Dave Plummer

I mean, I had to be around a long time and kind of grow on people because I had no game, because I had no ability to do the social dances that that whole thing requires.

So my only option is to just be myself, and that works for some people.

Yeah.

I mean, her family was way more open with that kind of thing than mine was.

And so it was a growing period for me.

Well, now we do a lot of affirmation and checking.

Like, in the last couple of years, we do a thing where she'll just be like, you good?

I'm like, yeah.

And there's two steps to that.

There's the, are you good?

And then there's my response.

Because if I'm like, yeah.

She knows something's up.

Yeah.

And so there's always this pinging back and forth because there's not the ability to read people just from looking at them to know what's going on.

So we have this explicit check mechanism, I think, where we've developed that.

Yeah, I think a lot of people, maybe 10% to 20% of the population, is somewhere on the autism spectrum, but isn't impacted by it enough that it rises to the level of a disorder.

But they still have many of the characteristics that arise from autism.

And I think if they can understand and identify and manage some of those behaviors in an optimal way, they can both leverage them to take advantage of some of the skills and mediate some of the deficits and problems that come with it.

And I wrote it mostly for my kids because none of them, as far as I know, have ASD, but they've all got certain aspects of my behavior that are particularly related to it.