Burgers with Bill Gates - Secrets of the Autistic Millionaire - E01

hey i'm dave welcome to my shop today in dave's garage something completely different today i'm going to do a reading of the first story in my new book secrets of the autistic millionaire my plan is to then spin all of the asd related content off into its own new channel called the autistic millionaire on this channel dave's garage right after this one and done example my plan is to return immediately to shop topics like compilers and computers and leds i'll continue the reading of the book entirely on the other channel so it's important that if you want to continue that story that you click the link in the video description to head over to the autistic millionaire channel so that you can subscribe to that new channel that's the only way you'll get the following episodes chapter 1 introduction welcome to autism burgers with bill gates the first time i met bill was almost 30 years ago in his backyard a pair of burly security guards dressed in two tight purple microsoft polo shirts politely escorted me through his home on the west side of lake washington it was a match into my midwestern eyes though only a fraction the size of the more famous home he would later build sprawling across the hillsides of the lake's eastern shore windows 95 was still in the future and i was at microsoft working on the older operating system known as ms-dos i was just a temporary intern not even a full-time blue badge employee yet but back in those days microsoft was small enough to allow bill to invite the top college prospects over for a backyard barbecue out on the lawn with a micro brew in hand we all clustered around him hoping to catch his interest in conversation each of us had no doubt prepared something clever to say just in case the opportunity presented itself perhaps an insight about or criticism of a microsoft product so perceptive or biting that he'd recognize our innate genius amongst the crowd and pluck us like a gem from the front lines that was the daydream the starker reality was that after our burger and beer we'd be hurried out the front door and back to headquarters in redmond to work another of our 16-hour days competing directly against one another for the top spots everyone came from the best schools mit and princeton in the united states waterloo and canada with over 100 000 job applications coming into microsoft every year at the time just being one of those 30 was an incredibly big deal especially if you were from the university of regina like i was that's in saskatchewan if that helps any but either way i was only really at microsoft by virtue of having put myself through college on the proceeds from writing software for a competing computer platform my program hypercash had already sold a few thousand copies before it popped up on microsoft's radar my task now was to write something like it for their ms-dos releasing it for a hundred million pcs instead of just a few thousand if that went well there was a good chance of a full-time spot upon graduation complete with their famously lucrative microsoft stock options failing that i could always go back to my old job of 7-eleven and so you can see why i wanted to make a good first impression we gathered in concentric circles around bill as the setting sun glistened off the lake behind us few dared probe toward the center where bill himself stood alone but i had an advantage with ben my manager he knew bill and seemed completely unfazed by fame or fortune ben pulled me straight through the gauntlet of would-be nerds and presented me directly to bill as if i were a prized protege he told him this is dave our intern from canada in the space of four months and his voice trailed off to list the very real technical accomplishments that i had worked so hard to complete that summer i listened in earnestness at first but soon became highly distracted with one very real problem it hadn't technically been four months as ben had said it had only taken three not four it was a small thing but an important detail i was sure they'd want to know i cleared my throat and spoke up and interrupted them with a correction three months surprised they both stopped turned and looked at me my heart sank once again as always i had spoken out of turn somehow saying just the wrong thing at precisely the wrong time that much was obvious and that was three decades ago and yet i just found out last week that i have autism i wrote this part raw in the aftermath of that diagnosis to capture my early thoughts about it ben and i had long since moved on from microsoft and i had not seen him in several years at some point along the way he had been surprised by diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder for his own daughter and apparently after better understanding the symptoms and seeing them in the context of his own family one of his early thoughts was dave should get himself tested soon after he took me for lunch and told me about his daughter's diagnosis and without really being specific as to why he encouraged me to investigate being tested for autism myself i wasn't really bothered by the idea but i was a bit confused as to what would lead him to think so i went home and took the autism spectrum quotient test online and of a possible 50 points i scored 40. clearly i thought i must be answering the questions with personal bias so i had my wife of 25 years sit down and make sure i was being accurate and honest i already took the test with her to be sure that i did not exaggerate my square went up 42. for years i had joked that i'm not on the autism spectrum but you can see it from here i later upgraded that too i might be on the spectrum but i'm on the no invisible portion still i didn't really consider it possible i'm empathetic sensitive emotional funny all things that i thought would preclude me from being anywhere on the autism spectrum i booked the necessary appointments and over the course of a few weeks completed all the testing i would have done better on the sat and math sections with a little advanced practice but going in cold as an adult was also interesting in its own right it sure had been a long time since i'd done much long division preparing the full report took a few weeks and my wife accompanied me to receive the results the good news apparently i'm reasonably clever as in three standard deviations smart on some portions of the cognitive testing i even achieved perfection something they'd apparently never seen before but i was also slow i got the right answer but i took my own sweet time to get it each test runs to completion without you knowing the time limit but they watch and record where you are at when the set time load expired i scored an estimated 1550 of 1600 on the sat but only if time wasn't considered had i been cut off at the official time limit i would have only scored 11.50 a fairly average score the reason apparently i have serious attention deficit disorder oh and as noted it also turns out that i have autism more accurately i was officially diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder as the doctor my wife and i flipped through the pages of the reports in unison terms like significant social dysfunction stared back at me when we finally got to the autism specific behavior section my wife was pleased to know well at least the numbers are good here far above average but then the doctor corrected her and no no higher is worse i used to be gifted and now i had a diagnosis and it had a better and worse that's about all i felt in those initial minutes not everyone appreciates popular media portrayals of autism but we'll leave that aside for now to make use of two such examples as handy measuring devices if i were forced to use a pop reference as perhaps the least accurate but most communicative way to express the amount of autism that i am affected by i would say i have eighty percent as much as sheldon cooper on the big bang theory at current exchange rates i'd estimate that makes me about 25 as autistic as the title character in the movie rain man as you can guess these are not professional metrics they're numbers pulled from the air by a layman from the actual test report i can see that i'm more autistic than roughly 98.5 percent of the general population while that might sound quite autistic i'm still fairly high functioning i don't use those terms a lot however i'm also highly impacted in many ways which is what makes my balance point interesting i believe in short i'm far enough into it to deeply understand the autism thought process that is normally inaccessible to neurotypical people yet still conversant enough to explain back to everyone what they are missing and even how this condition can be of use in their own lives at times hopefully i can explain it to you unfortunately as with many people on the spectrum my brain is complicated in other ways as well as noted earlier i have significant detention deficit disorder and my mother says she would add hyperactivity to the list but i was never tested as a youth i also to my great regret smoke cigarettes for 30 years and believe it was that stimulant that allowed me to manage my dopamine and stay focused for most of my adult life this probably explains why the add only really came to light when i quit smoking or while sitting without them for long exams depositions and so on on top of this i've also suffered from anxiety which can be known to lead the bouts of depression if not well-managed or could it be that these are all just aspects of my autism mischaracterized as unrelated anxiety and mood disorders for decades these were among the questions i would attempt to answer for myself learning these things about myself didn't happen all at once in fact it's been a process of discovery over the course of more than 25 years treating problems and issues whenever and wherever they arose without systematically looking for a deeper connection between them that i did not eventually diagnose my own autism surprises me i don't feel bad for missing it however given that for decades more qualified educators and professionals also overlooked the same symptoms to be honest however i cannot blame them either over the years i've become a master at masking or the art of acting normal which makes a diagnosis without specific testing even more difficult girls are reportedly even better at such masking going undiagnosed even more often as a result the good news is that this odd mix of brain disorder and ability has not caused my life to descend entirely into chaos in fact quite the contrary although it has been a wild ride at times for both myself and those around me this exotic brand of mine has served me incredibly well if you will briefly indulge some self-congratulatory details i graduated at the top of my university with an engineering degree although years late in starting it because i had dropped out of high school i've made multiple fortunes many different ways and i have invented designed and engineered products used daily by billions of humans around the globe i've been issued half a dozen patents and started my own company in my own den that went on to achieve over 100 million dollars in sales i married my beautiful soul mate raised four happy and successful children and much more and yet for all this self-indulgent list of success privilege and grace i still struggle with simple things like eye contact and conversation flow and relationships and anger and anxiety and meltdowns and a dozen other things that we shall soon turn to look at it is only now in retrospect that i can look back and see specifically where certain aspects of my autism impacted me for better and for worse and it is here that i tell those stories if i am successful it will be because i not only explain and entertain but i will have done so in a way that empowers you to apply some of those lessons learned to your own life whether you are personally affected by autism or not because to be clear life with some autism can be spectacular now if you want to continue the story you're going to have to take one manual step and that is to click on the link in the video description to head over to the autistic millionaire channel and subscribe there for future installments i also recommend you turn on personal recommendations so you don't miss those episodes as subscribing doesn't really mean much anymore of course if you like the story so far please consider picking up a copy of the paperback or ebook by checking out the amazon links in the description thanks for joining me out here in the shop today in the meantime in between time hope to see you next time right here in dave's garage over the years i've become a master at masking the active that's pretty ironic

Channel: Dave's Garage

Views: 56,900

Keywords:

Id: TFjj9649Feo

Length: 12min 10sec (730 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 03 2021