Ramblin' & Amblin' (2026-10-22): This message comes approved by somebody, the only

So this message comes approved by somebody, the only person that really his opinion matters and that is my wife and An eta and talking about this openly like I have talked about the ADHD thing which EEGs on the head and multiple diagn oses but I've not been formally I haven't gone to a doctor and been like here's bo op you've got autism what I have is a lifetime of evidence and uh enough people who were in the know who always wanted to seem to have a conversation are you what you ever been checked for autism uh have you ever done the check uh I've done a few online assessments and and I always figured out just biasing towards yes but I was always thinking that I was kind of uh uh consciously leading it or it was you know whatever excuse I would come up with it wasn't the case but um um there's also enough people would say things like okay Mike um okay Mike um we know how particular you are about terminology uh and using the uh correct words uh and I feel like it's engineering can we just not just agree on words and uh it's more of uh um I I always strove not to be too pedantic um but uh rigid though and uh is is where it really was it was the rigidity um and uh yeah so just uh watching my old videos listening to even these videos as you're hearing them what I think I sound like is very much not what I sound like um and uh uh what I think our expressions are not always is uh um clear as I'd like them to be now it's uh it's now a balance with um that exact thing about the um the tests is and why I cared about masks and in in conversations and why I even did eutastic to begin with was um to find a way to connect with people that I just had to construct and uh it's been a limiting factor in my life um you know my own personal dysfunctions other people not understanding me disconnects because of of a gap um and then me not understanding other people and that you know I'm not saying oh every other person was just great and I was just being you know no sometimes people did suck and they were being jerks um but I didn't know how to deal with it so sometimes you know when you don't know what to do you get louder and I'm already prone to being a loud person this is well known fact in my family then just loud um I would go in the truck with my dad had to be loud talk to uh um somebody on the warehouse or in the dock or when I was in the army you gotta sound off gotta be heard speak you know from your diaphragm um so I always tried to and I'm not a big guy you know I'm I'm you know five probably five or seven at this point but uh um so you know habits probably are so deeply embedded that um you know they maybe even change my physique that I'm naturally going to be louder um you know and uh people that uh I would work with in a more professional environment that maybe came from more soft spoken um environments or through more traditional education where um conflict was um handled differently um and uh just recognizing that uh it isn't so simple as just say oh it was autism or oh it was ADHD it's a combination of things but um years and years of of dealing with this and looking back and especially now having to re-watch videos that I'm finding myself from little uh presentations like this um where I'm I can tell I'm just so uncomfortable because I have like and I'm just like speaking to nothing uh I'm looking at a camera and I'm talking into a camera and trying to visualize people on the other side and it's so hard um that's why I even like doing these videos this is incredibly hard at least you know like out here um I guess I understand why people do these videos outside but um I can just hear it's why I had a freaking tuba waltz is the I know I'm corny but like I was just saying okay I need to put together something this sounds fun all right and then I you know and then people said I can't even listen to the interviews because of the damn tuba in the beginning but it was too late that ship had already sailed but I wasn't gonna be able to redo it and I wasn't really sure what it should have been and what would have been better I've always hid behind the dirty work I even got into technology because this is even before the dot com before boot camps before any of this stuff I mean I was on a TRS-80 called a computer three DOS learning the operating systems just it's like as soon as they came out I was at Best Buy picking up a new version of MS-DOS 5 MS-DOS 6 what was it 6-2 I don't remember where it ended Windows Windows 3-1 Windows 3-1 for work groups Windows 95 Linux came out I got Red Hat and I started to learn that this was all pre-2000 the computer lab was my favorite place in the world why because it was quiet there was the teachers were smarter not but you know even I show my bias there I yeah I think I show my bias there as a foundational thing is that for me being around the computers tended to be more sophisticated people that I felt comfortable around you know the high school teacher who's the basketball coach and the you know the gym teacher who you know was sorry I don't want to walk over other people the social connections were not something that my family was tapped into or that I even knew how to navigate so technology was a place for people who were a little different a little like you know I fancy myself a nerd at the time so I liked computers because well they were the realm of the nerds they were in Star Trek they were in Star Wars they were all the shows that I loved sci-fi that's they were all had computers in them and I wanted to be around computers I didn't understand them really but I didn't understand people either but the computers I could sit down and reason through and get to success people on the other hand not so much so maybe that's why you know I was I have a different connection to the industry not that I'm some super programmer out here who did a bunch of cool stuff and I'm the most amazing language creator there's people that make me look like you know I'm standing still on their worst days and my best days but I've also said to people that I would rather be the worst skater on the ramp than not be on the ramp at all or that's it's a lot like being a musician who just doesn't quite break into you know the big time and you gotta be a working musician taking gigs where you can because you wanna just be making music and it's even that when I was first approached by somebody to mentor me into being a programmer they told me how much I could make and I was like yeah I can teach programming I'm like okay sure yeah I'm thinking this is you know impossible and he's like yeah absolutely you can do it and he was right but he said oh you can make over $150,000 a year this was in 2000 I said get the f*** out of here get the f*** do what getting the program oh my god that's the greatest thing ever like so I've had a number that you know in my head but for a long time that was like this pinnacle idea but now we know you know economy is what it is that isn't what it once was is a aspirational number but that's the funny thing about numbers is that they're fixed but everything else goes up and down mostly up the thing though was it wasn't about the money for me to begin with but at the same time I knew I needed to fund it so I worked and I got work to get experience and and that was fine when it was all engineers mostly that I was working with I was young and I was learning everything but later things had changed now I'm a senior person and all those skills that I learned how to collaborate with people and working truck warehouse military previous generation and that the culture instead of technology changed in the mid to late 2010s and I attribute this to the rise of the boot camps bringing in again this isn't a blast this is just people who were in it for the money or they were in it because it was now an opportunity and I'm sure there was a lot of people that came in because of love of the game I've worked with and mentored a few but the thing was that wasn't the majority of the tide and it was a culture shift and the rise of FAANG methodologies and mindset and what I call the tech bro culture because he coincided with that and that meant for guys like myself and I'm not the only one I've seen others who were kind of like if not the old guard at least trained by the old guard the tools no longer having the desired outcome so I attributed a lot of that to my own personal anxiety over that and frustration to my own personal shortcomings and I didn't understand my own foundational reasons for getting into this field and even coloring some of my opinions about AI is that 15 minutes I'm going to wrap it up here in a sec is that I got into this because I was into technology because I knew how much my future would have depended upon people skills to survive and take my dad's business forward into the future because he didn't have people skills either and so I knew we were kind of boned because every time he did work with somebody with people's skills they inevitably stole his work and all the money and he was left just with scraps and he was bitter for it so I wanted to stay away from that have I ended up in the same situation yeah yeah I have yeah yeah yeah I have you know it's awareness that there was this like period between the early 2000s and mid 2010s where there was just a flip and engineering people were pushed out and they were replaced with people with more people skills why I have my guesses but all of this is it's just to underline how confusing all of this has been where I'm looking at my own recognition of my own neurodivergence is actually being the thing that was the instigating factor for me to even pursue this field and now I have taken some steps to document it and in retrospect I can look back and be like oh yep yep that's true but also that these things actually happened and it wasn't just that I was neurodivergent seeing this or I was misremembering because my own grievances over the way things have changed no I can I can balance those better now and I can listen to myself and I can hear my own voice and recognize that yeah I I'm sure I came across strange to a lot of people but um I really meant what I was doing to the best of my ability so anyway coming up in 20 minutes yeah I'm ADHD and autistic two things can be true at the same time it is not trendy it is not because it's cool it is just my live reality so thank you very much all right Thanks. Bye.