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Transcript

With Great Power #296... 22 Panels with Tess Langston · 22 Panels - A Comic Book Podcast

• 0:02
  Tad Eggleston: Good evening, everybody. Welcome back to 22 Panels. My guest tonight is Tess Langston, who's Kickstartered Growing Up on the Spectrum.
• 0:12
  Tad Eggleston: caught my attention immediately, has been talked about on the weekly episode a couple of times now. I got to read it today, I…
• 0:18
  Tad Eggleston: I loved it, and I want you to pitch it to us, because…
• 0:24
  Tad Eggleston: I don't want to make too many assumptions about what you wrote it for, even though I definitely
• 0:30
  Tad Eggleston: I definitely have my view of what I think
• 0:34
  Tad Eggleston: where I think it hits, but Tess, tell us about the project,
• 0:39
  Tad Eggleston: Tell us about yourself. I should have said hi.
• 0:42
  Tad Eggleston: remember, autistic, I don't even… I don't always… even on my own podcast, I'm not always good at the basics. Hi, Tess!
• 0:48
  Britton Payne: I'm doing great, Ted.
• 0:51
  Tess: Mall Talk is hard.
• 0:53
  Tad Eggleston: I hate small talk.
• 0:57
  Tess: How's the weather today? Clouds.
• 1:03
  Tess: Hey everyone, I'm Tess, I'm the creator of Growing Up on the Spectrum, producing, Shadowcast Studio, and the project is basically a middle school and up resource that is a 101 book on autism for anyone on and off the spectrum who's curious, for educators, students, guardians.
• 1:23
  Tess: And doctors, and it's just a good in-between resource between children's books and, giant adult medical books.
• 1:32
  Tess: And, it's a part memoir, part 101 guide on the spectrum, starting from my point of view and branching off into a little more research, but overall, this is a…
• 1:47
  Tess: Gateway to ask more questions, and at least lay down the basic foundation of what autism is.
• 1:55
  Tad Eggleston: Okay, I nailed it. Isn't that what I texted you, Britt?
• 1:58
  Britton Payne: Spot on.
• 2:03
  Tad Eggleston: just always worried, particularly with a personal work, that, like, I'll describe it one way and just discover that the other person meant it some other way. So, I wanted to hear you say that first. Yes, I think it's brilliant at being that book for either young people who are either recently diagnosed or just starting to…
• 2:23
  Tad Eggleston: Understand what their diagnosis means, and especially for their friends, their parents, their teachers, as a… as a…
• 2:33
  Tad Eggleston: Easy to digest reframing tool.
• 2:36
  Tad Eggleston: To, to look… to look at the autism spectrum as… as…
• 2:41
  Tad Eggleston: As a condition, and not automatically even a negative one, not a disease to be cured.
• 2:47
  Tess: Oh my god, yeah.
• 2:49
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, yeah.
• 2:52
  Tess: Well, and even, even with some of the YouTube promotional stuff that I've done, little shorts and everything, or, that I've put up on social media, people genuinely ask, hey, what's the difference between a disease and a disability?
• 3:07
  Tess: And, you know, calmly, you know, I've had to explain, well, a disability is a different way of functioning versus a disease which is a debilitation of functioning.
• 3:19
  Tess: Or, it's taking a wave function. Like, for example, a blind person
• 3:24
  Tess: has a disability. They still function in the world, and…
• 3:28
  Tess: They just can't see, whereas someone with, like, for cancer, for example, that is a debilitating condition where, if not treated properly, leads to death.
• 3:41
  Tess: Where a disability, the only difference is in… the success is accommodations.
• 3:50
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 3:51
  Tad Eggleston: Accommodations, adaptations, modifications. Can you tell I work in special ed?
• 3:56
  Tess: Yes!
• 3:58
  Tess: Much needed, much needed.
• 4:03
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, so, I mean, I… I… I loved it, I laughed, I wound up showing stuff to my wife.
• 4:10
  Tad Eggleston: Because, I mean, you do a…
• 4:15
  Tad Eggleston: how to put it… my wife hasn't been diagnosed, but is probably, at the very least, somewhere on the neurodivergent sheet. She might be more ADHD than autistic, and the line blurs more and more all the time. But we laugh because we have, like, almost opposite traits, and the page that I actually pulled out
• 4:33
  Tad Eggleston: To show her was… was when you were talking about the different thinking styles, and…
• 4:38
  Tess: Oh, yeah.
• 4:38
  Tad Eggleston: And… and, like, I definitely think…
• 4:42
  Tad Eggleston: verbally, I literally cannot form a picture in my head. It does not happen.
• 4:50
  Tad Eggleston: Whereas my wife very much thinks visually. She…
• 4:53
  Tad Eggleston: Only sees… actually, she'll tell… the way she describes it is as swirls of colors that sometimes become pictures.
• 5:01
  Tess: Wow!
• 5:02
  Tad Eggleston: But when it got to the pattern part, we actually decided that we split that in half, because she's very spatial.
• 5:09
  Tad Eggleston: She's an artist, an art teacher, very, very spatial, and I'm not so good at that, except, like, cardinal directions. I always know which way north is, like, but that's because I know my maps really well, because I'm really, ridiculously good at, like.
• 5:23
  Tad Eggleston: pattern recognition and, like, the math music, like, you talked about you can sing when you listen to it. I can read the notes, but can't always, like.
• 5:33
  Tad Eggleston: effectively make music, but, like, if I read the notes, I can hear what it's supposed to sound like in my head without…
• 5:40
  Tess: Like, that's a talent! I think that's a talent all on its own. It is! Like, oh my god, you could read the dots?
• 5:46
  Tad Eggleston: Right, right. The dots make sense to me.
• 5:50
  Tad Eggleston: And I love listening to music. Recreating music has always been… but it… like, the only language other than English that I'm good at is math.
• 6:00
  Tad Eggleston: All other languages, they're too different.
• 6:04
  Tad Eggleston: Math is, like, a completely separate language.
• 6:08
  Tad Eggleston: It's tied into English, and it's a bridge to other languages, which is why I'm pretty certain that if I ever learned another language, it would be through math.
• 6:19
  Tess: Computer science is technically another language. A few of my friends went to computer science.
• 6:25
  Tess: Got… filled their requirement for language with binary and, computer code.
• 6:32
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, that's good to know. Because while I've never gotten hardcore into it, it's not because I don't have aptitude.
• 6:40
  Tad Eggleston: I'm putting this at the back of my head. Somebody else asked a question, otherwise Tess and I are just gonna autistic geek out.
• 6:45
  Tess: Info dumped.
• 6:47
  Tad Eggleston: And while that would make an awesome podcast, we did invite other people for a reason.
• 6:52
  Dr. Edgar Ramos: Can I, can I jump in right quick?
• 6:55
  Dr. Edgar Ramos: And bear with me, I'm sick as heck, so I apologize, and…
• 6:59
  Tess: Aww.
• 6:59
  Dr. Edgar Ramos: Dad knows my style, and I'm quite…
• 7:02
  Tad Eggleston: The bug has been going around and somehow missed Lee.
• 7:05
  Dr. Edgar Ramos: Oh my god.
• 7:06
  Tad Eggleston: I hate Lee, because he's been around both of.
• 7:09
  Dr. Edgar Ramos: Right, my friends went out.
• 7:10
  Tad Eggleston: In the last week, and somehow he's not sick at all.
• 7:14
  Dr. Edgar Ramos: Yeah, I feel like death, so bear with me as I chug along. So first, first off, Tess, I enjoyed the read. I perused the book quickly, and I did support the Kickstarter. I think I was one of the ones that emailed and said I was a retailer, and I… I don't know if Ted mentioned it, so I am a doctor, so I have a different…
• 7:36
  Tad Eggleston: I mentioned offhandedly, he's the one that diagnosed me.
• 7:40
  Tad Eggleston: And he did it initially just at C2E2.
• 7:43
  Dr. Edgar Ramos: I have some perspectives on it, but as a doctor, but also as a comic shop owner, I did buy the retailer package, and I had a special one made, so thank you. I don't know if it was you that approved it, but I requested a special retailer package, which you guys helped facilitate for me, so I will be selling the book at the shop.
• 8:02
  Tad Eggleston: I apparently even did before I texted him, which made me really, really happy when I learned it.
• 8:06
  Dr. Edgar Ramos: Oh, yeah, I had already done it, yeah, and then you told me…
• 8:08
  Tad Eggleston: I texted him, I thought, like, within hours of the campaign starting, so somehow he heard about it even before I did.
• 8:17
  Dr. Edgar Ramos: For mental health, I tend to be pretty quick on that stuff, so I think you worded it very well when you said it's a good one-on-one book, and I do… I thought that was really good, well stated, because it's a really good introductory to understanding, you know, some of the basics of the spectrum disorder, and it's a very good read for that, and it's facilitated or written in a manner that
• 8:39
  Dr. Edgar Ramos: you can ask questions, that kids can talk to each other and ask questions, that mom and dad can ask questions, the kid can… it's a really good read with that, so I actually enjoyed it at a level. It was just like, oh, okay. It wasn't trying to, you know.
• 8:53
  Dr. Edgar Ramos: reshape people, like, you know, the neurology of what, you know, autism is, which sometimes people try to get into over their heads about speaking at it, so I thought that was really good. It wasn't trying to go into, like, well, this is the psychology behind it. I'm like, I tend to read a lot of books on psychology and psychiatry, obviously, and it's just like, oh, this is really, like, your experience and your understanding and view of it, which I thought was, like, that's what people need to see, is your experience, your
• 9:18
  Dr. Edgar Ramos: Your view of it, I thought that was beautiful, so I just wanted to kind of make sure I state that right off the bat.
• 9:25
  Britton Payne: And if I could… if I… oh, sorry, I don't mean to…
• 9:28
  Tess: No, no, no.
• 9:29
  Britton Payne: Giving him flowers, so let me pause for a moment.
• 9:32
  Tess: No, no, please, please, go ahead.
• 9:34
  Britton Payne: Well, I just want to follow up that, in addition to your points, Dr. Ramos, the… oh, by the way, I'm Britton Payne, I'm a father of an autistic kid, I'm an entertainment attorney, and I speak a lot at Comic-Cons and elsewhere about the intersection of autism and pop culture, and I'm the founder of the nonprofit The Autism Scene, which is
• 9:53
  Britton Payne: A nonprofit dedicated to getting more explicitly autistic.
• 9:56
  Britton Payne: characters into kids' pop culture, including running a screenwriting competition right now called the Auspec Awards, and you can find out all about all of that.
• 10:05
  Britton Payne: at theautismscene.org. But the point that I wanted to make is, Tessa, your work not only is by an autistic person, which often you'll find writings about autism of this kind is not necessarily written by people who are autistic, or at least people who are
• 10:20
  Britton Payne: specific… even if you are autistic, you're not necessarily writing from the perspective of an autistic person. You might be trying to sort of, you know, present a non… a book without a particular point of view, just a factual book. But, so not only is it from the point of view of an autistic person, but it is
• 10:34
  Britton Payne: also largely, not always, but largely targeted towards autistic readers, helping them understand themselves, so that as a neurotypical person trying to help an autistic person, which is a situation I find myself in, I can see… I can look into it and say, oh, that's…
• 10:49
  Britton Payne: helping a person understand themselves a little bit, and I get to look in from the outside to sort of help them on that journey. And so it was a… it was a really nice piece to see for that reason as well, because it was speaking to,
• 11:03
  Britton Payne: the kids.
• 11:06
  Dr. Edgar Ramos: I wish I would have been able to see that book. So my son, who's, lee, how old is my son now? I don't even remember. God, I'm getting old.
• 11:13
  Larry Woods: He's, like, 20-something, 22.
• 11:16
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, the older… one of the older ones.
• 11:18
  Dr. Edgar Ramos: Yeah, so my point…
• 11:19
  Tad Eggleston: Tommy for a second there.
• 11:20
  Dr. Edgar Ramos: I know, Ozzy, so my son is autistic, and it's funny, because, like, we all knew, and obviously I know, you know, but…
• 11:28
  Dr. Edgar Ramos: we… it was never really explicitly stated, you know? And I always was very careful, like, to, you know, and for whatever reason, it is what it is, I'm a human, is to normalize it as much as possible, whatnot. But I'll never forget the day when he walked into the kitchen. It was me, his sister, and my wife, and he just looked at us, and…
• 11:48
  Dr. Edgar Ramos: Just out of nowhere, he's like, guys.
• 11:50
  Dr. Edgar Ramos: I think I'm autistic. And it was just like, we all just kind of looked like…
• 11:56
  Dr. Edgar Ramos: You know, and I'm like.
• 11:57
  Dr. Edgar Ramos: I didn't have, you know, and again, we're talking 20 years now, there wasn't a lot of material for him to read, or for me to find, you know, that he could kind of identify with, and I think that's the beauty of stuff like this, you know? Like, it's funny because he… he went and read, I think we talked about Huck.
• 12:13
  Dr. Edgar Ramos: You know, and he really liked Huck, you know, and I'm like, you know, I'm like, man, you know, why did… you know, Britton, I think you said something well with that, it's like, there is… there is material out there about it, but it's never… it's not always necessarily…
• 12:25
  Dr. Edgar Ramos: autistic people writing about autism. It's always from the other perspective, so I think it's just… it's good. So, you know, I'm…
• 12:31
  Dr. Edgar Ramos: I am so glad, you know, I'm waiting for it, I can't wait till it comes out, because I want to push it as much as I can. Like, it'll be on the top shelf, with me right behind it, going, hey, read this book, read this book. It's, yeah, it's a great thing.
• 12:45
  Dr. Edgar Ramos: Sorry, I have spurts of energy to talk.
• 12:49
  Tess: Yeah, no, please, I'm just taking all of this, and I'm so…
• 12:54
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, there wasn't actually a question there, it was just.
• 12:57
  Tess: Great job.
• 12:58
  Larry Woods: I have a… I have a question.
• 13:01
  Tess: Yes! Okay!
• 13:02
  Larry Woods: I'm gonna give you your flowers, because I… again, I was able to… Tad was kind enough to send me it as well. Okay.
• 13:08
  Tad Eggleston: Which, by the way, my name is Lee. We're doing nice flowers, because there's the… there's the… there's the, also the…
• 13:16
  Dr. Edgar Ramos: The ones you smoke?
• 13:17
  Tad Eggleston: Lentandre Craigslist flowers, and we're not doing that here.
• 13:22
  Britton Payne: Not one I'm familiar with.
• 13:24
  Dr. Edgar Ramos: I don't know what the Devil's Flowers is.
• 13:28
  Tess: I don't know what that is either, that's news to me.
• 13:31
  Dr. Edgar Ramos: Name a dog.
• 13:31
  Tad Eggleston: Well, that's good. I'm glad that you don't. It's a way that they used to get around the, you can't solicit certain…
• 13:40
  Tad Eggleston: How to put this… certain services, so you can't…
• 13:46
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, I'll be nice to you if you give me money, so instead it would be flowers appreciated.
• 13:58
  Tess: This sounds very Victorian. This sounds very Regency era. Mr. Wickham shouldn't be trusted because he went on Craigslist to solicit certain flowers.
• 14:09
  Dr. Edgar Ramos: I've never heard that. I'm intrigued.
• 14:13
  Larry Woods: You know, there for a while.
• 14:15
  Tad Eggleston: You shouldn't be intrigued, you're happily married for at least the second time, or is it?
• 14:23
  Britton Payne: Billy…
• 14:25
  Larry Woods: Yes, my question, students…
• 14:27
  Tad Eggleston: Sorry. It's late at night for me, Tess, and I also have a question. I'm very loopy, and I will ask this question before we end today. So…
• 14:36
  Larry Woods: I enjoyed it, the artwork was wonderful, the dialogue, again, it was…
• 14:42
  Larry Woods: Yeah, the 101. I'm gonna continue with that, because it was very…
• 14:47
  Larry Woods: informative to me in some ways, too, not just from The sort of,
• 14:52
  Larry Woods: the neuro side of things, but also just the experiential side, which is typically where I operate from.
• 14:58
  Larry Woods: Being that as a… I'm a counselor, so I also see patients, and I've seen patients that have had autism as well.
• 15:05
  Larry Woods: So, for me, the question would be.
• 15:09
  Larry Woods: before I jump into even more higher praise, is…
• 15:13
  Larry Woods: What drew you to, pun intended, what drew you to write this book?
• 15:19
  Larry Woods: Or do this book.
• 15:20
  Tess: It was… before 2020, it was…
• 15:26
  Tess: Sort of a last straw and a long line of documentaries and different stories coming from one point of view of autism, which usually… it isn't people on the spectrum talking about it, and it's usually someone outside of it talking about someone who's on the autism spectrum.
• 15:45
  Tess: And in, classic me, I just was a bit spiteful, and I was raising my hands and being like, you guys, like, there's so much more to this, and…
• 15:55
  Tess: So, I decided to write this book, and I decided to make it a comic book, because that's how I function. I am a very visual thinker, and I've been doing comics professionally since 2011, and even long before that with just being a kid and making comics in classes, so…
• 16:15
  Tess: Then, along with the age group, I decided middle school and up, because there was a gap there for information, and…
• 16:21
  Tess: middle school and up, that's when a lot of changes happen for kids. That's when a lot of social pressures start coming in. They are changing, and I remember a lot of hard times being in middle school.
• 16:35
  Tess: And it's not going to solve everything in that, but I'm really hoping that that information at least
• 16:42
  Tess: builds an understanding, or is a foundation for understanding in that regard. So, I did it for a lot of those reasons, but overall, it was, before 2020, a lot of
• 16:55
  Tess: The same stereotypes kept coming up.
• 16:59
  Britton Payne: So it's a pretty long work. How many pages is it that's…
• 17:03
  Tess: It is currently 190, but we reached past the stretch goal where we're adding more pages, so it might.
• 17:09
  Britton Payne: Wonderful.
• 17:10
  Tess: Closer to 200 at this point.
• 17:11
  Britton Payne: Wow.
• 17:12
  Britton Payne: Well, when you're writing a work that long, though, and especially when you're drawing it, as well as, you know, writing it.
• 17:18
  Britton Payne: by the time you get to page 175, you might find that something on page 5 is no longer fully accurate, or not… no longer reflects how you feel. Were there things like that that came up as… especially in the world of autism, where there might be new discoveries today, or new ways of thinking, new forms of therapy, new encounters that you have in your personal life, where you're like, oh, I hadn't really thought about kids with this particular profile.
• 17:40
  Britton Payne: So what are some things that… that you had to go back and…
• 17:43
  Britton Payne: and change in order to fit your current thinking, and what… at what point do you say, like, okay, I'm done now, and if it has to change, it'll change in Volume 2?
• 17:53
  Tess: I would say two instances of that, because I write the script first, and then I thumbnail, and then I do the comic, but… and I had to do a bunch of edits in the script before even going into thumbnails, but…
• 18:05
  Tess: with the chapter for masking, that was a whole chapter I added in,
• 18:10
  Tess: near the end of this, because I read Devin Price's… Dr. Devin Price's Unmasking Autism, and there was a lot that I had to do some introspection about, and…
• 18:20
  Tess: A lot of things, like, wow, this needs to be talked about, because it kept coming up more and more during and after the pandemic, and it was a light bulb moment of, like, wow, this was…
• 18:31
  Tess: explains a lot of feelings growing up and being where I am today.
• 18:36
  Tess: And the other one is monotropic thinking. That was also another big one that I realized, oh my god, I have to talk about this, so I made it into a little short comic towards, one of the end chapters, just talking about some of the stuff that happens when
• 18:54
  Tess: with monotropic thinking, it's when you are on that one-track mindset, whether it be a special interest, or a task, or something like that, and so I made it a quick little summary of that, that at least will get people curious and jump off into their own research, but there was a point where
• 19:13
  Tess: I thought, okay.
• 19:15
  Tess: this is enough because then I think more of the terms go more into academic and more,
• 19:24
  Tess: a lot more complicated in that regard, and this is… I have to remind myself, this is a basic jumping-off point.
• 19:32
  Britton Payne: Yeah, when masking appeared in the book, it felt like It was also…
• 19:37
  Britton Payne: part of your journey, you know, it… we keep talking about the book as a one-on-one, but it really is…
• 19:42
  Britton Payne: in a lot of ways, your story, and then you sort of flesh out your own story, and then you realize there are things that are not part of your story that you also want to talk about. So it evolves more into the 101 over the course of the book, but early on, it feels very much like it's your story, and when you get to masking in particular.
• 19:57
  Britton Payne: it feels kind of like what you just described. As a reader, it feels like what you just described, where you got to a point in your life where you're like, oh.
• 20:03
  Britton Payne: A…
• 20:04
  Britton Payne: just learned this term, masking. I learned a little bit about what it means and how it can express itself, and maybe I have been masking, and maybe if I thought about that in my own life.
• 20:13
  Britton Payne: I'd be happier. And it has… it feels like a revelation in the book. It feels like a… almost a dramatic point in the book.
• 20:20
  Britton Payne: And not just in a… as a recitation of the things that you know and can advise about autism.
• 20:28
  Dr. Edgar Ramos: If I could, jump in. So, you definitely did some good research, and it's funny, because one of the things that stuck out in the beginning was NVLD, which, for people listening, nonverbal learning disorder.
• 20:39
  Dr. Edgar Ramos: Do you know I haven't heard that term in years? I had to take a whole year course of that when I was in my doctorate program, and I remember speaking to it, and nobody… nobody knew what that was, and I'm like, when I saw it, I'm like, oh my god, you know, it's, you know, like, so I was… I was impressed, so I'll start with that, but my…
• 20:56
  Britton Payne: You felt justified in having learned it? You feel like, finally, finally I'm using calculus as an adult.
• 21:02
  Dr. Edgar Ramos: So, like, it does help. So, but my question is…
• 21:06
  Dr. Edgar Ramos: when I have parents in there, and kids, and they walk in, what would you like to be said or stated when a parent comes in and says, can I read this to my kid? To my child? Or is it something I should let them read alone?
• 21:20
  Tess: I would say it depends on the… because they're the parent, they know best, but this is marketed to middle school and up, so if it's a kid that's younger, let the adult read it first, and then decide whether or not to give it to… read along with the kid, or let them read it.
• 21:37
  Tess: Or if it's a kiddo that's, you know, again, in middle school,
• 21:45
  Tess: I think it really depends on the developmental stage of the kid, too.
• 21:50
  Tess: I have a lot of… I have a lot of people in my life who are teachers, and not everyone is going to be the same in each grade, but I wanted this to be…
• 22:03
  Tess: it's really tricky, because I don't want to… I don't want to use generalizing blanket terms, but I do feel like in middle school.
• 22:11
  Tess: I think it should be safe to let the kiddos read the book, and hopefully they're in a space where they can
• 22:20
  Tess: ask questions.
• 22:22
  Dr. Edgar Ramos: Perfect. Next part. This one's an easier question, but it may be a hard answer. Will there be a Spanish version?
• 22:30
  Tess: I would… Oh my god, I would love there to be, it translated in all languages, to be honest, but…
• 22:41
  Tess: That would be…
• 22:42
  Dr. Edgar Ramos: I'm a little biased.
• 22:43
  Tess: I… I know, I wish I had all the money to pay translators. That's the thing. I really, I really want there to be, all the money in the world to pay all the translators for their hard work, because it is hard work to translate.
• 22:58
  Britton Payne: Dr. Ramos, can I ask you a question along those lines? I'm not a Spanish speaker at all.
• 23:02
  Britton Payne: But…
• 23:03
  Britton Payne: My guess is that a translation of a work like this would not just be about the translation of the words.
• 23:09
  Britton Payne: maybe some changes that would also need to account for cultural differences with… among Spanish speakers versus among English speakers? Is there anything that stands out to you, either in this… in Tessa's book, or generally in the autism world, where you'd want to approach it differently?
• 23:24
  Britton Payne: And while you sort of ruminate on that, because I know you're sick, I want to give you a second, let me tell you a quick story about,
• 23:31
  Britton Payne: Sesame Street when they wanted to bring it over to Russia. And so they sort of handed it over to the Russian educators and said, okay, can you do it? And they did the equivalent of D is for depression.
• 23:42
  Britton Payne: And the Sesame Street people in America were like, alright, well, that's cool that you tried that, you know, but maybe we don't want to talk about depression, even if that's the word that you commonly use when you're doing your alphabets in Russia. And then when they translated it to the Middle East.
• 23:59
  Britton Payne: they had, on different sides of Sesame Street, were the different communities, because it was about trying to figure out how to
• 24:06
  Britton Payne: make immunity across the street, which was important in the Middle East at that time. So, translating a work like this sometimes can involve more than just the words, and so I wonder if you had any thoughts about, like.
• 24:20
  Britton Payne: autism education, or this work in particular, that would… that would… could use a little bit of a reorienting to account for cultural differences among Spanish…
• 24:28
  Dr. Edgar Ramos: So that's an important part to it, is that it's not… you're absolutely right, it's not just translating the words, because it… I mean, there's words in each of our language that just don't translate evenly. Like, we have a word that… it's called carino, which…
• 24:40
  Dr. Edgar Ramos: it's about a paragraph to translate it in English. Like, it just… there's not a word that's in English that, you know, works very well. And for those of you that don't know, I actually learned to speak English and read English, reading Captain America comics, so it's a very huge thing for me to… how this relates. So it's capturing the idiosyncrasies in our languages that's going to be very important in this book. So, it's not just a translation service that would be required, it's someone that's actually
• 25:04
  Dr. Edgar Ramos: bilingual, bicultural, and I think that.
• 25:07
  Britton Payne: True.
• 25:07
  Dr. Edgar Ramos: So it's actually… because in translating, then they would understand the references, so they would have to understand both cultures to be able to really reference it. And even within that, it would be, well, which Spanish are we referring to? Because Puerto Rican Spanish is different than Colombian Spanish, then from Mexican Spanish to Spain Spanish, so it's like…
• 25:25
  Dr. Edgar Ramos: it's really a matter of which Spanish are we talking, and really, I think the short answer is they would have to be bilingual, bicultural to really understand those idiosyncrasies within both cultural parameters, and well-versed in it.
• 25:37
  Britton Payne: Yes, it sounds like Dr. Ramadan for the job.
• 25:40
  Tess: I will, hold on one second, I need to, move myself to a different room. I'm terribly sorry.
• 25:45
  Tad Eggleston: That's okay. We'll keep it going.
• 25:48
  Dr. Edgar Ramos: I gave you my answer, what I'd be interested in doing.
• 25:51
  Tad Eggleston: I, I saw that.
• 25:57
  Tess: So I appreciate your patience with me. Oh, there you go.
• 26:03
  Tess: This is the part of the podcast that I wish to cut out a little bit to edit.
• 26:06
  Britton Payne: Yeah, but Tess, you can hear us.
• 26:08
  Tad Eggleston: Remind me, but otherwise, I'll give, I'll give a,
• 26:12
  Tad Eggleston: a similar answer to yours, to Dr. Rommel's question, I think I would tell parents what I tell parents with any book, is that it's never a bad idea for you to read it first and decide whether or not you think your kids are ready for it.
• 26:28
  Tad Eggleston: Yes. And if you need to ask me that question, then you should be reading it.
• 26:34
  Tad Eggleston: You shouldn't put the responsibility on knowing what your kids are ready for on the…
• 26:41
  Tad Eggleston: The person working the counter.
• 26:44
  Britton Payne: I mean, that's tricky with other kinds of books, right? Because if I'm just trying to find a middle grade, you know, graphic novel for my 10-year-old daughter, who is a mature person but isn't ready for, you know, sex stuff.
• 26:57
  Tad Eggleston: Well, and I…
• 26:58
  Britton Payne: You know, then I appreciate the book giving me, sort of, that kind of guideline so I can just buy it. But when it's something like this, which is really a teaching text, I feel like it is worth taking the time to… and it's the responsibility of the parent to sit down and figure out, you know.
• 27:12
  Tad Eggleston: But even with the other stuff, I'm a big fan of, like, you should ask the vendor any question you want, and they should do their best to answer you, and they should be honest about whether or not they read the book, but at the end of the day.
• 27:27
  Tad Eggleston: Like, the parent knows their kid, and the parent makes the decision on whether to… you know, this is kind of the teacher in me, too, that gets so frustrated when it's like…
• 27:36
  Tad Eggleston: You hear about
• 27:38
  Tad Eggleston: thank God, not too much at my school, but the parents that want this book or that book pulled out of the library, because they don't want… I'm like, well, then, like…
• 27:46
  Tad Eggleston: A, have you read it?
• 27:49
  Tess: And B…
• 27:54
  Britton Payne: In reading it, in the text of it, it seemed like you were pretty clearly influenced by, I'm assuming, manga and definitely anime and other cartoons on television. But as you, you know, work on your own style, even the cartoons that you put at the end are of a slightly different style than the bulk of the book.
• 28:13
  Britton Payne: what influences do you feel like brought you to make the book look like this? I have a couple guesses, and I'm not really an anime or manga reader that much, so I see a little bit of that in there.
• 28:24
  Britton Payne: But it also feels like the storytelling structure and the way you present your narrative, they remind me of somebody specific, and I'm just curious, you know, what you feel like your influences are.
• 28:35
  Tess: So, style-wise, with how I draw my characters, a lot of that
• 28:39
  Tess: it's a progression over the years, but one that definitely influenced me was Rumiko Takahashi. Like, early on in middle school, I got to read some Ranma One Half, and later on, I watched, Inuyasha. That was one of my favorite series growing up, and later in high school, a lot of Mike Manola's Hellboy was very influential.
• 29:04
  Tess: And, Svetmana Shimakova, who is a Russian-born but Canadian, comic book creator, who I looked up to quite a bit.
• 29:13
  Tess: later on.
• 29:15
  Tess: Well, and, actually, Avatar The Last Airbender was a huge influence as well, too, especially with facial expressions and learning, muscular anatomy.
• 29:25
  Tess: in action. I would say later on in college, I got really into Jeff Smith's bone, and his brushwork was beautiful, and his stylization with body movement and silhouette design was really influential. How I told this story
• 29:44
  Tess: was actually inspired by, Erica Moen's Oh Joy Sex Toy Comics, because she presents information in such an open dialogue, and the way that she presents information was easy for me to understand, because, again, I live in America, and
• 30:02
  Tess: we… our sex education, including health sec… sex health, wasn't always the best, and so this really helped fill in the gaps. And I really wanted to present information in a way that was open invitation for questions, and open invitation
• 30:22
  Tess: to not… Be yelled at if you didn't know something.
• 30:26
  Britton Payne: That's awesome.
• 30:28
  Britton Payne: How much did you change your… since you're a character in the book, how much did you change your personality?
• 30:34
  Britton Payne: How do you compare the real you to the you in the book?
• 30:38
  Tess: I curse more in real life because, I'm with my adult friends. Not at work, I substitute works like chimney crackers, or,
• 30:47
  Tess: what the fudge, when I'm in public, because I know there's kids and parents, but with my friends, I do curse a lot more. But, personality-wise, I would say it's… it's a one-to-one. I am that ridiculous, I am that silly, and I…
• 31:02
  Tess: I do kind of get exasperated, and my face… I do have a big face that just kind of, whether or not I intend to sort of emotes what I'm thinking eternally, sir, internally. Oh, English is hard. I don't know about Spanish speaking, but English is so hard.
• 31:19
  Tad Eggleston: Yes.
• 31:22
  Tad Eggleston: I want to go back to masking, just because… Just because,
• 31:29
  Tad Eggleston: because it was a term that I came across later in life, too, and I haven't… I have… I have started, and I… it's late at night, I forget the book that you quoted a minute ago, but… but… but…
• 31:41
  Tad Eggleston: Go ahead.
• 31:44
  Tad Eggleston: You looked like you were gonna say it to me.
• 31:46
  Tess: Was it, the book that… was it one of the influences, or a different novel?
• 31:51
  Britton Payne: The unmasking book that you…
• 31:53
  Tess: Yes, unmasking by Dr. Divin.
• 31:55
  Tess: Yes, Unmasking Autism by Dr. Devin Price.
• 31:59
  Tad Eggleston: Right. So, so, it wasn't my first introduction to masking. My wife dove down the… the autism
• 32:07
  Tad Eggleston: rabbit hole for me, because she's the pro researcher. So she's always giving me, hey, is this something that… this seems like you.
• 32:16
  Tess: I'm sorry, sorry.
• 32:16
  Tad Eggleston: So I'd actually already, like, come across some more user-friendly
• 32:22
  Tad Eggleston: masking… unmasking guide tools, when I came across Devin Price's, book.
• 32:30
  Tad Eggleston: And I'd started listening to it, unfortunately, in November of 2024, so it very quickly became, like, it was too much for me to handle on top of the world, and I had to set it aside.
• 32:45
  Tad Eggleston: But it's… you reminded me that I need to get back to it.
• 32:50
  Tad Eggleston: Because it wasn't that I wasn't enjoying it, it was like, oh yeah, I had that experience, I had that experience, I'm gonna go cry now, I need to pull.
• 32:59
  Tess: Ugh! Oh my god.
• 33:04
  Tess: Yeah, there's some… there's some people out there that really hit home with those feelings, and I…
• 33:08
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 33:09
  Tess: just, they… I'm so inspired by them.
• 33:15
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, no, but I have to… I mean, I guess the question that comes…
• 33:21
  Tad Eggleston: to this, and I promise I have a way more fun question next.
• 33:25
  Tad Eggleston: like…
• 33:27
  Tad Eggleston: I have a love-hate relationship with, like, learning more about autism outside of trying to just learn about how to manage my own life, because…
• 33:38
  Tad Eggleston: Like, on one side, it makes me feel so seen, it helps me feel…
• 33:46
  Tad Eggleston: I had the same suicidal tendencies that you wrote about. It helps me feel less like there was something wrong with me all of those years.
• 33:54
  Tad Eggleston: But at the same time, it takes me back to all of those years. And I'd already kind of moved on from there having been something wrong with me. And while on one side it helps me move even further on from there was something wrong with me, it's still, like.
• 34:10
  Tad Eggleston: Oh… Oh, that wasn't something wrong with me, that was the people around me wanted me to…
• 34:19
  Tad Eggleston: be and or do something that I just literally wasn't equipped to be or do.
• 34:30
  Tess: Yeah.
• 34:31
  Tad Eggleston: So do you have… I mean, when you're dealing… I mean, for that matter, writing 200 pages of this, like, does it take…
• 34:39
  Tad Eggleston: an emotional toll at times, or are you able to… to separate from it? How do you manage the…
• 34:47
  Tad Eggleston: The stuff with the stuff.
• 34:51
  Tess: Yeah, oh my god, it is… it is actually both, because with some of the sections in talking about the science of autism and, different ways to experience it, it is very,
• 35:06
  Tess: It's more of a joyful explanation and exploration, but with the emotional stuff, yeah, no,
• 35:13
  Tess: So, I will say.
• 35:14
  Tess: In 2021, while I was working on this book, my mother passed away from stage 4…
• 35:22
  Tad Eggleston: Sure.
• 35:22
  Tess: Thank you. And when I was drawing out the pages with her trying to connect with me around the mirror, and I was literally crying. I had just gotten… we'd just gotten the service done, and I had just gone through so many photos of my parents and my mom, and…
• 35:41
  Tess: So, visually, I had a clearer idea of how to draw her, but also, I was just…
• 35:48
  Tess: during certain chapters, I was crying, or I was putting a lot of emotion into it, because it was taking me back to those moments.
• 35:58
  Tad Eggleston: Alright.
• 35:58
  Tess: Yeah, and with… That, on top of the…
• 36:03
  Tad Eggleston: the suicidal ideation, which is another reason why I say, parents, I need you to read this book before you give it to a kiddo to go off on their own with.
• 36:11
  Tess: Because these are topics that, though unpleasant, do need to be talked about. It's one of those truths, along with sex ed and,
• 36:24
  Tess: bullying that we do need to confront. And…
• 36:28
  Tess: I realized early on in writing comics and writing in general, in order to connect with people, in order to…
• 36:36
  Tess: have this information stick. I need to open up my heart veins and just put myself in there, whether it's through fiction or through an educational book like this, and say.
• 36:47
  Tess: You're not alone.
• 36:50
  Tess: I was there, and I want you to know that if you're feeling this.
• 36:54
  Tess: this is what I've learned, it is not you, and you… I want you to stay. So many people want you to stay, and it is really tough.
• 37:05
  Tad Eggleston: Dear?
• 37:07
  Tad Eggleston: It's funny, your mirror scenes hit me too, but more because I remembered that I did that.
• 37:15
  Tad Eggleston: And nobody knew why, and, like, if anything, I was made fun of by family for it. They didn't mean anything, but I remember, like, trying to stop doing it as much, because…
• 37:28
  Tad Eggleston: I had overhear… like, they never did it to me, but I, like, I remembered being…
• 37:33
  Tad Eggleston: In the spare chair at, like, a beauty salon, and, and, like.
• 37:37
  Tad Eggleston: The beautician and my grandmother and my mom talking about boys being weird because they were always making faces in the mirror.
• 37:47
  Tad Eggleston: My dad…
• 37:48
  Tess: Oh my god, my dad actually… so, at the family dinner table.
• 37:52
  Tess: they… we had a mirror right at the dinner table, and my mom had to put it away and say, listen, your dad is making faces in the mirror, and I always made faces in the mirror, too. And so, I don't know what it is, it may just be a little bit of that narrow spice going through the family genes, or it could just be, like.
• 38:08
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, there's a lot of… lot of evidence for genetic,
• 38:15
  Tad Eggleston: Dr. Ramos, you're allowed to say goodbye.
• 38:20
  Tad Eggleston: You don't have to just write to us. He has to go do doctor work.
• 38:26
  Dr. Edgar Ramos: Oh, they make me work. Tess, awesome book. I can't wait to get it, and market it, and push it, and have others read it. I'm gonna have my son read it as well. All of it's been great, wonderful, and let's talk about that Spanish translation.
• 38:40
  Tess: I'm on to talk to Lindsay and Jale about translations, for sure, yes.
• 38:44
  Dr. Edgar Ramos: Guys, take care, everybody.
• 38:45
  Tess: You too.
• 38:46
  Tad Eggleston: Dr. Ramos is the wild man who… who is the dean of,
• 38:52
  Tad Eggleston: psychology school owns a… how many locations does the practice have, Lee?
• 38:59
  Larry Woods: Oh my goodness, right now we currently have 3, yeah, because I run his practices, so he's a dean at a local university,
• 39:08
  Larry Woods: a licensed clinical psychologist at a private practice where we have 3 different locations in the Chicagoland area.
• 39:14
  Tad Eggleston: And he's got, like, a dozen people working under him, and just for kicks, he…
• 39:19
  Tad Eggleston: bought a comic shop in November.
• 39:22
  Larry Woods: Yeah, he's a very busy guy.
• 39:24
  Britton Payne: the dream.
• 39:25
  Tad Eggleston: Eddie's got a 6 and a 4-year-old running around the house?
• 39:31
  Larry Woods: He's a busy man.
• 39:33
  Tess: Are you sure he's not from Krypton? Are you sure… are you sure that…
• 39:38
  Tad Eggleston: Wonder sometimes.
• 39:40
  Larry Woods: I don't… I'm glad you said that off-air, so… but if you listens to this…
• 39:45
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, it was totally on air.
• 39:47
  Britton Payne: after this.
• 39:48
  Tad Eggleston: He's not here anymore.
• 39:50
  Larry Woods: Yeah.
• 39:50
  Tad Eggleston: I didn't stop recordingly.
• 39:53
  Larry Woods: Well, if he ever listens to it, sorry.
• 39:55
  Tad Eggleston: No, actually, I think really what it comes down to is Sam…
• 40:00
  Tad Eggleston: who gets her doctor in May, Pretty much does the work.
• 40:07
  Tad Eggleston: for running the practices, and definitely does the work for raising the kids, and I think does more of the comic shop work than we know about.
• 40:18
  Tad Eggleston: So, I think Sam is from Krypton?
• 40:22
  Tess: Oh, okay.
• 40:23
  Tad Eggleston: He's low.
• 40:24
  Tess: Oh, he's low, he's legs!
• 40:26
  Larry Woods: Every time I see her, she is a real-life Wonder Woman. She…
• 40:30
  Larry Woods: Kills it.
• 40:30
  Tad Eggleston: That's right. No, Sam wouldn't be happy with being from…
• 40:35
  Britton Payne: Lee's concern is they're gonna both start to look like Hector Hammond.
• 40:42
  Tad Eggleston: Alright, I promised you a more fun question.
• 40:46
  Tad Eggleston: I… was regularly
• 40:53
  Tad Eggleston: And I was trying to find a great example, and I just found too many, so I'm just gonna…
• 40:59
  Tad Eggleston: Regularly, really impressed.
• 41:02
  Tad Eggleston: with the way… You use the medium to tell the story.
• 41:09
  Tad Eggleston: Better than it could possibly be told.
• 41:12
  Tad Eggleston: In any other medium.
• 41:14
  Tad Eggleston: I mean…
• 41:16
  Tad Eggleston: I just wound up with the random page where you're zoomed in on the table, and then come back out at the table.
• 41:23
  Britton Payne: That's a good one.
• 41:24
  Tad Eggleston: You know, there was another… oh, I remember the one that caught my eye immediately. It was in the… you had the teacher and the student, and behind them you had two charts of ability… yeah, there we are.
• 41:38
  Tad Eggleston: Of different abilities in… in learning.
• 41:41
  Tess: Yeah, yeah!
• 41:43
  Tad Eggleston: It might have been two students, but I read it as a teacher and a student. And it's like, the teacher's strong in this, and the student's strong in that.
• 41:50
  Tad Eggleston: And that can lead to interesting.
• 41:55
  Tad Eggleston: And you didn't… you weren't even specifically saying that, but it's like…
• 42:01
  Tad Eggleston: it's in there. You know, and that's one of the great things about the comic medium, is, like, you can tell parts of the story that you're not…
• 42:10
  Tad Eggleston: Gonna take the energy to take, or aren't necessarily necessary for every reader.
• 42:17
  Tad Eggleston: You can… you can pass along the things implicitly.
• 42:23
  Tad Eggleston: Rather than explicitly, or through the arts, without supporting them with the words.
• 42:29
  Tad Eggleston: And, yeah.
• 42:31
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, so I, I appreciated that. I asked this of every, every cartoonist.
• 42:39
  Tad Eggleston: How hard do you think about that, and how much of it comes naturally?
• 42:43
  Tess: God, well, my brain is very visual, so it…
• 42:48
  Britton Payne: I think it's just translating the… it's like Google translates. There was a trend of, trying to translate a song, and then translating it through hundreds of languages, and then back to English, and having it sort of…
• 43:02
  Tess: It is… I'm visual thinking, it's also audio thinking, so it's like cartoons playing in my head, and then trying to…
• 43:09
  Tess: put that through a script so that I can edit the words and everything, and then I try and
• 43:16
  Tess: translate that into thumbnails and pictures. So, it is a bit of…
• 43:23
  Tess: dreaming, and… it's the initial thought idea, then translation, and then execution, which I'm thankful that it's… I'm so thankful that it's communicated well to you guys. I'm really glad that my ideas
• 43:38
  Tess: are coming in clear to you. That is the most important part of comics, is clear communication. And I've learned.
• 43:45
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, we're your target audience, so let's cross our fingers for the next step.
• 43:50
  Larry Woods: So, and this is… I promised you earlier, I was gonna give you higher praise, and I apologize. I'm very tired, so if it doesn't make sense, please let me know.
• 43:58
  Tad Eggleston: This is actually the third podcast in a row Lee has been with me on, and they've been progressively later each night.
• 44:05
  Larry Woods: Every time.
• 44:06
  Tad Eggleston: We did 7, then we did 8.30, then we did 9.
• 44:09
  Tess: Oh my gosh.
• 44:11
  Larry Woods: But the high praise that I have for you, and I'm still new into the comic community, comic world, and there's a lot of catching up and reading that I need to do, but yours did something that I have not experienced with any other comic, and I'm actually going to reference the Saga, a podcast that Ted and I are on.
• 44:31
  Larry Woods: which deals.
• 44:31
  Tad Eggleston: Last night.
• 44:33
  Larry Woods: last night, that deals with its own sort of dynamics. I'll save that for another day. But your comic
• 44:41
  Larry Woods: Helped me to look at it through the lens of a parent.
• 44:46
  Larry Woods: In that… what would I do in that situation, right? And that's where I was really…
• 44:54
  Larry Woods: thankful. Like, I, for a moment, was like.
• 44:57
  Larry Woods: and excuse my language, but it was like, yeah, what the fuck would I do?
• 45:02
  Larry Woods: Like, there. Like, I wouldn't… I'm educated, I can do… work with them therapeutically.
• 45:07
  Larry Woods: But, like, as a parent, that's a different level. So, like, for me, and why I really like that, and I love Saga. I'm a die-hard Saga fan, and I can talk for days on that.
• 45:19
  Larry Woods: And there's parents in there, and there's grandparents in there, but I never empathize with those characters.
• 45:27
  Larry Woods: But yours, I did.
• 45:29
  Larry Woods: So, like, for me, and again, just that sort of higher praise of.
• 45:33
  Larry Woods: It was very well written, illustrated, and… human.
• 45:41
  Larry Woods: it was very human, like, how would I go about that in a very caring and nurturing way? Because, yeah, the mirror scene with you and Mom?
• 45:50
  Larry Woods: I was like…
• 45:51
  Larry Woods: yeah, okay. I think I could do that. Like, that's… okay. And so, again, high praise for you.
• 46:00
  Tess: Thank you so much! Oh my god, that just…
• 46:03
  Tess: Thank you. That… that was a real… it's a real goal of mine in comics to make it human. Even when I do fantastical… more fantastical content and fiction.
• 46:15
  Tess: that was always something that struck me with the stories I love, is that human emotion and connection. Even in… especially Guillermo del Toro's work, when I first watched Hellboy and then dove right into the comics, there was this very human element of a father and son, and…
• 46:34
  Tess: having these…
• 46:37
  Tess: having these beings that were different, and the parents saying, no, I love you, despite that. And even talking to parents while making this book, different…
• 46:48
  Tess: like…
• 46:49
  Tess: I didn't have as many autistic folks to talk to during this book before 2020, but talking with different teachers and parents and, other folks
• 47:01
  Tess: It is that struggle of,
• 47:05
  Tess: they were really scared, and saying, what do I do? How do I talk to you? And it is that real…
• 47:12
  Tess: Especially with the, scene with my mom in the mirror, that was such an important story to her, because that was when she started… we started connecting.
• 47:21
  Tad Eggleston: Right?
• 47:23
  Larry Woods: Hey, yay.
• 47:24
  Larry Woods: Thank you for that, and I do apologize. I need… I need to go to bed. I need to go to bed.
• 47:31
  Britton Payne: Good night, Lee.
• 47:33
  Tess: I don't know where you're at, but I know I'm, like, my state's closer to Canada. You guys, you don't need to say sorry so much. I don't think any of us are in Canada. I mean…
• 47:41
  Larry Woods: I guess it's no way.
• 47:42
  Tad Eggleston: You know, I think sometimes we wish we were.
• 47:46
  Tess: Oh, yeah, all…
• 47:47
  Britton Payne: But then we would have said, sorry.
• 47:51
  Tess: Cool.
• 47:51
  Tad Eggleston: We'd have better healthcare.
• 47:53
  Larry Woods: Sorry, bud.
• 47:54
  Tess: Yes!
• 47:56
  Larry Woods: No, but thank you, Tessa, and again, I look forward to, now that I know Dr. Rama's invested in the retailer version, I look forward to that, and yes, thank you so much.
• 48:06
  Tad Eggleston: Well, and maybe we'll try to drag her out from Montana to the scary city sometime.
• 48:10
  Tess: I would appreciate that. We're in the suburbs, we're on the outskirts, so we should be fine.
• 48:17
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, at least the people in South Dakota, we don't count as the outskirts, we're still the scary city.
• 48:24
  Tad Eggleston: Talk to Kelly about her family sometime.
• 48:30
  Tad Eggleston: You're moving to Chicago? That's scary!
• 48:34
  Larry Woods: Well, y'all have a.
• 48:34
  Tad Eggleston: I know they got lots of guns there!
• 48:36
  Tess: Oh, thank you, thank you so much, you too.
• 48:39
  Larry Woods: Take care.
• 48:41
  Britton Payne: Tess, if I could ask you, you had two places in the book where you talked a little bit about representation of autism in pop culture. Yes. And that's something that I've obviously focused on a bunch over the last couple years.
• 48:52
  Britton Payne: And I just kind of wanted to…
• 48:54
  Britton Payne: Give you a chance to talk about what you talked about in the book.
• 48:58
  Tess: Oh, yeah. Yeah, I'm so happy with more and more representation that we're seeing nowadays.
• 49:06
  Tess: But it's still, like, I agree that it's still got a long way to go, and a lot of times, growing up, I felt more akin to non-human characters in that regard, because…
• 49:19
  Tess: and I've been thinking about this, one of my favorite forms of storytelling is monster media, and it's because they invite the other.
• 49:29
  Tess: And so many people feel othered out for so many reasons, whether it's different cultures, or different races, or part of the LGBTQIA community. And for me being autistic, there were characters in that field that were like, oh, I understand how that feels. I understand having my senses heightened.
• 49:47
  Tess: I understand how it feels to be, to dress up as
• 49:54
  Tess: someone who I'm not, just to survive, I understand those feelings. And when…
• 50:04
  Tess: how do I put this in the nicest way? And then, when there was representation of autism that wasn't written by a person on the spectrum, and it was very…
• 50:15
  Tess: It didn't feel like it was me, it felt more like it was a stereotype.
• 50:22
  Tess: And it didn't make… I didn't connect with those characters. So,
• 50:28
  Tess: I'm really happy now that there are more characters. One of my favorite examples is actually from Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries.
• 50:36
  Tess: And it's an Australian show taking place in the 20s, and there's an episode called The Mad Blood of Joanna, and there's this woman in academia who… you can see she's clearly neurodivergent. It's very…
• 50:51
  Tess: Akin to autism in that she loves schedules, she only eats, jam sandwiches, she's not getting the cues from all these other people in the university that are totally against her, and it's such a good episode, because it felt…
• 51:07
  Tess: very real, and it felt… it wasn't a cut and paste, oh, here's the parameters of autism. It was, this is a person on the spectrum with this gender in this time period, in this culture.
• 51:23
  Britton Payne: But in the medium that you've chosen, you know, how about in comics, in general? I mean, I happen to… so I know…
• 51:29
  Britton Payne: literally every… you are now in my presentation, by the way, but I know literally every…
• 51:34
  Britton Payne: Explicitly autistic character who's appeared in comic books.
• 51:40
  Tad Eggleston: We find a new one for you every once in a while.
• 51:43
  Britton Payne: popping up. This week was a big week, actually. I got 3 new ones this week. One in DC Comics, your book, and the other one that you sent me, Ted.
• 51:50
  Tess: Oh my gosh, that's so cool. You'll have to give me that list, because I think the only ones that I grew up with were Manta Ray… Mantis from, Aquaman? Like, someone… Not Mantis.
• 52:01
  Britton Payne: Yeah.
• 52:01
  Tess: Yeah, Blank Manta. He was supposed to be autistic, and then the only other one nowadays people are pointing out more and more is Donatello from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
• 52:11
  Britton Payne: Has he been made explicitly autistic? I didn't know that.
• 52:13
  Tad Eggleston: I don't think he's been made explicitly.
• 52:15
  Tess: Not explicitly.
• 52:17
  Tess: I think there's certain, adaptions that lean more towards that characterization that people are really excited about, but I… yeah, I have not…
• 52:27
  Tess: anything, in comics that was explicit? I didn't… I didn't really have any that were explicitly autistic.
• 52:34
  Britton Payne: Yeah, I mean, and that's something that…
• 52:37
  Britton Payne: is not at all surprising, just because most of the… most of the autistic characters have happened… explicitly autistic characters have happened within the last 10 years. It's shocking that you knew of the Black Manta one, because it was only one issue of one comic book in 2003 that I also happened to read and remembered 20 years later when I sat down to make this presentation.
• 52:55
  Tad Eggleston: But that's actually one of the famous ones.
• 52:59
  Britton Payne: to Howard.
• 53:01
  Tad Eggleston: I don't know why.
• 53:02
  Britton Payne: It was also a bad representation, you know, it was… Well, I think that's take that back.
• 53:06
  Tad Eggleston: I think that's why.
• 53:07
  Britton Payne: If you were doing it today, you wouldn't do it the same way that it was done 20 years ago, for a lot of different reasons.
• 53:12
  Tess: Probably.
• 53:13
  Britton Payne: You know, he got the word in there, and it worked, and so, you know, one of my bailiwicks is, let's keep him autistic, just do a better job with it.
• 53:20
  Tess: Yeah, exactly. No, if… oh my gosh. Oh, the fun possibilities of having an autistic writer do Black Manta, and what they could do with that. Oh my god, because…
• 53:30
  Tess: Thinking about it, being underwater must be so much…
• 53:35
  Tess: Less stimuli than being on the surface.
• 53:38
  Tess: And…
• 53:39
  Tess: I mean, if his special interest is the ocean and all the creatures and stuff, oh my god, the infinite possibilities with writing Black Manta, Manta being literally autistic, would be so much fun. I feel like.
• 53:52
  Britton Payne: Did you hear your pitch?
• 53:54
  Tess: Yup?
• 53:57
  Tess: Maybe he's just like, no, I would rather be in the water, Aquaman. I don't know why you want to go on land. Everything is loud, and there are too many smells. I don't know what you are doing. And the wind.
• 54:07
  Britton Payne: All that wind?
• 54:09
  Tess: All that wind, yeah.
• 54:11
  Britton Payne: To reference your character in the book.
• 54:13
  Tess: Oh, with… yeah, I definitely was having a hard time with wind movement and air as a child. That's not even… that's not even a joke.
• 54:21
  Tad Eggleston: You know, I wonder how much we're gonna see…
• 54:27
  Tad Eggleston: A change in both representation and in the number of people who Are either diagnosed or self…
• 54:35
  Tad Eggleston: identify as neurodivergent having the writing chores as we get more… I mean, again, I… I wasn't autistic.
• 54:47
  Tess: Until I was 32. Yeah, oh my god.
• 54:51
  Tad Eggleston: You know, so to a certain extent, like, I wonder how much we'll start seeing a shift just as…
• 55:01
  Tad Eggleston: we have people who wouldn't have been… because, I mean, knowing so many people in comics, I will tell you that there have been autistic people writing autistic characters. They may not have been diagnosed as autistic!
• 55:16
  Tad Eggleston: And the characters aren't always explicitly autistic.
• 55:22
  Tad Eggleston: But that has more to do with the lack of language than the writers themselves, or, you know, I mean…
• 55:34
  Tad Eggleston: one of the reasons this podcast is such a release for me is I've, like, found my people, not just in terms of
• 55:42
  Tad Eggleston: Of a love for comics, and surprisingly, a lot of love for baseball.
• 55:48
  Tad Eggleston: But in terms of… there are a lot…
• 55:52
  Tad Eggleston: to neurodivergent people in comics. Like, a lot of neurodivergent people in comics. And some of them are aware of it, and some of them are less so, and…
• 56:05
  Tad Eggleston: Some of them have…
• 56:08
  Tad Eggleston: old-school diagnosis, you know, there's a lot of people that have, like, the OCD diagnosis, but they don't have a spectrum diagnosis, or they have…
• 56:17
  Tad Eggleston: ADHD diagnosis, but they don't have a spectrum diagnosis. Lots of borderline personality diagnosis without a spectrum diagnosis, you know, a lot of things that, like.
• 56:29
  Tad Eggleston: you know, I mean, when you and I sometimes talk about the statistics of autism rates, you know, because I'm a huge stat head.
• 56:37
  Tad Eggleston: One of the things that I want to know before I will actually say that autism is going up is there are all of these things that we know we used to diagnose people.
• 56:47
  Tad Eggleston: when we probably should have been diagnosing them as autistic. So unless you can't show me that those diagnoses are going down.
• 56:55
  Tad Eggleston: Because I bet you they are.
• 56:58
  Tad Eggleston: You know, I mean, it's more than just, do we have a higher rate of diagnosis? Are we having more people tested? Is, like…
• 57:06
  Tad Eggleston: Is… is… is it… I mean…
• 57:11
  Tad Eggleston: How… if you don't mind me asking, Tess, how old are you?
• 57:15
  Tess: I'm 35, I just turned 35 yesterday.
• 57:18
  Tad Eggleston: Right. Happy birthday. Well, happy birthday!
• 57:20
  Tess: Thank you!
• 57:21
  Tad Eggleston: Which… which almost makes it shocking that you got an early diagnosis, because you were a girl!
• 57:29
  Tess: I know!
• 57:30
  Tad Eggleston: aren't supposed to be autistic.
• 57:33
  Tess: My friend was joking with me last night because of that stereotype, saying, wow, I guess Tess is secretly, like, a trans girl then, because girls aren't supposed to be autistic.
• 57:45
  Tess: And this is a trans man saying this joke. He looked at me, it just… we all cracked up.
• 57:51
  Tad Eggleston: But, I mean, that's the thing, is like…
• 57:55
  Tad Eggleston: If you dig into the data, like…
• 58:00
  Tad Eggleston: Affluent white male autism rate has been pretty flat for a while now. What's rising is female autistic rate.
• 58:08
  Tad Eggleston: Hispanic and, and, and Black autism rates.
• 58:13
  Tad Eggleston: Poor white male autism rate.
• 58:17
  Tad Eggleston: I think that is mostly the societal walls coming up. Right. I think the numbers were always there.
• 58:24
  Tess: But our perceptions are opening up. Yeah, my grandfather used to always ask, oh, there… where are these gay people coming from? There weren't as many gay people back when I… in my day. And I said, Grandpa.
• 58:39
  Tess: it's kind of like being a Jewish person in Germany. You're not gonna say you're Jewish. You're gonna keep that to yourself, during Nazi Germany occupation.
• 58:48
  Tad Eggleston: It's almost a step further, though, because…
• 58:51
  Tad Eggleston: sometimes it was just a lack of language. Like, one of the rabbit… you know, one of my newer hyperfixations, and it's one that really makes me wish that I was better at foreign languages, is just the study of language. And it all came out of the Stereo Lab episode on colors.
• 59:09
  Tess: Because, as it turns out.
• 59:13
  Tad Eggleston: In every language except Egyptian, The last color to get a word was blue.
• 59:22
  Tad Eggleston: And they started digging into why.
• 59:26
  Tad Eggleston: The only place in the world where there's a naturally occurring blue in nature.
• 59:32
  Tad Eggleston: Because there's a natural occurring blue flower along the Nile.
• 59:37
  Tad Eggleston: There's no other naturally occurring blue in nature.
• 59:42
  Tad Eggleston: People will bring up the sky and water and that sort of thing, but… but they've done more recent tests of, like, how long you can go before anybody asks what the sky is, or what color it is, and if you go out of your way not to tell kids about it, they won't say anything about it for shockingly long times.
• 1:00:03
  Tad Eggleston: But… but where I got really, really fascinated…
• 1:00:06
  Tad Eggleston: Is there was a test done in the 80s.
• 1:00:10
  Tad Eggleston: where they found an Aboriginal tribe, in… the Amazon.
• 1:00:17
  Tad Eggleston: That still didn't have a word in their language for blue.
• 1:00:21
  Tad Eggleston: And they took a 9 square…
• 1:00:25
  Tad Eggleston: With shades of green to blue, and blue-green in between.
• 1:00:30
  Tad Eggleston: And they had them… Use words for them, and they describe them all as green.
• 1:00:36
  Tad Eggleston: In fact, the blue square…
• 1:00:38
  Tad Eggleston: they said looked identical to one of the other blue squares. They thought there were 8 different colors on
• 1:00:47
  Tad Eggleston: The page, rather than 9, because because they didn't have a word for it.
• 1:00:52
  Tad Eggleston: Their brain adjusted it to something that they did have a word for.
• 1:00:58
  Tad Eggleston: So…
• 1:00:59
  Tad Eggleston: This is actually one of the places where I totally agree with Britt that it's really important to get the explicit autism out there.
• 1:01:06
  Tess: Because…
• 1:01:06
  Tad Eggleston: Not having the word for it matters.
• 1:01:09
  Tess: Yes. And that's his…
• 1:01:11
  Tad Eggleston: place I've come around, I think, since our first conversation, Britt.
• 1:01:14
  Britton Payne: Be very persuasive.
• 1:01:18
  Tess: Well, what…
• 1:01:19
  Tad Eggleston: I never… I never fully disagreed with you, but, like, the more I look at… how much… having language
• 1:01:29
  Tad Eggleston: four things matters, and this goes back to the translation thing, and how it… a good translation
• 1:01:38
  Tad Eggleston: and we had a whole episode on translations, and I hope to have more, because a good translation involves not just
• 1:01:48
  Tad Eggleston: taking one language and putting it into another, but you need to localize it, you need to work with idiom, you need to… you need to figure out whether, okay, does this joke translate? If it doesn't, well, this is what I'm trying to convey, can you think of something
• 1:02:04
  Tad Eggleston: That fits the story well enough, that conveys the same meaning, and sure, maybe the literal translation type who reads both versions of the book will go, why are you talking about a duck here when it was talking about a cigarette there?
• 1:02:18
  Tess: Yeah!
• 1:02:19
  Tad Eggleston: But we're laughing.
• 1:02:20
  Tad Eggleston: the same reason.
• 1:02:22
  Tess: Oh my god, yeah. Well…
• 1:02:25
  Tess: I… I have two… I have two notes for different parts of what you just said, because I think.
• 1:02:31
  Tad Eggleston: Sorry.
• 1:02:32
  Tess: very poignant.
• 1:02:33
  Tad Eggleston: Way too much into it.
• 1:02:34
  Tess: No, that was great! I was learning so much from that. I did not realize that Egypt was the only other culture with blue. When you were talking about… The first… the first culture that had blue. The first culture, yes. So…
• 1:02:46
  Tad Eggleston: Word for me.
• 1:02:47
  Tess: One of my friends pointed this out with the Japanese language, because the word for…
• 1:02:53
  Tess: blue and green was Midori, because with the mountains, up close, it's green, but with atmospheric perspective, which is the…
• 1:03:03
  Tess: oxygen and hydrogen in the air, farther away from the mountain, it becomes more blue. But…
• 1:03:10
  Tess: because they didn't have a word for… it's just both. It's just both blue and green, and again, there was no science behind the atmospheric perspective.
• 1:03:20
  Tess: So, that just reminded me of that so much on that term. So, yes, you are right that the language for explicit autistic characters, explicit autistic experiences, is so important, because it brings out the blue against all the green.
• 1:03:37
  Tess: And…
• 1:03:39
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, I like that.
• 1:03:40
  Tess: I like that.
• 1:03:41
  Tad Eggleston: I'm gonna have to use that one.
• 1:03:42
  Tess: Pretty good.
• 1:03:43
  Tad Eggleston: Brings out the blue against all the green.
• 1:03:46
  Tess: Yes, yes. She's the writer. Yeah, what was, translation-wise,
• 1:03:51
  Tess: what was that point about translation? It's… I…
• 1:03:58
  Tad Eggleston: Idiom, jokes.
• 1:04:00
  Tess: It was… oh, I read the book… my friend recommended a book called Misquoting Jesus, and it was about the translation of the Bible throughout the ages in different cultures, because it comes from, I believe it was the Middle East, Palestine, or Israel that the faith came from.
• 1:04:19
  Tess: And the translation of the Bible has been so wrought because it was like Google's translates again.
• 1:04:25
  Tess: They had to localize it, they had to edit it, they had to figure out different wording for it.
• 1:04:31
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, I had to satisfy.
• 1:04:33
  Britton Payne: their patrons. That's something… something… with all of this, anytime you're talking about any kind of art or literature, you've got to remember
• 1:04:38
  Britton Payne: Especially historically, but even now, you know, you've got masters who are writing paychecks, or that you are trying to earn fees from, you know, you're writing to an audience, and so if you think that
• 1:04:50
  Britton Payne: your audience is not going to, as you were saying, Tess, not going to respond to bad words, you know, or, you know, inappropriate language or whatever. Even if that's the right thing to write aesthetically, you are still thinking about who are the other people in the equation, you know, so it's… it also includes the patrons. King James Bible, you know.
• 1:05:07
  Tess: Yes.
• 1:05:08
  Britton Payne: paid for by King James, and you'll bet there's a couple things in there that King James.
• 1:05:11
  Tad Eggleston: Put his name's a name on it, I don't think he actually translated it himself.
• 1:05:15
  Britton Payne: He never did it himself, but he did, and he had a little… there's a little joke in there, Psalm 44, I think it is, with Shakespeare, that if you look, it's the… something like the…
• 1:05:24
  Tess: 44th word in is shake, and the 44th word from the end is spear, and in Psalm 44, and when it was published in, whatever, 150-whatever, it was Shakespeare's 44th birthday, and so there was, like, a…
• 1:05:36
  Britton Payne: there are little things in there that you can find that are little gifts that were made for King James himself.
• 1:05:43
  Tess: That's so funny.
• 1:05:45
  Tess: See, I grew up…
• 1:05:46
  Tad Eggleston: I grew up in Wheaton, Illinois, which is… I…
• 1:05:53
  Tad Eggleston: We're gonna use sarcasm, but I don't always use sarcasm well, which I affectionately refer to as the Bible Belt of the Midwest.
• 1:06:01
  Tess: Public stability.
• 1:06:02
  Tad Eggleston: Graham Center.
• 1:06:04
  Tad Eggleston: So I had to learn my Bible to deal with my bullies.
• 1:06:07
  Tess: Oh…
• 1:06:09
  Tad Eggleston: and learn about the Bible to deal with my bullies. And one of my favorites was when… when, like.
• 1:06:15
  Tad Eggleston: they would insist that it was the literal word of God, and I'm like, well, I mean, then God's a really weird writer, because, like, the beginning here says, this is Paul writing to the Romans. Why is God saying, this is Paul?
• 1:06:30
  Tad Eggleston: But, okay, God wrote every word of it. He touched the writers, it's… what about the translators? Did he touch all of the translators? Because it's been through a few languages. Have you ever played telephone?
• 1:06:47
  Tess: So, okay, one of my favorite facts about the translation from the monks is, two things. One, not all of the monks were literate, so they were looking at the shape of the words, and sometimes with these, it's sort of like a copy of a copy, they would miss…
• 1:07:05
  Tess: miscopy a word, a letter, and it would translate differently depending on the language.
• 1:07:11
  Tad Eggleston: I believe it!
• 1:07:12
  Tess: Secondly, and this one's my favorite, and especially in Ireland, not every place in Europe had the best drinking water. And you know who had some great foods were churches, so a lot of people would go into the church.
• 1:07:26
  Tess: And this included beer.
• 1:07:28
  Tess: And at one point, apparently, because they got so sloshed, because there wasn't a lot of good drinking water.
• 1:07:35
  Tess: A monk had written the word for drunken Irish on a column of a copy of a Bible that he was, basically copying for the masses.
• 1:07:46
  Tess: So sometimes it was… Trying to translate. Sometimes it was for to satisfy the patrons.
• 1:07:55
  Tess: Sometimes it was a misquote because they weren't literate, and then it was because they were drunk.
• 1:08:03
  Tad Eggleston: And see, like, where I would always really come back to is, like, it's also a real shame, because
• 1:08:10
  Tad Eggleston: There are a lot of great lessons in that book, but you need to look at it on a whole, and you need to look at it through certain lenses, and as soon as you start deciding that you absolutely understand, and that everything is… I mean, aside from, like, conflicting
• 1:08:26
  Tad Eggleston: itself, That everything is…
• 1:08:29
  Tad Eggleston: write and goes through all of the ages, rather than just for the time it was written, you're gonna run into problems.
• 1:08:40
  Tad Eggleston: Mark Russell's written some great comics about this, I recommend Second Coming, I recommend God is Disappointed in You. That's for our listeners, and for you, if you haven't read them already.
• 1:08:49
  Tess: Oh my gosh, that sounds great. I'm getting all kinds of good recommendations. I'm glad the… I'm so happy the comics industry is booming, too, at this point, and going into so many genres. It's fantastic.
• 1:09:00
  Britton Payne: Yes, I have a recommendation for you. It's Invisible Differences. It's, it's a…
• 1:09:04
  Tad Eggleston: That's.
• 1:09:04
  Britton Payne: It's a really good book. It's a graphic novel by a French woman who wrote about her experience
• 1:09:11
  Britton Payne: Spoiler alert, getting a late-in-life diagnosis of autism. And it's a… it's really… it's a lovely book.
• 1:09:17
  Tess: Oh my gosh.
• 1:09:18
  Tad Eggleston: Well, I mean…
• 1:09:20
  Tad Eggleston: This one is barely available, and she got a very late diagnosis, and it's only part of it, but she's a brilliant cartoonist. Tess Fowler's autobiography.
• 1:09:30
  Tad Eggleston: Is now available through her website.
• 1:09:33
  Tad Eggleston: Which, I have to go look up the name of the book again, because I have too many book names in my head.
• 1:09:38
  Britton Payne: Unless Britain rolls.
• 1:09:39
  Tad Eggleston: ship.
• 1:09:40
  Tad Eggleston: What?
• 1:09:40
  Britton Payne: It's called Take the Fault, Test Fault.
• 1:09:42
  Tad Eggleston: My fault.
• 1:09:44
  Britton Payne: Tess Spowler Gutierrez. It's a hard read, it's not, it's not an.
• 1:09:48
  Tad Eggleston: No, it's… I will warn you, it's not an easy read. Like, content warnings for breast cancer, for childhood neglect, for…
• 1:09:59
  Tad Eggleston: For sexual assault, you name it, it all kind of came
• 1:10:04
  Tad Eggleston: Came together as she dealt with her breast cancer journey during a pandemic.
• 1:10:10
  Tess: Oh my god, yeah, oh my god.
• 1:10:11
  Tad Eggleston: Alright.
• 1:10:13
  Tad Eggleston: But she's a brilliant cartoonist, and turned it into something really, really beautiful, and, like…
• 1:10:20
  Tad Eggleston: where it wound up hitting me the most, and here I am spoiling the end of her book, I think she'll forgive me.
• 1:10:29
  Tad Eggleston: Is she and her husband both got late diagnosis.
• 1:10:34
  Tad Eggleston: After all of this stuff, that started making so many things start to fall into place. It's like, oh!
• 1:10:48
  Britton Payne: And then if you want to read a really uplifting, very recent representation of autism in comics specifically, the DCKO, the Kids Are All Fights special, came out last week, a week ago tomorrow. Jeremy Adams,
• 1:11:01
  Britton Payne: As the writer, and it is essentially a Teen Titans-type thing, young heroes all gathering together to fight something.
• 1:11:08
  Britton Payne: And there's a character called, Fair Play, who's the child of Mr. Terrific, who was the, breakout character from the Superman movie over the summer.
• 1:11:16
  Britton Payne: Jeremy wrote, and the first thing we see is that he's explicitly autistic, and so this is the first explicitly autistic DC Comics superhero.
• 1:11:25
  Britton Payne: in comics, and so it's… and it's a very nice little presentation. There are two… one, it's named explicitly when they describe the character, and then the second instance of referring to it, it has his buddy, so he's got a buddy, explaining that, like, essentially, his ability to do this is…
• 1:11:43
  Britton Payne: part of the expression of his being on the spectrum. And so, it's,
• 1:11:49
  Britton Payne: it's a very lovely, positive portrayal. Now, it leans towards the autism superhero trope, but… because it's a superhero comic book, but surprisingly, not as heavily as it has elsewhere. You know, it actually… to me, it didn't send up my spidey sense about that particular issue.
• 1:12:08
  Tad Eggleston: Would have been even cooler, though, if they'd had Rose Stein and Ted Brandt draw the issue.
• 1:12:14
  Tad Eggleston: Because they're autistic.
• 1:12:16
  Britton Payne: You know, yes, however, in this journey, we're gonna need a lot of allies, and so it's great.
• 1:12:22
  Tad Eggleston: And they did…
• 1:12:23
  Britton Payne: Actually, I don't know. For all I know, the artist is autistic, so I can't say one way or the other.
• 1:12:28
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, yeah, no, I don't know either. And they did get to draw Harley Quinn's, Fartacular, the scratch and Sniff comic, so, I mean…
• 1:12:37
  Tad Eggleston: They've been taken care of.
• 1:12:39
  Tess: Well, I think the other thing, you brought up a good point about the, stereotype of autism being a superpower, that being…
• 1:12:49
  Britton Payne: And you brought that up in your book, too, as something that, you know, you have your sensors up for.
• 1:12:54
  Tess: Yeah, well, I think in this case, in this comic.
• 1:12:57
  Tess: it negates that because everyone's a superhero in that comic. And so…
• 1:13:02
  Britton Payne: I mean, look, you could still fall into it, it's just that this particular presentation didn't.
• 1:13:06
  Tess: Good, good, yes. Yeah, no, you're right about that, too.
• 1:13:10
  Britton Payne: Different people might feel different things, but my perspective.
• 1:13:12
  Tess: No, no, yeah, no, but you're right about that, that that is a very tricky trope to slip into, because…
• 1:13:21
  Tess: And… Yeah, this is… again, it comes from a very well-meaning place, but it negates the struggle.
• 1:13:31
  Britton Payne: Yeah. And my thesis is, if with volume, that stuff becomes less of an issue, right? If you have one Black character on a show, on an entire network, let's say, or an entire evening slate, or sitcoms in the
• 1:13:45
  Britton Payne: late 70s, if there's only going to be one Black character, that one Black character has to bear the weight
• 1:13:50
  Britton Payne: representing all Black people, which, of course, we now have a better understanding, is…
• 1:13:56
  Britton Payne: is unfair and unrealistic. And now, when you can look across your television shows and see all different types of Black characters, any one presentation doesn't really stand out as bearing that kind of weight. And so if one character does have the autism superpower and another character doesn't.
• 1:14:13
  Britton Payne: and then there are 50 other different presentations of autism. The one who's standing out as a superpower, autism, isn't as much of an issue as it might feel when it's the only representation, when the only representation we have is Rain Man, and he's got a superpower. And so then, suddenly, he's bearing the weight that
• 1:14:31
  Britton Payne: Autism parents, or parents of autistic kids are being asked, what's your kid's superpower?
• 1:14:35
  Tess: Oh my god, yes. Oh, the Rain Man trope, yes, yeah. No, you're… that is an exact good point right there,
• 1:14:44
  Tess: That, yeah, with, more of a varying cast of people of color and people of different genders and neurodiversity, in that the amount of people on that helps negate the stereotype and,
• 1:15:01
  Tess: Less weight is carried by one person, along with
• 1:15:05
  Tess: the lovely, lovely Rain Man, sort of,
• 1:15:11
  Tess: a comparison. I usually think about this sometimes. Sometimes when someone says something really off-putting to me about autism.
• 1:15:20
  Tess: Sometimes… when I'm in a stressed state, I really just want to say, would you say that?
• 1:15:26
  Tess: about someone who's Black, would you say something like that to a Black person, or a person in a wheelchair or something? Because it just sounds…
• 1:15:36
  Tess: Not as bad as when you say something that…
• 1:15:39
  Tess: that blatant to someone who's different to you on any other scale. Like, for example, oh, do… oh, you… you two are autistic people, you'll get along just fine. And I say, would you… I never said this to anyone, but I would… I think to myself sometimes, would you say that to two people who are Black?
• 1:15:56
  Tess: In the same room. Oh, you two are black, you two would get along great! That sounds.
• 1:16:01
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, they leave out the word black, but they often introduce them.
• 1:16:06
  Britton Payne: There's a funny scene in When Harry Met Sally, that addresses that very issue, and it's, oh, you two are from New Jersey!
• 1:16:13
  Britton Payne: You'll… you'll have a lot in common, won't you? Yeah, where are you from? West Orange, where… how about you? Haddonfield. And then they're silent, and they turn away from each other, because, as a person from New Jersey, I know, one of them is essentially suburban New York, and the other is suburban Philly, and ne'er the twain shall meet.
• 1:16:38
  Tad Eggleston: I gotta get out my superpower thought, because it's something that I… a conversation that I have had with a number of my students. It's definitely one of the ways that… that…
• 1:16:49
  Tad Eggleston: that…
• 1:16:51
  Tad Eggleston: they will find out that I'm legit when I say I do understand some of the things they're going through, is that, like.
• 1:16:59
  Tad Eggleston: Every autistic superpower is also a curse.
• 1:17:03
  Tad Eggleston: We do absolutely have superpowers, like… it's great that I can…
• 1:17:08
  Tad Eggleston: hear all of the different conversations in the room individually. There are lots of great things that come out of that.
• 1:17:15
  Tad Eggleston: It's also really, really horrible that I can't tone out any of the conversations in the room and turn them into background noise rather than specific conversations that I'm hearing every word of individually.
• 1:17:30
  Tess: Oh my god!
• 1:17:35
  Tess: Noise-canceling headphones have become my best friend.
• 1:17:41
  Tess: They say diamonds are a girl's best friend. Nuh- get her to Best Buy and get those big, chonky headphones.
• 1:17:46
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 1:17:47
  Tad Eggleston: You know, and, like, what I love about your book, what I think we're talking about here.
• 1:17:56
  Tad Eggleston: Is… is that it does show…
• 1:18:01
  Tad Eggleston: Because your personal story… without even bothering to say, hey, I'm an atypical autism story, because you're not really an atypical autism story, except that everybody's an atypical autism story. There is no typical autism story.
• 1:18:16
  Tess: Nope.
• 1:18:19
  Tess: Oh, there's not!
• 1:18:21
  Tad Eggleston: You know, is that you're showing… that… oh.
• 1:18:31
  Tad Eggleston: there are things that are harder, there are things that are easier, just like for… more and more, I'm becoming convinced that… that we're not the minority.
• 1:18:41
  Tess: Meow.
• 1:18:42
  Tad Eggleston: I think, like, 60% of the population may be neurodivergent. The problem is, the 40% that doesn't… Is…
• 1:18:56
  Tad Eggleston: essentially separated into two categories. Thinks in words, thinks in pictures, but they think the same. So… and the 60% that are neurodivergent are split into…
• 1:19:07
  Tad Eggleston: What, 60… 60% of… 9 billion people is… 6 billion people, so at least 4 billion categories?
• 1:19:20
  Tad Eggleston: Does that seem about right?
• 1:19:22
  Tess: Man, well, so one of my special interests is biology, and in biology, diversity along with
• 1:19:31
  Tess: friendliness and adaptability are crucial to survival. And even in the same group of animals, being diverse, especially in a social animal group, is so helpful. That includes
• 1:19:45
  Tess: not only physical different adaptions, but I think neurological different adaptions. People have… Absolutely.
• 1:19:52
  Tess: Yeah, people have said, like, hey, what, like, in caveman times.
• 1:19:56
  Tess: It's great to have people who are daylight people, and people who are more awake at night, because the daylight people can go and, like, gather fruits, and get food, and all the stuff. The night people are like, okay, I'm gonna stay up and watch out for predators. I'm gonna stay up and fiddle with this, spear some more and invent stuff, you know?
• 1:20:14
  Tad Eggleston: So…
• 1:20:15
  Tess: Being neurologically diverse is so natural. I think it's the stigma that we really need to fight against.
• 1:20:23
  Tess: In the beautiful chaos that is… Biodiversity in general.
• 1:20:29
  Tad Eggleston: One of my favorite jokes that my wife has come across in her
• 1:20:34
  Tad Eggleston: Part of every good autism group.
• 1:20:37
  Tad Eggleston: Rabbit hole that she's fallen into is, fire was created by the…
• 1:20:44
  Tad Eggleston: Neurodivergent person playing with rocks at the back of the cave, while all of the neurotypical people were out front talking about the weather and whose hair looked nice.
• 1:20:58
  Tad Eggleston: Oops.
• 1:20:59
  Tess: Brit has to go be a parent, or sleep, or something.
• 1:21:02
  Tad Eggleston: So we should say goodbye to him, but if you've got a little bit more time, we can autism geek out, and I haven't gotten to my required final question yet.
• 1:21:11
  Tess: Oh yeah, let's do it!
• 1:21:12
  Britton Payne: Okay. Thus, it's a pleasure talking with you.
• 1:21:14
  Tad Eggleston: Say goodbye to Britt.
• 1:21:16
  Britton Payne: reach out if you feel like I can be of any help, or if you want another pair of eyes, you know, reading through it, I'm happy to help out with anything.
• 1:21:22
  Tess: Oh, thank you so very much. I thoroughly appreciate that. It was so good meeting all of you guys tonight. This has been absolutely.
• 1:21:29
  Britton Payne: Pleasure to meet you too, Tess.
• 1:21:31
  Tess: Thank you.
• 1:21:32
  Britton Payne: I'll see you, Tad. Thanks for… thanks for.
• 1:21:33
  Tad Eggleston: Listen Brett.
• 1:21:33
  Britton Payne: shit.
• 1:21:36
  Tad Eggleston: Alright, now all the neurodifficult people are out of the room, except that I think actually all of them are on the spectrum, they just don't know it.
• 1:21:45
  Tess: We're in good…
• 1:21:46
  Tad Eggleston: I think Edgar knows it.
• 1:21:47
  Tess: friends with them. It's not, oh, the stereotypical, vaccines make people autistic. No, it's being friends with us and realizing you're autistic is what makes them autistic.
• 1:22:02
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, well, it's Tylenol now.
• 1:22:05
  Tess: walls.
• 1:22:05
  Tad Eggleston: That's why we're autistic, remember?
• 1:22:08
  Tess: Oh yeah, they switched that up!
• 1:22:10
  Tess: Oh, I mean…
• 1:22:11
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, vaccines are still a thing, but… but… but it's also… I mean…
• 1:22:16
  Tad Eggleston: Go figure it, it all has to do with discrediting science and or making women deal with pain.
• 1:22:23
  Tess: Oh, well, you gotta hit two birds with one stone, ableism and sexism.
• 1:22:27
  Tad Eggleston: Wait. 8.
• 1:22:35
  Tess: Love… you gotta love when people… well…
• 1:22:39
  Tess: When very ignorant people who wish to stay ignorant try and come up with new excuses to stay ignorant and not listen to people, they're like, no, no, we…
• 1:22:48
  Tad Eggleston: odd.
• 1:22:49
  Tess: We want to know best. We don't want to listen to you and just push us to the side.
• 1:22:54
  Tad Eggleston: There is nothing more exhausting.
• 1:22:58
  Tad Eggleston: Than… Than the people who, like.
• 1:23:08
  Tad Eggleston: Let me tell you how it is, because I know things, and based on the things I know that aren't this, I think that this is true. This is what feels right to me. What you're saying doesn't feel right to me. I don't have time to read more stuff. No, stop sending me articles!
• 1:23:33
  Tess: Oh, especially when they're the ones going, well, you need to do your own research. Okay, I did the research, here's a bunch of articles.
• 1:23:39
  Tad Eggleston: But I'm actually half the time talking about the people that are smart most of the time, and do agree with me on so many things, and then would be like…
• 1:23:50
  Tad Eggleston: oh, that doesn't jibe with my vibes. And it's like, yes. See, another one of my rabbit holes is the education system. You grew up when they were teaching…
• 1:24:01
  Tad Eggleston: a lot of Milton Friedman.
• 1:24:03
  Tad Eggleston: Even though Milton Friedman has never actually, like, worked.
• 1:24:09
  Tad Eggleston: When real data was applied.
• 1:24:15
  Tad Eggleston: And for that matter, if you really want to dig into Milton Friedman, I might be, like, over…
• 1:24:22
  Tad Eggleston: data dumping on you, so, like, tell me if I get to that point. Like, his first essay that everybody loves, the one that's greed is good, blah blah blah, it didn't actually say greed is good, what it said is that, like, the only…
• 1:24:36
  Tad Eggleston: The only moral obligation, a, a.
• 1:24:40
  Tad Eggleston: Corporation has is to its shareholders.
• 1:24:43
  Tad Eggleston: And…
• 1:24:45
  Tad Eggleston: In the first essay, and if there are societal goods that don't align with the profits of corporations, it is the government's responsibility to make laws to constrain them.
• 1:25:00
  Tad Eggleston: The company's moral obligation is to maximize profits within the law.
• 1:25:06
  Tad Eggleston: It wasn't until years later, when he'd gotten lots of funding from lots of rich people, that he started really hammering on deregulation.
• 1:25:14
  Tess: Oh my god… Gotta love when money becomes a muppet and starts talking.
• 1:25:21
  Tad Eggleston: Right, right.
• 1:25:23
  Tess: You know, similarly, what everybody remembers about John Maynard Keynes is.
• 1:25:28
  Tad Eggleston: is the whole, oh, if you're in a depression, the government should spend more money, and when you're doing well, the government should spend less money. And everybody's like, but it's not that simple, blah blah blah, and it's like, yes, it's not that simple, and that's not the main lesson of Keynes. The main lesson of Keens is workers
• 1:25:44
  Tad Eggleston: And consumers?
• 1:25:46
  Tad Eggleston: Are the same people.
• 1:25:48
  Tess: Yeah! They are.
• 1:25:50
  Tad Eggleston: Golly Willikers!
• 1:25:52
  Tess: I've never seen either of them in the same room at the same time. It's almost like they're the same person!
• 1:26:00
  Tad Eggleston: You know, and yet, even now, in economics classes, in, like, every high school economics book I've ever seen, except the one written by Paul Krugman, which isn't used enough.
• 1:26:11
  Tad Eggleston: It has involved talk.
• 1:26:14
  Tad Eggleston: of… Whether or not minimum wages will actually cut down on… Employment.
• 1:26:23
  Tad Eggleston: Because… because if you… if you have an artificially high wage, then they'll hire less people, blah blah blah. I'm like, no…
• 1:26:32
  Tad Eggleston: Well, I don't… I don't think it'll work that way, because they're gonna have more customers, because people will be making more money.
• 1:26:41
  Tess: Yeah, yeah, well, yeah, so…
• 1:26:45
  Tess: Whenever, like, me and… because, you know, we live in our times, whenever me and my friends, have a little extra income.
• 1:26:52
  Tess: We want to spoil each other!
• 1:26:54
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah. Around the holidays, we want to…
• 1:26:57
  Tess: Celebrate with each other.
• 1:26:58
  Tess: And when I'm, you know, being poor and stuff, being… living in current-day America, I am stingy, because I want to survive, and I want to save enough to pay my bills, and get food, and take care of medical stuff, and everything. Golly gee, it's…
• 1:27:18
  Tess: I don't have enough money… time or money to be…
• 1:27:21
  Tess: spending and splurging, and whatnot on luxuries. Excuse moi, so…
• 1:27:29
  Tess: It's… these people up top, a lot of…
• 1:27:34
  Tess: Oh, jeez, a lot of big corporations just forget how to be a person for a hot second.
• 1:27:41
  Tad Eggleston: Not just the corporations.
• 1:27:43
  Tess: Yeah.
• 1:27:44
  Tad Eggleston: the, the, the, I mean… The number of people who…
• 1:27:49
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, I actually had this conversation with somebody recently when they were essentially arguing that it was impossible to have
• 1:27:57
  Tad Eggleston: better union protections. It was impossible to have higher taxes on rich people and corporations. It was impossible to have
• 1:28:04
  Tad Eggleston: a better social welfare net, you know, social safety net, etc. And I'm sitting there going.
• 1:28:11
  Tad Eggleston: You understand that you were alive and benefited from a country that had all of those things.
• 1:28:20
  Tad Eggleston: The social welfare net didn't start getting shredded until Reagan, and wasn't really shredded until Clinton.
• 1:28:26
  Tad Eggleston: the… the top…
• 1:28:28
  Tess: Yeah!
• 1:28:29
  Tad Eggleston: individual tax rate in 1968 was 93%!
• 1:28:40
  Tess: Oh my god, it's always the rose-tinted.
• 1:28:42
  Tad Eggleston: And that's… and that's beyond… that's before you go, okay, what's so special about America that we can't do what Canada and most of Europe does?
• 1:28:53
  Tess: I know, right?
• 1:28:55
  Tad Eggleston: Mexico has better healthcare outcomes than we do.
• 1:28:58
  Tess: Real… ugh!
• 1:29:00
  Tess: Well, now I'm even more jealous, because they've got, like, better food, and, like, more eclectic culture, and now they have better healthcare.
• 1:29:09
  Tad Eggleston: That's the point where they open up their borders for American refugees? I know people. I might move.
• 1:29:15
  Tess: I don't blame you! I don't blame you one thing!
• 1:29:19
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, the downside of Mexico right now is they have Texas as a neighbor.
• 1:29:24
  Tess: Ugh… That's the third time this week I've heard Texas being dumped on, and I…
• 1:29:31
  Tess: few people that are coming from Texas, have told me how much, not a favorable state.
• 1:29:39
  Tad Eggleston: You know what the problem with having Texas as a neighbor, though, if you're Mexico?
• 1:29:44
  Tess: Oh, no.
• 1:29:44
  Tad Eggleston: Because there's another thing that Mexico
• 1:29:47
  Tad Eggleston: Would be a shining example of.
• 1:29:50
  Tad Eggleston: if it weren't for having Texas as a neighbor.
• 1:29:53
  Tess: Oh, what is it?
• 1:29:55
  Tad Eggleston: They have a constitutional right to bear arms.
• 1:29:59
  Tad Eggleston: But for the most part, have also done very well with gun control. There's only one place to legally buy guns in Mexico. There are specific things that you have to go through to get it.
• 1:30:12
  Tad Eggleston: Here's the problem.
• 1:30:14
  Tad Eggleston: You know where the easiest place in the world to buy a gun is?
• 1:30:19
  Tess: Texas, and Walmart?
• 1:30:22
  Tad Eggleston: Texas!
• 1:30:23
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, no! You know what the single biggest illegally smuggled thing across our southern border is?
• 1:30:32
  Tad Eggleston: It's not drugs coming north.
• 1:30:38
  Tess: I'm guessing it's the guns.
• 1:30:40
  Tad Eggleston: It's guns going south.
• 1:30:43
  Tad Eggleston: In other words, the reason that the cartels are able to terrorize Mexican citizens and send drugs north is… is because
• 1:30:54
  Tad Eggleston: we have… Weapons manufacturers that like it to be easy to get the guns down south.
• 1:31:00
  Tess: Well, of course, the gods.
• 1:31:02
  Tad Eggleston: Heaven forbid!
• 1:31:03
  Tess: You should actually…
• 1:31:04
  Tad Eggleston: take care of the things that we can take care of to solve a problem.
• 1:31:09
  Tad Eggleston: Let's talk about bombing Mexico, rather than talking about preventing guns from getting across our border into Mexico.
• 1:31:17
  Tess: I will be right back, I just gotta charge my phone real quick.
• 1:31:20
  Tad Eggleston: No problem. We'll pause for a second.
• 1:31:22
  Tess: Excellent. Well, it could have been…
• 1:31:25
  Tad Eggleston: And we're back.
• 1:31:26
  Tess: Excellent, okay. Thank you for dealing with the technical difficulties on my end, but I agree that America does have a…
• 1:31:36
  Tess: I'm just so exhausted from it.
• 1:31:40
  Tad Eggleston: No, I am too. We don't need to talk about that. I was already ready to change the subject. I just…
• 1:31:44
  Tess: Oh yeah, fair enough, fair enough.
• 1:31:46
  Tad Eggleston: it's one of my hyperfixations, like I said, particularly because… and I was really struck by your talking about…
• 1:31:53
  Tad Eggleston: Autistic people having in common
• 1:31:57
  Tad Eggleston: focusing on the trees, and sometimes having trouble seeing the forest, because I always feel like I'm a 10,000…
• 1:32:03
  Tad Eggleston: foot person, but what I realized as I was really trying to think about it is, no, the problem is.
• 1:32:10
  Tad Eggleston: I… I have lots of trees that I'm really fixated on, so I can… I can go up and connect them.
• 1:32:17
  Tess: Yes, yes.
• 1:32:20
  Tad Eggleston: So, I find myself at 10,000 feet, because you say A, and I think Z, M,
• 1:32:29
  Tad Eggleston: B, and D, and pull them all together, and take us to K.
• 1:32:36
  Tess: Because it's… you can, yeah, you can get the interconnections going. Your, brain can…
• 1:32:43
  Tess: make a big root system, like mushrooms. Right. Like, they have a big root system. They look individual, but they're just so interconnected. That metaphor actually came… I believe it came from a Temple Granite book I had read.
• 1:32:56
  Tad Eggleston: I believe it, I need to read her stuff. I haven't yet.
• 1:33:00
  Tess: Some of… okay, so a lot of it is really cool because she's one of the first autistic people to write books and bring that perspective.
• 1:33:07
  Tad Eggleston: That's why I know who she is.
• 1:33:09
  Tess: And some of it's a little bit outdated, you know, because of the times, and people are…
• 1:33:15
  Tad Eggleston: But also through her own lens.
• 1:33:17
  Tess: Yes! Yes, it is! But it is a valuable read, because most other books I was looking at, immediately I look at the cover, or crack open, and they say, autism is a disease! And I'm like, I'm… no, I'm putting that down.
• 1:33:29
  Tad Eggleston: The book… the book that actually wound up blowing my mind was a book called Neurotribes.
• 1:33:38
  Tad Eggleston: Written by… and it actually, like, it disturbed the hell out of me when I realized that it's not a new book.
• 1:33:44
  Tad Eggleston: it's, like, 10 or 15 years old. The author's actually dead.
• 1:33:49
  Tad Eggleston: Which made me sad, because I found it, and I'm like, I have a podcast, I want to track this guy down and talk to him.
• 1:33:54
  Tad Eggleston: Because that's now what I think about… I mean, I have a comics podcast, but I can find a way to make it about comics. You're my second Montana guest.
• 1:34:02
  Tess: Oh my god, really?
• 1:34:04
  Tad Eggleston: They have voted for the other one.
• 1:34:07
  Tess: Jonathan, was his… was he a senator?
• 1:34:13
  Tad Eggleston: No, he ran for governor.
• 1:34:15
  Tess: Oh, okay.
• 1:34:16
  Tad Eggleston: running for…
• 1:34:19
  Tess: For, jon Tester! Was it Jon Tester?
• 1:34:22
  Tad Eggleston: No, Jon Tester's a senator. I would have loved to have Jon Tester. Ryan Busse.
• 1:34:26
  Tess: Oh, okay. Hmm.
• 1:34:28
  Tad Eggleston: just the… he was just the Democratic candidate for governor.
• 1:34:32
  Tess: Oh.
• 1:34:33
  Tad Eggleston: Unfortunately, but not suspect… but he's now running for, I think, the House seat against Ryan Zinke.
• 1:34:40
  Tess: Oh, good, yeah, yeah.
• 1:34:41
  Tad Eggleston: Warm again.
• 1:34:44
  Tess: Look, I'm.
• 1:34:46
  Tad Eggleston: Cold.
• 1:34:46
  Tad Eggleston: he also wrote a book called Gunfight, because he used to be a gun executive.
• 1:34:52
  Tad Eggleston: And then started seeing the writing on the wall about how…
• 1:34:57
  Tad Eggleston: okay, this isn't about sportsmen anymore. This isn't even really about protection anymore.
• 1:35:03
  Tess: This is about some really scary shit.
• 1:35:07
  Tad Eggleston: So, so he left the industry, and he was the issues director for Giffords International, or Giffords…
• 1:35:14
  Tad Eggleston: Gabby Gifford's group, the, the… like, Arizona representative that was shot during a… started a gun control group.
• 1:35:25
  Tad Eggleston: And then he ran for governor, and now he's running for…
• 1:35:28
  Tad Eggleston: But Steve Silberman is the one that wrote Neurotribes, The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity.
• 1:35:36
  Tad Eggleston: And what he is, is he's actually, like, a legit…
• 1:35:42
  Tad Eggleston: journalist. So he came at it from a journalism's perspective.
• 1:35:48
  Tad Eggleston: So, like…
• 1:35:51
  Tad Eggleston: He first takes us through the history and, like, identifies some people that you obviously can't say were autistic, but I mean…
• 1:35:59
  Tess: Congratulations, Barb!
• 1:36:01
  Tad Eggleston: Just because the word didn't exist yet.
• 1:36:05
  Tess: Yeah, hmm, should we tell?
• 1:36:07
  Tad Eggleston: And then he has… and then he has chapters on both Asperger and the other guy.
• 1:36:12
  Tad Eggleston: whose name I can't remember, and really, like, emphasizes both the good and bad of both of them.
• 1:36:18
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, no. Because they have some real issues and some real strengths.
• 1:36:22
  Tess: Yeah!
• 1:36:24
  Tad Eggleston: And probably the biggest issue between both of them is that they both wanted their definition to be right, so they didn't work together.
• 1:36:33
  Tess: Oh, man.
• 1:36:34
  Tad Eggleston: They knew of each other. They knew of each other, and, like, pretended that they didn't.
• 1:36:41
  Tess: That's such a mean girl's attitude. My god, these two grown-ass men are sitting across…
• 1:36:46
  Tad Eggleston: It's a white male…
• 1:36:49
  Tess: Oh, yeah, no, they're much more Mean Girl than mean girls. Oh, here…
• 1:36:53
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 1:36:53
  Tess: Designing autism as this, you can't sit with us.
• 1:36:56
  Tad Eggleston: Right, right.
• 1:36:57
  Tad Eggleston: But so, anyway, you know, and it goes through parent movements, and it goes through things that worked well, and things, and it's really honest about them, and that sort of thing, but then Chapter 11 hits, and I… and I remember that it's Chapter 11, like, I… I made so many people read just Chapter 11.
• 1:37:16
  Tad Eggleston: Because Chapter 11, I don't know if it's where… where… where Temple Grandin was… was…
• 1:37:23
  Tad Eggleston: introduced, but it's certainly where she made her bigger… biggest appearance, and there were a bunch of other people that made appearances that I don't remember all the names of, because I'm not good at that.
• 1:37:32
  Tess: No, yeah.
• 1:37:32
  Tad Eggleston: Individual facts is not my thing. Big pictures, I'm really good at remembering. Individual facts, that's what the internet's for.
• 1:37:41
  Tad Eggleston: I was so happy when it was invented, because I didn't have it when I was a kid, so I had to carry around lots of books and or notes of things that I thought were important.
• 1:37:51
  Tad Eggleston: But that's an aside. Chapter 11 is when the autistic people Started getting involved.
• 1:38:01
  Tad Eggleston: Chapter 11 is the autistic people advocating for autistic people.
• 1:38:06
  Tad Eggleston: Chapter 11 is the autistic people looking at the way blind people
• 1:38:10
  Tad Eggleston: Had advocated for themselves and saying, oh, that's what we need to do.
• 1:38:14
  Tess: Hell yeah!
• 1:38:16
  Tad Eggleston: Chapter 11 is just filled with so much… Wisdom and pain, and…
• 1:38:26
  Tad Eggleston: whatever, you know. I mean, the part that hit me the hardest was, and this is where I should just… I should make certain I quote it properly, but thankfully, I,
• 1:38:40
  Tad Eggleston: I highlighted the hell out of my Kindle version.
• 1:38:46
  Tess: Gotta love the invention of the highlighter.
• 1:38:48
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, but, but, but there was a… a… a period…
• 1:38:57
  Tad Eggleston: where they taught autistic parents… and I think you kind of touched on this a little bit with the doctor talking to your parents.
• 1:39:04
  Tad Eggleston: They would teach autistic parents that you had to, like, mourn your child.
• 1:39:10
  Tad Eggleston: Yes. You know, you needed to mourn the child that you thought you would have.
• 1:39:16
  Tad Eggleston: And, like… I mean…
• 1:39:25
  Tad Eggleston: on one level, trying to be empathetic, I can get
• 1:39:29
  Tad Eggleston: Where the psychologist or whatever would be coming from, where they're… they're trying to…
• 1:39:34
  Tad Eggleston: To… to get you to let go of some sort of expectation, so that you can be… present.
• 1:39:43
  Tad Eggleston: with… with your kid, and, and, like, the guy who I'm about to quote,
• 1:39:51
  Tad Eggleston: Actually, for this conference that he went to, he wound up taking… a, a, a,
• 1:40:02
  Tad Eggleston: a younger autistic kid with him, you know, the parents had said, hey, can you… so it was, like, the first time that he'd been responsible for somebody, so it had him rethink… he's like, okay, I kinda understand where they're coming from. So he, like, even wound up toning down his language on…
• 1:40:16
  Tad Eggleston: On this part, because of that, but, oh, where is it?
• 1:40:28
  Tad Eggleston: Okay, that's… Oh, that's right, her first book was as a recovered autistic individual.
• 1:40:37
  Tad Eggleston: I forgot that.
• 1:40:39
  Tess: Oh my god.
• 1:40:42
  Tad Eggleston: Well, because she could write a book now.
• 1:40:44
  Tess: Oh.
• 1:40:45
  Tad Eggleston: I mean…
• 1:40:46
  Tess: And, well, but it came out in 1986, remember? In 1986?
• 1:40:51
  Tad Eggleston: 36, if you could talk, you weren't autistic.
• 1:40:53
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, that's right. It wasn't until 1992 that you could be autistic and talk.
• 1:40:58
  Tess: Well, see, yeah, that was before my time. See, yeah, no, I was in… I was born in 91, so.
• 1:41:05
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:41:05
  Tess: That was before that, yeah.
• 1:41:07
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 1:41:09
  Tad Eggleston: So, I mean, like… That's where all of this becomes so, so, so complicated.
• 1:41:18
  Tad Eggleston: Particularly for those of us… I mean, I feel… Let me rephrase.
• 1:41:25
  Tad Eggleston: As far as autism goes, if the rest of the nation survives the next decade, I feel really good about the world that my autistic grandchildren will have.
• 1:41:36
  Tess: Oh my god, oh my god, I know! I'm just so happy. I know that the pandemic had created so many different changes, good and bad. One of the good ones being we're talking about autism more, it's less stigmatizing, it's on the path of being less stigmatized, and…
• 1:41:56
  Tess: We're seeing each other and accepting each other, and we are…
• 1:42:02
  Tess: talking about it more and more, and I feel like it's amazing coming out of that, so… and the things that we were shamed about, it becoming less shameful, like, oh no, I do that too! Like, I have hyperfixations, I've got special interests, I…
• 1:42:18
  Tess: can set boundaries to say, hey, stop, I'm feeling overstimulated and burnt out. We can do these things.
• 1:42:24
  Tad Eggleston: I'm getting better at that, though it involves more days off from work than I'd like.
• 1:42:29
  Tad Eggleston: I'm still trying to find the way to balance that.
• 1:42:31
  Tess: Yeah!
• 1:42:33
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, I wasn't at work today, because I think what I told Edgar when I was texting him earlier today, or maybe I told my wife, it was one of the two, it's like, yeah, I stayed home autistic with a cold.
• 1:42:48
  Tad Eggleston: So were you home because you were autistic, or were you home because you were… had a cold? And I said, yes.
• 1:42:53
  Tess: Pretty sure.
• 1:42:53
  Tad Eggleston: I'm pretty certain if I hadn't had a cold, I wouldn't have been home today, and I'm pretty certain that if I had a cold but wasn't autistic, I wouldn't have been home today. But you put the two together…
• 1:43:04
  Tess: They tagged you.
• 1:43:05
  Tad Eggleston: It's too much.
• 1:43:06
  Tess: Oh, no, oh my god, I know. Well, so getting back to mourning the child that you could have had.
• 1:43:16
  Tess: So, with that conversation, honestly, it should have been phrased as letting go of your expectations of normal, and I really wanted to put that in the book, because… and this I didn't add in, but when I was first diagnosed, it was before they… so, my parents didn't know what was going on.
• 1:43:34
  Tess: And they ran through tests, like, is she deaf? Is something happening? The doctors did some scans. At first, they thought it was a brain tumor, and my parents were absolutely heartbroken, and they're like, please test again, and they did.
• 1:43:49
  Tess: And the doctor said, oh, I'm so sorry, Lisa and Mike, it's worse, your child is autistic. And my… thank God my parents were like, oh my god, thank you, oh, let's do this, let's… let's Fen do this, like, we're so glad that she doesn't have a brain tumor. So…
• 1:44:05
  Tess: It was a struggle back then, and again, with each era, there are going to be struggles and, accommodations made. Heck, my mom invented DoorDash before DoorDash was a thing, because she couldn't take me to the grocery store, she had to order food to get taken to the apartment, but…
• 1:44:21
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 1:44:22
  Tess: But…
• 1:44:23
  Tess: My… more and more people are finally figuring out we need to let go of what is considered normal.
• 1:44:32
  Tess: Because it's harming us.
• 1:44:34
  Tad Eggleston: The harm of… That's why… Go ahead, I'm sorry.
• 1:44:38
  Tess: Because these… the constraints of what is considered… the toxic parts of normality
• 1:44:44
  Tess: We see the effects of that harm on all of us.
• 1:44:54
  Tad Eggleston: I found it.
• 1:44:55
  Tad Eggleston: Here, here it is,
• 1:44:58
  Tad Eggleston: And it was, I think Jim Sinclair was the set who said it. He said, this is what we hear.
• 1:45:05
  Tad Eggleston: When you mourn over our existence. This is what we hear when you pray for a cure. This is what we know when you tell us of your fondest hopes and dreams for us.
• 1:45:17
  Tad Eggleston: That your greatest wish is that one day we will cease to be, and strangers you can love will move in behind our faces.
• 1:45:27
  Tess: That is beep!
• 1:45:31
  Tad Eggleston: And again, this is, this is at, like, I think the first autism conference held by autistic people.
• 1:45:39
  Tad Eggleston: In a talk called Don't Mourn for Us to the Autism Society in Canada, And… I wanna say…
• 1:45:48
  Tad Eggleston: 1990-something, but I don't have it immediately in front of me. Well, I mean, I have it immediately in front of me, I don't have…
• 1:45:55
  Tad Eggleston: I'm not seeing the citation on my pages of highlights!
• 1:46:02
  Tess: You know it's a good book when the highlights are pretty much entire pages?
• 1:46:06
  Tad Eggleston: Well, and when you have to start using different colors to mean different things…
• 1:46:12
  Tess: That is a stellar book right there.
• 1:46:15
  Tess: That's a reading rainbow, literally.
• 1:46:17
  Tad Eggleston: Narrow Tribes, Steve Silverman, I can't recommend it to enough people.
• 1:46:21
  Tess: Okay, I'm gonna… that's on my reading list, that's on my to-do list.
• 1:46:24
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, that was the one that, like, wound up…
• 1:46:29
  Tad Eggleston: waking me up to the fact that, I mean, I hadn't been working
• 1:46:37
  Tad Eggleston: in autism for long before I went, oh, this explains a lot, I'm autistic.
• 1:46:43
  Tad Eggleston: Everything we've ever had work in therapy is the stuff that I'm teaching.
• 1:46:49
  Tad Eggleston: We're using to teach.
• 1:46:52
  Tad Eggleston: kids now.
• 1:46:54
  Tad Eggleston: we're, you know, I build scripts, I… Oh my god.
• 1:46:59
  Tad Eggleston: Oh my god.
• 1:47:01
  Tess: Young fledglings, let us, let us do better by you than what they did for me.
• 1:47:06
  Tad Eggleston: Right. Well, and at least I didn't go through official What is it?
• 1:47:13
  Tad Eggleston: behavioral… what is it? I always forget the acronym.
• 1:47:20
  Tad Eggleston: There's some sort of behavioral therapy. Is it DBT? No, not DBT, something like that, that lots of autistic people used to get, that you don't name, but you have it in the book, with rewards and punishments for behaving properly.
• 1:47:35
  Tess: Oh my god, yeah, when I heard about that.
• 1:47:38
  Tad Eggleston: All you hear is horror stories from people who went through that.
• 1:47:41
  Tess: Yes!
• 1:47:42
  Tad Eggleston: for that matter, I mean, I wound up digging deep into why so many people with autism don't like Autism Speaks, because I know so many people involved with Autism Speaks that
• 1:47:52
  Tad Eggleston: And essentially, it's because… they haven't… explicitly…
• 1:48:01
  Tad Eggleston: like, spoken out against this type of therapy, but then the other thing is, this type of therapy has kept its name, but also changed
• 1:48:11
  Tad Eggleston: Dramatically since these people who were traumatized by it.
• 1:48:16
  Tad Eggleston: It's like, as medicine should.
• 1:48:19
  Tess: Yeah!
• 1:48:20
  Tad Eggleston: it evolved.
• 1:48:21
  Tess: Yeah! They're not using leeches anymore!
• 1:48:24
  Tad Eggleston: rebranded.
• 1:48:26
  Tess: Yeah! Well, and also, Autism Speaks had a terrible, terrible commercial about the program, and saying, I am autism, I will drain your funds, I will ruin your marriages, I will…
• 1:48:38
  Tad Eggleston: Right, right, right, right.
• 1:48:39
  Tess: stairs and set your house on fire, blah blah blah. It was so… it was a horrible, horrible.
• 1:48:45
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I wasn't trying to say that they're at all…
• 1:48:51
  Tad Eggleston: this is not my endorsement of Autism Speaks. It was only my, my, my…
• 1:48:56
  Tad Eggleston: Layers upon layers upon layers, because it's new.
• 1:49:01
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, even, like…
• 1:49:03
  Tad Eggleston: Okay, sure, it's been around since the 40s. Like, in terms of medicine, how new is that?
• 1:49:11
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, we didn't have the word PTSD in the 40s, but PTSD came directly from shell shock that we started diagnosing in the Civil War, so PTSD is way older than autism.
• 1:49:25
  Tess: As far as medically-wise, yeah.
• 1:49:27
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, from a medical standpoint, what… from a medical or psychological standpoint, how many things are truly newer than autism?
• 1:49:36
  Tad Eggleston: And really, from a psychological standpoint, because it's a different kind of research. I mean, yeah, AIDS is different… newer than autism, but, like, you've gone down biology. Chemical research…
• 1:49:48
  Tad Eggleston: Versus… Behavioral research is massively different.
• 1:49:53
  Tess: Yes, it is. There's… it's comparing apples to oranges. I mean, they're both fruit, but they're different kinds of fruit.
• 1:50:01
  Tad Eggleston: Right?
• 1:50:02
  Tess: And they're coming.
• 1:50:03
  Tad Eggleston: I mean…
• 1:50:03
  Tess: Yeah.
• 1:50:05
  Tess: I mean, I, I…
• 1:50:07
  Tad Eggleston: I had somebody talking to me about how, oh, all of the… All of the…
• 1:50:14
  Tad Eggleston: And I love how it's always, well, if it works for you, that's great, but all of the… all of the psychological, pharmaceutical company or industry is a complete and utter hoax. You know, none of those work in more than 3% over…
• 1:50:30
  Tad Eggleston: over, the placebo, and I'm sitting there going, do you understand that in things that aren't measurable.
• 1:50:37
  Tad Eggleston: In things that are measured only by… patient… response?
• 1:50:45
  Tad Eggleston: 3% over placebo is actually really high!
• 1:50:52
  Tess: I love when people go on a rant, and they haven't done.
• 1:50:56
  Tad Eggleston: as much research, they just really want to make a point, because this thing that does not work for them, they're like, oh, well, it's not going to work for anyone else, but that helps… They want the thing that…
• 1:51:10
  Tad Eggleston: Well, and again, I've discovered it's just a different way that my brain is wired. I always want to ask the next question, I always want to look for the next answer.
• 1:51:19
  Tad Eggleston: I don't have a part of me that says, oh.
• 1:51:22
  Tad Eggleston: That's not worth me knowing. Everything's worth me knowing.
• 1:51:28
  Tess: Everything's ridiculous. And that's what's scary to a lot of folks.
• 1:51:30
  Tad Eggleston: And I'm also willing to say I don't know.
• 1:51:33
  Tess: Yes, yeah, no, I've got what becomes really.
• 1:51:35
  Tad Eggleston: scary is when I'll say, neither do you.
• 1:51:38
  Tess: I love when… well…
• 1:51:43
  Tess: I guess there's two… there's a couple different ways. A lot of people who are neurodivergent, it's like, oh, well, you're so blunt, and you're so rude, and sometimes that's true, but sometimes it's like, is it rude to say, I don't know, and neither do you, or do you not like being proven wrong? Like, what…
• 1:52:01
  Tad Eggleston: That's part of it. I actually had a great conversation at C2E2 with a couple of, Mad Cave…
• 1:52:12
  Tad Eggleston: like, sales executives.
• 1:52:14
  Tad Eggleston: one year. We were just talking, and like…
• 1:52:19
  Tad Eggleston: I got into one of my Babbel modes, and I just stopped and I said, hey, I'm autistic, so, like, if I'm overwhelming, if I'm crossing boundaries, if I'm…
• 1:52:28
  Tad Eggleston: whatever, please tell me, you know, and also, I'm tired, so I've got no control over my intonation, or my volume, or whatever. Like, please just… everything I say is what I mean, and everything…
• 1:52:44
  Tad Eggleston: you know, if it doesn't seem right, just ask questions. And they're both like, why don't people always communicate like that? I'm like, I don't know, that's on you guys.
• 1:52:53
  Tess: Oh my god!
• 1:52:55
  Tad Eggleston: People communicated like that.
• 1:52:58
  Tess: Oh, if only, sir! God, that's a dream. I… that just…
• 1:53:02
  Tess: If someone just said that in my life, that would have been amazing.
• 1:53:07
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, it's like, yeah, no, wouldn't it be amazing if, like, the way we communicated was we used the best words we could come up with to say
• 1:53:19
  Tad Eggleston: Exactly what we mean, rather than assuming that you were gonna figure it out from the things that we left unsaid, or the facial expressions that we made, or the tone that we used.
• 1:53:34
  Tad Eggleston: or… or whatever other thing, and that if you heard it, and you either didn't fully understand it, or you said.
• 1:53:44
  Tess: you.
• 1:53:45
  Tad Eggleston: It seems like you're saying this, but that doesn't feel like a thing that you would normally say. Rather than immediately getting angry or responding negatively, you said, this is what I'm hearing, is it what you mean?
• 1:54:00
  Tess: Yeah, oh my god! That's some pain right there, that's revisiting some pain right there.
• 1:54:07
  Tad Eggleston: This is one of the reasons why I think the autistic people are, like, Not the broken ones.
• 1:54:15
  Tad Eggleston: Another thing I… I'm gonna see if I can find this. Have you ever seen the… the… the…
• 1:54:23
  Tad Eggleston: I think it's only available through the Wayback Machine now.
• 1:54:27
  Tess: But the institution…
• 1:54:29
  Tad Eggleston: from the early days of the internet, because of course autistic people figured out the internet first.
• 1:54:37
  Tad Eggleston: and they created the DSN4, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Normal Disorders.
• 1:54:46
  Tess: Oh, I've never heard it, but I do love that joke if you diagnose a neurotypical person. I love that.
• 1:54:52
  Tad Eggleston: The Institute for the Study of the Neurologically Typical.
• 1:54:57
  Tess: Oh my god, that sounds amazing.
• 1:55:00
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, meets qualification of at least two of the following criteria. A, egocentrism, at least one of the following. One, egocentric perspective, e.g, fails to realize that others may have a different perspective, needs, nature, or experiences from his or herself.
• 1:55:17
  Tad Eggleston: 2. Egomania, e.g, acts or talks as though better or more important than peers or others. 3. Selfishness, either of the following. A. Market greed or covetedness. B, domineering or bossy attitude.
• 1:55:33
  Tess: Oh my god.
• 1:55:35
  Tad Eggleston: B, lack of originality. At least one of the following.
• 1:55:39
  Tad Eggleston: 1. Rigidly follows traditional or social rituals. 2. Is often faddish, following the latest fads, fashions, or crazes invented or set by others. 3. Often demonstrates a herd mentality.
• 1:55:54
  Tad Eggleston: E.G. thoughtlessly follows a social reference group or local group of friends, often gives in to peer pressure.
• 1:56:02
  Tad Eggleston: C. Lack of sympathy. One or both of the following. 1. Cruel or callous toward the feeling of others, e.g, engages in teasing or ridiculing others.
• 1:56:12
  Tad Eggleston: Play potentially harmful practical jokes on unsuspecting victims who are unlikely to be amused, or two, often manipulative, e.g. uses others as tools to… toward…
• 1:56:23
  Tad Eggleston: Own goals, treats others as objects which may be acquired for own satisfaction, uses dishonesty as a convenient way to achieve goals.
• 1:56:33
  Tess: Oh my gosh, well…
• 1:56:35
  Tad Eggleston: on to have a description, associated features, and differential diagnosis, prevalence. The exact prevalence of the incidents are not known. However, normal personality appears to be frighteningly common, and its incidence is increasing, or may be increasing.
• 1:56:52
  Tad Eggleston: But my favorite is the,
• 1:56:55
  Tad Eggleston: prognosis. Normal personality is most often a lifelong condition. Rarely is there any significant improvement in symptoms. It has been suggested that the presence of neurotypicality makes the prognosis worse.
• 1:57:12
  Tess: Oh.
• 1:57:13
  Tad Eggleston: This has not been substantiated. Despite the severe social dependencies and possible cognitive impairments associated with normal personality, such people are often relatively high functioning. Many of them even become successful professionals, with politicians being an especially common
• 1:57:29
  Tad Eggleston: in this population. However, the egocentrism, poor insight, and narrow standards of acceptability may make the person with normal personality dangerous to other in the community, being particularly threatening to those who are not themselves normal.
• 1:57:45
  Tess: Oh my god… I mean…
• 1:57:49
  Tess: Oh, jeez, I… that is definitely, like, the originality of the joke right there, because, I mean, yeah, I…
• 1:57:59
  Tess: I feel like some of those descriptors people now use for narcissistic tendencies or other types of stuff right now, it just reminds me of that, but…
• 1:58:08
  Tess: I do like joking with friends, if someone were diagnosed with neurotypicalness, the doctor would lean in and say, I am so sorry.
• 1:58:16
  Tess: your child is typical, they'll never have a special interest. They'll always want eye contact. Harold, no eye contact! I can't believe it! There's something missing there. They…
• 1:58:28
  Tess: Oh, the… Poor… this poor child will…
• 1:58:32
  Tess: have to go through life and, based off of others, and it's just… I'm so terribly sorry. Like, the dramaticism of getting diagnosed with anything other than neurotypical.
• 1:58:43
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:58:43
  Tess: is laughable, and to just sort of flip that script and say, how does that feel to you when someone looks at you and goes.
• 1:58:51
  Tess: And especially, especially, yeah, especially with the eye contact, sometimes I have to go, like, okay.
• 1:58:56
  Tess: With that amount of eye contact, where… do you need… do you need…
• 1:59:00
  Tad Eggleston: I've actually gotten in so much more trouble because of my masking eye contact than I ever do. Oh my god.
• 1:59:07
  Tad Eggleston: Why is that person staring at me?
• 1:59:10
  Tess: I thought I was supposed to be looking at people when I talked to them.
• 1:59:13
  Tess: Yay!
• 1:59:14
  Tad Eggleston: thinking about talking to them, or, or, or, like, there are times where you're supposed to look at people, and times when you're not supposed to look at people. What the fuck?
• 1:59:26
  Tess: Get this to me!
• 1:59:28
  Tess: What the hell? Yeah, no, I… oh my god, yeah, and it even varies through culture, because
• 1:59:34
  Tess: when I was in high school, I told a therapist, listen, I'm not the best at eye contact, and she said, you know what? In some Native American cultures and in certain tribes, it's disrespectful to look at people straight in the eyeballs and stuff, and…
• 1:59:48
  Tess: It's like, wow, wouldn't that be nice if that was culturally acceptable.
• 1:59:52
  Tad Eggleston: Well, I mean, in certain cultures or Native American tribes, the people who were different were assumed to be better.
• 2:00:01
  Tess: My… so I talked about this in the book, like, autism may have been around for way longer, just under different names, like…
• 2:00:09
  Tad Eggleston: It definitely has. Like, there is nothing about autism that seems like it's something that would just appear.
• 2:00:22
  Tess: Yeah.
• 2:00:23
  Tess: Yeah, I do think it's been… and that's the.
• 2:00:26
  Tad Eggleston: You know, I mean, it's one thing with the disease where, again, like, a bacteria or a virus can mutate to become something.
• 2:00:36
  Tad Eggleston: Right? So, so, I mean… I mean, I brought up AIDS earlier. AIDS… AIDS is something that has come up in our lifetime.
• 2:00:45
  Tad Eggleston: There's not really… er, my lifetime, you're…
• 2:00:48
  Tess: 12 years younger than me.
• 2:00:52
  Tad Eggleston: Or 11 years younger than me, yeah.
• 2:00:54
  Tad Eggleston: Don't make myself too old. I turned 46 this year.
• 2:00:59
  Tess: relative, my 90-something-year-old grandma had… or great-grandma, actually, had a red Porsche, and she was.
• 2:01:05
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, yeah.
• 2:01:06
  Tess: Living her best life until…
• 2:01:08
  Tad Eggleston: Totally.
• 2:01:09
  Tess: 100 and a half, so… age is wrong.
• 2:01:11
  Tad Eggleston: Absolutely. It is.
• 2:01:13
  Tad Eggleston: But, again, like the pandemic, the pandemic
• 2:01:20
  Tad Eggleston: was kind of a new strain, except that it wasn't. One of the reasons we were able to have a…
• 2:01:25
  Tad Eggleston: vaccines so fast was that we were actually already working on it, because we'd already had
• 2:01:32
  Tad Eggleston: a coronavirus, just not THAT coronavirus. So, being able to… To pivot a little to… you know.
• 2:01:45
  Tad Eggleston: Like, every year's flu is not the same as the one before. Those… those are, are, are new things.
• 2:01:54
  Tad Eggleston: There have been blind people Forever.
• 2:01:58
  Tess: Yeah. There have been deaf people.
• 2:02:00
  Tad Eggleston: forever. There have been left-handed people Forever.
• 2:02:06
  Tad Eggleston: So, there have been autistic people.
• 2:02:08
  Tad Eggleston: Forever.
• 2:02:10
  Tess: Yeah.
• 2:02:11
  Tad Eggleston: They just had different names for them.
• 2:02:14
  Tess: And that's… that's the same with the… I mean… That's the same.
• 2:02:18
  Tad Eggleston: And, or they had much shorter lifespans, for myriad reasons.
• 2:02:24
  Tess: Unfortunately, yeah.
• 2:02:27
  Tad Eggleston: Though, honestly, I would be willing to bet that one of the reasons why there's such a prevalence of neurodiversity is that
• 2:02:35
  Tad Eggleston: there are definitely some societies where being neurodiverse, like, hunter-gatherer times? I bet you you live way better neurodiverse.
• 2:02:44
  Tad Eggleston: When you can think of the… the… the new thing to get away Sabertoothed Tiger.
• 2:02:53
  Tess: The diversity of brains really helps a team, you know? Just, like, looking at… it's kind of like… so, I like to use the metaphor of a 7-Eleven with security cameras. If you have all these same security camera pointing at one spot.
• 2:03:07
  Tess: but your candy bars are still getting stolen, that doesn't work. If you add in a night vision camera in a different part of the store, you'll be able to catch the candy thief way quicker.
• 2:03:18
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 2:03:19
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 2:03:20
  Tess: You just need different kinds of cameras in different kinds of spots, and that's the same with brains.
• 2:03:24
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, like, yeah.
• 2:03:27
  Tad Eggleston: But… but, like, you're not allowed to say that out loud right now, because that's… that's,
• 2:03:34
  Tad Eggleston: What did the Supreme Court say about that?
• 2:03:37
  Tess: No.
• 2:03:38
  Tad Eggleston: When they were getting rid of…
• 2:03:40
  Tad Eggleston: When we were getting rid of, -
• 2:03:44
  Tad Eggleston: Huh.
• 2:03:45
  Tad Eggleston: Affirmative action, so…
• 2:03:50
  Tess: You can't think differently, Janet. That's… That's taboo! What!
• 2:03:56
  Tad Eggleston: No, no, oh, no, what it was is they saw no…
• 2:04:00
  Tad Eggleston: They felt that there was no credible
• 2:04:04
  Tad Eggleston: Proof of extra value to diversity. That's what they said. I knew I'd remember it.
• 2:04:13
  Tad Eggleston: No credible evidence that it was in the best interest of all students to have diversity.
• 2:04:18
  Tess: Wow, that sounds like something a clone would say.
• 2:04:21
  Tad Eggleston: Sounds like something Brett Kavanaugh would say.
• 2:04:24
  Tess: That just is impeccable.
• 2:04:26
  Tad Eggleston: It might have been Clarence Thomas.
• 2:04:29
  Tad Eggleston: Oh my god. Could have been Sam Alito.
• 2:04:32
  Tess: That's just…
• 2:04:32
  Tad Eggleston: Now that the Supreme Court is another of my hyperfixations?
• 2:04:36
  Tess: Tell me you're autistic without telling me you're autistic.
• 2:04:43
  Tess: Okay, so, okay, when… a couple years ago, I got to watch the pilot episode of Star Trek, and this is, like, the original Star Trek.
• 2:04:52
  Tad Eggleston: Okay.
• 2:04:52
  Tess: short term.
• 2:04:52
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, yeah, I've seen it.
• 2:04:53
  Tess: You've seen it. So, okay. Me coming in and watching this, I was so scared, because most of the cast were the same-looking white guy.
• 2:05:03
  Tess: And there were only two women, and I was genuinely feeling like, oh, this is science fiction body horror of, like, the same dude everywhere, the same milk white toast guy, and I could not tell any of them apart. I was…
• 2:05:18
  Tess: this was genuinely kind of terrifying for me, so I'm so glad that
• 2:05:23
  Tess: the Star Trek after that was like, no, no!
• 2:05:27
  Tad Eggleston: Let's add in some more genders and more… That actually sounds like the second pilot.
• 2:05:33
  Tess: They had…
• 2:05:34
  Tad Eggleston: two pilots.
• 2:05:35
  Tess: Oh, they did!
• 2:05:37
  Tad Eggleston: And do you… I mean, first of all, do you know who bankrolled Star Trek?
• 2:05:43
  Tess: Lucy Liu, baby! Or no, wait.
• 2:05:44
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, Lucy.
• 2:05:45
  Tess: I love Lucy!
• 2:05:47
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, yeah, Lucy
• 2:05:48
  Tad Eggleston: And if I recall correctly, there was a decent amount of diversity in the first pilot.
• 2:05:55
  Tad Eggleston: And… The network insisted that it wouldn't work.
• 2:06:02
  Tess: Of course they did! Of course they did!
• 2:06:07
  Tad Eggleston: But then… but then they did the second pilot that was even less diverse, and it… Bombed massively.
• 2:06:15
  Tess: Oh, I wonder why! Was it the drone army that came in?
• 2:06:20
  Tad Eggleston: Right, which is what led to… and they still had to fight tooth and nail to get…
• 2:06:26
  Tad Eggleston: Uhura and… and George Decay and…
• 2:06:33
  Tad Eggleston: But apparently they were more willing to have a black woman than a black man.
• 2:06:38
  Tad Eggleston: But once they had a black woman, they couldn't have other women, at least not right away.
• 2:06:42
  Tess: Oh my god, of cr- oh, wow, just…
• 2:06:47
  Tad Eggleston: See, this is a new hyperfixation of mine.
• 2:06:50
  Tad Eggleston: And I'm not… I haven't… I haven't gone deep, deep on the Star Trek hyperfixation.
• 2:06:55
  Tad Eggleston: It's… it's more of…
• 2:06:57
  Tad Eggleston: how to put this? Because among other things, my hyperfixations have gotten weirder as I get older, because I don't give up many of them, which means that
• 2:07:05
  Tad Eggleston: Which means that I don't…
• 2:07:08
  Tad Eggleston: I pay attention to more things and don't fall as far down as many rabbit holes. Like…
• 2:07:14
  Tad Eggleston: My, my rabbit holes… Are for a sitting period, rather than a month.
• 2:07:19
  Tad Eggleston: to me, rabbit holes were, like, a month long, and now, if I have to stop to go to sleep or go to work or whatnot, I may or may not go back to that rabbit hole, rather than…
• 2:07:32
  Tad Eggleston: Absolutely, positively going back to that rabbit hole.
• 2:07:36
  Tess: I love, I love that. I love hearing how people
• 2:07:41
  Tess: Talk about their special interest in hyperfixations, how they interact with them, and how it…
• 2:07:47
  Tess: plays into their lives, too, because I learned so much from my neurodiverse friends' info dumping to me, and being like, wow, I didn't know this much about ASPIC. I didn't know this much about bugs.
• 2:07:58
  Tess: I didn't know this much about, Ace… Ace Attorney video game. Like, I did not know any of this stuff. I love that my friends can get… because they're so passionate about it.
• 2:08:10
  Tess: And it's like, I'm learning so much more from you than so many other professors with a dead Pantone that are doing this just because they're getting paid.
• 2:08:18
  Tad Eggleston: I… I once… Had a kid.
• 2:08:24
  Tad Eggleston: Spend half an hour giving me…
• 2:08:29
  Tad Eggleston: way more details than I remember, but he was fascinating in giving them, so I think he was shocked that I didn't shut him down.
• 2:08:38
  Tad Eggleston: On… on the different types of…
• 2:08:41
  Tad Eggleston: Town emergency sirens. You know, the ones that they like.
• 2:08:45
  Tess: Really?
• 2:08:45
  Tad Eggleston: test every Tuesday.
• 2:08:47
  Tad Eggleston: What? I didn't even know that there were different types, and he had all these YouTube videos of different ones that he'd watch, and he had all this terminology. I have a kid right now that, like, his big hyperfixation is tollways. He can tell you everything about every traffic signal, every…
• 2:09:08
  Tess: That is stellar! And they're both awesome!
• 2:09:10
  Tad Eggleston: kids, like, they do good at other stuff, but it's like, okay, we're done with math, I'm gonna go back to tollways now.
• 2:09:19
  Tess: Because pull ways are cool, dude! I don't know what your problem is!
• 2:09:22
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 2:09:24
  Tad Eggleston: And in that sense, I feel really lucky that my hyperfixations were things like baseball and music, because…
• 2:09:33
  Tad Eggleston: Because then it only became problematic for me when I didn't know when to stop talking.
• 2:09:38
  Tess: Oh…
• 2:09:38
  Tad Eggleston: Rather than just what I was talking about?
• 2:09:41
  Tess: Oh… I was not lucky in that regard, oh my god. A lot of the stuff I loved.
• 2:09:48
  Tess: it was really hard to find people to talk to them about, because, you know, I live in Montana and stuff, and it's really hard to talk about anime or animation with a lot of folks. It was hard to figure out… because I also love mythology and storytelling. Storytelling is a huge special interest of mine, and so…
• 2:10:08
  Tess: it was tough to find folks to talk to that about until I found better peers at school.
• 2:10:16
  Tad Eggleston: Right?
• 2:10:17
  Tess: And one way I would connect with folks is asking what their favorite cartoons were, and I remember, I distinctly remember my… on my mother's side, so my nan's favorite cartoon growing up was…
• 2:10:28
  Tess: Roadrunner and Coyote, my grandfather's was Yosemite Sam. I remember my dad's favorite cartoon growing up was Johnny Quest, my mom's was the Jetsons, my sister's was Johnny Quest's New Adventures, and my first big
• 2:10:42
  Tess: story special interest, other than where the wild things are in Aladdin, was Scooby-Doo. That was one of my first… that was a deep dive. That was like, I gotta know about everything about this, because I love it so much. Which explains a lot of my tastes nowadays, now that I think about it.
• 2:11:00
  Tad Eggleston: See, see, I… I have a disdain for Scooby-Doo, but my wife also likes to point out that half of the songs that I randomly sing with whatever words come to my head are the tune of Scooby-Doo, so I don't know what my Scooby-Doo thing is.
• 2:11:19
  Tess: You know what? That's okay, that's the…
• 2:11:21
  Tad Eggleston: And I haven't been willing to… I haven't been willing to… to go revisit, because, like, I… when I think of watching Scooby-Doo, I have, like, a physical reaction of, no, I don't want to. Yeah! But again, it's somehow… it's somehow in my psyche enough that, like…
• 2:11:36
  Tad Eggleston: Do-do-do-do-do-do-do- is, like… a common… So it's like…
• 2:11:44
  Tad Eggleston: what is it that… that is why I think I don't like Scooby-Doo, particularly because so many people I… and, like…
• 2:11:53
  Tad Eggleston: I'm gonna wind up… I know how it's gonna work already.
• 2:11:57
  Tad Eggleston: Because, like, for a long time, I wasn't into Star Trek at all.
• 2:12:01
  Tad Eggleston: I, you know, when I was young, you were supposed to be Star Wars or Star Trek, and I was hardcore Star Wars, so, like, fuck Star Trek.
• 2:12:10
  Tad Eggleston: My friend Chris was one of the rare people that was actually into both of them.
• 2:12:16
  Tad Eggleston: I didn't know him when I was a kid, so he wasn't, like… we met…
• 2:12:19
  Tad Eggleston: Much more recently. So when he got…
• 2:12:24
  Tad Eggleston: the gig writing Star Trek Defiant, the comic book, he was over the fucking moon.
• 2:12:31
  Tad Eggleston: Blake.
• 2:12:33
  Tad Eggleston: Super, super excited text from him, going, Star Trek!
• 2:12:38
  Tess: Oh my god.
• 2:12:39
  Tad Eggleston: And I'm like, fuck, I need to learn about Star Trek now.
• 2:12:44
  Tad Eggleston: But, as it turns out, when I started learning about Star Trek, I wound up liking Star Trek quite a bit, so, like.
• 2:12:51
  Tad Eggleston: I… this is… this is what I imagine. At some point, somebody I love is going to write a Scooby-Doo comic.
• 2:12:58
  Tad Eggleston: go.
• 2:13:00
  Tad Eggleston: Okay.
• 2:13:01
  Tad Eggleston: Or I'll get to know Mark DeMatis, because he and Keith Giffen already did the Scooby Apocalypse that everybody says is great, and I haven't brought myself to read yet.
• 2:13:10
  Tad Eggleston: That sort of thing.
• 2:13:12
  Tad Eggleston: Well, I think also, like, the history of Scooby-Doo is interesting, because the character designs were done by Iwao Takamoto, who was a second-generation American-Japanese person. Okay, so you already have me more interested than I've already been.
• 2:13:26
  Tess: He learned how to draw from a Vietnam… a person from Vietnam in an internment camp at one point.
• 2:13:32
  Tad Eggleston: Okay.
• 2:13:33
  Tess: And so, it's not just… and also, the name Scooby-Doo came from a Frank Sinatra song, Strangers in the Night, when he sang Scooby-Doo-by-Doo.
• 2:13:45
  Tess: Like, it is…
• 2:13:45
  Tad Eggleston: Alright, alright.
• 2:13:47
  Tess: And the designer.
• 2:13:48
  Tad Eggleston: Who can be?
• 2:13:49
  Tess: Oh my god, and the design of Scooby-Doo? On purpose, they talked to a Great Dane breeder, and they asked, okay, what are the defining features that make a good Great Dane? And they did the opposite.
• 2:14:01
  Tess: When designing Scooby-.
• 2:14:02
  Tad Eggleston: So… so he's an… he's a… he's a neurotypical Great Dane.
• 2:14:07
  Tess: He's a… he's a neurodiver.
• 2:14:08
  Tad Eggleston: Typical.
• 2:14:09
  Tess: He's an atypical Great Dane! Yeah! He is completely atypical.
• 2:14:15
  Tess: He is a breeder's worst nightmare of a Great Dane. Like, anything that is the opposite of a show dog Great Dane, that is Scooby-Doo. It's… so I totally… that's completely understandable that there's some things about a property that are like, that's not for me. Like, I…
• 2:14:32
  Tess: I'm not the biggest fan of My Little Pony, but when I hear folks who love the show that are like, yeah, here's some behind-the-.
• 2:14:39
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, I actually have a lot of male autistic students who love…
• 2:14:46
  Tess: Yeah!
• 2:14:46
  Tad Eggleston: And I ha- I-.
• 2:14:47
  Tess: Yeah.
• 2:14:47
  Tad Eggleston: down the rabbit hole yet, but I have, and we've had guests on this show, at least four different My Little Pony… I mean, Alex DeCampi wrote My Little Pony, Tony Fleeks did My Little Pony, yeah!
• 2:15:01
  Tad Eggleston: I can't even remember all the other people that I've had that have done my Little Pony stuff, so it's like… and… and also, it was Tony Fleeks that told me, like,
• 2:15:11
  Tad Eggleston: I'm sorry, I feel really bad. Ted Anderson, who's part of the Milestone Book Club, so he's been on the show, like, 40 times, wrote My Little Pony.
• 2:15:23
  Tess: Yeah, and like, I tried getting into this series, it wasn't my cup of tea, but I love learning about it from people who love it, and it's like, wow, I need to revisit this at one point, because these people are giving me the Costco samples of some of the good stuff.
• 2:15:39
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 2:15:39
  Tess: Better.
• 2:15:40
  Tad Eggleston: Well, and what Tony Fleeks told us that just, like, really sunk in with me, he's like, what I'll absolutely tell you is that PonyCons.
• 2:15:49
  Tad Eggleston: are THE best.
• 2:15:52
  Tad Eggleston: To be a guest and table at.
• 2:15:54
  Tad Eggleston: they treat you like fucking royalty, they all know you. They all actually know your work. They're not just trying to get you to sign something so they can slab it and sell it, and they don't go, oh, not a big star, and keep walking, and…
• 2:16:11
  Tess: Oh!
• 2:16:12
  Tad Eggleston: keep… they ask you, what's your favorite beverage? And they bring you a cake, not wine.
• 2:16:17
  Tess: Oh, my God, that's so sweet! It reminds me of the furry community.
• 2:16:23
  Tess: I… again, I'm not a part of the community. There are great artists from that community, and a lot of people that I've met from that community are so kind and so creative, and their costumes are, like, Jim Henson Muppet-level stuff.
• 2:16:38
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, yeah! No, I know too. And this is… anytime that community comes up, I need to state something for the record for all of the people who only watch Fox News.
• 2:16:50
  Tad Eggleston: I have known many, many, many, many furries.
• 2:16:55
  Tad Eggleston: Of the furries I know, Most of them prefer cats.
• 2:17:01
  Tad Eggleston: First of all, they do not identify as cats, except when they're doing furry things. It's… it tends not to be, I am a cat all the time.
• 2:17:14
  Tad Eggleston: It's more of a fetish fandom type thing. And second, I have NEVER
• 2:17:23
  Tad Eggleston: EVER met a furry cat that had ANY interest in using a litter box.
• 2:17:31
  Tess: God, that rumor was atrocious! Oh my goodness. Well, particularly…
• 2:17:36
  Tad Eggleston: Given the number of people who didn't treat it as rumor.
• 2:17:40
  Tad Eggleston: And also didn't use basic logic. It was always…
• 2:17:45
  Tad Eggleston: Everybody who ever talked about it, oh, I… I have a friend who goes here, and they said that this happens. Nobody had ever actually seen it. But… but even when they were talking about it on TV, you know what they never had?
• 2:17:58
  Tad Eggleston: strange?
• 2:18:00
  Tess: The… The picture.
• 2:18:02
  Tad Eggleston: And are you telling me that a high school could have a litter box in the bathroom, and nobody's gonna take a picture of it in this day and age? Are you fucking crazy?
• 2:18:13
  Tess: Yes, yes, they are. I think you hit it on the head. They are actually crazy, because they… they rather rumors than.
• 2:18:19
  Tad Eggleston: No, I think that's being mean to crazy people.
• 2:18:22
  Tess: Oh, that's true, okay, I'm sorry. These people…
• 2:18:26
  Tad Eggleston: Cool, crazy people out there.
• 2:18:28
  Tad Eggleston: Dumb.
• 2:18:29
  Tad Eggleston: They're neurodifficult and dumb.
• 2:18:33
  Tess: You know what, I do love that term. I do love that term.
• 2:18:36
  Tad Eggleston: My wife gave it to me. Like I said, my wife now follows, like.
• 2:18:40
  Tad Eggleston: one of my wife's things is, like, when she… and this is one of the reasons she's probably somewhere on the spectrum herself, too. When she starts caring about something, not only does she do as much research as she can.
• 2:18:52
  Tad Eggleston: But she'll join, like, every face group.
• 2:18:55
  Tad Eggleston: book group that she can find that seems to, like, be appropriate. She'll try and, you know, follow every Instagram person she can find that seems to be… so this was, like, some autism mom that she follows on Instagram.
• 2:19:11
  Tess: Oh, God.
• 2:19:11
  Tad Eggleston: put up… put up my… my… I was driving my… my son to school this morning, and he asked me why neurodifficult people blank.
• 2:19:20
  Tad Eggleston: And… and I don't even remember what he asked, because that was just so perfect that that's what I'm using now.
• 2:19:27
  Tess: Yeah, no, I think that's per… I think that's a great differentiation.
• 2:19:31
  Tad Eggleston: So it came from some 6-year-old.
• 2:19:33
  Tad Eggleston: It's a 6-year-old autistic kid.
• 2:19:36
  Tess: He's got it! He gets it!
• 2:19:38
  Tad Eggleston: Actually, when we were talking about swear words earlier, I,
• 2:19:42
  Tad Eggleston: one of my coworkers, I guess her daughter, I think, would be, like, 11 now, but she was telling me about when she was 9,
• 2:19:51
  Tad Eggleston: She made her own curse word.
• 2:19:54
  Tad Eggleston: dictionary.
• 2:19:59
  Tad Eggleston: But the thing is, she didn't actually know what they meant meant.
• 2:20:03
  Tad Eggleston: So, so it was like, it was like, FUCK!
• 2:20:06
  Tad Eggleston: Something you say when you're angry.
• 2:20:11
  Tess: She knows the context, though! She may not have known what the actual word meant, but she got the context.
• 2:20:16
  Tad Eggleston: No, no, no, that's what it was. It was her… it was her entire contextual dictionary of all the spare words.
• 2:20:23
  Tess: You know what? I think that's a very good book! You know what?
• 2:20:26
  Tad Eggleston: It's amazing, it's amazing.
• 2:20:28
  Tess: Yes!
• 2:20:30
  Tess: And I think that's very important information to have. I may not know the Latin.
• 2:20:34
  Tad Eggleston: And that's why my coworker, who is a speech path and works with a lot of autistic kids, like, rather than being the parent that's like, oh, no, we don't do that, is like, hell yes, let me put it on the refrigerator.
• 2:20:52
  Tess: Because it's a work of art, and she knows it's a work of art.
• 2:20:58
  Tess: Oh my god.
• 2:20:58
  Tad Eggleston: She's also… she's… I mean, that's a kid that wound up…
• 2:21:04
  Tad Eggleston: By careful deliberation and choice in a special school.
• 2:21:08
  Tad Eggleston: That she's so happy to be in.
• 2:21:11
  Tad Eggleston: Because it controls…
• 2:21:14
  Tad Eggleston: for the things that are hard… I mean, and her big thing is she had, like, two really good friends, and she's like, well, will I get to… and her mom's like, well.
• 2:21:22
  Tad Eggleston: One of them lives right next door, so yes, and the other one will make certain that you still get to play with each other.
• 2:21:31
  Tad Eggleston: And it immediately became, then I want to try it, and, like, she'd been there a week before it was like, thank you, thank you, thank you.
• 2:21:38
  Tess: Oh.
• 2:21:39
  Tess: Because now I can learn…
• 2:21:41
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, because that's one of the special ed balancing acts, is, like, inclusion is great, and inclusion is actually really great
• 2:21:49
  Tad Eggleston: For the neurodifficult kids.
• 2:21:51
  Tad Eggleston: Because they're gonna have to be around autistic people all their lives, and they need to start learning how to be better for them.
• 2:21:58
  Tess: But…
• 2:21:59
  Tad Eggleston: It can also be… really hard.
• 2:22:04
  Tad Eggleston: It becomes a… I mean… It becomes a question of what's the important thing for them to be learning, which… which, actually, that was… this is one of two more things I'm going to do on the book, and then we need to get to, like, closing questions, because I do need to work at some point in the morning. Yes.
• 2:22:20
  Tess: Yes.
• 2:22:22
  Tad Eggleston: But I loved the part where you talked about your parents.
• 2:22:27
  Tad Eggleston: And not caring as much about the math and science as the…
• 2:22:33
  Tad Eggleston: building relationships, and finding your people, and whatnot. And specifically, the point that you pointed out, that, like.
• 2:22:42
  Tad Eggleston: Math's great, but if you can't relate to people, it won't get you a job.
• 2:22:48
  Tad Eggleston: That's another one. Which isn't always true. Sometimes if you're ridiculously good.
• 2:22:54
  Tad Eggleston: you know, I mean, I've known people who don't know they're autistic, who manage to get pretty good jobs because they're really good at things that you don't actually need social skills for, and they manage
• 2:23:08
  Tad Eggleston: There is something that should be pointed out here. They're all white males from…
• 2:23:14
  Tad Eggleston: At least moderately affluent.
• 2:23:17
  Tad Eggleston: to very affluent families. So, they had people with connections to go, hey, trust me, my kid's good at this.
• 2:23:28
  Tess: Aw, yeah.
• 2:23:29
  Tad Eggleston: am out.
• 2:23:30
  Tad Eggleston: But, so, like, it's, you know, for all of the parents that want to push the calculus for the kid that's good at calculus.
• 2:23:40
  Tad Eggleston: There are possibilities, but you're gonna have to do more work for them. And you know what? If they're that good at calculus, they can fail calculus in high school, and they'll still catch up and show the world that they're good at calculus.
• 2:23:54
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, how many of our tech bros dropped out of college?
• 2:24:00
  Tess: You know what, you're… I don't really… Way too many of them.
• 2:24:03
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, the answer is way too many of them.
• 2:24:05
  Tess: Oh, I gotcha.
• 2:24:07
  Tad Eggleston: And only half of them?
• 2:24:10
  Tad Eggleston: had as much parental support to get started as… like, like, as much as the tech bros have become horrible, horrible, horrible people, and the newest generation of them tends to be…
• 2:24:22
  Tad Eggleston: Truly horrible people that also are… are… are fail-sons.
• 2:24:27
  Tess: Like, if you…
• 2:24:28
  Tad Eggleston: go back to your original Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, that sort of thing, not only did they all… most of them drop out of college because it stopped being useful to them, and they weren't particularly good at college, they were good at building computers.
• 2:24:43
  Tad Eggleston: But… Less of them had as much parental support.
• 2:24:51
  Tad Eggleston: And, like, this is where I… Warren Buffett always says, yeah, no, I made most of my fortune, my parents weren't rich, but I was trading stocks in high school, and that's not something that most people can do.
• 2:25:05
  Tad Eggleston: My parents had enough money to give me money to trade stocks in high school.
• 2:25:10
  Tess: Yeah, well, no, it's really… it's really a balancing act as far as, like, the knowledge goes, because it's…
• 2:25:19
  Tess: Everyone's got gaps in their knowledge, and it is…
• 2:25:23
  Tess: some things our brains come in and take easier. And for some neurotypical folks, it's a lot of social stuff. And for a lot of neurodiverse people, it could be some social stuff, but it could be different topics, it could be special interests, it could be…
• 2:25:40
  Tess: Things that can help us later on with the job market, or not.
• 2:25:46
  Tess: But it's so good to have a good balance, and I feel like I was really lucky in the draw of my parents
• 2:25:54
  Tess: Realizing that the social skills
• 2:25:57
  Tess: Are gonna help me adapt to different spaces that are not gonna always accommodate for my needs.
• 2:26:06
  Tess: Versus… Having, a high-level math
• 2:26:11
  Tess: skill, which, again, my brain is not skilled at math as much as I would like it to be, so that would have been a very difficult path for me, personally. I'm pretty certain that if we spent time together, I'd wind up blaming your teachers for that, and I'd help you unlock it, but that's a whole different thing. Oh, I would love that.
• 2:26:28
  Tess: But, no, yeah, but, again, again, that…
• 2:26:34
  Tad Eggleston: We teach math really badly in this country, period, but we teach it particularly badly for people who might have the capacity to understand it rather than memorizing it.
• 2:26:45
  Tess: I… well, so my friend actually… so I had a hard time with gym and physical exercise for years because, again, gym teachers weren't really the best. A lot of, a lot of.
• 2:26:55
  Tad Eggleston: I can only imagine what… I mean, like, I hate to play the stereotype game, but I can only imagine what they must be like in Montana.
• 2:27:04
  Tess: Oh, I do remember a hiking trip where, and this was not the gym teacher, but this was the, this was a different teacher, and I was having a hard time, and she said, oh, let's play slave driver and slave! I'll be the slave driver, you'll be the slave!
• 2:27:19
  Tess: No! And I was like, this is the most horrible thing I could possibly.
• 2:27:23
  Tad Eggleston: Let's play I Don't Wanna Have a Job Tomorrow.
• 2:27:27
  Tess: If there's any…
• 2:27:29
  Tad Eggleston: Any justice in the world.
• 2:27:31
  Tess: Good God, I know, it was horrible. Even my friends were like, Tess, are you okay?
• 2:27:37
  Tess: So I hated hiking for a long time, but my friend in college
• 2:27:41
  Tess: she took winter courses in belly dancing, and she said, hey, Tess, do you want to take this with me? And I did, and I finally found a physical activity that I loved, which was dancing. And I did martial… I took martial arts classes because, you know, I watched a lot of cartoons with martial arts, and I'm like, well, I want to learn about that. I watched Avatar Last Airbender, and I…
• 2:28:00
  Tess: was like, hey, I want to get into some Aikido, I want to get into some stuff here.
• 2:28:04
  Tad Eggleston: I want to fly through the air.
• 2:28:06
  Tess: Yeah! Why can't I do that?
• 2:28:08
  Tad Eggleston: Doesn't work that way? Fuck.
• 2:28:10
  Tess: Why can't that be my autistic superpowers flying through the air? Come on!
• 2:28:15
  Tad Eggleston: I watched Hero yesterday.
• 2:28:19
  Tad Eggleston: And it's so stylistically wonderful, but I don't think that physics work that way.
• 2:28:26
  Tess: Darn it. But yeah, no, my friend… yeah, my friend got me into dancing in… or physical activity in a fun and different way, so I totally agree that math could have been a much better subject for me if it was taken into a different angle. So, yeah. What were some of your other questions?
• 2:28:43
  Tad Eggleston: No, I had one more thing about the book, and then I was gonna transition to my traditional closing questions. And this is… this is mostly a comment that is just, you did something really, really…
• 2:28:56
  Tad Eggleston: really well, that immediately made me think of my wife, and it's the page where you have the rabbits and bunnies, leads to fairy tales, leads to literature, leads to soft fabrics, leads to the history of textiles.
• 2:29:12
  Tess: Leads to watercolor art, leads to the creation of paint pigments. My wife is an art teacher.
• 2:29:17
  Tad Eggleston: Who knows everything about color, and everything about art history, and, like, this is definitely the way… the way her brain has taken her to certain things is, like…
• 2:29:28
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, I love that, you know, it starts with the really broad, you know, even when I showed her this, she's like, I do like buddies!
• 2:29:39
  Tess: That's fantastic!
• 2:29:42
  Tad Eggleston: But, like, the creation of paint pigments immediately made me think of her, but then the web in general is like, yep, okay, totally get that. For that matter, everybody thinks I'm into politics, and it's not that I'm into politics, it's that…
• 2:29:56
  Tad Eggleston: I'm into figuring everything out, and like, when the world…
• 2:30:00
  Tad Eggleston: stop working the way I thought it was supposed to work.
• 2:30:03
  Tad Eggleston: Which, you know… Was much longer ago than… than most people.
• 2:30:10
  Tad Eggleston: Like, I started paying attention to the world wasn't working the way that they were teaching me in school, that it was supposed to work.
• 2:30:17
  Tad Eggleston: About the time that you were born.
• 2:30:21
  Tad Eggleston: so I've been having hyperfixations on things like government systems, or…
• 2:30:25
  Tad Eggleston: Or what does this department do? Or what does that department do? Or…
• 2:30:30
  Tad Eggleston: what does this mean in the Constitution? How is the law written? You know…
• 2:30:35
  Tad Eggleston: so everybody thinks I'm political, when it's like, I don't give a damn about the politics of it, except that, like, I do give a damn about the…
• 2:30:44
  Tad Eggleston: governing of it, and, like, when this person says they want to do that, I'm sitting there going, you understand that even if you let them do the thing they're saying they want to do, it would be bad!
• 2:30:56
  Tess: Yeah, it's your webbing, it's the interest webbing. It bleeds out into other subjects that you gotta deep dive into. That's how my brain works with a lot of stuff, too. How much, how much mythology did I get into after watching Inuyasha and Avatar and Hellboy? Like, I don't know.
• 2:31:12
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 2:31:12
  Tess: Every day for that.
• 2:31:14
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, yeah.
• 2:31:14
  Tess: But…
• 2:31:15
  Tad Eggleston: And honestly, I want to say it probably, like, where it really came out of is I discovered the Negro Leagues, so the baseball fixation.
• 2:31:24
  Tess: Oh, I remember that!
• 2:31:27
  Tad Eggleston: And I discovered…
• 2:31:33
  Tad Eggleston: like… Kerouac, and Selinger, and… Langston Hughes, and enough people who had really dealt with adversity…
• 2:31:48
  Tad Eggleston: That it started really hitting on that level.
• 2:31:52
  Tad Eggleston: And this was the era where, like, both the Republicans and the Democrats were talking about super predators. You know, Clinton did some great things, but he also…
• 2:32:02
  Tad Eggleston: Signed the crime bill that, like, institutionalized racist punishments.
• 2:32:09
  Tess: Oh, God.
• 2:32:12
  Tad Eggleston: Y-you know, cause, like… An ounce of cocaine has a mandatory minimum of, like, a year, right?
• 2:32:19
  Tess: Oh.
• 2:32:21
  Tad Eggleston: An ounce of crack, which, by the way, an ounce of cocaine can be made… used to make, like, 100 ounces of crack.
• 2:32:29
  Tad Eggleston: But… but an ounce of crack was, like, 3 years mandatory minimum.
• 2:32:36
  Tad Eggleston: People use cocaine, poor black people use crack.
• 2:32:40
  Tad Eggleston: Well, no, a month.
• 2:32:41
  Tess: I know we use meth, okay? Well, yeah, well, my wife's from South Dakota.
• 2:32:46
  Tad Eggleston: They're on it.
• 2:32:48
  Tess: So, I just want to get… I'm so sorry, my phone is dying, so…
• 2:32:53
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, okay. Then we'll go straight to… we'll go straight to the last question, then. Okay. Well, no, the last two. Okay. Because you've been at Comics long enough that I need to ask you this one.
• 2:33:06
  Tad Eggleston: in, like, the 5 years that I have been doing this podcast, I feel like my life has entered the Twilight Zone. I get to have conversations and experiences
• 2:33:17
  Tad Eggleston: on, like, a weekly basis, that if you'd told me that I was going to have them
• 2:33:22
  Tad Eggleston: 10 years ago, I would have said, yeah, fuck you.
• 2:33:25
  Tess: Jeez.
• 2:33:26
  Tad Eggleston: You're out of your mind.
• 2:33:27
  Tess: Right?
• 2:33:28
  Tad Eggleston: I'm gonna text with who during the World Series?
• 2:33:31
  Tess: Oh my god.
• 2:33:33
  Tad Eggleston: But more and more, I find that everybody in comics has these surreal experiences, these ways that their life has changed, and just ways that their 10-year-old, 20-year-old self would just go, are you out of your mind?
• 2:33:47
  Tess: Yeah, yeah.
• 2:33:48
  Tad Eggleston: So I like to, I like to ask people to share one.
• 2:33:51
  Tess: it was actually starting my own studio, because as a kid, I thought, oh, I'm gonna work for an animation studio, I'm gonna work for a comic book studio.
• 2:33:59
  Tess: And I thought that having my own studio was sort of this very impossible thing, and now that I'm, like, I have my own self-publishing studio, little tiny me would be like, no. No, you don't!
• 2:34:13
  Tad Eggleston: Right?
• 2:34:13
  Tess: That's impossible, but I do! I've got my own mascot, I've got my own lines of work, I'm collaborating with other self-publishers, it's amazing!
• 2:34:22
  Tess: It's just been absolutely incredible, so that's the thing that's blown my mind.
• 2:34:26
  Tad Eggleston: No, I love it. I love it. And then, this has been my favorite question to ask for forever. Tell me something you love.
• 2:34:36
  Tad Eggleston: Preferably a comic, but we don't have rules. Preferably storytelling, but we don't have rules. But something that you love, that not enough people around you have experienced.
• 2:34:47
  Tad Eggleston: And you need them to, so you have more people to talk about it with.
• 2:34:52
  Tess: Three.
• 2:34:53
  Tess: Bone by Jeff Smith. Not enough people have read Bone by Jeff Smith. ElfQuest by Wendy Panini. Panini? Panini? Elfquest. Such a good comic book series. And then the Battle Angel Alita manga. Not enough people talk about the manga. It is so well done, and so action-oriented, and so good with body horror. So those are the three comic books where I'm like, please!
• 2:35:16
  Tess: Please read this. I want someone else to get, say, stupid, stupid rat creatures. Please, I want this joke to continue.
• 2:35:25
  Tad Eggleston: My rat creature is downstairs, otherwise I'd pull him on screen.
• 2:35:31
  Tad Eggleston: Oh.
• 2:35:33
  Tess: Oh, you're a little rat creature. These ones are way bigger.
• 2:35:39
  Tad Eggleston: No, no, I, I have, I have the, the…
• 2:35:42
  Tad Eggleston: I have phony, smiley, and, and, and phone bone.
• 2:35:49
  Tad Eggleston: And, and… Bartleby.
• 2:35:52
  Tad Eggleston: Stuffed ones.
• 2:35:53
  Tess: Yes! Oh, part of me, yes!
• 2:35:56
  Tess: Yes! Oh!
• 2:36:00
  Tad Eggleston: No, actually, no, do you know the Billy Ireland Museum?
• 2:36:05
  Tess: No, I do not know the billiards.
• 2:36:07
  Tad Eggleston: At Ohio State.
• 2:36:08
  Tad Eggleston: Billy Ireland Cartoon Art Museum at Ohio State is the largest repository of original comic art.
• 2:36:14
  Tad Eggleston: Possibly in the world, definitely in the nation.
• 2:36:17
  Tad Eggleston: after he was on the show for the first time.
• 2:36:24
  Tad Eggleston: Jeff and Caitlin McGurk, who is the curator of comics and cartoons at
• 2:36:31
  Tad Eggleston: The Billy Ireland took me on a personal backroom tour.
• 2:36:37
  Tad Eggleston: So, so I, I got to look at original comic art.
• 2:36:41
  Tad Eggleston: through the ages that was picked out for me by Caitlin McGurk and Jeff Smith.
• 2:36:49
  Tess: God, that's so cool!
• 2:36:51
  Tad Eggleston: Which is why you need to, you need to apply to table at…
• 2:36:58
  Tad Eggleston: Cartoon Crossroads Columbus. Every year. Just do it. Every year. Get yourself a table. Meet Jeff Smith.
• 2:37:05
  Tad Eggleston: It's his con. He's always around.
• 2:37:09
  Tess: Please email me the name of that con. You need to email me that con.
• 2:37:13
  Tad Eggleston: We should just stay in touch. We'll stay in touch.
• 2:37:15
  Tess: Yes, let's do that.
• 2:37:17
  Tad Eggleston: go out there every year, which is why I'll say, if you table or not, if you come out, I'll introduce you to Chef Smith.
• 2:37:26
  Tess: Oh my god!
• 2:37:28
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, he'.
• 2:37:28
  Tess: He's not…
• 2:37:29
  Tad Eggleston: quite at the point where I can call him one of my friends, but he's… we're very friendly.
• 2:37:37
  Tess: Yes. He recognizes me, and he's been on the show multiple times.
• 2:37:42
  Tad Eggleston: I can be your Jeff Smith hookup, and I've met Wendy, I haven't had her on the show yet. I did trade contact information with her at C2E2 last year.
• 2:37:51
  Tess: What a.
• 2:37:52
  Tad Eggleston: I haven't read enough ElfQuest, I need to read more, and I haven't read any Battle Angel Alita, though it is on my radar.
• 2:38:03
  Tad Eggleston: So stick around for a minute.
• 2:38:05
  Tad Eggleston: Particularly because you're starting.
• 2:38:06
  Tess: Actually, the action sequences are… Jeff's kiss.
• 2:38:10
  Tess: Oh, yeah, I'm sorry.
• 2:38:11
  Tad Eggleston: I know it'.
• 2:38:12
  Tess: Thank you so very much. Hold on just a second.
• 2:38:14
  Tad Eggleston: Let me… let me take us out, and then stick around with me for a minute, or until you go out. For Tess…
• 2:38:20
  Tad Eggleston: Tess Langston, this has been 22 Panels. We will see you after the next page.