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THE SJ CHILDS SHOW-Advocating for Autistics, One Story at a Time
🎙️ Welcome to The SJ Childs Show Podcast! 🎉
Join Sara Bradford—better known as SJ Childs—as she bridges understanding and advocacy for the neurodivergent community. This podcast shines a light on autism awareness, empowering stories, expert insights, and practical resources for parents, educators, and individuals alike.
Brought to you by The SJ Childs Global Network, a nonprofit dedicated to supporting autistic individuals and their families worldwide, this show is your weekly dose of inspiration and actionable ideas. Visit sjchilds.org to learn more about our mission, find resources, and connect with our growing community.
Catch us on platforms like Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and Goodpods—or tune in Fridays at 8:30 AM EDT on the Helium Radio Network’s Life Improvement Radio (Channel 1). Together, let’s foster a brighter, more inclusive world! 🌟
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THE SJ CHILDS SHOW-Advocating for Autistics, One Story at a Time
SEASON 13-Episode 300-Transforming Autism Advocacy: Journey Through Entertainment and Employment-with Judi Uttal and Marlene Sharp
Discover the inspiring journeys of Marlene and Judi, two extraordinary advocates reshaping the autism community. Judi, the mastermind behind Autism and Entertainment and leader of the Orange County Asperger Support Group, reflects on her dual role as a mother and high-tech marketing professional. Marlene, with her rich experience in animation as a producer and writer, shares her vision for bridging education with the entertainment industry through her work with the Center for Learning Unlimited. Together, they reveal the story behind their innovative autism and entertainment conference that has become a cornerstone for community and connection.
Experience the magic as we recount the triumphs of the autism conference, initially conceived during a casual meeting in May 2022 and growing into an unexpected success with over 400 attendees. This vibrant gathering, graced by speakers like Jorge Gutierrez, was more than just an event; it was a celebration of belonging, healing, and joyful reunions. Marlene and Judi’s pioneering efforts underscore the transformative power of networking, as the conference sparked organic partnerships and lifelong friendships, providing a platform for hope and collaboration within the entertainment industry.
Embrace the future of autism advocacy and employment as we explore innovative strategies for personal and professional growth. Exciting initiatives, such as incorporating Toastmasters programs, are enhancing communication skills and empowering individuals on the spectrum to overcome employment challenges. By addressing concerns like the fear of losing benefits, these efforts are paving the way for a more inclusive workforce. Through the spirit of collaboration and community building, this episode invites listeners to participate in a movement where success is shared, and everyone thrives together.
• Importance of community support and networking
• Personal journeys advocating for autism in entertainment
• Statistics on unemployment in the autistic community and the need for change
• Themes of empowerment and the "superpowers" of autistic individuals
• Successful outcomes from the Autism and Entertainment Conference
• Addressing fears surrounding failure as part of personal and professional growth
• Future projects and continued advocacy for autistic individuals
• Insight into Social Security challenges faced by autistic adults
The SJ Child Show is Backford's 13th season. Join Sarah Bradford and the SJ Child Show team as they explore the world of autism and share stories of hope and inspiration. This season we're excited to bring you more autism summits featuring experts and advocates from around the world. Go to sjchildsorg to donate and to get more information. Congratulations on 2024's 20,000 downloads and 300 episodes. Hi and welcome to the SJ Childs show today.
Speaker 1:I'm so honored to be meeting with Marlene and Judy and they are coming from the same area but we're going to be talking a little bit about some projects that they both work on or they may be working on separately and really just kind of uncover why they are amazing, wonderful guests today. So, without further ado, let's have an introduction. I have met with Marlene and we've been able to talk and get to know one another. This is my first time getting to know Judy and I'm really honored to spend this time in this space with them to really uncover the services that they're providing in the autism community and just really for the community when they're providing in the autism community and just really for the community when we look at it in general. So, yeah, let's start with that. Marlene, please give us an introduction and let us know a little bit about yourself.
Speaker 2:Well, I'm going to start out by introducing Judy, because without Judy I wouldn't be here. So Judy is the founder of Autism and Entertainment and she's also the president of Orange County Asperger Support Group, and I am privileged to work with Judy on both of those endeavors. And I live in Los Angeles, judy's in Orange County, so we're neighbors by about 50 to 75 miles of a buffer in between. But we work on a lot of projects together and I'll turn it over to Judy to give more color and history to our collaboration, more color and history to our collaboration.
Speaker 3:Wonderful. Okay, marlene, you got to introduce yourself as well, so I guess what Marlene brought up is that I run Orange County Asperger's support group and autism in entertainment and autism in entertainment. Just a little personal background is I'm the mother of a 33-year-old son with high-functioning autism, which is where my focus in this community comes from, and my background is I have had a career as an executive in high-tech marketing and educational background from UCLA in computer science and Carnegie Mellon in business administration, and I think that gives me the skill set that enables me to get things done, which I think has been critical in helping the community in Southern California move forward on a lot of different fronts related to the challenges that families have as they try and improve their quality of life when dealing with some of the challenges of autism.
Speaker 1:I love that. Thank you so much for your work and for being here and for bringing Marlene along on this journey with us. Yeah, it's, it's incredible, and the friends and community that I have found in interviewing and working with so many people throughout the spectrums related opportunities, if you will has just really showed me the closeness that we all can find in one another, with our community, and that's why we love to do shows like this to highlight all of the opportunities and services that are out there. The resources so we have some really great resources and things to talk about today for sure. So, marlene, now we get to get your little introduction, or big introduction.
Speaker 2:Okay, well, I am a producer, writer, creative executive who's relatively new to autism. As a cause and part of my career, I started with a non-profit called Center for Learning Unlimited about four and a half years ago. I was brought on through a friend of mine who's teaching there, a friend from animation. She was teaching and she enlisted me as a consultant for an animation program for adults on the spectrum to learn fundamentals of animation as potential career path, and so my background is very heavy in animation and merchandise-driven entertainment A lot of the nerd brands that your viewers probably have heard of, such as Sonic, the Hedgehog and Yo-Kai Watch and Power Rangers, a lot of boys' action brands, and so the Center for Learning Unlimited training program seemed to be at a place in their development where they needed an entertainment industry liaison to bridge the gap between the education that the students were receiving and then transferring into the real world when they graduated from this three-year program.
Speaker 2:So I was working as a consultant for Center for Learning Unlimited, as well as Brainstorm Productions, which is the four hire studio that we started for the graduates of CLU and through a grant program. That's how Judy and I became acquainted, became acquainted, so Brainstorm and CLU received a grant from the California Department of Developmental Services and Judy, through Orange County Asperger's Support Group, received a similar grant, also from the DDS, and we were introduced through a couple of different avenues. We were running in the same circle, so we were bound to meet at some point in time and Judy was already underway with preparations for the first conference, which took place on April 5th, and I invited myself to join and never left here I am the end, I love it.
Speaker 1:Invited myself to join and never left. And, you know, let's bring that conference up because that was the basically the first time I had an introduction to autism and entertainment through our mutual friend, harry James O'Kelly. Love you so much, harry, and you know, I not only saw that she was there, but Danny Bowman and Shannon Penrod and all of my friends that were there, and I was like, oh my gosh, you know, zara Astra and Scott Steindorf, and some of some people that I just love and adore. And then I've had, you know, had on the podcast and in so many events in the past, and I said to myself I should be at this conference right now with all of my friends here. But, yeah, so it was just I have to get to know what's going on here. And then, of course, harry, doing the wonderful thing she does, you know, sent me 10 back-to-back text messages with all of your names and how to get ahold of you and and all of that. And so that's where I started to to really, you know, look in and see, oh my gosh, this is something.
Speaker 1:Not only that, it's so important and so necessary for representation and it also is offering opportunities for adults on the autism spectrum, and that's really necessary for families to understand that. You know your child doesn't have to grow up and not get a job or work at the grocery store as a bagger, and that's the only type of employment they can receive. You know what are their passions, what are their loves, what do you find them doing every day, all day? Excuse me and follow that and really push those dreams and those strengths. And there are some big opportunities out in the world for those types of individuals. Judy, what kind of what drove you, or what maybe your son's interests, to really pursue this in the entertainment or just in all of it?
Speaker 3:Sure, let me just kind of take a couple steps back and say that when I became president of the Orange County Asperger's Support Group as a marketing person, which I mentioned I was the first thing I did was a survey, and from that survey the thing that came out which I was surprised about because my son was not out in the working world, but that was the number one issue was employment of our membership, and over the course of time I focused a lot of energy on employment and autism, learning that between 80 and 85% of the autistic community adults were unemployed or underemployed, and so working on trying to improve employment became a passion for me and I did a variety of things in that area. I ran something called Career Club that was focused on adults who had graduated from college but needed to start their journey, finding employment. So that was very top of mind. And again, as a marketing person, I saw that the strategy that was being used by a lot of organizations was very horizontal. So we need to create jobs versus. We need to create jobs in healthcare, we need to create jobs in law, we need to create jobs in technology, and so I thought I was seeing success for the higher functioning autistic community In which I know can be a sensitive term, but in the technology space. So there was an organization called. It was founded by microsoft and and companies like dell and hp, hp and sap have all been eager to employ neurodivergent individuals in their organization and they created the Autism at Work roundtable, which now I think is called Neurodiversity at Work to create employment opportunities for individuals on the autism spectrum.
Speaker 3:And so many leaders in that tech space are people on the spectrum, such as Bill Gates or Steve Jobs. So there have been, you know, a variety of folks who maybe because of just some of the characteristics of people on the spectrum, were very talented in the tech space. So I saw that and when my son graduated from college, from Cal State, fullerton, with a degree in television and film, I started realizing how many people in the entertainment space that were drawing people with autism to that space, who had a passionate interest in video games, a passionate interest in animation, and I thought, well, maybe what we should do is take an approach that was vertical and just focus in on the entertainment space and try and expand employment for individuals on the spectrum in that space. So that was my initial concept and the way I thought about doing it again pulling from my career experience, was in high tech there are oftentimes things called working groups that are created and a lot of times you'll have coopetition, you'll have competitors participate in that, because what they're trying to do is do some initiative for the industry. A lot of time it's standards related. So I was involved in some storage standards working groups and I thought, you know, that might be the right model for how to take this initiative forward, because I felt that it wasn't going to just be me. I needed to create this group of people who could help push this initiative forward.
Speaker 3:And if you ever saw Castaway, I love it how Tom Hanks' character talks about how you just kind of wait and then that sail, which happened to be a port-a-potty, shows up on the island and he finds his way and it becomes a sail.
Speaker 3:And so for me, I started socializing this idea and found other people that would be interested.
Speaker 3:And then one day I went into an OCSG meeting it was a virtual support meeting and a woman named Patricia Turney showed up and she introduced herself and she said that she happened to be the chair of the Board of Exceptional Minds, that she happened to be the chair of the board of exceptional minds and I said, ah, I had heard about exceptional minds but I didn't know anyone in exceptional minds.
Speaker 3:So I talked to Patricia and so we started working on launching this work group and and we brought in a company called Zavacon, who had been my partner on Career Club and they had both had experience in the entertainment space. So I thought they're job developers in the entertainment space. And there were people I met at D&D games Dungeons and Dragons games and different people who I brought in and said, hey, you want to help us try and make something happen. And so in May of 2022, we had our first meeting of the Autism and Entertainment Work Group and that was the starting point for the idea of the work group. Probably I should breathe and I can explain the conference in a few minutes, but kind of let you process all that.
Speaker 1:I love those approaches that you took too. It's really fascinating to hear your mindset and the way you really played it out and how you, you know, put in different models or different ideas of how you were going to create it, which is wonderful for me because I'm just starting a nonprofit and I feel like the baby is baby infant. I don't know what I'm doing, but I need these ideas, you know, I need to know what might work and what might not, and and so it's great for for learning in all types of ways. But, yeah, just fascinating to hear those, those steps that you took, marlene, what, how did you, when did you kind of find your way in and what did that look like? I was late to the party.
Speaker 2:I didn't come in until summer 2023-ish around that time and that was due to the when I was working with Brainstorm and CLU. We were and my dog is very passionate on this. She loves to talk about origin stories, so you might hear her like a Greek chorus in the back. But there you go. But our program at CLU, brainstorm, was getting underway, so our grant from DDS was related to research on remote job coaching, and so we were starting in earnest at that point in time. And then the head of Bra about Judy and what she was doing with the conference, because we had similar grants. But then David Siegel said, oh, you should really get to know Judy Utah because she's putting together the autism and entertainment conference. So I thought, okay, to to to. Very noteworthy sources have told me to go to Judy, so I will do that today. And then that's what I did.
Speaker 2:And so Judy allowed me to go to one of the planning meetings, the virtual planning meetings, and that's how it started.
Speaker 2:And I asked some questions because I am a nosy, busy body, and so I had a million questions and I was jumping out of my seat because it just all sounded so exciting and I couldn't wait to contribute in some way. So I asked a number of rapid fire questions about the plans for our press release and social media and all kinds of things that are pretty standard in the business of shameless promotion that I am in, which is also meant to sell toys to children. So everything's all about the eyeballs and how many people you can get to hear your message so they'll run out and buy video games and toys, and so this is a Judy's is a group of benevolent human beings who are all about the message and not as much about getting the message out. Yeah, shameless self promotion, which is where I came in, and so I became the mouthpiece for the organization in the sense that I was handling sponsorships and PR and then continued on with community outreach and things of that nature.
Speaker 3:So I just want to kind of yeah, let me kind of work back a little bit. Yeah, let me kind of work back a little bit. So in November in May of 2022, we had our first meeting. We decided we wanted to have a conference. That summer we found out about, one of which was our conference. The other was the CLU project about remote job coaching, and so we applied for the grant and got the grant, marlene and I, when there were about 50 or so organizations who got these grants, about 50 or so organizations who got these grants, and DDS did a really phenomenal job of holding quarterly meetings with these different teams and featuring different groups. And so that's where I heard Jenny from CLU speak and I was like picking out. There were maybe three or four different grants where the individual involved had some entertainment related connection, and so, anytime, I was starting from ground zero.
Speaker 3:When I got started with this community, I didn't really know. You know, I had relatives in the industry, but that was about it. I had relatives in the industry, but that was about it. And so there were just these breadcrumbs that kept on dropping and I would just follow them. And so, whether that was reaching out to CLU and Jenny, or when Marlene showed up, it was another gift Because I knew that we you know, I'm a marketing person I knew we needed to do PR, but I didn't know who was going to do it and I had budgets set aside to do it. And then Marlene shows up and I said, okay, this is the person that's going to be doing this, and she had.
Speaker 3:When we started, we didn't know who was going to come to the conference. We were putting on a conference for 400 people, but we didn't know who was going to be there, who was going to speak, who was going to do anything, and so we were having to create this all from nothing. And it was really an example of how important networking and promotion is, because it was through. You know, I saw that Marlene had thousands and tens of thousands of followers and I thought, well, once she starts talking about this, people are going to find us, and we now have a database of over 1,600 people. And we had more.
Speaker 3:We were turning people away for the conference because we didn't have enough space away for the conference because we didn't have enough space, and so it was through those efforts that we were able to get speakers and get. We ended up finding a dozen of what we call educational partners, companies like Exceptional Minds or like CLU Brainstorm Productions, who are focused on this community and providing training to them. So it's interesting to see. I'm going to say one more thing. We had over 60 speakers at our conference, because any time we brought this up, you know, our panels were overflowing and Marlene, who was the sage in this industry, said oh, don't worry about that, people don't show up. The day of Now, we did have one person who didn't show up of those 60 plus, but he ended up connecting in remotely, so because there was bad weather that day. So, anyway, that showed you the level of passion and importance that people felt about this particular topic.
Speaker 2:It was great to be wrong about that, Judy. I never enjoyed being wrong, so much that was awesome.
Speaker 1:Well, that was my question was how you know what was the general consensus, the feel, you know, gorgeous venue and we had huge exhibit space but it was a beautiful setting and we ended up with over 400 people attending.
Speaker 3:We had planned for 300 originally, but we were managed to stretch our budget. But it was just an amazingly lovely, lovely day. We had keynote speaker. Our first keynote speaker was Jorge Gutierrez, who is a well-known animator who happens to have autism, and he gave the most inspiring speech. We had speakers Scott Steindorf was there, astra was there and she interviewed Danny Bowman and another person on the spectrum, alex Estrella, who runs Blue Star Productions. So our morning was just overflowing on a grand stage with featuring these speakers and then in the afternoon we had breakout sessions. It was an amazing day.
Speaker 3:People on the spectrum a lot of time feel broken. They've been bullied a lot and they don't know who their community is, and this day for them was a day of healing, a day of joy, a day of reunions. There was a sense of ohana because a lot of these people we ended up only choosing to include people on the spectrum who had already studied in this area, so they were career ready and they ran into people that they had gone to high school with or they had been in this program with or whatever, and there was just so much reuniting of people and the networking was amazing and the communication and so many little conversations have led to amazing um activities since then. Marlene can go on and on about this, but but we uh ended up doing a project with Rob Kuttner who offered to be our media partner. We found out even about relationships that formed the guy who we had be our voice of God, tyler Berman. He ended up meeting his love interest, mallory at at this event, uh, we had authentic love on the spectrum.
Speaker 3:I love it on the spectrum there too yeah, we had it figuratively and literally.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I love that. You know, and and as a, what was amazing for me was one of the people that we brought on to the Autism and Entertainment work group is Paul Hamstreet. Paul had been the executive vice president at Warner Brothers responsible for the additional DVD content, so whenever there was a Harry Potter film there was all the extras and he was responsible for the extras. He led our production, our video production team, so we recorded the entire conference. So if anyone is interested, they can watch the entire conference from our website and he led a video crew in recording it. They also. He also led the production of six different documentaries about different people on the spectrum who were just having success in their career. One is Danny Bowman. So one of the people on his production team is my son, josh, who I saw working that whole day shooting video, and he he made two documentaries for our conference and, and it was like wonderful, a couple of weeks ago he, as I mentioned, he graduated from Cal state, fullerton. He had a professor, gwen, who he's kept in touch with over the years, and Gwen heard about the conference and she had him come to his class and talk about the Autism and Entertainment Conference. So so many little contacts, little relationships have blossomed from this, which was our, you know, was our goal. So it was an amazing day.
Speaker 3:It was amazing that the themes that we wanted for the day came out organically. One of the things was about having superpowers. You know, we wanted to basically that strength and brand that you have for autism and technology. We wanted people to see that for entertainment and these people and that message about having superpowers. Scott Steindorf said it best when he said you know, people on the spectrum think differently and thinking differently leads to innovation, and so that was wonderful.
Speaker 3:Another wonderful thing that came through was about the importance of failure. The importance of failure and that you know, a lot of people on the autism spectrum have anxiety and a lot of them are perfectionists and they just are scared to do anything because they're scared to fail. And that theme of importance of allowing yourself to fail and how failing is part of the process of learning was reinforced humorously by Jorge Gutierrez, who every story he told ended with and then they canceled it. You know all the different failures, but how he never let that be a problem. He basically took that and said I have learned, I have grown, and now I'm going to take this and apply it somewhere else. I have learned, I have grown, and now I'm going to take this and apply it somewhere else. And he reinforced that, danny Bowman reinforced that, alex Estrella reinforced it, and so there was.
Speaker 3:You felt that that message of don't allow fear of failure to be a barrier to success, to be a barrier to success. So it was just amazing to me how these themes just became interwoven throughout the day and reinforced this really positive day. One last thing was there was just so much interacting going on, and there's so many stories of little conversations with Jorge or conversations with between two people that ended up leading to something else. And so it's. It was an amazing day that it. It was like a, an art. It's an orchard that keeps on delivering more and more fruit, and so, um, it's a blessing that that that that that was such an important day for so many people.
Speaker 1:Excuse me. Yeah, I can completely agree and understand only because I didn't tell you this earlier. But I've also had virtual events I started. My first one was in 2022, called the one in 44 tour, and then I did kind of like a play on the numbers the one in 36 mix we had an international autism summit, safety summit, and then we did another one in 36 mixes last year. But the same thing the opportunities we usually have 22 to 44 speakers about.
Speaker 1:You know two days worth of it too, but I can't wait to do something in person, to really get, bring everyone together, to see all the smiles in one place together and not just virtually. It's wonderful on virtually, but, yeah, to see it in person. I can imagine this just be so amazing and the messages that you can get and I'm so glad that the community in general just really sound like they supported you so much in putting this together and bringing it to fruition. Let's talk a little bit before we run out of time, some of the other programs and things that you're working on right now.
Speaker 3:Sure. So I should mention that. The beginning of my journey, you know, not counting being a mother but when my son was 18, he did a program called Peers, which is a UCLA based social skills program, and during that they encouraged you to join clubs. And I had the idea of because at the time I was starting a Toastmasters group at my company about wouldn't Toastmasters be the right club for somebody on the autism spectrum to join? And so it's been my life's work. For the last dozen or so years I have been working with autism and Toastmasters. I run a monthly gavel club where there are 20 or so participants who give speeches and have had personal growth. And while I was running this conference I was also working on a government grant that well, not a government grant, a grant from the Organization for Autism Research for a couple faculty members, sasha Zedek and Yasmin Valerian, who were doing a study on the effectiveness of Toastmasters for individuals on the spectrum, and so I'm really excited there. I ran two workshops for them to measure them, before and after. They interviewed a number of people on the spectrum, people on the spectrum including Tom Island, who had had done Toastmasters and were dealing with autism and the benefits they saw, and so what's going to be great is, in the next year or so, there'll be several articles that will be published about the benefits of Toastmasters for individuals on the spectrum, and it's such an accessible way of improving your communication skills, of meeting people, socializing, that I'm really excited about that. So that's one area of focus that I continue to do as part of the Orange County Asperger's support group. I mentioned that my involvement has led to being involved in employment related initiatives when I, when I did retire from my career, I joined a group called the Orange County Local Partnership Agreement, which is an organization in Orange County that includes schools, so it includes high schools, includes colleges, it includes Department of Rehab Regional Center, which, in California, is an organization that supports individuals with disabilities, so it has this footprint of a and non and nonprofits and a variety of organizations, and so I have been running a group focused on benefits, so it's a benefits planning group.
Speaker 3:The years and my son had received SSDI is that people were afraid of losing their benefits if they worked, and so what was happening is a lot of these people who were there's hundreds of thousands of people working on trying to help people with disabilities find employment and one of the problems they have is that the person isn't eager to find an employment or their parent is concerned about them working because their hard-fought safety net, which is bringing in you know, maybe nine hundred dollars month, they could risk losing that and losing their health insurance if they made too much money or if they didn't manage this appropriately. And so I ran a group to really look at this and try to work with Social Security on fixing the underlying problems, and just finished analyzing a survey that was responded to by over 600 individuals with disabilities that showed that two-thirds of them were fearful of losing their benefits if they work and so that fear was causing them was impacting their decision. With a significant portion of that over half of that group it was significantly impacting their decision. But what was scary was that of the 600 people, 40% had either worked or were currently working. It was about 50-50. Of that group, 75% had problems with Social Security. These weren't short-term problems. These were problems lasting months, years to resolve if they got resolved, years to resolve if they got resolved, and the problems they received, the impact to them, were many.
Speaker 3:Over 70% received overpayment notices. These are notices that say we think we paid you too much money. Send us that money back and know. It's like if you checked and and these are for long periods of time, so they can be tens of thousands of dollars, and it's because they only review your file every so often and then they go back and say oh, we made a mistake 10 years ago. You, us all, owe us all the money that we've given you for the last 10 years. It would be like if you checked out a library book when you're a kindergarten and they didn't tell you you were overdue till you graduated, and then they say you can actually build a whole new library for us, thank you. You know that's the kind of impact.
Speaker 3:But you know, 40% lost their benefit. 40% lost their benefit, a significant loss their health insurance, and many like 10% were told you're no longer disabled. The reason is they equate being disabled with the ability to work, and so if you worked so much, now you're no longer disabled. So then it kind of makes a lot of things confusing about. Well, can you get back on Social Security if they're saying you're no longer disabled? So then it kind of makes a lot of things confusing about.
Speaker 3:Well, can you get back on social security if they're saying you're no longer disabled, and it ignores the fact that a lot of times these jobs are opportunistic. They're like somebody decides you know you've got a paid internship and you can do it, or somebody, there's a special person that works at this company, that brings you on there they're your aunt or a friend of the family and then they leave the company and now you don't have a job. Or your mom dies and now all of a sudden you're an emotional wreck and and that mental health issue gets in the way. So anyway, this is a. This is a big deal that needs to be what is social security is general.
Speaker 1:You know what are. Are they're going to support you or are they going to work with you, or have they? Oh, I mean, what's been their response? Yeah, what has been there?
Speaker 3:I really haven't had enough. I've had some peripheral discussion with them, but not the meaningful discussion. I only finished doing the analysis of this in the last month or two. But they're underfunded and like we put together a paper with 64 different things that they could do to fix it and the top nine so we can have in your site a link to the infographic that we have and things like that that have that. But some of them are just simple little software tweaks.
Speaker 3:You know, my background is software and I think, god, this is a summer intern work. This is not a huge amount of work. But they say, oh, we have a lot of things on our list, or we don't have the money, or we don't have this or that. You know it's kind of like you're flushing money away on the wrong things. You're flushing money away on the wrong things and if you, if you're, you're putting your money into treating the problem versus not having the problem. And and so there was a long period of time where there was a lack of leadership in social security. But I haven't really done enough yet to have had although I'm working across the state of California and I'm working with a lot of senior people we haven't. We kind of came out with the answers during the period of time when we were in the middle of an election, and so I've kind of been waiting for that election to settle down and figure out what's the best strategy moving forward.
Speaker 1:Thank you for your work in that that's. I mean, my son also receives social security and, yeah, that is something we're going to have to consider someday and if we, you know, we thought about getting trusts and things like that. So definitely some, some things we have to consider. It has been so lovely to have you both on today to get to know you better, and I hope that we can remain close and and stay in touch in the future, because I think that we have so many similarities in what we're working with, our main goal to be really real, for you know, that's, that's what it is, and I want to make sure that we get the information. Is this correct? Orange County Asperger's support group.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and you just need the apostrophe there and I'll put.
Speaker 1:Yes and I'll. I'll fix that when I get it really into the in the show notes autism entertainment. Make sure that you make go and and any other websites or any sites you'd like people to go and visit.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I'm putting. I'm giving you the autism and entertainment. Orange County Asperger's support group website. We have social media sites, linktree, we've got a linktree.
Speaker 2:We've got a merch site. Now we're doing e-commerce for autism and entertainment, so you can get cool stuff like this. Oh, I love it. I love that Our design by Jorge Gutierrez. He donated this design based on the original design by Jimmy Bordeaux, and so we have two different official logos and merch to match all of them.
Speaker 1:Oh, I love that.
Speaker 3:I'm trying to get you the link tree as well, which has the social security information, has the infographic and the white paper, and there's even a petition you can sign if you're concerned about this, so share that with your audience. Sarah, you're wonderful. Thank you so much for meeting with Colleen and me today. We really enjoyed it.
Speaker 1:Oh, me too. Thank you, judy. It's such a pleasure and I hope that we can, you know, have some fun in the future. And please know that there's an open invitation for my next event, which will be in April, for you guys to be a part of it, as, whatever that may be, I would love to have you be a part of it. Of course, I'm waiting for the new numbers to come out from the CDC before I make my exciting what the name of the show is going to be.
Speaker 3:When are those?
Speaker 1:supposed to come out again, Sarah? Do you know 2025. Just right around the corner. That'll be interesting to see, which we know that won't possibly be totally correct because there's so many that are just undiagnosed.
Speaker 3:You know the problem. I did some analysis of this one time and the data that they report is basically four years old when they report it. So it's already old when they report it and it's based on people being diagnosed by age eight. Yeah, so you're already missing out on all the late diagnosed people. So you just know that it really is underrepresenting, because my guess is that at least another third of people get diagnosed after the age of eight. So you just know of this number that you're going to be sharing, or that they will be sharing, is going to be really under-representing the true impact of of autism.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, a hundred percent.
Speaker 1:I think that's part of the reason we do it is to really show that, even though this is what you know, it may be telling you, you have to look deeper to to see the truth and and really, um, but being a part of the community and I have heard this in the last month a few times is like, uh, the last secret, you know beautiful place of Atlantis or something that is just like this amazing place that um is is unknown for so many people around the world. But we're trying to really bring it forth so that people can join us and have these amazing opportunities and go to our amazing events, so that you can create these relationships and really just happiness and success for you in the future. So thank you so much for being here. It's such a pleasure. Thank you, Sarah, and I really can't wait to stay in touch and make sure you guys let me know when you have things coming up in the future so that we can be doing some cross promoting for each other for sure, we will Thank you so much, sarah.
Speaker 2:Thank you, see you later, marlene Bye Bye, jimmy Bye Sarah.
