So before we get into all the fancy science stuff, will you start with your personal story or how you kind of got into the autism field?

Well, I think the personal story is everything.

And so, you know, I never even thought I would be doing this five years ago.

But, you know, my bio kind of reads, grew up in Florida, went to Davidson College, majored in chemistry, ended up at Duke University Medical School, graduated from Duke, went to University of California, San Francisco for general surgery, University of Miami for plastic and reconstructive surgery, into the United States Navy where I was a plastic and reconstructive and general surgeon, and then plastic surgery is what I did.

My life changed significantly when my youngest son was born.

His name is Marston.

That's why the book's called Educating Marston because it's everything we did to help Marston.

So what were the things you were concerned about, what you were seeing him as a child and a teenager that you were wondering could impact his quality of life and independence?

And how did you, where did you feel like you lived?

Yeah, it's kind of hilarious that, um, you know, working at...

I worked in sort of big enterprise architecture and software and everything.

Um, and, you know, my enterprise, uh, company as well as clients, as a, as a consultant and a coach, they're always asking me, you know, "How do we be more like a startup? Help us be more innovative and agile and all that." Uh, and then working with the startups, it's all about, you know, how do we scale? How...

Can you bring that sort of big company, uh, rigor and, and expertise to, um, you know, to help us scale up our startup? So yeah, absolutely.

It, it's, uh, you know, two sides of the same coin.

Um, but, you know, so my, my work at Raytheon, I worked on these integrated defense systems, so the, all the systems on, on these aircraft carriers that were integrating all of their, their sensors and communications and weapons systems and all that.

... where- what's the opportunity here to actually, like, have design and startups thinking alike and doing more together in each other's ecosystem?

remember first visiting a zumbach in manhattan i mean that was a shock and a half you know never having experienced that in new york city right and all those different levels like you're in a parking garage or something and

yeah no exactly and those dealers couldn't offer like an oil change special or something because it was cheaper for somebody to come in and have their oil changed every day than the parking garage But a funny story when I talk about Woodstock, Vermont, we had one of my field reps, Ed Terrell.

He was a New Haven city person.

And when I first took over the regional manager's job, he was up in New Hampshire and Vermont, and he visited the dealer in Woodstock.

And his name was Dale Johnson.

He was actually the volunteer fire department chief there.

And an aside on that, too, is that Michael J.

are you