 Good day, my lovely listeners! You are listening to The Forty Autie Podcast. Tune in every week to explore inspiring stories and insightful information that dive headfirst into the world of autism and mental health. With all those tantalising tongue twisters out of the way, let's get into the show. Good day and welcome back to The Forty Autie Podcast with your host, Mr Thomas Henley. How are you doing today? We have an absolute banger of an episode for you. We are going to be focusing on a more person-centred podcast, in contrary to the usual podcast where we talk about a specific topic with our guests. We're going to talk about someone and their life and that person is Scott Klum. Hi there, thanks for having me. Thank you for agreeing to come on. I really appreciate you taking time out of your day to come chat to me. Definitely, I appreciate you having me on. So Scott, how have you been doing lately? Lately, I've been a kind of roller coaster of emotions and stuff. The other week, I've been dealing with depression and mood swings. And then this week, I've been offered the potential best film job of my career. Lots of ups and downs then? Lots of ups and downs, but like a big part of my life is my sobriety. I am 12 years sober now. And if there's one thing I've learned, it's to just take things one day at a time, sometimes even one hour or one minute at a time. So I had to do that with my depression and then this week's been much smoother. Living with a long-term mental health condition, it's a bit of a weird one but it never quite gets better in a sense. It doesn't reduce, it's just the ways that you deal with it and work around it and manage it just change over time. Right, yeah. I've dealt with severe depression since 2006. I lost three grandparents and a friend committed suicide within nine months of each other and that just threw me for a loop and it's just like... I was at rock bottom for... A lot of people think of rock bottom as an event or like a short time in their life. My rock bottom was nearly a decade. And I'm just happy to be where I'm at today and get to the point I'm at because now I'm able to create films about my struggles I've dealt with and be really personal about it because a lot of filmmakers, they may tell a story about depression or something but they may not directly relate to it. My film Autism One Grand's Journey was a memoir and a documentary about my hardship, perseverance and hope and it connected with so many people because they were able to see how I got through so much and I've done therapy for years, I still do therapy and honestly I think anyone could benefit from therapy. It's been really helpful to me. Well, some of the strongest people I know, they're always the ones that recognize that there's an issue and have the courage to go out and seek help from other people. It goes against the typical idea of strength that we have in our society. It seems to be all geared towards maintaining a center and never being pushed off one way or the other. Exactly. And it's not realistic and especially if you have mental health conditions it can be very detrimental to the way that you view yourself if you always have that kind of inspiring frame of mind. Yeah, so I was raised in a family where the guys didn't show any emotion and so I learned to bottle up my emotions and part of therapy for me during my really bad depression was learning to be okay with showing emotion and it took a long time to get to that point but now being at a point that I'm okay with crying and okay with sharing what's going on in my life with other close friends and family. Or an online community. Yeah, it's made things so much easier versus internalizing it. I'm a ticking time bomb if I do that. I think it's really interesting you mentioned that because I imagine that there's also some sort of input from being autistic with the Lexifamia. I always rattle on about a Lexifamia but I think it's such a core thing that a lot of people are kind of not paying enough attention to when it comes to autism. And it can have impacts on the way that you understand, manage or even feel mental health conditions. It's always kind of on that baseline level all the time that you can't really see until it gets up to a point and it kind of affects your life in multiple negative ways. Yeah, I mean my therapist always reminds my family and stuff that autistic people oftentimes feel things three to five times more intensely than a neurotypical does. And so what may be just like a simple change to their day or something that just kind of eke them wrong but they can brush it off may be something really intense to me. There are specific things that we tend to struggle with more. Some things that we struggle with less as well but it tends to be like all this stuff that's about life. Like the executive functioning, the cooking, the cleaning, the emotional regulation, things of that nature seems to be a lot more difficult to us. But I guess what I want to do because I'm really enjoying the fact that we've just jumped on and immediately started talking about the topic. I like that. Yeah, I mean it's very relevant in my life right now. So yeah, I'm happy we could dive in. Well, could you tell us a little bit about the work that you do around your filmmaking? Just kind of give us a taster. I've been doing filmmaking since I found my passion in 2004. So I've been doing this for 18 years now. I started as a filmmaker in the ski industry. Originally I just wanted to make movies with my friends and I and then I broke way too many bones. And I've had some very severe injuries including breaking my back and both arms at the same time. Your back and both arms? Yeah. Is this from skiing? Skiing, yeah. Oh my God. Yeah. I was in the hospital for like two or three weeks. I shattered my left wrist and had to have reconstructive surgery and I was doing physical therapy for about six months and yeah, great times. That's just crazy because when I think of skiing accidents I always think the knee or the hip or the foot. Yeah, I've done those too. But yeah my list of injuries is like I've broken my back and both arms, broke my right wrist again and had to have surgery on that. I dislocated my kneecap. I broke my leg. I tore three or four muscles in my upper leg. I broke my eye socket. So I have a plate in my eye now instead of a bone. And the more that you keep talking about this, the more that I get where you come from about not doing that stuff anymore. Yeah, so I ended up, my parents are like, we can't afford the medical bills anymore and you're really going to regret these injuries as you get older. So instead of being filmed, I ended up becoming the one behind the camera and I started filming my friends at the time and they are some of the top pro skiers in the world right now. They compete in the Olympics, the X Games. They're in big ski movies and I developed a name for myself in the ski industry and I kind of got tired of the ski industry because there's not much of a career in that. It's just more fun. But I ended up finding myself doing documentary work and that's when I made my first film, Autism One Man's Journey and that connected with a lot of people. It made it into like 10 film festivals or something as well as winning a few awards. Congrats. Thank you. And then I did the disability film challenge in 2020 and the theme was documentary and I won Best Editor out of like 87 films. Nice. And then... You need to come edit my videos. Yeah. Can you do it for free please, Scott? I can't do it for free but I can definitely be for hire and help out. I did a few films for disability film challenge and then I made a newer documentary this past year and it was called Thriving on the Spectrum and it was about what it was like to be autistic and the autism community in Colorado during the pandemic and how there were so many struggles with like I lost all my supports almost in the beginning and just lost so much structure and I had to find new supports and it ended up working out in the end but just there were so many changes that just made everything so rough and that film has won, I think, three or four awards and been in 20 film festivals now. I mean, here's some of my awards right here. Wow. Is that an Oscar at the top? It looks like an Oscar but so that was for this other film festival in LA and it's actually the same company that makes the Oscar trophy but it's 24 karat gold so that's pretty cool. Oh my God. As you can see, I'm in my office right now. I obviously like film. I've got the film poster behind me. I even have it tattooed on my arm, like a film reel there. Nice, nice. And I'm wanting to get into tattoos more. The issue that I find with tattoos is when I was younger I was really, really, really super against a lot of things. I wouldn't talk to people who smoked. If someone mentioned that they did any recreational drugs I would immediately just drop all contact with them and one of those things was also tattoos and piercings. I was like, why do you have to put it on your body? It's going to be there forever. It's such a bad idea. And my granddad passed away when I was in Thailand. I was researching mosquitoes in Thailand. He passed away and I was like, you know what? I've heard a lot about these steel needle tattoos that monks do in Thailand. That could be a really, really great sort of cathartic thing just to get like a tattoo. I got one in the center of my back. They did like a whole ceremony. Yeah, I saw a picture of that in one of your weightlifting pictures. I think it's really important with tattoos to choose something that's meaningful to you. I know too many people that have just gotten random tattoos and that's not me. But I have the three main points of the serenity prayer to represent my sobriety. I have the film reel that goes up to here to represent my passion for film and creativity. And then the flat irons mountains on the lower part of my arm to represent my love for the outdoors. I had one other thing just related to the film. One story that my mom always loves is in, at first I went to college for just to do my general studies and then I went to film school for almost three semesters. I dropped out because of mental health. My freshman year or first year of film school, the very first big project, we're going through every student's project and I'm watching these things. I'm like, crap, I did this project so wrong because everyone's project was just cookie cutter the same. I'm just like, please, like don't show mine. And then all of a sudden, mine's playing and the teacher pauses the project in the middle. I'm like, crap, what did I do wrong? And the teacher says, class, take note. This project right here is better than any of our graduate students. And from that day forward, from my first year in film school, I became that guy that everyone wanted on their projects. And it's just like, to me, like that's kind of, when I look back at it, it's like that's kind of an autistic trait to me. Like I think a lot of autistic people within their passions or their special interests are so talented at what they do. That for me, that was film. And it's just, yeah, I mean, it was a great feeling to hear that from my teacher because I've never had that kind of just positive information. Yeah. And I mean, yeah, I never finished film school. I don't have a degree in it, but honestly, where I'm at today, I've done more in film than any of my friends with graduate degrees because when it comes down to it, people are more interested in the talent and the skill set than they are whether you have a degree or not. You can't teach creativity. Yeah, it's an interesting one, that, isn't it? I guess for some people, it could be a way in to learn the skills and stuff. But for example, with myself, I've never done any training or I've never done it. Well, I've looked, most of my editing skills and my presenting skills and things of that nature all come from YouTube. You can learn a lot from it. You can go to college on YouTube. The University of YouTube. The University of YouTube. It's great. It's free. Yeah. Yeah. So I guess, you know, today, we're here to kind of talk about you and your life and the things that you found hard, the ways that you've progressed, the things that you've learned. So I guess the best place to start would be, what was your childhood like? Yeah. And what was your adolescence? Yeah, adolescence. From your perspective now, kind of looking back after a diagnosis, do you think that, you know, your experiences are different as well? Like your perception of them? My perception of my experiences have certainly changed since I got my diagnosis because now when I, just so everyone knows, I was diagnosed late in life. I was diagnosed when I was 23, almost 24. And so when I look back on my life, I can point out things that, that was me being autistic, that was autism like that. It's like those things make sense now. Sure. But it was tough because I felt a lot of pressure growing up because my, everything came easy to my brother and I felt like I had to be like my brother. He partied all the time. He played varsity sports throughout high school and still gets valedictorian. Then he goes to college, still parties and then also gets into dental school and just everything came easy. I really struggled in even elementary and middle school and high school. It's just like, I would come home with panic attacks every day, just like, not knowing how to manage my time at the moment. I would be assigned a project. I was doing six weeks. I would finish it that night and just have just this bother panic for and chaos for one night. And I mean, I was also bullied basically elementary school through my junior year of high school. Yeah. And I mean, there were instances where I had to present my mom remembers this story specifically. It's just like in middle school, I had to present a project and I ran out of the classroom when it was my turn and people were trying to catch up to me and I just ran around the school avoiding them and looking back on that, it's like, that's a meltdown. There were instances where it's just like, we used to go to Hawaii all the time and then one year my parents decided we're going to do a cruise this year. Any kid would be excited about that. Me, I broke down in tears and just got really upset. Is it like a routine thing with Hawaii? Exactly. It was like a radical change in what I was used to. I used to have something similar to that. Me and my family used to go to this place called Center Parks. It's like a UK holiday destination thing. I don't know if you've heard of Robin Hood or things of that nature. Sherwood Forest, that's the place that Center Parks is in. It's such a nice place. You can bike everywhere. There's so many trees around that it just feels all cozy. You get little bungalows. It's not like I'm trying to do an advert to Center Parks, but it's really cool. In the UK, we used to have red squirrels in the UK until I think one of some ambassadors to a different country introduced a gray squirrel into the population of squirrels and they just absolutely took over. Center Parks is one of the only places that has these red squirrels. I get what you mean. It was really important to me to have that routine because one of the things you go away on holiday to do is to relax. You can relax much more when you know exactly what to expect. When it's your comfort place, it's like you have your routine. You know what you're getting involved with. Over the years, I've gotten more and more flexible just over time. I wanted to jump back on something that you said because I feel like we brushed over it a little bit. You were telling me about the difficulties that you had in secondary school. What were the days like for you? What were the week to weeks like? I mean, each week I didn't want to go to school. Mostly, not so much the academics, but I was like, I hated being bullied. I hated being picked on. I was at public school through seventh grade and then we realized I was struggling a lot. I went to a school in Denver that was for learning disabilities. Long before being diagnosed as autistic, I was diagnosed with Central Auditory Processing Disorder and learning disabilities in general. I believe I still may have Central Auditory Processing Disorder, but that could also be the communication barrier with autism. I think one of the immediate tests that people do on kids is when they're asking the question, is this child autistic? One of the first things that they do is doing a hearing test. Yep, that's one of the first tests. Academics was always hard for me, but I felt like I had to get straight A's and nothing less because that's what my brother got. I pushed myself too hard every single week to the point of what I would consider now being a burnout. And when I was in college, my parents were like, what kind of grades do you think we expect you to get? I'm like, straight A's like Ryan. They're like, no, we just want you to do your best. I'm like, that would have been nice to know 10 years ago. It's hard, isn't it, with siblings? I mean, I don't have the experience of having an older sibling. I've always been the older one and it is true. From my experience specifically with my brother, he always looked up at me and compared himself to me all the time. I did pretty well in school. I wasn't a straight A student, but it's quite a lot of A's. I did quite well in sports. I guess a lot of similarities between yourself and your brother. I mean, there's similarities between you and I too. I was good at sports as well. I played basketball in high school. I played varsity golf for four years and I won tournaments and stuff like that. That's cool. And then the other thing with high school for me, because of the bullying, it led to me just reaching my tipping point and really the only way for me to get away from being bullied was to be quote-unquote cool like everyone else and start going to parties, trying drugs, trying alcohol. And being that I have an addictive personality, that didn't turn out well and that went downhill for quite a while. I'm sorry to hear that. Eventually I found, I realized I needed to get clean and sober and I went to drug and alcohol rehab and then I've been sober ever since. Congrats. There's no easy feat to be addicted to a drug and then to come out of the other side sober. Exactly. And stay sober for that long. It's a massive, massive achievement. In the first season of my podcast, I did an episode with an autistic lady called Francesca. She's Mexican and she had her drug of choice, which was crystal meth. She was kind of describing it to me and she obviously really struggled in school and making friends and connections and stuff. She said that the drug scene doing these drugs was one of the only ways that she could always know that she has someone to socialize with. Although, obviously under the influence, it's connection is something that humans crave. Definitely is. That reminds me of one of the other topics we were going to talk about, which was relationships. I feel like we all crave just connection with people in some way and I don't know. For me, I'm an introvert, but I consider myself to be an extroverted introvert sometimes where it's just like, if I'm with the right people, if I'm with the right friends, I am very social. But I also need time to just sit back and recuperate or just downtime. I think it's interesting you say that because whenever anyone asks me about improving social skills or going out and doing quote extroverted things, it's either important to have a place that you know that you're going to or have people that you're comfortable with and that you know. We kind of need that focus or we need some kind of control of the situation and being aware of the place that you usually go to. It's kind of like a grounding thing. On the other side, if you have someone that you're really close to, it can be easy to sort of get into the flow of conversation just by like starting off talking to them and maybe drifting around if you feel comfortable. Right. Yeah, I found when I was like my close friends, I can interact really well. But then another couple of weeks ago, I went and saw the new Doctor Strange movie with my friend, Mariah, and then she had like five or six of her friends that they know of me but I've never met. And it's just like that there was almost too much for me because when it's a group like that, I'm good with maybe three people. I feel like I can interact on that level and feel like I know when to jump into a conversation or relatively know how to jump in. It's a struggle to jump into conversations for me sometimes. But when it's a big group, I have no chance of getting involved in that conversation. So I try at first, but then a person interrupts me and then I try to jump into the next part but then another person interrupts me. And then eventually I find myself just looking straight at the ground and just like standing there doing nothing. Yeah. No, I am fused with that. Most of the time I'm quite introverted. I like to say that I'm an extroverted autistic person because we tend to be a little bit, just through our behaviors and the way that we struggle with socializing and the social anxiety. We tend to be a bit more introverted. I like that. For an autistic person, if you are sort of going out there and socializing, most of the time if I was to go into a social situation, if someone just randomly came and talked to me while I was out in the street doing shopping or something and strike up a conversation that I am absolutely flabbergasted by that, I just can't do it. Yeah. It's like my brain's not primed to be in social mode. But as soon as I know that I'm going to be in this place with these people, it's going to be this kind of thing, then I can kind of be like, okay, I've done this before. I'm comfortable with this. I just kind of need to ease into it slowly. I like the term extroverted autistic person. Another one I heard recently was social introvert and that kind of stuck with me as well. Well, the introvert extrovert thing is basically just based on whether you recharge in the company of others or you recharge in the company of yourself. Exactly. Yeah. It doesn't necessarily mean that you're not a sociable person. No. It's just your management of the time that you're socializing is a little bit more strict when you're introverted. Yeah, that's very true. I appreciate that you've opened up about your experiences in adolescent secondary school. I can 100% relate to the absolute torment of bullies and that sort of daily trying to cope in that environment. It's a very stressful thing. I took a lot of days off school just because of anxiety and the sensory environment and the people. It's something that I hope that will be normalized as something that's kind of like a reasonable adjustment. How old were you when you were diagnosed? I was 10 years old at the time. So I was diagnosed fairly early in comparison to yourself. But it was only until I got into my 20s when I was able to conceptualize autism not just as social differences and sensory difficulties because that was the things that I really understood about autism. In my 20s, that was kind of like my in-depth diagnosis of myself but basically understanding myself. I guess that leads us on to our next question. Could you tell us about your journey through the diagnostic pathway and some of the key moments that stood out to you? Originally, this was during the time I lost so many people and then was severely depressed and my psychiatrist at the time was just like, there's something more going on here than just the depression. She said to my mom, I think your child has autism but there's really no reason to get him diagnosed because there's nothing out there that he would benefit from or get from it. And this was back in 2000, I don't know, 9 maybe? A while ago. A while ago and it's just like at the time they didn't have the supports in place that were needed I mean over the last decade, autism has become the most thought of diagnosis these days and it's just things have really changed over the last decade but at the time I was struggling so much and I think my words to my mom at the time were I want to get tested because I want to know what's wrong with me. At that point I was so far into my rock bottom that I was so depressed that things to me was what's wrong with me. These days I don't think anything's wrong with me. Me being autistic, that's who I am, it's okay, I like certain parts of it and it's made me who I am as a person but it's just back then I wanted to know what's wrong with me and originally I got this testing done and the person testing me decided not to give me, it would have been Asperger's back then but she decided not to give me the Asperger's label and gave me pervasive developmental disorder not otherwise specified instead because... PDD Noss. Yeah, PDD Noss. She decided to make her own judgment. She decided to say that I couldn't possibly be autistic or have Asperger's because I make money off of my special interest in passion and so she said I am now PDD Noss because I make money off of my film work and I just want to warn people getting their diagnosis. I know it's expensive to get tested, I know the pain but be prepared that you may not get the diagnosis you want the first time around. I had to get pay the money all over again to get tested a second time and it's just like all because of this ridiculous tester's judgment which isn't even written in any DSM book or anything that because you make money off your special interest you couldn't possibly have Asperger's or be autistic. It's like some kind of cruel sort of gatekeeping. Yeah, pretty much. So then I got tested something like three years later again and also because I got the PDD Noss diagnosis it made it so I couldn't get certain disability help. So the support around it and the disability payments and stuff like that is all not applicable to PDD Noss. A lot of the time it's not and it really depends on how they see it in the court. So then we went to this professional in Denver and she's really good. When she heard that the person made the judgment about me not getting the diagnosis I needed because of me making money off my special interest she said that was absolutely ridiculous. It is ridiculous. It's just like how is that even a thing and that is her just being judgmental and it's just like I just want to warn people you may run into people like that during the testing just keep your head up and keep fighting for what you need. While we're on the sort of topic of diagnosis I guess what kind of pathway did you take through the mental health side of things? Because for me it was initially I'd been picked up by my school because I'd been self-harming and I kind of started with anxiety and then depression and then I think a lot of dissociative disorders that took a long time for me to get over. I have a form of body dysmorphia at the time I was like I was bulimic I was younger. Not like hardcore like every time all the time it was more of a sporadic thing but it definitely did sort of withstand the entirety of my life up until this point where I decided not to do that anymore and now I've got a binging disorder. Sorry, it went off a bit of a tangent. No, I'm happy you spoke to that because I can relate. I struggled with anxiety for most of school then came the severe depression when I lost those four people in nine months and that made it so difficult because I could never go through the grieving process with any of the individuals. As soon as I started one grieving process I lost another person and I could never process it. So awful. So that led to the severe depression and in 2006 or 2007 I self-harmed for the first time and that was like throwing gasoline into a fire. I have scars just up and down my arms, legs and I haven't self-harmed in four years or so. It's not on my finger right now but I have a ring that I usually wear that represents me trying to stay clean and stay away from self-harm and it's just like something I look at it also gives me something to fidget with when I get those thoughts and it's like even to this day when I haven't self-harmed for that long there's times I still get thoughts on a daily basis. That was honestly the hardest addiction for me to break of alcohol, drugs, cigarettes, anything. Self-harm took the longest. I was in and out of psych hospitals for many years. I was clean of self-harm for about a year in between 2009 and 2010 but I was using drugs and alcohol and then when I got sober self-harm came back. This is a really important sort of issue because autism and drug or addictive addiction seem to be very highly correlated and the same could be said for mental health as well. One thing that a lot of people don't know about their relationship to an anxiety and depression is depression usually... It comes on for one of four reasons which is you have the situational we have the existential, the cognitive, things of that nature and one of the biggest drivers of depression is chronic pain and anxieties could be considered another form of chronic pain. It's definitely not the most comfortable thing to live with and you have this sort of network of different brain areas and different sort of hormonal organs called the HPA axis which is like the hippocampus, pituitary, adrenal axis and they found by doing studies on it that people with long-term anxiety conditions it affects this HPA axis and it makes you more likely to become depressed and I can kind of see that angle in your story but I can also obviously with the passing of your loved ones you have this situational aspect of it as well as it be. I mean loss and grief has been a big part of my life for years now and between 2013 I lost I think I lost eight friends in six years just like I lost friends to avalanches I lost friends to kayaking off a waterfall it's just all these extreme sports have a lot of death and it's just like it's been tough I mean two of the deaths I was gonna be there those days I could have died from the avalanche I've been blamed for certain things it's just like it's just grief has always been so hard for me even last year another one I've been dealing with I have survivors remorse because there was a shooting at a grocery store less than five minutes from my condo last March I was at that Starbucks 20 minutes before the shooter showed up and it's just like it's just like who's to say that shooter did not get stuck in traffic did not get out at the time he wanted to and also if I was with my caregiver that day the time the shooter got there is the time I go there every each week and it's just like so I had people texting me calling me making sure I was okay and it's just like it's tough and I mean I feel like mental health is one of the hardest things to deal with and needs to be talked about more definitely I really I really feel for you with those experiences I guess it could sort of create a lot of questions in your brain like why is this stuff happening to me or it must feel like sometimes the world is against you I mean for me I know I've come from a religious family and because of all the stuff I've gone through I began to lose belief in God and then I began then our spiritual then like all this other stuff happened lost any sort of spiritual connection those big big life events can have such such sort of powerful impacts both on you emotionally and when something comes along and it's kind of like someone's just like broken the glass on your world and you feel nihilistic and you're like what's the point why am I doing things is there any reason for me to do all this stuff if I'm just going to be forgotten in a few years and spirals it just feels like to me if there was a God or a higher power it's like why is all this happening to me right now and my connection to spirituality comes in and out right now I have more spiritualness again I'm in a better place in my life but it's just like with all those hardships and just pains those connections ebb and flow a lot well thank you for sharing that with me it's very open and raw for you to tell me I appreciate it a lot I'm sure everybody else is listening and appreciates being so open about these things I'm sure it's not something that there's a lot of people out there who don't really it's not really acknowledged that mental health in general is kind of it's become a little bit of a common buzz term it's like you know you've got to keep in track of your mental well-being and if you get a little bit anxious and a little bit sad then you have mental health issues it's good and it's good that we're having that conversation I think also it's easy for the rest of society to ignore the fact that there's people out there who have clinical depression or treatment resistant depression that they've been they have to fight with like every day of their life basically a big thing for me a big part of that journey with mental health was finding the right medications it's like when you're on multiple medications it's not as simple as just here you go you're done and it's just like it took years to find the right medication regimen for me and it's just like it could take three months to get a medication into my system then another couple months to find the right dosage then find out that it's interfering with another medications and then you would have to wean off of it and I mean I had medications that gave me such bad side effects to the point I had tremors from head to toe and my jaw would literally chatter and I couldn't stop it and it's like my parents would go to my psychiatrist and it was just like while this may be helping Scott mentally how is this actually helping because I had such bad tremors that I could no longer hold a camera study and so now I get depressed because I can't film and it's just like probably maybe seven or eight years to find the right medication regimen and now and now it's like we finally found the right meds with the least amount of side effects for a while I needed more heavy meds to just get me by day to day but they had the bigger side effects and now I found ways to take meds and my biggest criteria is I do not want to take meds with severe weight gain and I do not want to take meds with tremors and it's just like I've come to accept that I can't just rely on medications to make things better but I also have to put an effort myself to like when certain things come up I have to find ways to cope with it and it's just it's been a journey with medications as well I definitely empathize with you on that meds when I was I think 14 and one thing also that I love GPs and a lot of people don't now is that meds can have very different reactions for autistic people one of the things that seems to prop up a lot is a lot of the medications that are for depression although they can be described for anxiety as well they actually from people I've talked to from my own experiences they can actually make anxiety worse so then you have to balance it out with an anti-anxiety medication and then you've got like two doses of different side effects that you have to try to deal with and the issue that I have at the moment is my sedative medication it really makes it difficult for me to get up and be productive in the morning as well as the weight gain the binging that I get on the night I can be absolutely amazing at handling it throughout the entire day I can get on my nutrition on point I've got protein shakes and cottage cheese and different sort of healthy things to eat and then it soon gets to a night time I'm not going to do any binging tonight 15-30 minutes later I turn into like the Hulk I just want to consume everything the worst is when you have nightmares and you're like it's like 10 or 11 at night and it's like I'm going to have a bag of chips it's just like that's really going to help me with weighing in on the scale the next morning but for me my sensitivity because of all the traumas and stuff in my life I deal with insomnia so I have to take three pretty heavy sedating nightmares to even get me to sleep so you've done what many autistic people dream of you've turned your special interest in filmmaking into a job could you tell us about some of the benefits that this arrangement has on your life like do you find that it's still as interesting and enjoyable and you can focus just as much as if it wasn't a job I'm more interested in it than ever it's just like even when I do it as a job I still find myself finding it as a special interest and finding more things to film when I'm not working it's just like it's because of it being a job it's made me even more talented than ever what I do and probably even more passionate because I just want to learn more about it and I continue to grow as a filmmaker but it took many years to get to where I'm at filmmaking is not an easy industry to make any sort of money in I suppose you have all the equipment that you've got to buy or hire I have so much equipment I have two gimbals I have three heavy duty tripods I have a crane system I have two really nice cameras lots of lenses and all I have a drone I have literally everything I could need I made some money in the ski industry when I did work for ESPN or I did work for another big ski movie some people might have heard of him but Warren Miller did a voiceover over some of my shots and that was just really cool because he's one of the guys that started ski films and to have him speak over one of my clips was just a real honour and awesome how would you advise other people who are wanting to give their special interest into a job how do you think that it can go around that when interview skills not too great maybe degrees or GCSEs A-levels not too great how do you think people can find a path through that I would say don't give up and if you really need to it's just like find people that are stuff within your special interest that you admire and even in the beginning offer to volunteer your time to them in the beginning build up that network build up the connections a big part of filmmaking is building a broad network of people and so if you can show these people how much you love your work and even if you're volunteering your time for a few months six months even a year it will not go unnoticed they will realise how talented you are and just work your hardest and eventually it will be noticed there's a good chance that either the people there will be like you know we've really appreciated your time or it could go we just heard of a job opening in similar work this might be a great fit for you the other thing I worked with DVR through disability which they help you get jobs and stuff for a long time I was very clear that like I don't want to be one of those statistics again that's just sent to a disabled person being sent to a grocery store to bag groceries and push shopping carts we made very clear to them I wanted to be a filmmaker edit things and at first the people are just like we've seen this a lot of people want to do something but then we showed them my work they're like wow he's really talented we have something here so advocate for yourself push yourself to clear to these people like do not send me to do just bag groceries I'm much more than that I think for some people you know working in a grocery store or doing something like that's for some people that's things that they aspire to do I suppose what you what you're saying correct me if I'm wrong is that you need to kind of you need to push for the life that you want to have right you can't just you can't expect things just to happen to you it's just you need to push forward I've been doing film for 18 years now and things really started to take off in 2020 I've done other work before then with freelance stuff the thing with freelance film there are months I'll make thousands of dollars and then I could go three months with no work so it's like it's hit or miss but I've been very grateful for the work I've done I mean last year or the year before I did a project for an NBA player I made his promo video for the NBA draft and he now plays for the Miami Heat and it's just like these things it's just I think the key to it is don't give up on your dream and just continue to push yourself to meet the right connections and again don't just sit back and watch and think things are going to happen to you you need to put in the work as hard as it may be and seek out the doors yep I like that well thank you very much for that Scott I do have one last question that I wanted to ask before we wrap things up sounds good I guess sort of a key sort of thing in the autistic community is that there is a there's a very big stereotype in the industry around autism but particularly like actors and things of that nature they tend to blocks people into different roles based on how they look and we've seen a lot of controversies in the media about that movie like Sia about the actors that are supposed to be autistic and autistic and things of that nature so I guess the key question here would be what's the change about the film industry or society with your films with your autism related films one thing I've learned over the past probably two or three years is there are a lot of good autistic actors in Hollywood and beyond and I I believe we need to have autistic actors playing these autistic roles and it's just it's kind of tough to see when these people that are neurotypicals play an autistic person and I mean even with the good doctor it's like they are good about bringing disabled people on their show however the lead role is a neurotypical playing an autistic person so it's like why it's as if they're trying to compensate for something there isn't in that show they bring in all these other physical disabilities and there was an autistic person playing a patient one time but it's just like why couldn't we do that with the lead role and I've also heard other things too because it's like in the last film I did for the disability film challenge the person I work with, George Steve all of his roles are based around playing some sort of autistic person and he really hopes that one day he will get to a point that he won't be stereotyped in film as an autistic person but he can play any character and there was a particular person that brings to mind this TV show that I watch called Hannibal which is like a series version of the Hannibal Lecter cases and stuff like that and the lead role in that, they're autistic and it was really interesting because the filmmakers were sort of playing with the interaction between psychopathy and autism which for me loving all stuff to do with emotions and empathy and socializing you know that was amazing because it's like let's show the difference between cognitive and adaptive empathy in a film and kind of it's just so great it wasn't like autism was the main thing but he just slot into that role just so well, it was really amazing to see that's awesome that he played that role so well you should definitely check it out, it's Hannibal alright, yeah I'll check it out it's a really good series a little bit gory, a little bit gruesome but yeah, that's okay I've seen the original films okay, so I feel like autistic people whether they're actors or behind the lens we need to be given just more opportunities in film, there are very few disabled people in the film industry compared to everyone else and as I was telling you earlier, like I can't speak too much about it but yesterday morning I just received this email offering me a potential big job so I'm in the running for a big position and it would be a life changing job for me and I mean it's the break I've been waiting for and just again going back to like what it takes to make your special interest a job like I have just over two weeks to prepare everything for a presentation with this group to begin the process of getting this work and I have meetings with them this coming Monday and it will be announced whether I get the job or not I'm July Craig and I mean fingers crossed I mean as soon as I find out more let you know what the job is I would love to hear you'll be amazed what it is I'm excited now you've got to be riled up I want to know and that goes just to say again things don't happen overnight but just keep pushing for what you want and what you're passionate about I mean things happen for a reason dreams do come true thank you very much for that Scott that is the end of the questions that I had for you so Scott when we last chatted I asked you to think of a song that can go in our Song of the Day segment for people to listen to that's related to the topic of the podcast or something meaningful to you so what is your song and why? it's funny that this is brought up because it came up with another friend recently my all-time favorite song is the artist is white apple tree and the song is snowflakes the reason this song sticks out to me so much is because it was the first major ski movie I had footage in and it was the trailer to their movie and this came out back in 2008, 2007 or so and I've been listening to this song on repeat for 14 years now so it just never gets old to me it brings happy memories it's pretty nostalgic it's always a song whenever I film snow and stuff I just always think of that song I love the snow thank you very much for that Scott I'll add it to the growing Spotify playlist of different songs from the podcast thank you very much for that we're not going to do any Q&A today because we're a bit strapped for time but I do want to show you a profile of the day this is a lady called Carol Jean Whittington also called the Social Autie and she has an account called Mind Your Autistic Brain which is all underscores between the words Mind Your Autistic Brain and she does a lot for bringing people from the autistic communities together she produces a lot of content and how to make it how to produce good content and she does a lot of good work in the community and she's definitely worth a follow especially if you're a creator and you're trying to improve your skills so that is our profile of the day Carol Jean Whittington the Social Autie at Mind Your Autistic Brain so this comes to the very end of the podcast I want to say thank you to my YouTube followers as well as anyone who's listening to the podcast on a regular basis listening to Season 1, all that stuff and also my patrons, specifically Mr Patrick Vetti for always supporting me with my work and of course thank you very much Scott for coming on to chat have you enjoyed your time on the podcast yeah it was a great time you've run one of the best podcasts I've been on so I'm so glad to hear that it's so easy to talk to you I've been yeah it's just been nice it just felt like a conversation this whole time it didn't feel like felt less like an interview and more like we were just having a nice conversation so it made me feel really comfortable and glad we could do this I'm very glad Scott, thank you for your kind words and thank you to everybody else who's tuned in and just remember that you can find my podcast on YouTube under Asperger's Growth or you can find it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google all of the podcasting streaming services the 4080 podcast you can find that there I would also point you towards my Instagram if you want to get in contact you can DM me on there you can check out some of the posts that I've been doing and if you want to get involved and you want to ask any of my guests questions that's all from me thank you very much for listening and thank you very much Scott I'll see you in another episode of the 4080 podcast see you later guys bye