a knock, but you seem to be willing to engage with the audience constantly, which is a necessary trait all of this. But yeah, I've noticed even when people respond, I was like, Wow, this starts to feel, not negative way it was good before, but like, there's another level of polish and professionalism that like, ah. And I get this now because I hear it with your Medtronic series. I hear it with others where the Q, A, it doesn't feel disjointed at at the same time, I almost know there was an um or a pause there. I'm sure of it, but it flowed so well. So he's done a really terrific job. He's

Scott Benner 1:30:52
wonderful. Let's not be too nice to him. He'll put the price up, but um, no, he lost the price. Yeah, I can't afford that. Like Rob, whatever insecurities you have. You have to hold on to at least 50% of them, or I can't afford this. But no, he's really wonderful, like and I'll have to have him on someday to talk about his theories about how he edits the show, because it's really interesting. When he tells me about it, he's made it better. He's a part of the process, and nobody would even know it. So anyway, all right, hold on, Brian,

today's episode of The Juicebox podcast is sponsored by the ever since 365 the one year where CGM that's one insertion a year. That's it. And here's a little bonus for you. How about there's no limit on how many friends and family you can share your data with with the ever since now, app no limits. Ever since, Arden started using a contour meter because of its accuracy, but she continues to use it because it's durable and trustworthy. If you have diabetes, you want the contour next gen blood glucose meter. There's already so many decisions. Let me take this one off your plate. Contour, next.com/juicebox Did you know if just one person in your family has type one diabetes, you're up to 15 times more likely to get it too. So screen it like you mean it one blood test can spot type one diabetes early. Tap now talk to a doctor or visit screened for type one.com for more info. Thank you so much for listening. I'll be back soon with another episode of The Juicebox podcast. The episode you just heard was professionally edited by wrong way recording. Wrong way recording.com. You.

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