#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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Kathryn works at Integrated Diabetes Services as an exercise physiologist and diabetes care specialist.

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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
Here we are back together again, friends for another episode of The Juicebox podcast.

Catherine is an exercise physiologist and a diabetes care specialist. She works with Jenny. She also has type one diabetes. She was diagnosed when she was 12. We're going to talk all about her life. Get some pretty deep details about some stuff that happened to her when she was younger, and what else here? Oh, she loops, and she's delightful. 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 to save 40% off of your entire order at cozy earth.com All you have to do is use the offer code Juicebox at checkout. That's Juicebox at checkout to save 40% at cozy earth.com if you're looking for community around type one diabetes. Check out the Juicebox podcast. Private Facebook group Juicebox podcast type one diabetes. This episode of The Juicebox podcast is sponsored by Omnipod five, and you can learn more right now at my special link, omnipod.com/juicebox you the episode you're about to enjoy was brought to you by Dexcom, the Dexcom g7 the same CGM that my daughter wears. You can learn more and get started today at my link, dexcom.com/juice, box. I start every day with a delicious drink of Ag, one, you could as well drink ag one.com/juicebox

Catherine Alvarez 2:05
Hello. I'm Catherine Alvarez, and I am an exercise physiologist and Diabetes Care and Education Specialist, and I also personally live with type one diabetes. I was diagnosed at 12 years old, and I utilize DIY loop for my personal management right now. But of course, I try everything out. So just recently on trio and wearing all the things nice you are. How old now I am 2727

Scott Benner 2:33
so 15 years with diabetes? You got it? Yep. Diagnosed 12. Any other people to type one in your life for your family? Yeah.

Catherine Alvarez 2:40
So my mom also has diabetes, and it's a crazy thing, you know, you would think like she would be really involved. It would be kind of a story where we enjoyed memories, or, you know, like helped each other through diabetes. Unfortunately, she just kind of ignores her personal diabetes diagnosis. She likes to pretend as much as she can that it's not there. There's no

Scott Benner 3:09
camaraderie between you because you handle things so differently, or because she doesn't talk about it at all,

Catherine Alvarez 3:15
right? She, I mean, she really doesn't talk about it, and we never had that shooting of in relation to living life with diabetes as I was growing up. How old

Scott Benner 3:25
was she when she was diagnosed?

Catherine Alvarez 3:26
She was like, 42 Wait, did

Scott Benner 3:30
you get it first?

Catherine Alvarez 3:31
No, she did. She was diagnosed during pregnancy, actually, with you, my brother, with

Scott Benner 3:37
your brother. Okay, so she was gestational or just and then type one or just type one diagnosis during the pregnancy.

Catherine Alvarez 3:43
Well, they thought it was gestational and then they realized post pregnancy that was actually a type one diagnosis, okay, and he

Scott Benner 3:53
your brother is older than you, yes, okay, so she's got diabetes for a few years before you were diagnosed. Yep, okay, she's 42 when she's diagnosed, pregnant, but you weren't born.

Catherine Alvarez 4:07
How much later? 18 months later, I

Scott Benner 4:09
see that was the part that threw me off. You didn't say, what do they call that? Irish twins? Yeah, no, not twins. No, no, you've never heard Irish. You're so young so far, for people who know, like, who don't know, Catherine held up a cable that had an audio plug on the end of it for headphones. And she's like, I don't recognize this connector. That's how she because it was like, like a round plug, like everybody listening would remember sticking in the top of their Walkman or their iPod or something like that. Anyway, so Irish twins is a, like, a euphemism for, you know, a Catholic person who has babies back to back. Oh, okay,

Unknown Speaker 4:47
never heard that. No. Super

Catherine Alvarez 4:48
interesting. I'm Catholic, so who knew? Yeah,

Scott Benner 4:50
I know, but now, now you do. Yeah, I think it's pejorative, in case you're wondering. But I think it's colloquial enough that we can get away with saying it. She had you right after. And then 12 years later, when she's 54 ish, you're diagnosed, yep, okay, all right. Is there any other autoimmune in the family?

Catherine Alvarez 5:09
There's quite a bit. Okay, yeah, all the autoimmunity in the family. What

Scott Benner 5:16
else do you have? Personally,

Catherine Alvarez 5:19
I don't have any other autoimmune diseases. I potentially, like, I had a test done that potentially rheumatoid arthritis, but at this point, I'm not doing anything to treat it. You

Scott Benner 5:31
had creaky wrists and knees and stuff like that. I have a very crooked

Catherine Alvarez 5:35
elbow, like, it looks like my arm is broken. It's kind of weird, like, a lump on your elbow. No, like, it's, it's literally not straight. Like, if I put out my arm as I'm trying to straighten it, it goes, like, off into a curve. And they

Scott Benner 5:50
think that might be Ra, yeah, interesting. But no pain. Oh,

Catherine Alvarez 5:54
yeah, lots of pain. Oh,

Scott Benner 5:55
you're like, oh, no, wait, did I? I didn't mean to say that. No, there's tons of pain where, like, all your joints, or certain ones?

Catherine Alvarez 6:03
No, it's all. It's just in that elbow. Just

Scott Benner 6:06
in that elbow. Yep, interesting. That sucks. Do they do anything for it? They shoot a cortisol. Nothing. I got cortisone

Catherine Alvarez 6:13
once, and I just it wasn't worth it. That shot is painful. Blood Sugar stuff,

Scott Benner 6:20
yeah, they say the juice isn't worth the squeeze. Have you ever heard that one?

Catherine Alvarez 6:24
I've never heard that, but I would agree with it. You and I are

Scott Benner 6:27
gonna have fun. I can tell Okay, what else like? You don't have to tell me the members. But like, what other like, are we looking at thyroid, celiac? What's going on?

Catherine Alvarez 6:35
Yep, yeah. So sorry, Hashimotos. And actually, nobody has celiac but my aunt. I have an aunt with rheumatoid arthritis

Scott Benner 6:46
and lupus, mostly on your mom's side or your dad's side.

Catherine Alvarez 6:50
Yeah, all on my mom's side, my dad's side is like the picture of health that you're just all live these long, healthy lives. Nothing wrong, nothing

Scott Benner 6:59
wrong with them? Yep. Let's try to understand a little bit what's happening. You're 12 and you're diagnosed, and you've lived your whole life with your mom. Would you say hiding it? Like not? Yeah, just don't see it.

Catherine Alvarez 7:13
Yeah, don't see it. She doesn't check her blood sugar. She does injections, but not, you know, to the point that she should be

Scott Benner 7:22
okay. Do you have any context now as an adult, what her care was like as far as outcomes?

Catherine Alvarez 7:27
Yeah, it was, I mean, it was horrible. She now is legally blind. Unfortunately, she's had a heart attack multiple strokes. Did

Scott Benner 7:36
you become a CD? C? Is that right? CD, CES, why did they change it?

Catherine Alvarez 7:41
Yeah, yeah.

Scott Benner 7:43
All the letters, did you become that to help yourself or to help other people because you couldn't help your mom? Have you talked to a therapist? You know why you did this? Yet

Catherine Alvarez 7:51
for other people? So my mom, I when I was actually, when I was diagnosed, I told her, this is a good thing, like, I'm going to be able to help you, because I'm going to learn about this and you're going to start to do better. And then I did just kind of figure it out. Since I was 12, I always did all my own management. Nobody ever helped me growing up and then why I became a CDC, yes, was actually because of my boss. He hates when I say this, but it's the truth. I read, think like a pancreas in undergrad and and just answered so many questions that I always had, and I was like, you know, everyone needs to know this information. Nobody ever told me this stuff like I've had all these questions. Couldn't find the answer until I read the book. So that's when I decided I want to be just like him and meet with as many people as I can to help educate them and provide these answers to why things are the way they are?

Scott Benner 8:50
So you in college read Gary's book, yep, and then became a CDE back then, well, it

Catherine Alvarez 8:59
was CDEs. Remember

Scott Benner 9:01
you just did this.

Catherine Alvarez 9:03
I mean, it was, what, like, three or four years ago. Oh,

Scott Benner 9:06
so you so when did you take the like, when did you become a CDC, yes, two years ago. Okay, so, did you work for Gary prior to that?

Catherine Alvarez 9:14
Yep, yeah, I got my hours and everything working with Gary. Oh, that's

Scott Benner 9:18
awesome. No kidding, when you told your mom, 12 year old, you Mommy, I'm gonna figure this all out, and we're both gonna be okay, uh huh. And then you figured it out, she is like, never mind.

Catherine Alvarez 9:33
Well, she, she's come a long way. I mean, she finally wears a CGM, which is huge, and she'll talk to me about, you know, like, some blood sugar stuff, why things happen the way they do. But

Scott Benner 9:45
you haven't put her on a on loop, for example, no,

Catherine Alvarez 9:49
not on loop. She, you know, with, with the vision. And so I live in Florida, she's in Pennsylvania, and my dad has to, like, change your CGMS. And. And stuff. It just would be dangerous for her to be on a pump because she wouldn't change it out.

Scott Benner 10:04
So do you have any hindsight on why she ignored everything so much? I guess it's

Catherine Alvarez 10:09
kind of her personality. You know, she did the same with kind of other health related things. I think pretending it's not there is her coping mechanism.

Scott Benner 10:18
Did she understand the ramifications of ignoring it, or did she just think it wasn't going to happen to her? Do you have any idea what her expectation was when she wasn't paying attention to it? My daughter is 20 years old. I can't even believe it. She was diagnosed with type one diabetes when she was two, and she put her first insulin pump on when she was four. That insulin pump was an Omnipod, and it's been an Omnipod every day since then. That's 16 straight years of wearing Omnipod. It's been a friend to us, and I believe it could be a friend to you. Omnipod.com/juicebox whether you get the Omnipod dash or the automation that's available with the Omnipod five, you are going to enjoy tubeless insulin pumping. You're going to be able to jump into a shower or a pool or a bathtub without taking off your pump. That's right, you will not have to disconnect to bathe with an Omnipod. You also won't have to disconnect to play a sport or to do anything where a regular tube pump has to come off. Arden has been wearing an Omnipod for 16 years. She knows other people that wear different pumps, and she has never once asked the question, should I be trying a different pump? Never once omnipod.com/juicebox, get a pump that you'll be happy with forever? Yeah,

Catherine Alvarez 11:37
I think, I think she was so scared of it happening that it put her in a point of not even being able to deal with it. If that makes sense. Like, I know that, like, rationally it doesn't, but you know, kind of going through it, I think she just, like, didn't want it to happen so bad that she made it happen.

Scott Benner 11:55
I'm just not going to look. And then there, if I don't look in the closet, the guy with the AX won't jump out. Exactly, feeling. Okay, all right, exercise physiology, that's what you got out of college, right? Yep. Okay, then you go find Gary. Sounds like you lived in Pennsylvania for a while. Gary's in Pennsylvania. You go find Gary. You get a job. What are you doing for him? At that point,

Catherine Alvarez 12:15
I was so as a little intern, I was mostly running the social media. And then I was also helping get people scheduled and sitting in on a lot of appointments.

Scott Benner 12:25
Okay, so through sitting in on the appointments, you gather your hours that way. Yes.

Catherine Alvarez 12:30
And then I also began, so I had to also teach people in getting those hours as well. So I did like exercise programming. We did a class at a local hospital, so I was able to actually help teach that class.

Scott Benner 12:46
Okay, so then you gather enough hours to take the test. Is that how it works? Yep, you think the podcast counts as hours. It doesn't. And I've never looked into it, but I'm assuming it doesn't. I don't know there's

Catherine Alvarez 13:01
this, like, unique pathway. So, like, I think you can, like, run your own business, and, like, as long as a diabetes education, I don't know if you can make your argument. I feel like anything's possible, interesting.

Scott Benner 13:11
I don't want to be a CDE because they changed the CD CES, which did no one say it out loud before they changed it. It's hard to say, right? Your brain gets lost in it. You're like, CD C. Wait what

Catherine Alvarez 13:25
nobody is that. It's not a CDC asking, CDC, yes, that's just

Scott Benner 13:29
no. Also, it doesn't flow like there's no rhythmic loveliness to it. Do you see I'm saying, Yeah, CDE, bang, bang, bang, lovely. Yes, like that. Yeah, everyone knew what you meant. No,

Catherine Alvarez 13:38
it's okay. Thanks. Yeah. No, just, I just say I'm a diabetes educator.

Scott Benner 13:42
Yeah, you know, they change it back, if they could, I bet, I bet there's four people in a room. There's like, what do we do there?

Catherine Alvarez 13:47
Yeah, I feel like JDRF is probably feeling the same way. Oh, you

Scott Benner 13:52
think we're breakthrough? T, 1d,

Catherine Alvarez 13:54
yeah, great. This just not taken. Everyone's still saying JDRF just

Scott Benner 14:00
floats. It floats off the tongue. Hard to change the name. It's, it's, you know, you can't even change like the color in Facebook. People have a

Catherine Alvarez 14:07
stroke. So exactly, people don't like that change. I

Scott Benner 14:10
don't mean to go back to your mom for a second, yeah, do it. But as she's having poor outcomes, and you're diagnosed, and she's not interested in helping you. Do you have, like, a, like, a personal separation from her that happened over that? Like, did your relationship go differently? No,

Catherine Alvarez 14:30
it was more like, I wanted to take it all on. I didn't want anyone else to be involved. So she, like, I remember the first week, like she was doing my shots for me. Very faintly remember that, but I remember the way she did it was painful. And then our good friend was a dentist, and he did it, and he just kind of jabbed it into me, and I realized, like, all right, well, The Way She Does It is just slow and painful and traumatizing. So I. I mean, I think that if she had to, she would have done it for me. I think I just realized very quickly that I would be happier if I did it myself. Was

Scott Benner 15:09
it I'd be happier if I if I was in control? Or was it like she doesn't seem to know what she's doing?

Catherine Alvarez 15:16
I don't know. I guess it was like a combination, like the way she did it was painful, more painful than what I realized it had to be. And also, you know, at 12, you don't want to stand out. You're trying to do everything you can to fit in. Yeah, if I had control over it, I can. It's a lot easier for me to be

Scott Benner 15:33
able to you can manipulate how people see you, if you're in control of everything exactly, yeah. So it wasn't you cognitively saying, like, I don't think the lady knows what she's doing right now.

Unknown Speaker 15:43
Yeah, right.

Scott Benner 15:44
What age do you realize that that's true? Probably 12. Okay, same year. Like, you would handle a meal differently than she would. She'd have problems afterwards. You wouldn't like that kind of stuff, right?

Catherine Alvarez 15:58
And then, you know, I wasn't perfect either, but like, I was this crazy 12 year old. I had my little car book. I looked everything up, I wrote everything down, and, you know, figured out how to make things work. Plus,

Scott Benner 16:10
you're right in that age when kids start thinking, like, I think dummy and what's your name over there? Don't know what's going on, like that, which is the thing that happens, wait, do you have a give any kids? Not yet? Well, you get one one day, and then wait like, 1015, years, and then it'll look at you one day and go, I think you're an idiot. Like, Oh, okay.

Catherine Alvarez 16:27
None of us really know what that we're doing. Then

Scott Benner 16:31
you have to make that decision. By the way, do you double down on pretending your way through life? Or do you just look and go, Look kid? I gotta be honest with you, there are days I'm stunned. We have a roof over our heads. I don't not know what's going on. I'm trying my hardest. You're working with Gary. You're doing your thing. You get your hours, then you have to go take a test, right? Like an actual Yep, yeah. How many times you have to take it to win? Just once, look at you. Show off, yeah. All right. And so now you become a newly minted diabetes educator, and you start working for Gary in like you cut, you do what Jenny does, right? Yep, yeah. So you see patients, yeah,

Catherine Alvarez 17:09
virtually, yeah. And Jenny and Gary were really they mentored me through it, her and Alicia. In addition, I sat in spent so much time with them, just learning talk about

Scott Benner 17:20
that a little bit like when you sit in a room, just use Jenny as an example, because people know her, although I know a lot of great things about Alicia, but like, there's Jenny. She's got away, she talks to people. What is it you learn? Like, is it how she asks questions to get to what's going on? Is it like, what do you take from it that you think, okay, that's the piece of Jenny that I'm going to move into who I am. Well,

Catherine Alvarez 17:41
Jenny just has an incredible way of connecting with people, and I think she's very empathetic and just really good at forming relationships with people. So I think just from Jenny, one of the biggest things that I took away was I always want people to feel that they're incredibly cared for, because that's definitely what Jenny gives like she makes everyone feel like they are important, and she's there for them, and she wants to see them succeed, as

Scott Benner 18:16
much as I think that comes across when I'm recording with her. I've had private conversations with her, and her desire to be helpful to the to people is so much stronger and deeper than you would even imagine, right? Yeah, she's really driven incredible to be valuable to other people with diabetes, yeah, yeah.

Catherine Alvarez 18:36
She's a very special person.

Scott Benner 18:38
I know everyone's different, but when you meet a new person, how long, just general, these are generally, you know, generalized numbers. But how long does it take you before you go, Oh, I know what's going on here. Do people fit into boxes? Like, like, how do you virtually help somebody be you're not with them, like you. And I talked before we started, and I said, you know, I've been talking to somebody online, and the person's just lost, and I'm basically right now just asking them a lot of questions. I'm half trying to see if I can figure out what's going on from the questions, and I'm half hoping that the questions make them think of something that they haven't considered yet. But at what point do you think, Oh, I know which way to take this or I know how to attack this problem, and how often does that actually even work? Dexcom g7 offers an easier way to manage diabetes without finger sticks. It is a simple CGM system that delivers real time glucose numbers to your smartphone, your smart watch, and it effortlessly allows you to see your glucose levels and where they're headed. My daughter is wearing a Dexcom g7 right now, and I can't recommend it enough, whether you have commercial insurance, Medicare coverage or no CGM coverage at all, Dexcom can help you. Go to my link, dexcom.com/juicebox, and look for that button that says, Get a Free. Benefits. Check that'll get you going with Dexcom. When you're there, check out the Dexcom clarity app or the follow. Did you know that people can follow your Dexcom? Up to 10 people can follow you. Dexcom.com/juicebox, links in the show notes. Links at Juicebox podcast.com and when you use my link to learn about Dexcom. You're supporting the podcast before. Ag one, I didn't have a comprehensive idea about how to support my gut health, but now that I drink ag one, I do my goals for 2025 are simple, stay on this path drink ag one, every morning, and keep things moving, and I mean that figuratively and literally in the right direction. So this year, try ag one for yourself. It's the perfect time to start a new healthy habit, and that's why I've been partnering with ag one for so long. Ag one is offering new subscribers a free $76 What is this? Offering new subscribers a free $76 gift. When you sign up, get out of here. You're going to get a welcome kit, a bottle of d3, k2, and five free travel packs in your first box. So make sure to check out drink AG, one.com/juicebox For more information, check it out.

Catherine Alvarez 21:19
Well, we before we even meet with people, we have them fill out a very intensive assessment packet. So oftentimes, just from that alone, you can identify some of the important points for education, just from all the questions that are asked in there. You know, we're asking things like for their data so we can look at all of their patterns and blood sugars and insulin delivery. We're asking them about like the glycemic index, and, you know, asking us, asking them to explain these different things to us to see, you know what their starting point knowledge basis is. That's really helpful. I would say we really just start with, like, the educational points in conversation. You just eventually are identifying these things that are coming up, and we have their blood work and everything as well. So

Scott Benner 22:14
yeah, so there's other outliers, like untreated thyroid or something like that. You can see that as well, right? Okay. And so then how much of the conversation that you have with them is about continuing to mine information, and how much of it is just, you like, tearing the whole thing down, starting over at basics and building them back up again?

Catherine Alvarez 22:36
Oh, yeah. It really depends from, you know, the person that everyone is kind of coming in at a different point. So some people, and they come in and they they know their stuff, like they have done so much self education, you know, just kind of clarifying pieces, and then really teaching some of them, just like that. How do you analyze your data and know what adjustments need to be made, or helping them pick, like, what system might work better for them based on their goals, what other people they need? Like, you got to cover every educational piece with them, because they're kind of starting from up spot of

Scott Benner 23:19
and it doesn't matter how long they've had diabetes, right? You can see a person who's like, I'm lost. I don't know what I'm doing. I've only been doing this for six months a year, but you could meet somebody who's been doing it for 10 or 15 years, and they could be in the same position, yeah,

Catherine Alvarez 23:32
exactly. Because a lot of times what happens is these people that have been living with it for so stinking long, I mean, they get a little burnt out, and they they don't follow up with the latest stuff anymore, where these people that were just diagnosed, especially if they have a little one like, they just pour themselves into everything that they can find. Yeah,

Scott Benner 23:50
yeah, no, I know there's this thing like that. I'm always trying to figure out, like, at what point that a person's had type one for a really long time, do they just end up going, like, I don't know, like, I can't impact this. It is what it is. I'm just gonna live as long as I can. Like, you know what I mean? Like, and and what happened to them that got them so off kilter? Like, Is it as simple as someone didn't explain basics to them, and therefore they're having all these responses to insulin and food that they can't make sense of and and then they just get to that point where they're like, Oh, I guess this is what this is. Or is it a burnout thing, where you're just like, I can't put any more effort into this. Or does it, do you get burned out because you're putting so much effort in, but you're putting it in the wrong places because you don't know any better, and that's what causes burnout. Does that all make sense?

Catherine Alvarez 24:42
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I think everyone's reason for getting to the point of burnout is different. I think some people are just doing too much and having like, their life revolves around diabetes. Some people, you know, just the fact that they have to do so many extra things. Every single day just gets to a point of it just not feeling fair, and they don't want to do it anymore. So I definitely think it comes from a different from different places.

Scott Benner 25:10
I always find it the saddest when a doctor misreads that. You know, when someone's is putting in a bunch of effort, but they're learning so quickly and having such great, you know, these great outcomes, and they're really putting all the pieces together. And just as it starts to make sense to them, by the way, just as they get to the point where I think they're actually not going to have to put as much effort into a day to day, because they really kind of got it down a little bit, a doctor will sometimes step in and say, oh, you know, you're going to, you're going to make yourself crazy. You got to stop. But I want to see your a 1c go up next time. Yeah, that really beats people up when that happens too.

Catherine Alvarez 25:45
Yeah, it really does. I mean, it almost makes some people, like, some distrust, I guess in the end, though, because they feel like, you know, they're doing so well, and the end is like, well, now you're doing too good. Yeah. I mean, I've, I've said similar things before, if you're not sleeping because you're just panicking about your kid all the time, and you're dosing them every five minutes because you're scared when their blood sugar gets to 120 that they're going to die. I mean, those are unrealistic. It's

Scott Benner 26:14
a different problem. Yeah, yeah.

Catherine Alvarez 26:17
So there is times where I mean that commentary is true. They are over obsessing over diabetes. And, I mean, it is true that that will likely lead to burnout or a heart attack for that parent from not sleeping. Yeah, they're just in a constant state of stress. Yeah,

Scott Benner 26:35
I'm always hopeful that they can transcend that moment and that, you know, after some time of, you know, like you said, Bolus, single 120 blood sugar, you know, like that, they can start saying, oh, you know, what, if I would have done this in the past, then we wouldn't have got to this 120 or like, same thing with a low like, you know, if you're always stopping lows, you can start looking back at your meal and saying, you know, maybe if I would have used the insulin differently at the meal, we wouldn't be low here. But I do take your point, and I do believe, from what I've seen, is that as many people as can transcend that moment and move forward, making better decisions earlier, stopping problems from happening more frequently. There's also the same number of people probably who get stuck in that moment, aren't and are treating that that number forever and ever and ever, until, like you said, they can't sleep anymore and they go crazy.

Catherine Alvarez 27:24
Yeah, well, and, I mean, in some ways, the technology is is almost hurtful, because it's so in our face. So, like, we almost feel like we should always be responding. We see it, and so naturally we want to do something. But so

Scott Benner 27:39
interesting how the different personalities react differently. Like, there's some people who like, Oh, thank God, this thing beeped. I can do something about it. You know, a different person would be like, This thing keeps beeping. I hate this, and I don't want this to happen anymore. There's so many different variables about who you might be in this scenario. Like, that's why I think seeing a person one on one should be helpful, if you can get somebody to actually focus on you. So why are you able to Why is Jenny? Why is like when somebody basically pays a concierge person to help them? What's the difference between that and a doctor's appointment? Because people want to say it's time, and I know the time is limited with a doctor, but do you not think it's more than that? I think it's more than just the time doctors have to give.

Catherine Alvarez 28:25
I think a big difference is just the compassion of it. You know, all of us personally, we live it, we experience it, and we want everyone to thrive like we don't want anyone to be held back. We want to see people happy and healthy just that point of living with it. I think we're so much more motivated to stay up to date on all the latest technology and

Scott Benner 28:55
and to ask bigger picture questions too, right? I mean, I'm in a weird position, whereas I don't normally speak to a person like face to face, you said something really kind before we started recording about like, you know, you talk to a lot of people who listen to the podcast and they like the podcast. I don't want to put words in your mouth, but it helps them. Is that about, right? Yeah. Okay. So how do you help people without knowing any of their details. You know, that's why I think over and over again, I just, I stick to the basics. I think that that has the best chance of helping the most people. Like, I don't think it's going to help everybody. I don't think everybody's going to have the same response. You know, for every person who's like, oh my god, this saved my life. I'm sure there's somebody who's like, I listen to what you said, and I gotta be honest with you, my life's no different. I know that that's the case, but it's all I have, right? Like, it's, it's, it's the best that I can do. I just said, look like here are the things that I figured out on my own that seemed to help my daughter, and I hope they help you too. Or maybe you can cherry pick. On it and take some of the stuff that helps or doesn't help. You know, it isn't until, like, I meet Jenny, and we start talking to each other. Like, my first thought about Jenny when she came on the podcast the first time as well, she and I think about diabetes so similarly, like, it's, really is, like, it's, it's awesome. Like, you know, like, it's crazy. How, like, like, lock step we are like when somebody says something, our responses are so similar. I realized later, because I don't really know at that point, this is going to sound crazy to people, but I've never read Gary's book, and I think I've only met Gary one time, and it was in passing where someone was like, Scott, that's Gary. He wrote, think like a pancreas. And I go, Hey, how are you? And someone goes, Scott writes a blog. And then I think we walked past each other. I've spoken to him on the phone once, and that was only more recently, like in the last six, six months, and that was maybe for 15 minutes, and had nothing to do with diabetes. Yeah. So I'd never read his book. I don't know any of the like conclusions he's come to, or the things he talks about. But then when I meet Jenny, and I realize Jenny works for him, she's probably working off of, like, some ideas that he, at the very least, like that. He's, you know, talked about, and I thought it's crazy, that book and this podcast are incredibly similar to each other. And then I meet one time I speak with Dr ponder, and he starts talking about how he thinks about diabetes, and I think, but that's how I think about it. And then you realize, like the people listen to Dr ponder have a lot of success, and the people that read Gary's book, Gary's book seem to have a lot of success, and the people listen to the podcast seem to have a lot of success, overwhelmingly, not everybody. And you go, oh, there's got to be building blocks basics within this that lead a lot of people to an understanding that helps them continue on and to have better outcomes. And it's interesting, isn't it, that three people saw it in their lives differently, like a doctor, and you know, I mean, who has type one, Gary, who has type one, and myself, who, like, you know, just raised somebody with him, is just looking at it from from an outsider's perspective. But in the end, we all came up with similar, like, touch points, right? It's really interesting. You know what I mean? Anyway, I don't know why I said all that, other than to say, like, I think, I mean, it's

Catherine Alvarez 32:09
like, the fundamentals. You just, you know, that's you find these fundamental things and, yeah, kind of take off with it.

Scott Benner 32:15
Thank you. That's my point. My point is that those fundamentals are so important to learn and then to try to adapt them and apply them is, is the part that I can't be helpful with. The book's not going to help you with, like, none of that's going to help you. Like, you learn this part, and then you say, Okay, how does that apply to what I just ate, how I just ran around, how I live my life, how blood sugars act in me, like all that other stuff. It's not like they're not hard and fast. Rules that if everybody just does them, it's just all gonna work out great every time it's it's not that. How long have you been doing this now, where you're actually sitting down one on one with a person trying to help them figure out the problems they're having? How long you've been doing that? A few

Catherine Alvarez 32:55
years. Yeah, I guess I'm, uh, like five years now, okay, it's a

Scott Benner 32:58
fairly long time. If I asked you, what are the fundamentals? What are they from your perspective? Well,

Catherine Alvarez 33:05
a big one is gonna I mean, it really depends on what system they're using, in a way too. But basal testing is huge, knowing what we need just kind of in a steady state, from a background, insulin standpoint, and how to do that type of testing, how to test your insulin to carb ratio, what factors in lifestyle are important to note and because they're going to have an impact. So just kind of like, you know, learning about stress impact and sick day management, growth hormone, those kinds of things that you see a huge impact on blood sugar with

Scott Benner 33:43
when you see people struggle, is there a is there a generalization to make? Like if I said, do you finish this sentence, most people struggle with what pops into your head?

Catherine Alvarez 33:54
Definitely different, but most people struggle, I would really depends on the population. I think most parents struggle with the unpredictableness of their child. And really that growth hormone is a big one, where adults, they struggle with food. Food is a huge thing. Yeah,

Scott Benner 34:14
consistency with Bolus,

Catherine Alvarez 34:18
yeah, that timing of the doughs, and then, I mean, protein, fat really gets people. That's a big one. Yeah?

Scott Benner 34:25
No, I know. Until we started talking about that on the podcast, I didn't even realize how many people were like, wait, what?

Catherine Alvarez 34:31
Right? Yeah,

Scott Benner 34:34
carb, carb, yeah. They're just counting carbs, right? And they're and they're not really thinking about the I mean, for me, making the podcast over the years, like, the impact that timing of digestion has on diabetes. I mean, now seems like an obvious thing to me, but back then, like, when I first started, I didn't think about it, and it wasn't. It's interesting how it all builds, like, right? Like, until someone said. Said, you know, fat slows down digestion. I was like, wait. And then the carbs are in there impacting longer, right? And they're like, Yeah. And I'm like, oh, that's what happens with pizza, yeah. And then you start applying it to other things in your life. You're like, Oh, my God. And then it just all starts to come together. You're like, oh, that's what happened when I had a cheeseburger and exactly, ice cream. Like, it really wasn't until, like, one time, I think when Jenny, like, said to me, like, you know, pizza isn't pizza. It's bread and sauce and cheese and, like, it's four things, you know, and maybe there's meat on it too, like, there's a protein to hit, like, and what about more cheese or less cheese? And, like, no one looks at their pizza and says, Oh, that's a thick cheese. My spike is gonna come later. You know what I mean? Or like, this is a hand tossed Neapolitan pizza that just has a couple of pieces of mozzarella put over it. Like, this isn't gonna hit me as hard and it's but now I think about all of that when I look at food, you know, again, like when people are so stuck counting carbs, like cheese, in your mind is like, free, like, Ooh, you know? And then the extent that you get normally, when you learn more is somebody goes, cheese isn't free, it's not free. But then it's not followed up with more conversation. It's just, you know, and you're like, Well, what do you mean? I flip the package over, it says zero. No such thing is free, right? Everything's impacting something somewhere, yep. Yeah. Okay, tell people a little bit about like you do something. I don't know if you call it part time or you do it like, in addition to your job, but tell people the other thing you do, yeah.

Catherine Alvarez 36:34
And I think that this has really helped me clinically, because I've experienced, I can't say what it's like to be a parent of a person with type one diabetes, but much more for San experience. So what I do is I also help a family where their little guy has type one diabetes. I moved from Pennsylvania to Florida two years ago, and he's five now, and I've traveled all over the world with them, and I spend most week days about two hours with them, but I also have sleepovers sometimes Tim as well. So I've just kind of learned for a very little one how different everything is, trying to be a pancreas for an ever changing little human being that you never know what they're gonna do next, and just the uniqueness and the challenges that comes with

Scott Benner 37:32
that. And so you think that just being around him, right? Yeah, being around this little boy, and seeing all the different impacts. Like, do you feel yourself leveling up constantly with diabetes? Yeah,

Catherine Alvarez 37:45
I think I mean, just professionally in this experience, it made a huge difference. I meet with most of the super little ones now that come to Integrated Diabetes services, because I have that first hand experience, yeah,

Scott Benner 38:02
it's a different world, isn't it? When, like, when you're trying to measure quarters of units in syringes, and, you know, they they eat, then they jump up and run around all of a sudden, and you're

Catherine Alvarez 38:13
like, I wasn't expecting that activity. Yeah, I didn't

Scott Benner 38:17
know that was gonna happen. And the growth

Catherine Alvarez 38:19
hormone is wild. I mean, like, just what they need sometimes, at when they first fall asleep, is just nuts,

Scott Benner 38:30
growth, menstruation, pregnancy. Those are the three that are just like, boom. I would maybe add to the end of that list, like the unexpected nature of how some anaerobic exercise impacts people,

Catherine Alvarez 38:44
right? Yeah, exactly. And I mean, just competitive sports like the adrenaline, that adrenaline, yeah, that's gonna that's tough to navigate, especially like when you have these different types of activity, you need a different strategy for practice versus game day. And, yeah,

Scott Benner 38:59
yeah, no, that's why I like the story that I ended up eventually telling on the podcast that I think has been the most valuable for people, because I hear them talk about it over and over again, is the idea of bolusing for a juice box if you think there's going to be adrenaline. And so, you know, I don't know if you've heard me say this, please stop me, but I have, oh, go for it. Okay, so Arden is, like, I don't know, young at the time, and she's playing this, like, in this little Sunday basketball league. And she'll show up, you know, it's always nine in the morning. These these games, they drag your ass out of bed. Like, you know what I mean? Like, you go over to the local school, to the gymnasium, bunch of little girls play this other bunch of little girls, and Arden has had diabetes at that point for a while, but still, it's like six years. And the truth is, is we're using a pump and a CGM at that point, but it's an earlier version of CGM, so it's kind of okay, like, you're still, like, hoping that the Bluetooth signals bouncing around on the metal deck ceiling of the gym and makes it back. Of the receiver, like, like, that kind of stuff, which, by the way, used to actually work, like, you could be in a room with a metal ceiling, and the receiver would work farther away than it would be if you weren't in a room with them. Anyway. So we'd get to these games, and some days her blood sugar would jump, like, into the mid two hundreds. And then some days it wouldn't. And so one game it would the next week, it wouldn't back and forth. And we, I was like, what is happening? And my wife and I are sitting there talking, and all I'm saying is, like, I we can't let her blood sugar keep going up to 250 like, like, we can't do that. And, and my wife's like, but, but last week it didn't So, what do we do? And I just, like, blurted out, I'm gonna Bolus for a juice box right before the game. And she's like, what? And I said, Well, if this adrenaline, that seems to be what it is, adrenaline, right? Like something's hitting her. And we actually eventually figured out where the adrenaline would come from and not come from, which is kind of funny, but I was like, here's the insulin. If the adrenaline pops off, then the insulin will will cut off the adrenaline rise. Now, she would still need food after the game, like it was still too much, but at least it got in the way of the adrenaline right? Yeah,

Catherine Alvarez 41:09
that sensitivity eventually kicks in. Oh, yeah. And that's, that's the big thing, is trying to figure out, well, how much insulin do you need to combat adrenaline rise?

Scott Benner 41:18
Yeah, well, so I still don't know how much was right, but what I knew was, if the adrenaline didn't come, I'd basically just pre Bolus the juice box. So if I didn't see the spike at some point, five or 10 minutes in the game, I'd be like, here real quick drink this juice to combat the insulin that we put in, right? And then after that game, she wouldn't need as much food. She still needs some, but not as much as if it the insulin was in there to battle the adrenaline. Now listen, this is very Listen, this is very rudimentary, but it worked, and it got us through it,

Catherine Alvarez 41:45
yeah. So you found your way. And this is what, this is one of the things I learned from Think like a pancreas, and I still use it to this day as like the starting point. But of course, everyone's different, so you gotta adapt every starting point. We say, okay, so her blood sugar usually went to 250 so we're gonna give a correction, assuming that's where she's gonna go. But because you are physically active, you're still gonna be more sensitive to that insulin. So you would do 50% less of what you would typically need to correct a blood sugar of 250 for the starting point, and then kind of go from there. What

Scott Benner 42:21
we figured out was, is that when she got to the game, like, Arden, like, was really competitive, and she'd assess the girls on the other side. I don't even think she knew she was doing it, but if she thought the game was going to be hard and that they would put up a fight, then she'd get this spike. And if it look, I usually say, like, if it looked like there were like, five little marshmallows on the other side, she'd be like, Oh, we're gonna kill these girls. And she didn't. She never got really excited about no problem. Yeah, listen again. It's a rudimentary way to take care of it. We got through it, everything, etc. But telling the story allowed people to realize, like, oh, adrenaline does that, and insulin will combat adrenaline, except later the adrenaline disappears, the insulin is still there, and then you have a problem, but I can still workshop that problem and try to get through it. And then eventually, one day, I adapted the idea. When a person said to me, you know, it seems like I need more insulin, but I don't know how much more to give at this meal, because we're not huge carb counters. Like, more like, Hey, I think this meal takes about this much kind of vibe. People would say, like, all I agree. Like, it looks like I need more at this meal, but if I've counted the carbs correctly, but I still need more, how do I make the leap of giving myself more? Like, it seems really scary to people to do just another unit or something like that. And so I adapted the thing from the basketball. And I said, Why don't you Bolus for the food that you know you've counted, plus a juice box, and then if you're too much, you can use the juice box to combat it. And if it's not too much, well, now you know that this much insulin plus this led us to this outcome. Do I need more or

Catherine Alvarez 43:56
less, right? And that's a cute way, I mean. And people think like, yeah, a juice box. You're right, that's not, it's not so scary. Doesn't seem

Scott Benner 44:03
too scary, etc. And that thing, when I go out into the, you know, into the audience, and I say, hey, because I've done this recently, I was like, Look, you know, over these 10 years, I've said so many, like, colloquial things that people will like, parrot back to me. Can you make a list of them for me? Because I don't. I've lost track of all of them, you know. And one of them that came back overwhelmingly was Bolus for a juice box. If you don't know how much more insulin to try, as crazy it is, is the slow progression of that story over years led people to be able to be a little more aggressive at their meals to see if maybe a little more insulin would be valuable for them. Crazy, you know what? I mean, yeah. So I like it, yeah, it's awesome. Like, the same thing with like, when people are like, I don't know how to pre Bolus for a little kid, they never eat. The same thing, right? You never know what they're gonna eat. And I just said one day, I was like, Well, is there a minimum amount that, you know, the lead, it just pre. Lost that much, and then, as you see it, go in, do the rest? You know, if more goes in, and that ended up being helpful for people, because the minute they see a pre Bolus actually work at a meal, it opens up a lot of other ideas for them,

Catherine Alvarez 45:13
right? And even a percentage of a pre Bolus is going to make a huge difference, yeah, yeah.

Scott Benner 45:19
So anyway, it's like little things like that that come from conversations and like and so you're getting to see those things with this little boy, plus you have type one. You actually have a rich layering of perspectives, because you watched your mom, I don't want to say she didn't take it seriously, but she wasn't putting the effort in where it needed to be put right. And then you figured it out for yourself, and now you're getting to watch a little kid live with it like, how long do you think you're gonna be like a Zen master at all this?

Catherine Alvarez 45:46
You know, something else that's super crazy too, that we haven't even talked about is my aunt. She has type 3c so she had her whole pancreas was removed because she had pancreatic cancer. Okay, so I get that too.

Scott Benner 46:01
Your mom's sister, yes, interesting. That can't be coincidental, right? The pancreatic cancer and the diabetes.

Catherine Alvarez 46:08
Well, right? I'm always so in all of us, my mom, my aunt and myself, we have it's called the Bronco two gene, so it puts us at, like, really high risk for breast cancer, pancreatic cancer, ovarian cancer. So my aunt, of course, was very unlucky and wound up with all the cancer. Okay,

Scott Benner 46:29
so what's your mom's background? What's her family? Her

Catherine Alvarez 46:34
family? Well, actually, Mom, we got a DNA test and found out that we're asking Ushi Jew, so that's why, that's where that everybody

Scott Benner 46:41
is. Everybody gets, like a 1% I believe, yeah, not everybody, but a lot of people, well,

Catherine Alvarez 46:47
a little bit higher percent, which puts you at high risk for this bracket two gene, really,

Scott Benner 46:51
no kidding, that's what does it right there. But are you guys like Irish English?

Catherine Alvarez 46:55
Yeah, Irish and Norwegian.

Scott Benner 46:58
I sometimes talk about my friend Mike, who's passed. I don't know if I've ever, like, added this layer of detail about his his life, but he was diagnosed type one when we were in high school, and his mom eventually died of pancreatic cancer, so I don't know it. And they're Irish and, like, you know what I mean? Like, I don't know how many different times you got to hear people's stories where you're like, this seems like, I hear about this, like a pattern, yeah, a little bit of a pattern here somewhere interesting. Are your mom and your aunt similar in their personalities, or did your aunt No, so your aunt took over and did what you needed to do.

Catherine Alvarez 47:34
Yeah, my aunt, we're kind of, we have similar personalities. She definitely is, but it's tough because she has a whole extra layer, like, we don't even realize, like, I never really appreciated the small things that my pancreas does do

Scott Benner 47:47
digestive sometimes. Yes,

Catherine Alvarez 47:51
yeah, it's just her, her trying to eat. Is it's quite complicated. Yeah, listen,

Scott Benner 47:58
I'm not a doctor and I'm not a researcher, I'm not anything, but, like, I hear a lot of people's conversations, and I so often when I see people with type one, you know, they always, Oh, my stomach hurts, or after I eat, or something like that. And I was like, Why does no one ever tell you, Hey, your pancreas does more than just this. And right? You know, a lot of you seem to have trouble digesting food, and then they'll tell you immediately that the doctor will jump to, well, you have gastroparesis then. And what if, just, maybe, you just don't have enough digestive enzymes, and you could buy them over the counter, by the way, and they're not particularly expensive, and they work really well. Like, why is that not talked about? I assume it's not talked about because they don't know the doctors, right?

Catherine Alvarez 48:44
Yeah, I always wonder that that same thing, you know, kind of talking, why? Why don't they mention the alpha cells? Yeah, I think it's just that. I know we talked a little bit about their time constraint. Maybe that's it. But,

Scott Benner 48:57
yeah, but how many times does somebody have to tell you my stomach hurts and they have type one before you go there, maybe I should say this out loud. And the amount

Catherine Alvarez 49:05
of people that don't even get checked for celiac antibodies is just shocking, right?

Scott Benner 49:10
Yeah. Or how about how many people's TSH has rise, and the doctor's like, that's fine, we're not gonna do anything about

Catherine Alvarez 49:15
that. Oh, right, yeah, as long as it, you know, they they're not looking for huge bumps every time. And as long as it falls within the range they're they're not going to

Scott Benner 49:23
see it. I love when a person's like, my hair is falling out, I'm cold all the time, and I can't sleep and I'm exhausted. My TSH is four, and the doctor's like, it's not that. And I have type one diabetes, and my brother's got celiac, and my sister's got a bump on her elbow. We're riddled with autoimmune issues. Like, that's probably not that, though.

Catherine Alvarez 49:42
It's probably your diabetes, honestly, yeah,

Scott Benner 49:44
have you tried cutting out flour? My thyroid is not well, you know, like, or I'm making it, my body's not picking it up correctly. Like, help. Help me. I. Leads me to ask you, have you. Helped anybody yet who's been added had a GLP added. What have you seen with that? Yeah,

Catherine Alvarez 50:06
yeah, there's, you know, definitely has increased in popularity, especially with these people in the DIY community, and doing it with unannounced meals. I've used it myself as well, but I'm not now, because I love to share too much information, but I'm trying to conceive, so can't take it during that time, but it's it is truly incredible just helping with that meal time and the fact that we are lacking in it really replaces a lot of what we're lacking in. So can make a make a huge difference.

Scott Benner 50:36
Have you seen anybody use it and it just didn't change anything for them with their blood sugars. Well,

Catherine Alvarez 50:41
what's more common is it did help them, but it negatively impacted them in many other ways that it wasn't worth it. Okay?

Scott Benner 50:50
So someone's like, Listen, I have diarrhea now, but my blood sugar is better. I'm gonna choose not having diarrhea, something like that, right? Okay, yes, but you haven't seen anybody just taken and just flatly, has not impacted their blood sugar.

Catherine Alvarez 51:03
I mean, you see people where it doesn't impact them from a weight standpoint, but no, from a blood sugar standpoint, I have not seen that. I'm sure I will. You know, no,

Scott Benner 51:11
I'm just trying to decide, like, I'm not in charge of anything. But I'm trying to figure out, like, Why did a guy come on the podcast, who was, I think he was, I don't know, 58 right? And he had diabetes for like, six years. He was probably lot. It was probably a really slow onset. He was overweight. They put him on GLP, gip one, and he loses a bunch of weight. But more importantly, like is literally not taking any insulin now. And he has excursions at meals. They go up 180 or so, they come back. He's clearly going to need insulin at some point, but his beta cells, like, had functionality. He was using a lot of insulin, like, as much as would make you I mean, he was comfortable calling himself a type one. So was this doctor. He was using that much insulin, right? And now suddenly he's not using any. What did that GLP do to free those beta cells up to handle the load, more or less? Like, do you know what I mean? And like, is there a world where his beta cells just weren't far enough along so they were able to be helped, like, with a crutch? And is there going to be a world where somebody's beta cells are so wiped out that even if you add that crutch, you're not going to see a benefit like, that's what I'm wondering, right?

Catherine Alvarez 52:23
And I think that would be the case, because if you think about, just think about people in the honeymoon phase in general. I mean, there is times where people don't need to initiate insulin right away. You know, they can supplement in some vitamin D, and with physical activity, they get away with not having to take insulin,

Scott Benner 52:41
or I wonder how much of that is inflammation, because

Catherine Alvarez 52:44
exactly that's yeah,

Scott Benner 52:46
I go back to, like, back before the podcast, where there was this one researcher who was trying, I don't, I don't remember any of the details about this. But other than to say this, one researcher was saying out loud, I don't think the beta cells are dead. I think they're frozen. They're inflamed to the point where they can't function. And I was like, Oh, that's weird. And then that's like, kind of the last time you thought about it again, right? Like it was back around when people were talking about stem cells a lot, and now you listen to people talk about GLP medications. Like I was just listening to a DR Drucker, who's like, kind of one of the pioneers of GLP, and I was listening to, like, a two year old grand rounds he was doing at a hospital recently. He's just talking about how the inflammation impact from GLP is almost like instantaneous when you put it in, like, they can see it impact your your inflammation markers almost immediately after it's put in your body. And like, I'm like, all that, like, wait till we figure out all this. But still, when they talk about it, like the researchers, I don't mean people who are like, you know, coming along, trying to find other research and uses for it. I'm talking about the people who, like, pioneered this thing. They still say we don't actually know how it works. Like, we have no idea what the heck is going on, yeah, which is not uncommon in man made medication, but to hear them say, like, yeah, you lose weight. Like, we don't understand why, yeah,

Catherine Alvarez 54:06
well, and not everyone does, though there's also some research. There's like, a blood work that you can do. I wrote an article about it. I wish I remembered it more like in a better way to explain it, but they can test something and see, like, predict if they would be a responder, really? Yeah,

Scott Benner 54:28
oh, that's interesting. So there's a blood test you can do to tell you if you're going to respond favorably to GLP,

Catherine Alvarez 54:35
right? Yes, huh? Yeah, I, I wrote a little article on it. So, yeah, I know it's out there somewhere.

Scott Benner 54:44
Is it a genetic test?

Catherine Alvarez 54:46
I don't even, I couldn't tell you. You know, I write so many different things. I wish I had a better memory. But

Scott Benner 54:55
no, don't, don't, please. I you know, again, these, how these good. Com. Conversations happen. Like, that's why none of this is, like, you know, it's, it's not medical. Like, this is a podcast. You don't even like, you're talking, you know. And you see if people don't hear something and go, Oh, I wonder if this is, you know, something I should look into. A C peptide test is one method that can help predict whether a person will respond well to GLP, right? So

Catherine Alvarez 55:21
well that, yeah, that's not what I read. That's not

Scott Benner 55:24
what you're that's not what you wrote about. Yeah, I

Catherine Alvarez 55:27
know C peptide, well, I would remember that. Yeah, no,

Scott Benner 55:29
but I mean, like, that's not what you're talking about, but it is what we were just saying about the other guy. Like, you know, if your beta cell still have the ability to, like, do some stuff, but it's just being held down by your body's inability to process the insulin and get the result, etc, that you want. Like, I can see why. I don't know, taking some of the like, it's weird to talk about even because, like, are you increasing your insulin sensitivity, or are you decreasing inflammation? Are both of those things happening, like, like, is it like a mix, and then it's just crazy when you hear the actual researcher talk about and they go, I don't know, but it works like, okay,

Catherine Alvarez 56:06
okay. I actually, I found the I found the article that I wrote about. It's called Hungry gut gene test shows who will benefit most from a govi, hmm, so yeah, I guess they're grouping them based off of this gut test, and it is a gene test. There's

Scott Benner 56:22
a genetic test available that's often referred to as hungry gut gene test, which identifies people who might respond better to GLP, one receptor agonist like semaglutide for weight loss. The test analyzes genetic variants associated with how the gut and brain regulate hunger and satiation. In studies, individuals with the hungry gut obesity phenotype showed greater weight loss up to 19 and a half percent compared to those without the phenotype. There you go. Yep, there it is, just like that. Yeah. Anyway, my point is is that this stuff's gonna is gonna help people, you know, and it's gonna get to helping people with type one. We were talking last night, like in a little private group, about how one of the big speed bumps for doctors, about giving glps and type ones is that in some people, and Dr Blevins has come on the show and talked about this too, it can lead to DKA, because their insulin needs go so low, right, that they almost can't use enough insulin to ward off the dka, because they obviously still Have type one diabetes, yep, and their beta cells aren't helping enough to ward it off too. So they're looking at protocols that will then make the FDA comfortable with the prescription being written. And that protocol may be as simple as you get a ketone meter and you have to test a certain number of times a day to make sure you're not in DK. And

Catherine Alvarez 57:41
that might get that good old precision x Oh, but yeah, yeah. But

Scott Benner 57:45
that literally might be the thing that helps it get written for type ones,

Catherine Alvarez 57:49
yeah, yeah. And it'll be a part of our CGMS. It sounds like too where alert us if we have ketones.

Scott Benner 57:56
You think CGM are going to tell people about ketones one day? Oh, yeah, there. I

Catherine Alvarez 58:01
mean, that's already kind of something that has been in the works, but it's almost like, is it too much information? Just kind of have to find that balance, yeah,

Scott Benner 58:09
yeah, overwhelming people with stuff. But anyway, I think that's interesting that like. So what this means is, if that thing is right about the ketone meter, is that the FDA knows it helps people with type one diabetes, and they just need to be able to put it into the world in a way that's not going to cause anyone to have DKA. And once they can guard against that, then they'll be okay with it being written, which then means it'll be covered by insurance too,

Unknown Speaker 58:31
right?

Scott Benner 58:32
Yeah, so that's exciting. Wait, wait, you trying to make a little Catherine? What are you doing over there?

Catherine Alvarez 58:37
Yeah, we want to bring a little human in to the world. What

Scott Benner 58:42
happened? You started watching this kid and you got what they call the baby fever.

Catherine Alvarez 58:46
I think I've always had the baby fever.

Scott Benner 58:48
Oh, are you like a little caregiver at heart? Yeah, I

Catherine Alvarez 58:51
just, I just love there's something so special about little ones. They're sweet innocents, and just adore them. How

Scott Benner 58:59
long have you been trying,

Catherine Alvarez 59:01
I guess, like eight months now, really, yeah, so taking a lot longer than you know what we had thought. But I think I'm probably just been stressing too much about the whole thing. So

Scott Benner 59:12
do you have any PCOS symptoms? No,

Catherine Alvarez 59:15
no, and I've been tested in everything

Scott Benner 59:19
stressing. Yeah, it's probably all it is no kidding. They say sometimes you just like, I'm sure I've said this before, but I'm adopted. My parents adopted me after being told like they could not have kids. Then, keeping in mind, this was the late 60s, early 70s, when they were being told that, and I'm not sure what the level of discourse was around this, they adopted me, and five years later, my mom got pregnant. I

Catherine Alvarez 59:42
keep hearing stories like that. It's so incredible. Yeah, and I told, I told my husband, Kenny. I was like, maybe it's just like, our calling, that we're supposed to adopt and then we can have far because, I mean, there's so many like, people need to adopt. It's has to happen.

Scott Benner 59:58
Yeah? Well, they. Doctor told my mom it was a fluke. She probably just relaxed enough for it to happen. I love the way they talk to women about their health. Literally, you don't have to worry about that. It's never going to happen again. And then five years later, she got pregnant again, pregnant again. Oh my gosh. So my brother is, like my youngest brother's, you know, 10 years younger than me. Yeah, it's huge. Yeah. We should have seen my mom, in her 60s, dealing with my like, teenage brother. She was like, Oh, the hell's going on here. Also, what was your husband's name? Kenny? Yeah. Kenny, yeah. I mean, Kenny wants a baby. But he's also like, I can't believe this. The fun part is lasting so long, this is awesome, so he's fine with it. Yeah, yeah. I bet you haven't heard him complain yet?

Catherine Alvarez 1:00:40
No, you're getting

Scott Benner 1:00:44
to the point where you're like, listen,

Catherine Alvarez 1:00:47
it's like, what's wrong with us? Yeah,

Scott Benner 1:00:49
well, you know, once it's on your calendar, now you're like, something's not working right. Where you're like, does it say here Thursday at two make baby. You know so well, I wish you a lot of luck. I'm I know it can be incredibly frustrating, for sure, yeah,

Catherine Alvarez 1:01:03
but you know, we're happy we have a crazy dog that really keeps us on our toes. So nice. Uh, because dogs are good practice, yeah, it makes me feel like I was not at all prepared. We, uh, we found our dog. She's a dumpster baby, and she has really humbled me. Oh,

Scott Benner 1:01:20
wow. Somebody threw puppies in a dumpster.

Catherine Alvarez 1:01:24
Yes, that happened. I

Scott Benner 1:01:25
guess that does happen. I don't know why I'm so surprised every time something horrible is brought to my attention, but Oh, wow. How did you like so somebody found them, brought them to a shelter, and you came and got one.

Catherine Alvarez 1:01:35
No, we found her. You found her. Yeah, just hurt her and, oh, my god, Catherine, what

Scott Benner 1:01:42
are you doing in a near dumpster? Are you okay? You're not living in an alley or something, right?

Catherine Alvarez 1:01:49
No, no, I'm not dumpster diving or anything. Gary's paying you, right?

Scott Benner 1:01:57
So you, you and Kenny are walking down the street and hear a dog in a dumpster? Yeah, we

Catherine Alvarez 1:02:04
just had eaten at our favorite sushi place. And yep,

Scott Benner 1:02:08
oh God, it wasn't the sushi place's dumpster. Was it?

Catherine Alvarez 1:02:11
Yes, it was,

Scott Benner 1:02:13
oh god. Did it make you wonder what you just ate in the sushi place? No, luckily,

Catherine Alvarez 1:02:16
the dumpster did not smell. So no, I

Scott Benner 1:02:19
don't mean that. I mean you anyway, oh, okay, I see what you're like, uh, oh, so you took the puppy out. It was a puppy, yep. What kind of dog is it a mutt or like, yeah, she's

Catherine Alvarez 1:02:31
mostly, she's pity Staffy bulldog and Boxer,

Scott Benner 1:02:35
wow. And how does it humble do?

Catherine Alvarez 1:02:38
Well, I mean, she is. She has eaten two couches, multiple dog beds, multiple shoes, purses, tampons.

Scott Benner 1:02:52
Yeah, it's a low moment when your dog's running around the house with the tampon.

Catherine Alvarez 1:02:56
Yeah, yep, and then has to go to the emergency vet because that's not freaking very bad.

Scott Benner 1:03:02
Oh my god, two like, so just chewed through sofas. Yes, so obviously you can't wish that you didn't hear the dog in the dumpster because of the moral implications of it. But have there been moments when you thought like, oh God, dogs not for us? Or just, no, I

Catherine Alvarez 1:03:19
love her so much. Like she has an Instagram I'm totally just at a reels for this dog. Did

Scott Benner 1:03:26
that? Flip you out when you realize the dog owned a phone, we're like, oh my god, the dog's smart enough to post on Instagram. Why doesn't it not know not to eat the sofa? Yeah,

Catherine Alvarez 1:03:36
I know, right. She is. She's really smart. I mean, she's gone through like, a lot of training, spent so much on that, and she knows she knows how to be a good girl.

Scott Benner 1:03:49
Oh, you're at this point now where you're looking at the dog going, I know you know not to do this. Why is this happening? Yeah, my wife thinks the dog looks at her differently. Sometimes she's like, he knows I'm like, I don't think he knows anything. I think his brain is the size of a walnut, and I'm pretty sure he doesn't know anything. Actually, Arden said on the podcast recently that, um, that she learned about consciousness and that dogs don't have it like, the the way dogs have consciousness is different than how, like, higher beings have it, like, it's something about the mirror test. Interesting.

Catherine Alvarez 1:04:22
Well, she makes these very like, I'm very sorry mom faces at me after she does something bad. So

Scott Benner 1:04:29
I believe they say that that's you giving human feelings to an animal. There's a it's called Adam. I can, I can never, like, pronounce the word Hold on a second. I sound like an idiot.

Catherine Alvarez 1:04:43
Do you know about that? I mean, it makes sense, but no, I don't anthropomorphism,

Scott Benner 1:04:47
it's a term that refers to the tendency to ascribe human traits, behaviors or intentions to non human entities, including animals, objects and even natural phenomenons. For example, saying, Oh, look, the dog feels guilty because of its body language after doing something wrong. That's a form of anthropomorphism. So you are doing that, not the dog.

Catherine Alvarez 1:05:11
Well, I'm still gonna believe that my dog is very sorry.

Scott Benner 1:05:16
You just want the dog to be sorry, whatever the just want the dog to be sorry. You're like, it must be regretful, because that sofa cost $1,000 No, she's sorry. Because if the dog's not regretful, you're gonna take it back to the dumpster and like, so you have to, like, tell yourself, it's not that you would do that. I'm assuming you would take it to a shelter and abandon it properly. Yeah, I would never abandon please take care of your animals. Like, please don't take on responsibility for an animal. Like, that's why. Catherine, how much do you listen to this podcast?

Catherine Alvarez 1:05:48
I wish more, but, you know, I not a lot. That's fine.

Scott Benner 1:05:50
So you don't know that I have a chameleon. Or you do know this? No, I don't know. Okay. So my family gets me a chameleon for Christmas. And my first thought was like, Oh God no. Like, I don't want to be responsible. Like I have, like, a strong sense of responsibility for things. Like, if you put me in charge of something, I'm gonna feel that very deeply. Yeah, and I actually think that's helped me with the podcast. And you obviously have that with that dog, or you would have lost it outside, lost it in quotes. Do you think that helps you at your job.

Catherine Alvarez 1:06:21
I guess. I mean, I guess I could make the argument that it does. Do you have

Scott Benner 1:06:25
less feeling that people feel guilty when they do something wrong than when the dog does it?

Catherine Alvarez 1:06:29
I think that my dog feels more guilty. Okay, let me

Scott Benner 1:06:33
ask you another question, because you've dealt with so many people. Okay. I've been asked this question. I've heard it said a lot of times. I don't actually think people don't care about their health, like, you know how people they'll say, like, they don't take care of that they don't care. Or I don't think that's true. I think everyone cares. I think that the way, the tools they have to attack that the problem are greatly varied between person to person. But I don't think there's any person who's like, I'm not gonna Bolus for my food today because I don't care. Like, I just, you know what I mean? Like, I don't, I

Catherine Alvarez 1:07:10
think they're, yeah, they're overwhelmed by it, or, you know, there's something else going on.

Scott Benner 1:07:14
I genuinely believe that too. Like, I'm not saying you can't get into a situation with mental health where you physically and intellectually can't I know that happens if, I mean every day to day person walking around who's not stricken by horrible depression or, you know, mental illness or something like that, I don't think there's anyone out there who's just like, I don't care if I live or die. And even if they say that, I don't think that's necessarily true. I just think they are lost and they don't know what to do next. Yeah, yeah. That sucks, yeah. I

Catherine Alvarez 1:07:44
mean, I think, yeah, they're just in such a such a dark place this world. I mean, sometimes it's hard to find the good in it. So

Scott Benner 1:07:52
yeah, is it hard when, like, you're younger, right? So, like, let's think about you for a second. You said you over shared. So let's keep over sharing for a couple more minutes before I let you go, right? Yeah. So you're diagnosed at 12. That sucks. You've got a mom who has type one but is of no help to you. You feel pressure to help her, because you realize she's not helping herself. That doesn't work out. You know, you get this job that you've always wanted because you know, you've read this book and you're like, oh my god, I could work with this person who you know taught me so much stuff. You go do that, you train yourself up. You become a certified diabetes education and care specialist. Does anyone hear it when I'm saying it? Why did you think this was a good Certified Diabetes Care and Education Specialist? Yeah, see what you did. You made it bad. Okay, so you become that thing, and now you're helping people, then you go off to like, you know, you help this little boy, you're trying to build your own life. You're having your own struggles making a baby. Like, all this stuff's happening. And when I gave you the opportunity to say something, you said, like, the world's hard sometimes, so why are you not beat down by it?

Catherine Alvarez 1:08:57
It's a choice. And I mean, so to add to it, like the hardest thing by far that totally overshadows, like all of my other struggles in life, is that my brother actually passed away. Oh my gosh, I don't think I'll ever go through something that was would be as hard as that was because he was like he was my

Scott Benner 1:09:18
person in life, unexpectedly from an illness. It

Catherine Alvarez 1:09:21
was from drugs. Okay? So, yeah, he was, he was just 21 but, you know, we were really close in age, and we really did everything together.

Scott Benner 1:09:30
This is only seven or eight years ago. Is that right?

Catherine Alvarez 1:09:33
Yeah, yeah, I'm sorry, yeah, like, I just came to a point in my life where it's like, am I gonna let like? Is this gonna be where my life stops, or am I gonna choose to keep going and almost try to make him proud?

Scott Benner 1:09:50
That could have happened? You could see that moment as an inflection point where you just kind of gave up to Yeah, yeah. How long did it take you to get past that feeling? Yeah?

Catherine Alvarez 1:10:00
Around two years, wow.

Scott Benner 1:10:02
Would you consider yourself depressed during that time? Oh, yeah. Did you have to do anything like, like, what did you do to manage that?

Catherine Alvarez 1:10:10
I tried talking to people I really fell into a dark place with, like, alcohol for a while in my college days. But eventually I, and this is going to sound so like cliche, but really, exercise is what ended up turning my life around. I found CrossFit, and I got really into fitness, and it was exactly what I needed to to heal me.

Scott Benner 1:10:40
I'm glad you found that. Yeah, see, now you should listen to more of the podcast, because eventually everyone says something like this, after we've been talking for a while, and then later they'll say, I don't know why I told you that, but I appreciate you sharing that with me. That was really lovely to be that open. Did you ever consider like because it feels like you went towards diabetes because of your mom and you. But did you ever think like, I could also help people with like, addiction or drug use issues, like, like, where does that like lay in your mind? Yeah,

Catherine Alvarez 1:11:11
that so I think that. I think that just hits too close to home. You couldn't be around it like that. I don't touch that so much, but when someone does lose a loved one, I think that I can definitely be a person that they feel safe confiding in,

Scott Benner 1:11:28
yeah, oh, okay. I know it's hard. I'm sorry. You okay? Oh, yeah,

Catherine Alvarez 1:11:32
I'm good, okay,

Scott Benner 1:11:33
I was gonna ask a different question. No, it feels like such a pivot. I'm sorry. Um, after you make your little, not dumpster baby, but but your actual own human baby. After that does, happens and the baby comes, comes and is in the world, are you gonna go right back to using a GOP again? Well,

Catherine Alvarez 1:11:51
I think that I will want to bring more babies into the world. So No, not right away, getting gonna

Scott Benner 1:11:57
do Irish twin it up. You're gonna go. Go twice. Real hard. Maybe. Let's do it again. My gosh, oh, my gosh. Well, that's, that's crazy. Like, we didn't talk much about or at all, because it just sort of came up. But you know, the amount of people that I hear come through here, like, when you say, you know, when you said earlier, like, you can kind of see pathways, like when I'm when I said, like, oh, I don't know how many people I have to interview who are like this happened to me. You know, I interview a lot of people who also have, like, a bipolar person in their family, or there's depression in their family. When you start thinking about depression, or, like, you know, bipolar and inflammation, and, you know, like, how this stuff seems to go hand in hand through bloodlines. Really? Do you think that the depression you had was solely from the incident, or do you think that it's a thing you've had or have had since? I

Catherine Alvarez 1:12:50
think, I mean, it's, it's definitely, you know, ongoing, it's a trauma that will always be a part of me now, yeah, but

Scott Benner 1:13:01
it started at your brother's passing. Or you think it was before that? Oh, it's probably before that too. Did you notice any alleviation on the GLP, no,

Catherine Alvarez 1:13:12
you didn't. No, no, no, it didn't, not with that aspect, not

Scott Benner 1:13:17
that it should, just that. I you, you don't know this. But like, a lady came on recently who said that GLP medication alleviated a lot of her child's bipolar issues, there's so many questions. And yeah, no, I was just wondering if you noticed, like a lightning of your load in that time or not.

Catherine Alvarez 1:13:32
Yeah. Well, I don't think I personally suffer from depression. I think that, I mean, I do. I have medication? I eventually found the right SSRI for me personally, that's,

Scott Benner 1:13:46
I'm glad you found something Well, I think you have laid out perfectly why people might want to contact you. I think maybe Jenny's calendar is going to open up now, because right now, if you try to get Jenny professionally, what's it take? Like, six months, right? Yeah, oh

Catherine Alvarez 1:14:00
yeah. Jenny is hard schedule to get on. Yeah, she's, uh,

Scott Benner 1:14:03
she made a lot of fans, so you can go steal some of those people. Now, would you share your email address at work? Yeah, it's

Catherine Alvarez 1:14:11
just my name. Actually, it's my old name. So it's K Gen teal, my old last name at Integrated Diabetes, com, G, E,

Scott Benner 1:14:21
N, T, I, L, E,

Catherine Alvarez 1:14:22
you got it?

Scott Benner 1:14:23
Okay? Well, if you're interested in Catherine helping you with your diabetes, that is how you would reach out to her. That's, I know that's not why you came on, but I just, I thought you did such a nice job, and, you know, laid out, you know, a path of of what you think and and how you know what kind of a person they might intersect when they reached out to you. So, you know, I hope you don't mind me saying that. Oh, thank you. Appreciate it. Oh, it's my pleasure. Did we talk about everything you wanted to talk about? Yeah, yeah, absolutely, I did. That always surprised. I

Catherine Alvarez 1:14:53
mean, I really didn't even have any plans, like, I was just like, No, can't wait to talk to Scott. This is gonna be super

Scott Benner 1:14:57
cool. We spoke on the phone once. Four, is that right? Yeah, you

Catherine Alvarez 1:15:01
helped me make friends at the children with diabetes conference.

Scott Benner 1:15:05
Oh, that's right. They don't let me come there, but I still knew some people. By the way, that's not fair. They just, I've never been invited. I'm sure it's fine, but I

Catherine Alvarez 1:15:13
think, yeah, they, I think they just have, I think they have a different approach. I don't know. I think I so. I've gone for the past two years now, and I love that conference. Oh my gosh. It is really fun. Yeah, I

Scott Benner 1:15:26
swear to you, I don't like I have no ill will about it. And if you know it's not a problem at all, I just every year I'm inundated with, are you going to be at friends for life? Are you going to be with children like people? So every I know it's like, on my calendar, almost like this is when it starts happening, when people ask me if I'm coming. And I'm coming, and I'm always like, I've, you know, I would come if I was invited. I've not been invited, that that's all,

Catherine Alvarez 1:15:47
yeah. So yeah, yeah. I just decided to volunteer, um, this past year, nice. And I hope that I get to volunteer forever, because I was tell me what you took from it, the connections that I got to see form, or the connections that were already formed just from so many years of attending. It really is just like they're a family, if you're looking for a family feel. I mean, I don't think there's a better place to be. Yeah,

Scott Benner 1:16:13
I just got back from an event where I was around a lot of people, and, like, I had so many different interactions that were just heartwarming and stuff I won't forget anytime soon, you know, from like, little kids who are just doing better, and you know, since the last time you saw them or watching people make friends, you know, had this really cool little conversation in this group of children where, like, we didn't Talk about, like, you know, and talk about diabetes management or anything like that, but I just there's, you know, I don't know, 50 kids in this room, and I just went around and just asked them questions, like, you know, like, What's it feel like to be low? What's it feel like when you're higher? You know, you know, you know. What do you struggle with? And then, as you let them talk, from like five years old to, like, 15, when they started relating to me the questions they had about their health and their life, and you really started seeing the things that they were thinking about. Like, not that I didn't think kids were thinking about that stuff, but it's, it's eye opening to hear them articulate it. You know what I mean to have a nine year old tell you I don't understand, like, what happens to me, and I wish I understood better. And you know, because I go to school and I try to take a test and my blood sugar shoots up and I don't feel well, and I don't know if I should Bolus or not, like, all this other stuff, like, and it's just this young girl, you know what I mean. And you know, then to explain to her, like, what adrenaline does to her, and then to watch all these little faces in the room go, Oh my God. And then they can start relating it back to their own lives. Then five or six people put their hands up. It's like, my blood sugar always goes up here. Like when I get to school in the morning. I said, Oh, that used to happen to my daughter. And I said, and then does anybody's blood sugar drop really fast when the school day is over? And so many of them are like, how do you know that you know what I mean and like? And just to see them feel like, Oh, this is not like an I'm not crazy, and this is an abnormal, yeah, and that guy's saying that it might be because of this, like one little girl, if anybody's listening, I would love to have her on the podcast. She came up to me afterwards with a notebook in her hand, and she had been taking notes the whole time. We were talking, like, in the in the hour. And I said, is that a notebook? And she said, yeah. I said, What are you writing in it? She goes, I was just writing down things, you said. And I was like, Okay. And she goes, would you sign it for me? Almost like, only if you want me to cry, like, you know, like, so, like, I signed it, and I was like, thank you. She goes. Thanks a lot. I have a lot to talk to my mom about. And then she just went away. So, so adorable. Yeah, it was awesome. I love those things, those those those groups are, are awesome. I'm glad you found them too. Okay, I'm gonna let you go. You've been on a long time. I apologize for keeping

Catherine Alvarez 1:19:00
you, yeah, well, it was an absolute pleasure. I'm glad

Scott Benner 1:19:02
you had a good time. Thank you.

A huge thanks to Dexcom for being longtime sponsors of the Juicebox podcast. Dexcom.com/juice box. Head over there. Now get started today. Omnipod five sponsored this episode of The Juicebox podcast. Learn more and get started today at omnipod.com/juicebox links in the show notes, links at Juicebox podcast.com, I'd like to thank ag one for sponsoring this episode of The Juicebox podcast and remind you that with your first order, you're going to get a free welcome kit, five free travel packs, and a year supply of vitamin D that's at AG one.com/juice box.

Are you starting to see patterns? But you can't. Quite make sense of them. You're like, Oh, if I Bolus here, this happens, but I don't know what to do. Should I put in a little less, a little more? If you're starting to have those thoughts, if you're starting to think this isn't going the way the doctor said it would, I think I see something here, but I can't be sure. Once you're having those thoughts, you're ready for the diabetes Pro Tip series from the Juicebox podcast. It begins at Episode 1000 you can also find it at Juicebox podcast.com up in the menu, and you can find a list in the private Facebook group. Just check right under the featured tab at the top, it'll show you lists of a ton of stuff, including the Pro Tip series, which runs from episode 1000 to 1025 okay, well, here we are at the end of the episode. You're still with me. Thank you. I really do appreciate that. What else could you do for me? Uh, why don't you tell a friend about the show or leave a five star review? Maybe you could make sure you're following or subscribed in your podcast app, go to YouTube and follow me or Instagram. Tik, Tok, oh gosh, here's one. Make sure you're following the podcast in the private Facebook group as well as the public Facebook page you don't want to miss. Please do not know about the private group. You have to join the private group as of this recording, it has 51,000 members in it. They're active, talking about diabetes, whatever you need to know. There's a conversation happening in there right now, and I'm there all the time. Tag me. I'll say hi. The episode you just heard was professionally edited by wrong way recording, wrong way, recording.com, you.

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#1380 I Don't Understand... Jenny Five

Jenny doesn’t understand why care what other people are doing?

You can always listen to the Juicebox Podcast here but the cool kids use: Apple Podcasts/iOS - Spotify - Amazon Music - Google Play/Android - iHeart Radio -  Radio Public, Amazon Alexa or wherever they get audio.

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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
Hello friends and welcome back to another episode of The Juicebox podcast.

Jenny returns today for another episode of I don't understand today. Jenny doesn't understand why we care so much about what other people do nothing you hear on the Juicebox podcast should be considered advice medical or otherwise, always consult a physician before making any changes to your healthcare plan. When you place your first order for ag one, with my link, you'll get five free travel packs and a free year supply of vitamin D drink. Ag one.com/juice, box, don't forget to save 40% off of your entire order at cozy earth.com All you have to do is use the offer code juice box at checkout. That's Juicebox at checkout to save 40% at cozy earth.com. Are you an adult living with type one or the caregiver of someone who is and a US resident, if you are, I'd love it if you would go to T 1d exchange.org/juicebox and take the survey. When you complete that survey, your answers are used to move type one diabetes research of all kinds. So if you'd like to help with type one research, but don't have time to go to a doctor or an investigation, and you want to do something right there from your sofa. This is the way t 1d exchange.org/juice box. It should not take you more than about 10 minutes. US med is sponsoring this episode of The Juicebox podcast, and we've been getting our diabetes supplies from us med for years. You can as well us med.com/juice, box, or call 888-721-1514, use the link or the number. Get your free benefits. Check and get started today with us. Med, this show is sponsored today by the glucagon that my daughter carries, G VO, hypo, pen. Find out more at gvoke, glucagon.com, forward slash Juicebox. All right, Jenny, Hey, what's up?

Jennifer Smith, CDE 2:08
Hi, how are you

Scott Benner 2:10
good? Good. Let's keep going with I don't understand. I'm getting nice notes from people that say they're enjoying hearing you talk about stuff that you don't understand. So

Jennifer Smith, CDE 2:17
yay. Maybe they just like my accent.

Scott Benner 2:20
I hope so. I hope it's just that they're delighted by you like I am. Oh yeah, I'm gonna go with your next one on my list. Why are we so interested in strangers behaviors like how they dress and what they're doing? Yes, all right, what? What made you put that one on the list?

Jennifer Smith, CDE 2:38
I think what made me put it on the list is because we are in an age of a lot of visual to people that we don't even know, right with all of the different social media avenues and all of the different things that you can look up online. I ran into this again as I was sort of traveling for a conference and I was watching people. I am a watcher. I am. I'm one of those people. I love watching people. I got that from my dad. He could go to the mall with my mom, and he just wanted to sit on the bench, and he wanted to watch what people were like. Doing that from a wit, he was a weird, I promise, but just like an observational I got that from him, and I, I've noticed it more now with all of the different avenues of looking up, what are the popular shoes to wear, and how should I tie my hair back today? And is it now I flip my collar up, or should it stay down and unbutton so I watch people scroll through, yeah, like all the things and what, like kicks their interest, right? Human observation is really interesting. But I also I don't understand why it's interesting to see somebody you will never meet and you don't know and what they're doing with their life, I would personally rather navigate my own life, right? And do you know what I'm saying? It's like, I don't know why you put your energy into that when just take care of yourself and do what you like.

Scott Benner 4:13
Also, I think that very often, because of the format of the phone, and you're not really seeing them, you're seeing, like, listen, I make social media videos sometimes I don't come in here and make them. If I haven't shaved for three days, I don't stand in front of a messy part of my house and do it. You're not really seeing their situation. I will tell you that I like this one for a conversation, because I think it dovetails a little bit into diabetes, a little bit. Oh, it does, yeah, and I could, because I've seen, I guess we should go backwards a little bit. This is all for eyes, right? Like, if it's if you're trying to sell footwear or clothing or, you know, I mean, listen, I'm not proud. Save 40% at cozy Earth, calm with the offer code juice box, right? Like, sure, yeah, they send me clothes and I put them on. Then I buy some too. But, you know, I, you know, right? It's how this whole thing works. There's an economy around this now, of course, right, the high side of it is people can start their own businesses, you know, like, become incredibly popular, reach people they've never reached before. Do you see that girl the other day? She's having like, a, like a happiness stroke online, because Taylor Swift wore her like, sparkly freckle tabs or something at a football game, and she's got, like, this small business, and it's just exploding, because, right, right. So, and

Jennifer Smith, CDE 5:30
I understand it from that perspective that you, that you're bringing up,

Scott Benner 5:34
what you're saying is, why did somebody go buy the damn sparkly things, just because they saw her wearing them?

Jennifer Smith, CDE 5:40
Right? Yeah. Like, I have for a long time not been a part of I don't I don't know. I do what I like because I like it, not because somebody else told me to do it right. And I think we've become really interested in, what is everybody doing right, what is and to some degree, that can be a especially in what we've had the past number of years, that can be a very good way to feel like you are reaching somebody or connecting with somebody. But to another degree, I like real social connection. I really like to talk to the person that I might be saying, hey, I really like your shoes, right?

Scott Benner 6:23
But maybe the real question is, I don't understand. Why does it not work on you? And it worked because there are real reasons like marketing. Listen, here are the fundamental psychological principles that shape how thoughts and emotions and behaviors are manipulated by marketing, you use emotional appeal. You aim to trigger emotional responses like happiness, fear and nostalgia. You help to make a brand connection, like puts that like team thing in to place. You're like, oh, well, my team is winning, or people like what I like. Then you use social influences to, you know, show them look other people who you know, are doing it too. They also can create a scarcity or urgency, feeling that works on people. I mean, look, there was that dock worker strike recently that lasted all of four days, right? You couldn't buy toilet paper at Costco again, like I saw the greatest meme online. One guy said he put it up on his Facebook, and he said, If you bought toilet paper this week, please unfriend me. I don't want to talk to you right? Then they find a way. They can find a way to target it to you. They use cognitive bias that's a higher initial price to make a discounted price seem like a better deal. Like that happens all the time, right? Like, hurry up. It's going down in price. Like it's going up. You gotta hurry up.

Jennifer Smith, CDE 7:41
I would imagine inclusive feeling like on the list would probably be. I feel included in this group of other people who are wearing the same shoes or carrying the same purse or has the same sport hat on, like you said, right? You immediately feel like you are a piece of that group or that you belong, right? And that's important for some people, I guess.

Scott Benner 8:04
Yeah. Well, I mean, listen, there are people who buy ads on this podcast, right? And no mistake, they're buying them so that you hear the words over and over and over again. And one day, you're in a doctor's office and the doctor says, Hey, have you ever thought of getting an insulin pump? And you think, Arden wears that Omnipod. That's it right there. That's what they're shooting for. Now, I'm in a lucky position to take ads from places that you know, stuff we use, and so I can speak to it, but I take ads from stuff that I've never touched before as well, sure, you know. So I understand how it all works. It's just, it's interesting to see it happen in so many different spaces. I mean, from like, little things you stick to your face to like, Arden said to me the other day, do you think this patch works? It's supposed to make you more aware, or something like that, like brighten your mood? And I said, I don't know what's in it. I look it's vitamin, right? I texted her back. I said, take the fucking vitamin I sent to school with you. Yeah. Like, that's all that's in this, you know. But she saw it on tick tock, or she saw it somewhere, and she's like, Hey, this girl says she was more awake during class, and she knows enough to think, like, that might not be true, but still made her wonder out loud, yeah, yeah. She wondered out loud about it. So, yeah. So back to the question of like, Why doesn't it capture you? Do

Jennifer Smith, CDE 9:23
you think it's a great question? Really,

Scott Benner 9:26
I it's hard to know, isn't it? It is really

Jennifer Smith, CDE 9:29
hard to know, and that's why I don't understand why it grabs some people and other people could really care less. It's not that I don't keep up with things like fashion and what's you know out there. But I don't seek it out. I don't go to look at, gosh, what's the most popular new shoe? Mine is, do the shoes let me run like I want to run, and do they feel good when I wear them just every single day? Fabulous. These are the shoes. And I don't care what big. Name person wears them. They could be from the no name store across the street, and if they look like I like them, and they feel great, then

Scott Benner 10:10
my phone will ring. I still have a home phone. I know that makes me old, but whatever, it sounds better. And when I'm having important conversations, I make phone calls from my home phone because it sounds better, but you'll get 1000 marketing calls. I'll pick the phone up and I'll go, I'm not interested, and I'll hang up, and my wife will say, weren't you interested in I said, I don't know. They didn't get that far. Or like, One day this kid knocked on the door. I love this story. He knocks on our front door. I open the door. I go, Hey, man, what's up? He goes, I'm wondering if you're interested in and then he started talking. I went, I'm gonna stop you. I don't need that. And he goes, Okay, thank you. And then I started pulling the door closed, and he looks at me, and he goes, sir. And I'm like, he goes, How do you know you don't need it? I haven't told you what it is yet. And I said, if I needed it, I'd know. I don't need you to tell me. But thank you. Yeah, no, absolutely. Like, there's this idea that there's something magical out in the world that I haven't found out. Haven't found out about yet, and the kid at my front door is gonna tell me about it. You know, if you take insulin or so faucinyas, you are at risk for your blood sugar going too low. You need a safety net when it matters most, be ready with G vo hypo pen. My daughter carries G vo hypo pen everywhere she goes, because it's a ready to use rescue pen for treating very low blood sugar in people with diabetes ages two and above that. I trust low blood sugar emergencies can happen unexpectedly and they demand quick action. Luckily, jivo kypo pen can be administered in two simple steps, even by yourself in certain situations. Show those around you where you store GEVO kypo pen and how to use it. They need to know how to use jivo kypo pen before an emergency situation happens. Learn more about why GEVO kypo Pen is in Arden's diabetes toolkit at gevoq, glucagon.com/juicebox, gevok. Gvoke shouldn't be used if you have a tumor in the gland on the top of your kidneys called a pheochromocytoma, or if you have a tumor in your pancreas called an insulin OMA, visit gvoke. Glucagon.com/risk. For safety information. I have always disliked ordering diabetes supplies, I'm guessing you have as well. It hasn't been a problem for us for the last few years, though, because we began using us Med, you can too us med.com/juice, box, or call 888-721-1514, to get your free benefits, check us. Med has served over 1 million people living with diabetes since 1996 they carry everything you need, from CGM to insulin pumps and diabetes testing supplies and more. I'm talking about all the good ones, all your favorites, libre three, Dexcom, g7 and pumps like Omnipod five, Omnipod tandem, and most recently, the eyelet pump from beta bionics, the stuff you're looking for, they have it at us. Med, 88887211514, or go to us. Med.com/juice, box, to get started now use my link to support the podcast. That's us. Med.com/juice, box, or call 888-721-1514,

Jennifer Smith, CDE 13:21
right? Or that you're missing. And maybe that is the point. I don't feel like I'm really missing anything. And like you told that guy, if you were, you'd have it on your list of things to go searching for.

Scott Benner 13:35
Yeah, I would know what to do. Like I'm aware of the things that I'm not doing or need or whatever, and when they come up on my to do list, I'll take care of them. Then, right, exactly.

Jennifer Smith, CDE 13:44
We had a Bug Guy, kind of similar to your guy, that came to our door this past summer, and he knocked, he's like, have you noticed an increase in these kinds of bugs? And he pulled out a sheet, and he was gonna start pointing. And I was like, sir, you can tell that our lawn has all the dandelions in the neighborhood. Yeah, you don't spray, we don't spray, we don't do anything. The bugs that are here, there's a purpose for the bugs. We're good. I don't really need whatever you've got. He was like, oh, okay, same thing. Oh,

Scott Benner 14:10
I, by the way, that same guy has been at my house. It's like a laminated chart of all the bugs, right? He goes, these are probably living under your soil. And I was like, Well, I don't live under my soil, so I'm okay with that,

Jennifer Smith, CDE 14:19
right? They're not in my house. They're not invading anything great. He

Scott Benner 14:23
goes, they could come into the house. I said, I've been here 20 years. Hasn't happened yet. I'm feeling good about it. It's the same thing with warranties, you know, like, Would you like to buy a $50 warranty? I'm like, the thing only cost $150 right? I'm gonna ride the luck. If it breaks, I'll spend 150 and get it again. My wife did that to me, like, we have this little like drink cooler. And we had one for 12 years, and it died. And I bought another one. I bought the same exact one, but two years later it died again. So when I bought a third one, she goes, Are you gonna buy the warranty? And I'm like, No. I'm like, odds are in our favor, baby.

Jennifer Smith, CDE 14:57
I'm not doing that. We never. Either if we never take out the warranty because it's a waste. It's kind of like, and I hesitate to say it, because I haven't car I have car insurance, but it's like car insurance, right? It is. It's like those things that you pay for, hoping that you don't ever have to utilize what you're putting money into all the time. Car

Scott Benner 15:21
Insurance is a halfway good example, but you need it. I think legal. You can't drive without it. Yes, correct. But if you think about it, what it costs you every year and every year you don't use it, and then one year you run into somebody in a parking lot. Let's say, imagine if you could look at that person. Go, Hey, listen, I've saved $40,000 in the last 20 years not buying car insurance. I'll give you 20 right now. Just go home and like, and that person would be like, leave it alone. Get the hell out of here. Thank you. Of course, you kill somebody in a litigious society. You hurt somebody, you're gonna lose your home. But yeah, that's the point of the warranty idea, which is, if I buy a $50 warranty on everything I buy, I've spent 1000s of dollars probably, and then why don't I just use that, keep that money in reserve and use it if one of these things breaks, like, that's how my brain works about

Speaker 1 16:06
that? Yeah, absolutely, yeah. So

Scott Benner 16:09
this is interesting. I asked, I know some of you like to freak out, but I asked chat, G, P, T, why are some people not impacted by marketing? So it says that high skepticism or critical thinking. People who naturally question the motives behind marketing messages are skeptical about advertisements. Tend to be less persuadable, right? They have an analytical mindset that scrutinizes claims that are made in ads and other parts of life. It's funny, because that is how I would describe you like, if we started this off and the and it was like, does Jenny get impacted by marketing? I'd think about you for five seconds and think I would answer no to that. Probably, oh, yeah, yeah. That does not seem like a thing that would like motivate you.

Jennifer Smith, CDE 16:55
It isn't. And it is a hard thing though, to navigate now with children, because I've long time been like this. It's just, yeah, I don't know why. It is just me, but with kids now, who are, I can see the influence of friends, and I can see the influence of brands and different types of things, and trying to get across to them the base concept of things like need versus want, and the fact that just be calves you have the shoes doesn't make you more popular. It may make you feel like you belong, but it's a hard thing to get across to brains that are still developing and understanding and learning connections. And

Scott Benner 17:40
also, if your kid is already real self confident and okay with being, you know, not having 1000 friends or something like that, then they'll probably be fine with that. But if you've got but at the same time, like, if you've got a kid who's struggling with something and a pair of certain pair of shoes might make their life easier, then I don't. I probably wouldn't have a problem with that either, you know what I mean, but I'd still have those conversations with them. But hey, here's the shoes just in case, right? It also says that people who are just familiar with marketing tactics don't fall for them as frequently. So I mean, when I was coming up and I was young, I worked in the marketing department for a credit union, ah. And so I have to say that probably even before that, though, if you said to me, like if you start selling to me, I hear it right away, or I start thinking about what you're like, why are they saying this to me? You know what I mean? Like, right? What do they get? Yeah, if solar panels were really affordable, I'd have them by now. Like, that kind of an idea, yeah, you know, like, I'd be up for solar. I'll take some free electricity. But if you're selling it to me, that must mean that I have to spend $20,000 to get my solar panels to save $400 a month, or whatever, or something like that. Like I don't know how that's gonna take a while for me to make that money back, right? I'd love to help the planet, but I don't have 20 grand to throw at the problem, correct? So I see that it says that. Now this is interesting. Would you call yourself emotionally reactive or no?

Jennifer Smith, CDE 19:01
I would say it depends for me, okay, emotionally reactive when appropriate, like when my cat passed away. Jenny, very sad. No,

Scott Benner 19:12
Jenny's cat passed away recently. Yes, she got on the last time we recorded. I was like, Are you all right? She's like, I just haven't been a bad thing. My god,

Jennifer Smith, CDE 19:20
yeah. So emotionally reactive there, I think inappropriate scenarios, yes, right? But other tie ins and like

Scott Benner 19:28
you've never seen a necklace and ripped off all your clothes and run around excited or something like that. Oh, my God, I have to have this, right? No, not at all. Yeah. Well, so if you're a low if you're low on that emotional reactivity, you're less likely to fall for it. So the reason I'm talking about marketing is because, whether you know it or not, the people you're looking at on Tik Tok and Instagram, either someone is paying them to do what they're doing where they're trying to get popular enough so someone will pay them for what they're doing. No one. Is doing a fit check for you, just because they want you to see how cute your butt looks when you show them your shoes. Like, like, like, that's most people are like, well, if I can get this thing big enough, someone will come now, the joke's on them. Unless you get so big you really don't, there's no money to be made. Really. There are a lot of influencers that make $25 for something like, something where you're like, oh my god, I get so many. It doesn't work like that. Like, do some Googling and find out what a, you know, 1000 Yeah, 1000 views on YouTube. Make sure, for example, because it's nothing, not a lot. Yeah, all right, right, it's not. I think I could. I think I get a check from YouTube, like once a month for like, 98 bucks. And I'm like, not trying to be big on YouTube or anything like that. But, yeah, I don't know, I do a few 1000 downloads a month on YouTube, but it's because all I do is put my podcast up there, right if I was to make a video and put a nice background behind me, and put up some lights and pull out a device like an omnipot or a Dexcom, which are very sexy on YouTube. Oh, I don't want to talk about it like this, but, you know, like a bullshit tutorial about how it works. Like, you know, here, like, basically read from the manual, but into a camera, push the button,

Jennifer Smith, CDE 21:06
and this is how it works, and it'll blink at you here, and, yeah,

Scott Benner 21:10
those things will get you hundreds of 1000s of downloads. Yes, there's nothing to say about how a Dexcom works that takes more than about eight seconds, right? It's not a 20, right? Yeah. Like, it's almost like, when people say, like, there's so many episodes about how people manage, but those people use pumps. What if I use MDI? I go, Oh, just do the same thing. Like, it's, you can't do extended boluses, you can't shut off your basal. You'll have to inject more. That's it. Like, there, like, what you want a series about that? I can't make you a series about that, like it's about the insulin, not about how you put it in, generally speaking, right? Those device things are exactly the same. Now, if you do like a drill down episode, like I did with like, how Omnipod five works for people, that's different. But if you're reading from the manual or from the marketing materials, you're just trying to take advantage of people's fear that they don't understand how this thing works.

Jennifer Smith, CDE 22:01
They don't know what they've been taught, yeah, and they probably have, at that point of looking up a device, you're looking for more information that you feel like you didn't get when you were initially trained on it, or that you really maybe, maybe you don't read things well, and you do visually work better with like sight, yeah, you get to see how it works, where to push the button, what the screen should look like. I think there's, you know, validity in seeing that type of a thing for a specific learner,

Scott Benner 22:30
right? There's no reason not that. I'm not saying you shouldn't, like say it. I'm just saying that those videos shouldn't have hundreds of 1000s of downloads. Like, you can figure out how a thing works holding it in your hand one time. Like, you know what I mean? Like, it's and I get the like, oh, it's got insulin in it. I don't, okay, like, I don't disagree, but the amount of your basal per hour doesn't change because the screen looks different on this one than that one. Like, that kind of stuff, right? I'm just saying that that's taking advantage of, like, a fear, or taking advantage of your excitement about the thing, like, Oh, I got a thing I want to go. That's another thing that's new to this, this kind of life now too. Like, I bought this car, I'm gonna go watch 9000 videos about it, about it exactly the cars outside. Go look at it,

Jennifer Smith, CDE 23:15
right? Go take a peek under the hood. See what it does. What does it sound like? Is it supposed to do that? Then, great, right? You're all set. We're all set, turn the turn the engine on and move. But I think you're right in bringing, you know, a bit ago, you mentioned that this also, it does navigate into our devices that we use, or diabetes, and the visibility that we now have two devices, you know, years ago, when pumps and CGM and newer blood glucose meters and all those things were really starting to ramp up in their design and what they could offer, we didn't see fancy people wearing the device and, yeah, advertising them, because that's really what it is,

Scott Benner 23:58
right? Listen, I get it like, I get why people see What's that girl's name? Is that? Lila moss, the model? She's, yeah, and her mom was a model. I probably sound stupid right now, you know. And she's wearing, was she wearing Omnipod? Maybe. And, like, she'll wear it on a runway, which is awesome. Like, I think that's terrific. I also think she didn't have a lot of options. She does have type one diabetes, and she's working, she needs to wear her insulin pump, right? And it's cool that she's not hiding it, and I think it's awesome for people to see it. As a matter of fact, I've seen threads in my private Facebook group all the time where someone will just say, like, if you could just share a video of your kid putting on a device or, right, a picture of your son or daughter wearing this thing, it would mean a lot to my kid. I understand that, right? I 1,000,000% understand that there's a use case where I go, okay, that makes a ton of sense to me, right? But go ahead,

Jennifer Smith, CDE 24:52
I was gonna say and in the same line, not only other kids or other people that you don't really know kind. It goes back to my not understanding why we why you'd want to watch somebody you don't know. In this case, I find it purposeful. You find connection with another little kid who's seven years old, or another football player who's 14, right? But I think in terms of what we see in the bigger scale of media coverage, like the model or known personalities wearing them, I think not so much in as an as an adult, I don't care who wears what, right it doesn't affect me. It's great to see in personalities that are more famous, but from a kid perspective and even like a teen perspective, I think what it does provide is some visual to what is possible, right? The football that the football player has got the pot on an arm and a CGM on the other arm. You see that as a kid, and you are a football player, and you're thinking, I never thought that I could actually go that far. Oh,

Scott Benner 26:00
I don't have diabetes. And I saw a guy kicking an extra point the other day with an omnipot on, and I was like, that's awesome. Yes, that's just for people who think, like, gosh, this thing happened to me. I'm by myself, no one else. That stuff is great. Like, I'm not, yeah, I am definitely not saying that. I just don't. So here, I think here's the problem is that you start off saying I'm going to use social media to talk to people about diabetes, yeah, and then you come to realize that they don't care, and they're not going to pay attention, and that doesn't get you big numbers, and it's not going to happen. So then they start leaning into other social media trends to try to get the following, and that the idea is to like, but then they don't talk about the diabetes anymore, like, and it's not their fault. I'm just going to come out and tell you, no one's going to watch your tick tock, you know about, you know, like, no one cares. Like, like, here's 10 variables that might impact your blood sugar. Like, no one's like, that's not what tick tock is made for. Tick tock is made for, like, that's funny, that's stupid, that's crazy. Like, yeah. Like, right. So I understand what happens to the creators. Like, they're like, I'm going to share good information. Good information is not going to get you widely picked up. It's not how the

Jennifer Smith, CDE 27:09
the algorithm works, because it's not shiny and sparkly. Yeah, the algorithm is

Scott Benner 27:13
not pushing that kind of content, right? I shared with you before we started recording, and I'm happy to say it here is, like, some, some nice guy on tick tock, like, found something really interesting about one of my episodes recently, made a tick tock about he's got like, 350,000 like, views on it. Right now, I'm the guy that makes the goddamn podcast. I couldn't, I can't get 350,000 views on like, talking about my about it, but he did. He was like, but then when you look at it, it had a sensational bend to it, and I've been paying a lot of attention to that this week, because the same thing happened to me within my my private Facebook group. So that it's, I don't know what episode it is, right, but a nice woman comes on and tells a story of our kid who got 150 units of insulin instead of a unit and a half from her school nurse. I

Jennifer Smith, CDE 28:01
haven't listened to that one yet, but I can't imagine the horror.

Scott Benner 28:06
Yeah, a fairly harrowing tale, like, I'm not gonna lie to you, and the mom was lucky enough to be at the school, but she panicked a little bit, and so it got really close, like it was not I mean, the kid's like, seven years old when this happened, 150 units. You know what I mean, right? It's episode 1323 it's called school nurse mistake. Now, in that same week, I had a woman come on and tell a story of her husband who had a borderline personality disorder, and she's trying to get her kids with diabetes away from him. Arden came on and talked about how she doesn't understand money. A 52 year old lady came on and talked about how the religion she grew up with was, you know, hard for her. You know, a 19 year old girl came on to talk about all of her health problems. She's off at college, and she and I tried to go through them together. You and I talked about what frozen shoulder is, like. A lot of stuff came out, right? There was a cold wind episode where a med device sales person came on, it was like, this job wasn't what I was hoping it was gonna be, right? None of them blew up anywhere. But the one about, can you believe that a nurse gave my kid 100 almost died? Like, right? Like, you know, I'm afraid that that'll happen to me like, I'm afraid that someone will give me too much insulin. I'm afraid they'll give to make it boom, it explodes,

Jennifer Smith, CDE 29:21
right? Because it's drawing from one of those emotional responses, fear, right? Yeah. And so it's going to get the

Scott Benner 29:28
hit. And you know that? Then I see somebody post in the face my Facebook group. I post in my Facebook group all the time. It doesn't matter unless I say something crazy. It doesn't matter if I go in there right now and say, I swear to you, you want your a 1c to go down a full point here. Listen to this episode. I guarantee you that you'll understand pre Bolus thing better. It won't do much. The algorithm won't push it. Nothing like that. If I jumped in there and said I had a bad day, or even if I say, Hey, by the way, I left the the editor left a curse in this episode by the. Thick. I'm sorry it's been taken out if you got it and offend you. I'm sorry it wasn't our intention that stuff blows up. Sure, that stuff all blows up. And

Jennifer Smith, CDE 30:07
what's it? Reacting to emotion,

Scott Benner 30:10
yeah, or titillating, you know, whatever it is, like curse words, like that kind of stuff. But so I see somebody posts in that group like, Oh my God. I listened to Episode 1323, about the school nurse and blah blah. That Facebook algorithm showed it to everybody that is in that group like it. Just pushed it and pushed it and pushed it. And I'm over here going, I wanted you guys to know what frozen shoulder was because,

Jennifer Smith, CDE 30:32
because it's important, it's important for you to know

Scott Benner 30:35
doesn't matter. It's not how it works. So I don't know, Jenny,

Jennifer Smith, CDE 30:39
I don't know. Would it push it better? I don't know much about the algorithm, or the algorithms, whatever it's using. Does it need, like, a tap dancing episode, like, does it need a video of somebody doing something entertaining to push it Well,

Scott Benner 30:54
here's the problem. Is that I get my tap shoes out, I feel like and I don't know if you know the phrase, it gives me douche chills, to do stuff like that so I don't get involved. I don't like, I honestly could take important information, I swear to you, and put it with a picture of a puppy, and more people would say it. See it, yeah, I can do that like that. Absolutely works. I've tried it for fun. I'm like, oh, that worked. I'm an adult. Like, I can't bring myself, like, right? There's a reason that when you open up any scrolling app, that if it's a girl, she's running towards you in the when the video starts, you don't know this, Jenny, because you're I don't,

Jennifer Smith, CDE 31:32
I don't have social media. I don't it makes, it makes their bosoms

Scott Benner 31:36
jiggle, okay, yeah, you understand how that works. Yeah, I'm a girl. And then people go, Oh, boobies. And then they hold for a second, right? Or, like, when the video comes up in the first person, the first thing they say is, don't scroll away, because you actually go, oh. Or wait till the end. There's nothing at the end. Let me tell you, it's nothing there. But if you stay to the whole end, the algorithm thinks you like the video, and then it shows it to more people, cute, I see that's exactly what like. So that's how these little things, like, you know, work. But the crazy thing is, is, we all know that's

Unknown Speaker 32:09
how it works,

Scott Benner 32:11
right? But I still buy the shoes

Jennifer Smith, CDE 32:13
Well, and that's the funny thing. So I mean, it's explained, I guess, a little bit better by Just Your short little blurb there, because I have seen, on the occasion that I've perused your your group, I have seen where people include a pic, a picture for the algorithm, like it's a picture of your dog. I don't understand, but clearly, dogs get hit. I don't know. Maybe people like dogs.

Scott Benner 32:37
Facebook favors images over video. If you put up a video of the same dog, it won't do as well. Interesting, Facebook doesn't love video. Instagram used to love pictures. Doesn't love pictures anymore. Now it loves video like so they they skew them towards certain stuff. But what that leaves it back to is you're either going to be a person like me who's like, Look, I am going to keep pushing out good content, and you guys will find it, but I am not going to whore myself like that, right, right? Or you get somebody who's like, I've got good information here. I guess I'll change my pump in a pair of shorter shorts, right? You know what I mean, like, I guess. And you see, listen, we all see people do it all the time, like regular or I'll go on a vacation and then do my diabetes stuff while I'm on vacation or on a beach, or I'm a little sun kissed, or something like that side

Jennifer Smith, CDE 33:24
during a hurricane. The ones that the news reels, that I actually would like to see are the ones with the men in the coats, like outside during the hurricane. I'm not laughing about the hurricane. I feel I feel terrible, because I do. I said that to Nathan. I was like, I feel bad that this poor man has to do his job outside getting blown away. See

Scott Benner 33:45
how nice you are. I walked into the room the other night, and, you know, I don't know who it was, one of the anchors was standing outside, and I said to Kelly, I'm like, I don't want anything bad to happen that guy. But how awesome would it be if he just blew away right now, just, if he just, if he was like, we think, once, anyway, it was just gone, and we heard him yell as he was going away. Like, because

Jennifer Smith, CDE 34:04
what you're saying, though, is sad that that is what grabs

Scott Benner 34:08
Yeah, well, they do it on purpose. I mean, they CNN, shoves. What's his name down there. He's wealthy, for God's sakes. He doesn't need it, but, um, Anderson Cooper, Oh, right. I mean, his mom was a billionaire, wasn't she? Like, I think he's okay, is what I'm saying. It's but, but he pours himself out and goes and stands next to that hurricane, right? Like, because that's what people want to look at. And I'm just like, look, I try. Like, I'll jump up and I'll make a video, and I'll be like, Hey, listen on this week's episode, we talked about this, this and this, it never catches on. Like, it just never does. Like, when even companies will ask me, like, why don't you try harder with your social media? And I'm like, the podcast is very popular, and people actually listen to that. They don't just scroll past it. You don't get 10 seconds out of them, and then they're like, and they're gone, you know? And what

Jennifer Smith, CDE 34:52
you're getting also is, it's more old school referral, it's, did you know about. About this, and because the community within diabetes on social media has grown in so many other places, there's the ability to share information, or now groups that are, you know, able to get together again. Did you hear about this? Or did you know about this? So you've got what is still the telephone call kind of right recommendation or referral. You don't need the cute dog with the bow tie? Yeah, I'm

Scott Benner 35:27
not, listen, I'm not gonna bounce myself at you. That's not gonna be me. I'm gonna put out what I think is good content and hope that you like it and listen to it and tell somebody about it like, that's my only that's my only option. But listen, I also can't tell you, like nobody would want to see me in my bathing suit talking about something, but if somebody wanted that, like, would I? And I don't think I would, because some of the things we talked about earlier, but I just saw the other day, and I have to pause here. I'm just gonna say it anyway. But I think these people are advertisers, but I just saw the other day this like, kind of glitzy, like red carpety event to push a thing. And there were diabetes influencers there. I know who they are, and I know how hard they're trying to get a audience so they can charge people money for their content. Like, I know what they're doing, right, and they're so happy to be there, and they're all dressed up. And I thought this influences no one, in my opinion, like, who looks at this and says, Oh, I'm gonna do this now, because the guy from the thing is Stan, like, he seems to be having a great life. Sure, he's dressed up very nicely. He's at a nice dinner. You're not there, like somebody

Jennifer Smith, CDE 36:34
paid him to be there, to be the visual.

Scott Benner 36:38
I also don't understand why that doesn't make people angry instead of, like, desirous, because I've seen people do that too, where, like, their thing blows up, and they'll get like, a real expensive item, like a car or a home or something, sure, and now they're showing it to people, and I'm like, I don't understand why you think that's attractive. Like, why do you think other people are looking at that and going, like, oh, he has a $300,000 car. I'll listen to him,

Jennifer Smith, CDE 37:01
right? I think that that's what it kind of boils down to for me, and my lack of understanding it's exactly what you're saying. I don't need to see all of your bling that I don't have, but I also really don't care about, yeah, and why should I? I've got other things I need to navigate, enjoy your

Scott Benner 37:18
car. Like, that's cool. Like, actually your thing worked out like that for you. Like, I'm actually one of those people. I'm like, good for you. Like, that's awesome, you know, but I don't understand that. If he's showing it to me, why, I would be like, Oh, whatever he's saying. I'm gonna do that because, look at that car. I don't get that. I just don't understand, especially in other walks of life. But we've changed there too like so I'm old, right? But I was there in Philadelphia when the first NFL player went into free agency. Oh, okay, so Reggie White, he filed a class action lawsuit. He got free agency for NFL players. I believe that NFL players should be able to sell their wares wherever. I don't think they should be restricted by who they're under contract with, right? People love this man. Okay? They loved him in Philadelphia, if you would have said Reggie White's outside and he needs you to cut off your pinky right now and give it to him, people would have run out of their houses holding their pinkies up in the air. But when the media told you that he got a four year, $17 million contract, people hated him after that, like, as soon as they knew how much money he had, and it was more than them, and they could do that, that's not fair. Like all he does is play football, that kind of thing, even though, back then you could have made the absolute argument, the only reason the Philadelphia Eagles made money was because of that guy, right? People turned on him right away. But then fast forward, how many years? 30 years, 40 years, people are like, Oh, he makes a lot of money. That's cool. Yeah, you're not going to make that much money ever. That's not happening for you. Like, maybe that's what social media has done. Is it allowed you to believe that you are just a couple of moments away from being that person that you're looking at?

Jennifer Smith, CDE 38:58
I guess maybe that's a interesting, interesting view on it. Yeah. And again, depends person to person, personality, I guess. And what's I don't know, not necessarily, what's important to you, but yeah, I don't know if people are interesting.

Scott Benner 39:15
I'm gonna Google this last thing before you go. Ready. Percentage of Americans that want to be an influencer. Reggie White, well, 57% of Gen Z ers want to be influencers. And

Jennifer Smith, CDE 39:34
do you think the real reason boils down to the baseline understanding that they think it's a monetary road more than

Scott Benner 39:41
half of Gen Zers think they can easily make a career in influencing

Jennifer Smith, CDE 39:46
a career. I guess that's where the hard thing for me is, because look at how, look at how fast trends change. And so if you become an influencer on these cool, fancy hoop earrings that monitor your heart rate. Yeah, right. You know, just great. But how long is that going to be around for you to influence on that particular like you're gonna have to continue to navigate the newest and the newest and the newest and I there's so much life to like, experience and enjoy that. I

Scott Benner 40:22
feel like, yeah, like, you'll make yourself a professional glitter sticker on your face influencer, and then that'll go out of vogue, and then you'll be like, uh, what do I do now? And the answer isn't, go find the next thing, because you're done now. You used up. You can't keep making it happen. It's very difficult to keep a thing going for like, take it from me, it's very difficult to keep a thing going for 10 years, for a long time. I'll share this with people, because I think it makes the point. And I don't think I ever would have said this on the podcast otherwise, at one point, I was aware of 100 other type one diabetes podcasts that began after mine and then failed, and there's a couple that are holding on, God bless them, like I really do feel like that. They should. I hope they're helping somebody. Yeah,

Jennifer Smith, CDE 41:06
because I think there's value in what gets put out there, in whoever it reaches. It's reaching somebody who needed something.

Scott Benner 41:12
My voice is certainly not the only voice, and that's wonderful, right? But those other ones, if you go look at charts, they don't chart really, it's great. They're reaching somebody, but they're not doing what this is doing. And this is it's random. I couldn't do it again, but

Jennifer Smith, CDE 41:30
you couldn't put a prescription to do this, then do this, and then move this way. You just kind of moved with the way that things were, and probably just the way that your brain thought about moving forward with the atmosphere of how things were changing? Yeah,

Scott Benner 41:44
I zig and zag. And also, for those of you who are out there killing yourself for trends and stuff like that, I ignored all of that the entire way. I never looked at social media. I always looked at what I thought was content that would help people. Sure, that's my main focus. Anyway, I don't understand why people are that easily influenced, although I guess I have a better understanding now, after we write about a little bit, yay, but I appreciate you doing this with me.

Unknown Speaker 42:05
Thank you very much. Absolutely.

Scott Benner 42:13
This episode of The Juicebox podcast was sponsored by us Med, US med.com/juice, box, or call 888-721-1514, get started today with us. Med links in the show notes. Links at Juicebox podcast com, a huge thank you to one of today's sponsors, gevok, glucagon. Find out more about G vo hypo. Pen at G VOQ, glucagon.com. Forward slash juice box. You spell that, G, V, O, k, e, g, l, U, C, A, G, o, n.com, forward slash juice box. I'm looking for guests for this series, so if you have a thing you don't understand, diabetes related or not, and you'd like to come on the podcast and figure it out together. Reach out to me through the website, Juicebox podcast.com let me know that you're interested in being on an I don't understand episode and what your topic might be. The Diabetes variable series from the Juicebox podcast goes over all the little things that affect your diabetes that you might not think about, travel and exercise, dehydration and even trampolines, Juicebox, podcast.com, go up in the menu and click on diabetes variables. Are you starting to see patterns, but you can't quite make sense of them. You're like, Oh, if I Bolus here, this happens, but I don't know what to do. Should I put in a little less, a little more? If you're starting to have those thoughts, you're starting to think this isn't going the way the doctor said it would. I think I see something here, but I can't be sure. Once you're having those thoughts, you're ready for the diabetes Pro Tip series from the Juicebox podcast. It begins at Episode 1000 you can also find it at Juicebox podcast.com up in the menu, and you can find a list in the private Facebook group. Just check right under the featured tab at the top, it'll show you lists of a ton of stuff, including the Pro Tip series, which runs from episode 1000 to 1025 Hey, you listened all the way to the end. You might want to know more about the Juicebox podcast. If you do go to Juicebox podcast.com scroll down to the bottom and subscribe to the Juicebox podcast newsletter each week. You'll get a rundown of the shows from the past week, just in case you missed something and you think, Oh, I would have loved that. Now I know, Hey, what's up everybody? If you've noticed that the podcast sounds better, and you're thinking like, how does that happen? What you're hearing is Rob at wrong way recording, doing his magic to these files. So if you want him to do his magic to you, wrong way recording.com, you got a podcast? You want somebody to edit it? You want rob you?

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