Life as an Entrepreneur with Diabetes | DJ Lipscomb

[00:00:00] Rob Howe: This episode is sponsored by embecta. Formerly known as BD Diabetes Care, embecta is now a standalone company solely focused on serving the diabetes community. They are partnering with diabetics doing things to help bring awareness to diabetes stigma by sharing stories from people living with diabetes like the one you're about to hear on this episode. Whether you're a person who has diabetes or you're helping someone else manage it, embecta wants to empower people to live a life unlimited by diabetes through innovative products and educational resources. You can learn more at www.embecta.com. That's E-M-B-E-C-T-A dot com. Hey everyone, we are approaching 300 episodes on this feed and over those years I've gotten to meet a ton of people either on Instagram or through the podcast or at events throughout the diabetes community. and occasionally you meet people that are going through a lot of the same sort of life journey that you're going through and navigating with diabetes along the way and our guest today DJ Lipscomb is one of those people I think we first connected on Instagram in around 2017 when I was starting out my entrepreneurial journey and DJ had sent his creative reel to me and said hey let's try to find a way to work together someday. And fast forward about four years, and we were able to find a way to do that. And DJ and his wife, Corey, and their company, Exhale Creative, have been a constant for diabetics doing things over the past few years and have been cutting together a lot of videos for us. So I'm really excited today to dig into talking about at least part of a lot of the things that DJ and I have worked on and kind of encountered together over the years, and you can hear some of his story. But it doesn't even begin to cover the entire spectrum of it because DJ is also heavily involved with the Breakthrough T1D play community and the diabetes gaming community, which we're going to touch on in future episodes. So please enjoy this interview with our longtime collaborator and my friend, DJ Lipscomb. Hello, and welcome back to another episode of Diabetics Doing Things. We're telling the amazing stories of people with diabetes from all over the world. And I'm really excited for this interview because my guest has been behind the scenes at Diabetics Doing Things now for over a year. And he and I have been friends via social media for six or seven years now. And we've really connected not only over diabetes, but also over entrepreneurship and creative work that we do. And we just have a very similar path in that. So DJ, I'm very excited that you are here on the show. DJ Lipscomb, you're T1D. We also know you as Patch in the Type 1 gaming community. Man, I'm really excited that you're here in front of the camera instead of behind the scenes. I'm thrilled. I know we've talked about this for a long time, and it's great to be here. Thanks for having me on.

[00:02:58] DJ Lipscomb: I'm excited to chat.

[00:02:58] Rob Howe: Yeah, me too. You know, we have talked about it for a while, and I was like, wait, we haven't done this? It seemed like we had in my head, like it was a weird thing. Like you talk about it enough. It's because we've streamed so many times together. My like only Zelda stream I ever did. You were my, like my viewer and, and we've done a couple of things with game to give now, um, breakthrough T1D play. So excited to talk about all those things, but we we're going to start where we always start, man. So diagnosis story, what do you remember about your diagnosis? And then what do you remember learning about diabetes from the beginning?

[00:03:30] DJ Lipscomb: It's funny. I was texting my mom today because I am not a diabetic that has like my date of when I got diagnosed in my memory. Like I don't remember. I know I was in fifth grade and it was in the fall of that year. The thing that sort of ties that timeline together is I got diagnosed with diabetes before I think my 11th birthday. So I think it was either 10 or 11 years old. And then on my birthday of that year, my parents took us to this concert. My parents were big into Christian music at the time. So we went to see Newsboys and Third Day, if you are familiar with either.

[00:04:05] Rob Howe: Yeah, I definitely am. I think that's another thing you and I bonded on is our childhood. I shared that first concert Instagram story recently. My first concert was Carmen in concert. Oh my gosh. Yeah, it was big, big Pentecostal music vibes.

[00:04:20] DJ Lipscomb: So I got a guitar from Third Day for my birthday that year. And I remember, well, obviously I remember getting the guitar that like, that's a big thing to remember. But I also remember because it was the year I got diagnosed with diabetes. So I think I was, it was fifth grade. I remember, I actually, I have pretty, a very vivid memory about what happened. I was at school. I hadn't been feeling good for a while. I like, I was getting headaches and nauseous. I was drinking all the time. Unfortunately, sodas, like just constantly thirsty. I had lost like I want to say like 50 pounds so I weighed I want to say like as a 10 or 11 year old I weighed like 50 or 60 pounds which is crazy and my parents had noticed and they were like starting to get concerned and like my mom even told me today I think she and my dad had had a conversation like hey you know if this continues we probably need to like take him to the doctor or whatever I remember I was like wetting the bed all the time or like having to get up and go to the bathroom throughout the night like all the time and so finally one day I started feeling really sick at school. I had a headache and like, I think I had maybe even, I don't think I'd thrown up, but I felt like I was going to, and I called my mom. So she came and picked me up. I think I ended up getting sick somewhere. She had to go do an errand and then she was going to take me to the doctor and I got sick. And so we, we got to the doctor's office and I remember she started describing the symptoms and immediately he was like, have, has he been tested for diabetes? And I think my mom describes it as like that kind of like, oh, shit moment of like, yeah, this makes total sense. And my blood sugar was like 450, 475, immediately got a shot. You know, they kept me at the pediatrician for a little while. And then we were living in Orlando at the time. So I went straight to Arnold Palmer Children's Hospital. And, man, I just I was so terrified. Like, I was so scared. And that really, that fear stuck with me for a while, especially, but you know, I, they, they ended up accidentally giving me too much either nausea medicine or something. And like, my mom says that they nearly put me into like a medical induced coma. I don't know how bad it was. There was a point I got to the doctor. I remember I was in the ER for a while. I remember, you know, it's just like a, it's a mad rush as a kid, especially like I, you know, they hooked me up to an IV. like I was so sick they started getting me you know giving me fluids and so they gave me something for nausea I remember at the time again still like church era I think my pastor like came by and said hello and like that's the only person I remember other than my parents being there and then I don't remember anything for like a solid 24 hours because whatever medicine they gave me like completely knocked me out and then I woke up like it probably I don't even I don't think it was 24 hours but I ended up waking up like way later the next day finally coming to and I just remember being the most hungry I've ever been in my entire life and eating like a

[00:07:16] Rob Howe: pancake breakfast at the children's hospital and so do you remember I I only ask this is like a core memory for me so like at the children's hospital at children's Dallas I had to like order food it was kind of like a hotel order it over the phone and like dial it in and I remember the person on the other side was helping me like count the carbs because they had like a carb ratio or like a carb threshold that they wanted me to meet. Did you have any experience like that? I think I had to fill out a like a sheet and turn it in basically like I gave it to the nurse

[00:07:48] DJ Lipscomb: but I think it was one for like a certain you know like carb or calorie threshold that I had to hit. They had specific meals that I could choose from and things like that. I don't think I ordered it over the phone but I know I remember filling out like a like a checkbox like sheet or whatever. So yeah, so I was there for, you know, at the time they were keeping, I don't know if this is the case anymore, but I was there for three or four days, I think. And I remember some of my friends came by and like brought me presents and stuff. And I remember in order to like leave the hospital, they were like, what are the two places you are the most afraid to give yourself a shot? And I was like, oh, probably like my leg and my stomach. And they were like, okay, cool. so you're gonna have to do that in order to get her before you leave and i was like so i i remember that and i you know prior to that though like i don't think i really had any knowledge of diabetes i know a friend of my parents was like an older she would she was probably a teenager when i knew her i remember that she was a diabetic but i didn't know much about it you know and then i did shots for a year my parents gave me shots for a little while when i first when i was first diagnosed and then i i started doing it myself and then a year after that like i was on a pump i immediately as quick as i could got on a pump and i was on the med well mini med good lord what was it i don't even remember what it was called at the time it would have been like the i'm gonna have to i'm gonna have to look it up because well it was one

[00:09:21] Rob Howe: of the i'm trying to think like what year would this have been so like this would have been 99 maybe so because of my relationship with Medtronic I get to go to Medtronic HQ from time to time yeah and so they have that cool museum and I know Justin did that video and you helped and worked on that with him but all of their pumps are there so you're you know I had I didn't get my first pump until 2008 and I think I had the 550 rebel mini med 550 rebel oh wow so yours has probably

[00:09:54] DJ Lipscomb: been that same probably 500 series. Yeah, I think it was a 508. I'm looking at it now. It was either

[00:09:59] Rob Howe: a 508 or 506 maybe. It's interesting like the timing because even though you were in Orlando and I was in Dallas and I was a little bit older than you when I was diagnosed, your time frame of like three to four days in the hospital, a year on injections before and then switching to a pump almost immediately after, pretty consistent with mine. Like that was the sort of the threshold they were like, yeah, you have to be on injections for a year and then we can put you on a pump. Yeah. And then I didn't really want to, because I was playing basketball. It didn't really make sense to me. And I didn't know that much about pumps. So I resisted that for like another year or so. I guess it was probably like three years with diabetes before I got on a pump, which like looking back, I can't believe that I was like going to college as a freshman and like moving away from home, playing basketball, managing diabetes with multiple daily injections. like while I was doing all that change, it just kind of like blows my mind.

[00:10:53] DJ Lipscomb: Yeah. I mean, I got diagnosed in fifth grade. I have a really good story that I think will work for one of your questions too in regards to that. And then I went into middle school and I changed school, you know, changed schools that year or whatever, man. And I just remember I was so afraid to be apart from my parents. Like I was terrified. And I actually, which is what's crazy is my middle school class, I went to this tiny private Christian school in Florida for all of middle school. And two other people in my class had diabetes, which is wild. Because like, I don't know anybody else in my immediate like surrounding right now. I don't think anybody else around me that's like my age, that's a friend of mine that has diabetes, that's like lives where I live. Like I have, I have you and I have friends like across the map that have diabetes, but like, I don't have any like friends. And I, in fact, I don't think I did for a long, a long time after that. So it was crazy that two other kids in that class had diabetes. It was also crazy because they managed their diabetes very differently than mine. Right. And very much fell into the stereotypes. I think there's a lot of, you know, there's a lot of stereotypes around and even stigmas around like how teenagers behave. But I think especially teenagers with diabetes, I remember hearing from a lot of doctors, like a lot of teenagers just don't take care of themselves. Like they just don't care. Like they don't want people to know that they have diabetes and things like that. And that was never something like, I've never really cared if people knew that I was a diabetic. Like I wear my pump visible all the time. Like you can see my pump all the time. It's never hidden. In fact, to the point where people were always like, why are you carrying a beeper? And I was like, it's not a beeper, but I just never cared about that. But I remember thinking these, these two other kids in my class, like one of them was a girl and one was a boy and they just didn't care. like they would pretty frequently be way out of range and had been in DKA multiple times and had like gone too low and things like that. And I just could never understand that. Like I never understood why you wouldn't want to take care of yourself, even though it is hard, but it was interesting being a year into my experience, going to school and being just absolutely terrified out of my mind for a while, probably for like the first, you know, couple of months. And then once I finally got my footing, I felt better. But then to watch another, like two other people in my class, just be like doing things so completely different than I did was really,

[00:13:13] Rob Howe: was really interesting. That's really interesting because for me, it was very similar. I went to a small school. There were a couple of kids who weren't, one of them was still at the school, but one of them was still around. It was a, it was a similar like Christian school attached to the church and we were, you know, involved in both. So like there's a little bit of like crossover over there. So I think there were total four kids with type 1 who were in that community. And we all did manage it very differently. There was one guy who was a little bit older and he and I had lunch a couple of years ago as well. It's still at least mutuals and childhood friends or what have you. And he like uses regular and like multiple daily injections and is like happy as a clam. Like his, his doctor just have it dialed in. And for him, it helps like for him regulate his diet because he's you know trying to he tries to eat really low carb as well just it's easier for him or what have you yeah and yeah and then there were these twins that had type 1 or i guess i don't know if they were i don't know if they were twins but they were like you know very close in age brother and sister and they had like the surgical like insulin pump port on one of them and so like i thought that that was like standard and so that was kind of like not misinformation but it was like wasn't the complete information for me so i was like very anti-pump because that was the only experience I had at the time. But, you know, I think two things I want to touch on before we move on is like the thing that I say a lot on the podcast and I say a lot to parents is we got to remember being a teenager is hard, whether you have diabetes or not. And is it as simple as teenagers don't take care of themselves or is it just like their hormones are so crazy that they think they're invincible and that's just part of like being young and growing and like crazy. Your hormones wake up at crazy levels at different times. And you say stuff that you don't know anything about. And you just are like, you know, your blood is gasoline. So you throw gasoline, you throw diabetes into that. And it's like, okay, well, it's not so much that the diabetes is out of control. It's just that you're out of control as a human because you're a kid. So, and you know, then on the other side, like the bell curve of A1Cs is for people who live with diabetes their entire life is highest when you're a teenager. And again, it's not necessarily always because you are just not taking care of yourself or, you know, or giving the middle finger to diabetes as much as it is like, yeah, you're just a crazy kid.

[00:15:33] DJ Lipscomb: Uh, you still like, we still experienced that today. I think we were texting about this like a week or two ago. It's like, it is mind boggling to me that in the morning I can wake up at a hundred after like a perfectly flat night, do absolutely nothing, not eat anything, just drink water. And maybe like we've, I've been adding, I told you, like I've been doing lion's mane in the morning and all of a sudden I'll be one 40, which again, still in range, but it's like, that's just my body. Like that's just hormones as an adult or whatever leftover from the night before that suddenly decides to make an appearance the next morning. It's so crazy how like the smallest things make such a huge impact on our blood sugar.

[00:16:13] Rob Howe: Well, it's also, and I've been trying to make sense of this over the past few years, you know, this about me and probably better than most, like, cause you're so dialed into the podcast, but like your body, everybody's body does that. Your body's just waking itself up. So your core temperature goes up, your cortisol and your adrenaline go up to wake you up and get your day started. And so yeah, if you don't have a functioning pancreas, yeah, you're going to have some blood sugar responses to that. And because of the pump systems and the algorithms and the delays of data for CGM, like you, it's not exactly perfect. Like you said, one 40, you know, is not a number that you're really concerned about, but if you're going with doing nothing, like no carbs or anything like from one a hundred to one 40, you're like, okay, well like that's kind of frustrating. And then if you overcorrected for that, then you're low and it's like, now you're chasing and the day hasn't even really started. So just a challenge again with like diabetes and all these things I'm trying to do now, Like you're talking about lion's mane, like I'm trying to make sure my sleep and my hydration are dialed in sleep, hydration movement. If I can keep those at a consistent level, almost everything else gets easier for me. And, but it's not the same for everybody. I think we've been really working on that too.

[00:17:27] DJ Lipscomb: Like we got up and went on a walk today. It was like first thing, like woke up before we did anything else. We went on a walk and we're trying to get in a better habit of just, I think a lot of people, the movement thing is so interesting and a rabbit trail of its own, but I think a lot of people get hyper focused on, Oh, I need to be at the gym. I need to do this, which those are all good decisions to make, but like just movement, like 10, 15 minutes of movement a day, it makes such a big difference just in general for your body, but especially with people with diabetes, like helping kind of keep things leveled out and just make your body feel good. So,

[00:17:55] Rob Howe: well, we, and I think I probably need to pull it up in notions so that I don't butcher the study, but we did an ADA podcast and we're talking about the actual data. Let's see, poster session links. There it is. Shout out Notion for keeping me organized at least or the second brain app, but like was the quality of exercise for glucose control. A study on, yeah, in type 1 diabetes meta-analysis, variable glucose response to exercise based on intensity. So you're talking about going to the gym, doing some like CrossFit or high intensity workout versus just getting up and walking around. or in the diabetes online community, we talk about like brushing your teeth or vacuuming or going to target or recipes for low blood sugars, right? So like just a little bit of activity. And so this meta analysis was like really clear. If you're trying for glucose control and also glucose response to exercise, low intensity, like a walk or a zone two cardio, if you're tracking your exercise zones, if you're a psycho like me, that's better for your glucose than high intensity exercise. And so, you know, it's kind of a challenging thing because it doesn't feel like quote unquote, those who aren't listening out on video, I'm doing the air quotes. Like it doesn't feel like exercise, but it is, it's really good for you. And even a 10 minute walk, especially around mealtime can just help get your insulin sensitivity. So you can have that higher carb, higher fat meal and have a better glucose response. So it's another one of those non-clinical, like non-medicine, non-pharmaceutical treatments where you can give yourself a little bit of an advantage. And yeah, man, it was interesting like reading that study because you think like, oh, I feel more tired. I feel more spent with high intensity, but that's going to give you a glucose excursion because of the adrenaline. And that can be really hard to manage. I remember the first time I tried to do some more

[00:19:50] DJ Lipscomb: difficult weight stuff at the gym in the last like year and was just like completely gassed and then i was chasing a high the rest of the day because i had a bunch of adrenaline and cortisol pumping through me so yeah the street that we're on has a little hill it's like a nice yeah i've seen you post about it yeah it's my little diabetes walk is what i call it whenever i'm like 180 and i'm like i really don't want to go high i'll just be like i'm just gonna go do a little diabetes walk so i'll just do like one you know it's like a five five to ten minute depending on how fast i'm going up the hill, come back down. It's perfect.

[00:20:19] Rob Howe: So nothing like a little hill walk to, uh, to calm those, those sugars and get that, that insulin absorbed. Okay. Let's shift gears a little bit. You are an entrepreneur and have been for quite some time and your company, XL creative, I was thinking back framing up this interview. You guys work with the podcast and have for a couple of years now, which has been awesome. You know, you and Corey, sorry for not mentioning your name sooner on this episode, Corey, but you guys have been, you know, a really integral part to the diabetics doing things team. I haven't gone back and verified this, but I was thinking about our first like conversations was definitely in the early days of recreation and diabetics doing things. And I was maybe sharing some agency stuff and you were like, Hey, you know, I'm a DP and a producer and a videographer and I run my own shop and you kind of sent me a creative reel and you were working on a couple of cool little artsy projects and also like commercial projects. And I was like, Oh, I bet this guy knows exactly what I'm going through right now, which is like setting up health insurance, trying to figure out how to make money and enough money to cover everything every month and starting a new company and doing new business outreach and all this other stuff. So right off the bat, I just remember, oh, I bet this guy knows way more about my day-to-day life than the average person with diabetes. So I don't know, how did you, you know, starting Exhale Creative, like your life as an entrepreneur, how did you get started in that? And how did you know that was something

[00:21:41] DJ Lipscomb: that you really wanted to pursue? Yeah. My professional career is like, it's bizarre. The history is very strange. Cause I, I started working for my dad. My dad was an artist manager in the Christian music space up until the time. Well, the weird rabbit trail there is that he was

[00:21:57] Rob Howe: in the golf course management business, which is really funny that we live in Pinehurst now. And that you got diagnosed at Arnold Palmer hospital, which I tracked.

[00:22:06] DJ Lipscomb: Yeah. So he worked in golf course management. He was like pretty high up and event at some point he just like decided I want to be out of this business and I want to be an artist manager in Christian music of all the things. So, and, and I had started playing guitar right before I got diagnosed. And so I worked with him for a long time when I was a teenager, I worked at his business up until he passed away in 2009. Anyway, so I worked with him at his business and was also playing guitar. So I ended up touring professionally, getting paid to play guitar by the time I was 18. So I had started doing that and I was learning all the business side of the music business. So I did that even after he passed away. And when he passed away, I ended up getting a job at a record label, started doing marketing. So at the time, they literally called it a digital marketing because it was separate at the time. There was the advertising part of the business and the traditional marketing part of the business, and there was the digital marketing. And so there were two different teams at the time. I worked there for a long time. And I think what happened is in between the time I started a corporate job, I had already been on the road. I got to play for an artist that was doing an arena tour. So I was like living on a tour bus. Do we need to drop the artist names? Stephen Curtis Chapman? Stephen Curtis Chapman, yeah. which was a whole other fun thing trying to manage diabetes while you're on tour and I didn't have a CGM at the time I would literally like keep sodas on my guitar rack on stage so if I ever felt low during the middle of a set I could just like go chug a soda real quick so I had just gotten used to this whole other life and then I tried to go get a corporate job which very different thinking back now seems very silly but I ended up working there for I think almost three or four years and in the middle of that somewhere in there I picked up a camera and I really I fell in love with the storytelling part of marketing and I watched a lot of people involved in the marketing process not do a good job of communicating together so I would watch our label go spend 10 or 15 thousand dollars on somebody to shoot a really really cool video but it just was like a really cool video that didn't serve any other purpose than being like a really cool video and And I watched a lot of guys just making really cool videos, but them not really having any sort of like story behind it or heart behind it. They just looked really good because they were shooting on a red camera. You know what I mean? And so I, as somebody who loved music and loved, like I was writing songs and stuff as a teenager and into my adult years. I still do some today. I like stories. I love stories. And I feel like stories are like the thread that kind of tie everybody together. And so the more I started working on that and kind of developing that passion, the more I realized that I didn't really fit into a job. And it wasn't until 2016. So like I got the job at the label like 2011 or 12. I worked there for a while and I worked at HarperCollins publishing for a while, did marketing for books. And then at the end of 2016, after several years of doing stuff as a side hustle, had finally garnered up enough contracts to feel comfortable to where I was making the contracts on paper, I was making more money than I was for my salary at the job. And so at the end of 2016, in the midst of getting divorced, I fully started my solo entrepreneur career and went full time, lost my insurance.

[00:25:32] Rob Howe: you know, those great experiences for the first, first days of entrepreneurship.

[00:25:37] DJ Lipscomb: Yeah. And it was, it was terrifying and it's still scary at times today. And I ended up doing my first and second year went extremely well. The beginning of the first year was terrible because I left my job with the promise of a contract being in place by the time I left. and then that contract ended up not getting signed for three or four months so there was in the midst of getting divorced I had to tell my now ex-wife that like we couldn't pay our mortgage for like

[00:26:09] Rob Howe: a month it was such a disaster man into 2016 and 2017 was a wild time I believe me at the same time as that was going on literally like not the divorce piece but the contracts that were promised versus like contracts that were actually fulfilled. I think I learned so much in that six months of like literally January 3rd, 2017, walking into my boss's office, both my business partner and I quitting. And, you know, I had saved, I think 10 grand and that was my runway. That was better than what I had. I mean, I was like, that was like the most I'd ever seen in my bank account. I think at that time I was like, oh my God, all right, how much, how long can I make this last? I had like stockpiled some supplies. I was like, now I know I was rationing insulin and just being like, Hey, Hey, this is our runway. I think I've got six months of insulin and I've got a little bit of money to like pay my bills. And I was eating like shopping at Aldi and like doing like $30 of groceries per week. I was like really grinding it out to make it. I don't know. Entrepreneurship is like the best worst thing. The feeling of the highs are like nothing else. And the lows are just as bad. It's very akin to diabetes, but Hey. hey, there's nothing like that for sales tax bill. There's nothing like that for self-employment tax return. You're like, oh my God, I made 60K and I owe 35. What did I do wrong?

[00:27:33] DJ Lipscomb: That was my 2018. In fact, I didn't incorporate or I didn't make the business as an LLC now, but the first year I did really well. The first year I made a decent amount of money. I was still just a sole proprietor and I didn't have my company set up and I'm still paying. that that tax the tax bill that i have for that is i could buy a new car like straight up with it right and we'll be paying that for the next i don't know there's like a point in taxes i don't know if i should say this on the podcast but there's like a point in tax law where they can't come after you anymore that's right i'm within a few years of just like being like just kidding i

[00:28:10] Rob Howe: don't want to pay that and then they can't do anything about it so hey if you're if you're from the irs and you're listening to this podcast first of all you guys owe me money and second of all, you didn't hear anything about that.

[00:28:21] DJ Lipscomb: Yep. But I, man, that was really scary and it sucks, especially because also in the midst of all that I met Corey and I felt really guilty for a long time as someone who owned their own business and kind of like came with not only like the burden of having a chronic illness, I also had three kids already and I had my own business that came with what was like a $30,000 tax bill. And so I was just like, sorry.

[00:28:50] Rob Howe: Yeah, it must be real love then if that, you know, you come with all that.

[00:28:54] DJ Lipscomb: Yeah. It took me a long time to really shake the guilt of all of those things. And I think I carried the weight of it too. I felt like it was my responsibility to carry that all on my own. When in reality compared to the relationship I was in previously, like I had a partner wanted to participate in making sure all of the things were okay, which is really nice.

[00:29:09] Rob Howe: So as you would say, shout out to Corey, cause she's, she's a real one for sure. So yeah. It's you know, when you find the right person, it's, it's pretty incredible. Well, Erica and I have experienced like a little bit different, like both sides of the entrepreneurial thing over the last couple of years. Cause like, I obviously have been an entrepreneur since 2016. Wow. Saying that out loud makes me sound old, but you know, she, she got laid off in early 2023 and had to become a entrepreneur on her own as a contractor doing freelance gigs. And now is back working full time. But I don't know, it was letting her avoid a lot of the mistakes I made early on and like, you know, have somebody, I don't know. you and I were talking before we started hitting record about other business ideas and like people that we knew that had already done that. And I think that's one of the things that I would never, I wouldn't do it any other way. Like I have no regrets about being an entrepreneur, but talking with people who have done it and getting advice from people like we're talking about that 2017 tax bill for me was $38,000 on 65K take home. So like you do the math there, that's not a whole lot of, not a whole lot of money. And it could have been avoided if I had done things a little bit differently. And so you live and learn, but there's a reason that like most businesses fail because it's really hard. And there's all this stuff that you just don't know about when you're going into it. And you think like the hardest part is generating the revenue. And no, the hardest part is keeping it. I think it's the hardest part is absolutely keeping the revenue. It's funny how

[00:30:33] DJ Lipscomb: you can go from having the best year to the worst. And this hasn't been the worst year for us by any stretch, but I had a friend and a mentor of mine in Nashville. He mixes records for people, which is its own business and he's an entrepreneur in his own right and he was like i operate under the feast or famine mentality and he's been very successful because of that and he always was smart about how he saved and spent his money and i had another boss that did the same thing that he was like our family operates on us assuming that we make fifty thousand dollars a year that's how much money we make everything else i put somewhere else and we don't touch it and and i've always really struggled to do that and especially you know adding in the diabetes portion of it because i haven't had insurance since 2018 and i remember actually one of the first conversations you and i had was i reached out to you about insurance because i think you had just gotten insurance set up for recreation and i think i actually talked to your insurance person because i was trying to figure out if there was a possibility for me to now once i had established my llc if there was like a possibility for me to have insurance as well. And it was just, since it was just me at the time, it wasn't cheaper for me to do it that way versus going through the marketplace. I mean, we still don't have insurance. It's I, I haven't had insurance since then it's crazy.

[00:31:50] Rob Howe: It's, it's such a shame, right? Because you know, Erica's going through she's working at a big company now. And so one of the benefits of working in a big corporate America enterprise is they have more employees so they can negotiate insurance coverage rates better for their employees. And early on, we didn't have insurance until year two, until 2018, I think for recreation. But we always had more than just myself and Sterling, my business partner. And so when you get into a group, you got to have like a couple employees to meet that threshold. And one of my really close friends owns a similar agency and they're up to about 60 employees now. And even they don't have enough employees to really get the great deals. And so every year your insurance premium goes up and the insurance company gives you less coverage. And so, yeah, you know, we've had insurance, but I never feel good about signing that renewal because it's like, oh, great. Now, I was pretty open recently about the insulin that really works for me. Fiasp isn't covered by my insurance. And they want me to take another name brand, Lyumjev, but my body doesn't respond well to that. My doctor's written letters and they still don't want to cover it. So it's like, you know, operating off of coupons. And so it's like, well, what am I paying for this for? And I just hate deals like that. Cause like as an entrepreneur, you want to have good business savvy and it's just bad business. It seems like, but you got to do it. My hot take is insurance in

[00:33:12] DJ Lipscomb: the United States is a, is a scam. And I, is that even a hot take at this point? I don't think so. But I mean, like I, as someone with diabetes who hasn't had insurance, the only thing that scares me about not having insurance at this point is like, if something like really bad happened. Right. Of course. But but even then, like I watched my dad, you know, go through cancer and like the medical bills that my parents racked up because of that. It was like, what was the point, man? Like you could have probably negotiated better with the hospital to get those bills down than than having to deal with insurance. And the amount of time that I spent on the phone when I did have insurance still fighting with what was being covered. Like, I'm so sorry, Medtronic, because like I know that there's like a two hundred and thirty dollar bill on my Medtronic account from 2017, where my insurance told me that they were going to get this filled before it ran out at my company and then they didn't. And so I got hit with the bill for it. And I'm like, I'm not going to pay for that. and when I moved here I had really good insurance here for like the first year and then actually got hit with a tax credit because I made too much money the next year and they didn't like that so then I got penalized for it which is a whole other dumb thing but I had to go through like a third-party prescription instead of going directly to MiniMed, Medtronic and so they were a huge pain to deal with and so now I'm like I have a couple of people that I got connected with that I've bought sensor supplies on eBay from. There's a great nonprofit called the Embrace Movement that's based out of Arizona that I actually just got a box from them a couple days ago and they'll send me like a three month supply from here and there. Stacey Sims here in North Carolina got me connected to the like T1D Facebook group. Bunch of people are always pretty quick to share stuff on there. Neil, what's Neil's last name? Great House, the Beaties. Great House, the Beaties. he was another person that I got connected to around the same time as you like Neil when he was still on Medtronic he sent me some stuff one time so and I only pay $35 for insulin which is crazy like you've had more issues paying like and all literally all you have to do to get that is not have insurance and fill out your information on Lily's website and they just like instantaneously give you a card because I went to refill my prescription a couple weeks ago and my prescription card that they gave me had run out and it was a point where I had waited way too long and I was like this is going to be an issue if I have to like go through this because it was like a weekend and they were closed and so I was like freaking out because I really needed the insulin and I went on their website and filled out a form and then I had the card immediately and it worked and it was like I and I pay $35 and I'll get four to six vials of Humalog so like I said there's sometimes where I wish I had insurance because I haven't been to a primary care and forever. I spend probably about $200 a visit for my endo appointments, which end up being like twice a year. So like $400 all in. So I'm probably still maybe two to $3,000 out of pocket a year for diabetes stuff. But honestly, like the only time that I wasn't paying that much was when I worked for HarperCollins, which is News Corp. And so like we paid nothing for insurance. They covered everything. That was the only time that I, I think my out of pocket maximum on that insurance plan was like $500. And so from there they covered everything. So, you know, it's like, those are the perks of the big corporate job. Right? Yeah. So I think now I'm just like as scary as it is sometimes. And it's frustrating because I wanted to move to an endocrinologist that was closer to me because mine is currently almost an hour away and nobody here will take cash patients. They will only take you if you're insurance, which is crazy. Like I'm giving you money. Like, why won't you just take my money? And it's because the insurance companies give them more money than cash patients do. It's a big old scam. I feel like they try to make you more scared about it. And it's actually not as scary as it is. I think I initially was like really nervous about having my own business and not having insurance. And like the first year it was really scary.

[00:37:22] Rob Howe: And then I watched how little money I was actually spending out of pocket. And I was like, well, you know. Yeah. Cause I mean, I'll tell it, I'll be honest with you, like transparently, and this is not an ad for recreation necessarily, but we pay a hundred percent of our employee health premiums because we've got to compete for talent and it's important to me, you know, we're trying to design the agency that Sterling and I would want to work at. And an important thing for me is, has having insurance covered because, because I'm a person with diabetes and a chronic illness. And when I'm evaluating job opportunities, that's a point in the right direction. And so we pay whatever, 650 bucks a month for every single one of our employees. So when you're talking about like the cost, yeah. So at the end of the year, even if they don't use anything, you know, it's almost seven grand. And so, or more than that, I guess.

[00:38:04] DJ Lipscomb: So per employee too. That's crazy.

[00:38:06] Rob Howe: Right. So right off the bat, that's what I'm doing. And then Dexcom just released the Stello CGM that you don't have to have a prescription for two of them a month. It's like 150 bucks, which is again, no disrespect to my mini med seven 80 G and guardian sensors, but that's less money for the Stello over the counter than my guardians cost with my insurance. So you start to look at those numbers and you're like, all right, well, I can get a CGM without insurance for this amount of money. There are some risks obviously, but there's risks with insurance as well. Like some people's insurance deductibles are like 15 grand. And so you're still going to be on the hook for that on these high deductible, low premium plans. So I think you said it earlier as a hot take. I don't think it's a hot take that we have the most expensive healthcare. We have the most advanced healthcare and we have the sickest population. And that's because we're just incentivizing the wrong things. yeah it's i mean i could go on a hold that's not what this podcast is about but because of this i'm digging into like health insurance experts and content creators who create content about health insurance to come on the podcast and help people navigate it because i really do believe that a lot of these systems they just weaponize boredom and weaponize having to be on hold for an hour and having to go advocate for yourself because people you know won't they'll just opt out they won't do

[00:39:20] DJ Lipscomb: anything yeah that's what i found is like a majority of the time i got what i wanted if i persevered. I always had to like psych myself up because I knew it's like when you call the IRS, it's like, I know my half of my day is gone. I always ended up picking a day to deal with tax stuff. Cause I'm like, well, that's half of my day. That's just what it is. And the same was with insurance. When I like had to deal with it, I knew it was going to be two, three hours of my time just gone. And to probably end up having to have another conversation soon after, cause it still would be wrong. It's so frustrating. I guess the positive side of it is like, if you're listening and you don't have insurance, I have found as a diabetic, and I say this in knowing my place of privilege, I'm still able to afford the things that I can, like $35 a month or whatever you're spending on for how many times you're getting your prescription filled. Sometimes that's a big deal for people. Thankfully, it hasn't been a big deal for me. And spending $100, $200 here and there on supplies hasn't been that big of a deal. But there's a really great community of people who are supporting people who can't get supplies. I think Laura from Just My Type, she shares a lot of stuff on her socials as well when people are giving things away. And so it doesn't have to be scary. I would say it honestly probably takes less work than dealing with insurance sometimes. But once you kind of know where those little pockets of people are, like when I figured out if you search on eBay for Medtronic oval tape that says read the description and then it says, oh, it also includes these things. There's ways to get your stuff. People are finding ways around the system. And I've been able to stay on my seven 80 because of that. Otherwise, like I couldn't afford it. Like there's no way it's so expensive. It's absolutely insane that it's without insurance. It was like five or 600 bucks for a box of five sensors. It's crazy. Like who can afford, nobody can afford that.

[00:41:02] Rob Howe: That's like, that's for five sensors. That's basically a month, a little over a month of sensors. And yeah. You know, and that doesn't even include like the out of pocket costs for the technology. Like it's like a small car for, for insulin pumps. I know there's some new insulin pumps as well. Like the sticker price on them is six, seven grand. I will say, so my, my six, what was before the seven series?

[00:41:26] DJ Lipscomb: Was it six, seven, six, seven, six, eight. Cause I had that before I moved to the seven 70 and then upgraded to the seven 80. But that one just randomly died on me for some reason. And I seriously considered moving to a Dexcom Omnipod. but when I went to price it out like I couldn't afford it neither of those companies had insurance free options they had a kind of a cash price discount but I was looking at spending over a thousand dollars a month on pods and Dexcom sensors and so I will say a big reason why I stuck with Medtronic was because they offered a payment plan for their their 780 Medtronic assurance program and so i think i spend 177 bucks a month which again i know for some people that's still more than you can spend but for me it was like i can afford that per month in the 780g system you know we're 780g boys like this system has changed my life like it's insane how great it is and everybody has their own experiences and things like that but man oh man do i love it i love it so much. I'm thankful that they offered that program because otherwise I think I would have maybe not had to get another pump. And I can't imagine now, like I can't imagine not being on a CGM and a pump that work together. Like it seems so crazy and scary, honestly, like even that two hour window when I'm not wearing my sensor, or if I accidentally changed my sensor and it ends at like eight at night. And I'm like, no way am I going to try to get a new sensor up before I go to bed? Like Corey hates it. When I go to bed at night without a sensor, it's like the scariest night of my sleep. I'm like, I did this for like 20 years. But now it's like, I can't imagine not having that safety net around me. Cause it's like, it really has like truly, I take for granted

[00:43:15] Rob Howe: nights. It's so crazy. Like even on the seven 70 G I would wear Medtronic seven 80 G even if I wasn't a Medtronic sponsored everything that I do. And I am so grateful for their partnership. They allow us to do amazing stuff. Like have this conversation, like hire you guys, like do our camps and our clinics, but acting like it's not the best pump algorithm FDA approved on the market right now is, is like, come on guys, like be for real. It is awesome. And I take for granted sleeping through the night. And even on the seven 70 G, cause the guardian three sensor, you had to do two calibrations a day. Like it would wake me and Erica up and mostly her. And she has really challenging sleep problems, but now no calibration requests in the middle of the night. I sleep through the night. I take it for granted now. And somebody is on my Medtronic CareLink share because they wanted to test it out with some new like third-party apps that so you could use some of the Medtronic technology with like a sugar pixel or something like that. Yeah, they're like, oh, don't worry I'm not gonna like judge your a1c or your time and range. I was like you can judge it all you want It's like 85% and like like I don't I don't think about it at all Like so the MiniMed 780G is an unbelievable piece of technology. I'm curious what mine has been For the last 30 days. Let's say not to even because i i don't even know that because i checked my my insights emails i was trying to log into that care link thing the my insights emails give you that every month and i don't even think i get i don't even think i get those i need i should set those up yeah they're super easy last 30 days 90 in range wow nine zero percent in range last 30 days you're that is i mean if you could have told me that in 2008 2010 like i would have been like what that's

[00:44:56] DJ Lipscomb: unbelievable even i get so annoyed too i i think you and i share this like oh man do i get an i

[00:45:02] Rob Howe: get so annoyed when i'm high and can't a little low alarm are you getting a low do you need a juice no i'm okay i'm i didn't even feel it yet it's like 66 so eric is looking at me through

[00:45:12] DJ Lipscomb: the window though like i'll be fine does she does she get your does she get your caroling stuff no

[00:45:18] Rob Howe: i actually have never shared it so i was telling that i was right yeah i've never shared it with

[00:45:22] DJ Lipscomb: buddy cory gets mine now and i think she gets more nervous about it than i do because like i went to bed we went to bed last night and i was like 170 with a down i had come off of like a weird high my blood sugar like spiked and so i was like two something initially when we went to bed and i had like 2.4 units of insulin on deck and i was like 170 with a down arrow and she was like hey like you're 170 with a down arrow i was like wake me up if i'm like under 90 and she was like are you sure i was like yeah yeah yeah yeah and sure enough like it came down and like leveled

[00:45:57] Rob Howe: out for the night but like it does it lands those so well like i sometimes will eat like high really high protein and kind of like high fiber low glycemic index dinners and yeah maybe you know eat too much but like i hit the first bolus but like you know the dual wave back in the day it would be like yeah later yeah and it catches that stuff so like I'll come up to like sometimes make a little over 200 and I'm asleep and it like levels me off I'm laying down I'm not even doing anything and I wake up in the morning didn't even know and yeah I click that button and I'm like a hundred and it's like wow what a what a huge level up I really feel like have really big problems like staying in range overnight and in the mornings because I just don't deal with that I know everybody's different but I really I love that about the 70g I will say my only criticism which you and I have talked about and I actually talked to Justin a lot about this because he

[00:46:45] DJ Lipscomb: didn't he wasn't super familiar with the Medtronic algorithm was I do feel like there's a few times where I hit this like over correction roller coaster where like I'll go high it'll correct I'll go low it will have cut out like I'll see the gap like you can probably see it last night even let's see I don't know if you can kind of see I don't know if you can see it on camera but you You can see where I had that gap where it gave me no basil, no, where no basil was coming in. And that was during the middle of the night. So I wasn't responding to it, but like, typically there'll be days where like, if that happens, if I go high for some reason, like I just didn't bolus correctly or a million other factors may have been, I feel like I start chasing all day and it's just this like up and down, up and down. That's really my only critique of the algorithm is like, if I get to have like a high, high, like a like above like 240 250 and I'm that's to where it starts to get to be like I go high then I crash then I go back up because I wasn't getting insulin and so I corrected for the low and I only did you know I only had like a juice so I had like 10 or 15 carbs but then spikes back up and there's no insulin on deck to catch it and so like that's that's my only critique but even with that like that being the most like annoying thing about it I still am managing to stay within the 90% range a majority of the time, which is crazy.

[00:48:04] Rob Howe: Yeah, like just 90% over 30 days. I think I've only maybe done that once. That's incredible. So props to you. But I think for me too, like the biggest thing for me right now is the little amount of time I'm spending managing diabetes. It's like a career low in thought about diabetes. And that's opened up a lot of like happiness and peace and productivity in the rest of my life. And man, I don't know the value of that. And like to be able to still hit, I think I hit my lowest time in range over 30 days in the last six months and it was 84%. So like what, like I'm not thinking about it at all. I'm getting 84%. Like I'm eating what I want to eat. I'm doing what I want to do. And that to me, it's almost priceless. So I feel psyched about that. We, we are like at an hour. So I want to get us to the rest of the interview. Cause we had a lot of fun stuff to talk about. We'll have to have you back to talk about, maybe we bring Monique in on this too. And we talk about breakthrough T1D play because the gaming side of, of diabetes is so cool. And what you guys do there, maybe we'll have to like do a stream or something and play

[00:49:08] DJ Lipscomb: Mario party or something while we do that. Because that community has been such a great part of my life. Yeah. We could literally spend a whole other hour talking about all that stuff. So let's just

[00:49:18] Rob Howe: dig in. Cause I know you have a stigma story that we want to talk through. So like, what do you wish more people knew about diabetes or like what stigma stories have you encountered in your, you know, life with diabetes over the past 20 some years? The most stereotypical stigma that I

[00:49:31] DJ Lipscomb: faced growing up was around what I could or couldn't eat. I don't know when the last time I had that question pop up, but it definitely is something that people for a long time, even into my adult years, it was something that people would be like, Oh, are you allowed to eat that? But the funny story that I have that kind of ties back into that is I, I still do this now, but I did it a lot when I was a kid. I probably have undiagnosed ADHD, but I used to just drum on everything like pencils in class all this stuff and I would drum all the time and so plus

[00:50:02] Rob Howe: we're like the same age and like drumming on desks I feel like the market on drumming on desks

[00:50:07] DJ Lipscomb: peaked when we were in high school it was like that's right yeah so I was this was in this was the year I got diagnosed like I had students in my class like fellow classmates that would bribe me with candy to stop drumming and so so when I when I came back after being diagnosed my my class thought that they had given me diabetes because they had given me candy to stop from drumming and then they were also like concerned they were like well how are we going to get him to shut the fuck up they lost their only leverage on you they lost their leverage because sugar-free candy is disgusting, uh, and makes you poop your pants. Oh man. The Amazon reviews on some of those sugar-free candies are hilarious. So yeah, my class like was so concerned that they had caused me to have diabetes because of sugar. And I think that's such a comment. That's such a weird, like the, oh, if you eat too much, you get diabetes and there's so much stigma around type 2 as well in regards to that kind of stuff. It's actually wild to me, the general lack of education that exists about diabetes in the world. And I think a couple of years ago, maybe this is what I was telling you about, but like before I moved from Nashville, I was working on like a little passion project of doing, I never finished it. It kind of got thrown by the wayside, but doing a documentary on diabetes, but like a very real kind of raw documentary about facing the fact that outside of the technology that we have now, and we don't have to think a lot. Like if you're just average Joe Schmo diabetic still doing whatever, even with a pump, like a pump without a pump that maybe doesn't communicate as well. If I stopped doing what I needed to do to manage my diabetes, it wouldn't be immediate for the most likely, but it would eventually, it would kill me. Like something would happen and it would most likely take my life, which is crazy to think about that we deal with a chronic illness that we will have forever for all intents and purposes. And thankfully, like we've been saying, we're really, it's at a place now in technology where so much has been relieved of that. But generally speaking, we don't know if there's ever going to

[00:52:22] Rob Howe: be a full 100% cure for this. And for us, for people who already have it, right? Yeah. Well, we both grew up in the age where my doctors were telling me the cure was 10 years away when I was

[00:52:33] DJ Lipscomb: diagnosed. And that was 25 years ago. I don't look at that with like any sort of spite, but I just some like realistic, but I do think a big reason that diabetes doesn't get as much funding compared to other illnesses and diseases is because I think diabetics in general, we don't think about the seriousness. We think about the seriousness of it, but not in a way that's like outwardly perceived by other people. So much so to the point that I think people don't realize how serious diabetes is or can be. And I think that's probably, if I'm thinking about stigmas and how people view diabetes in the world, I think it's that people don't view it with enough urgency. It's not to like gaslight us diabetics, but you know, we're just going through the motions doing what we need to do to take care of ourselves. And because it's not something as urgent as other illnesses, I think a lot of the research and development and funding and things has been slower to come in because it doesn't feel like there's like, oh, we need to get this figured out right now. But it's the idea if there's a day in the future where I fully don't have to think about this anymore and I can eat a bowl of ice cream without being concerned as to going high later or going and doing something outside and not having to think about how many juices I have in my everyday carry with me. that seems insane so I wish that people knew how serious it was because I think if people understood the seriousness of it that maybe we would be as thankful as I am for where we are

[00:54:06] Rob Howe: I think maybe we would be even further than we are now I'm with it I do kind of feel guilty sometimes of how easy I make diabetes look I got a comment a couple years ago on like a YouTube video from a woman who was like he makes it look so easy and it just like really hit me yeah I mean I was even making an effort to like show how seamless and kind of easy it is. And I never looked at it that way. I think that perspective, I think I have to make sure I, I walk in other people's shoes because it is hard. And it's like, I, I'm quoting someone's like shit posting tweet or something, but it's like diabetes is a deeply unserious disease. It's like, oh, I gave myself a micro millimeter too much of this liquid. And now all of a sudden I have to eat a bag of gummy bears or else I'm going to die. or, you know, I took too many steps and it was too hot outside. Now I'm laying in a pool of my own sweat scrambling for M&Ms. You know, it's just, it's a really weird thing. And it's like, oh, now all of a sudden I'm fine. I was, I was near death 15 minutes ago, but now I'm fine. Thanks to these magical gummy bears. I was trying to go to the grocery store. Yeah, exactly. Like you're, you're like, oh no, I'm, I'm going low in target and I've got to like go chug a juice box in the middle of this aisle. You know, like you're right. We're walking on thin ice every day. If we don't get it exactly right, we could die. And, you know, I think we do sometimes take for granted how serious it is or try to downplay it because we're just trying to fit in and we're just trying to, you know, not make a big deal out of it. I had a guest on the podcast recently who was talking about a guy who was a D1 football player and he didn't want to talk about diabetes with his coaches because he didn't want them to have another reason to take him out of the game that he had worked so hard to get to. And I, I related with that so much. I didn't want to be looked at and othered. And, but at the same time, you don't want to like minimize all the work that you're doing. So it just really is like one of those, you know, mind fucks that, that diabetes brings into the equation. I'm so thankful that we are at a place. And, and again, the whole other

[00:56:00] DJ Lipscomb: access conversation comes into play because not everybody has access to what we are using, but it is definitely the closest I've ever felt to not thinking like I have to think about it, but even, And, and I think that's what makes the moments where I do have to think about it that much more frustrating. Cause I'll get to that point where my systems, my pump and everything's working really well. I have a good site. I have a sensor that's accurate and I can spend a week. Like not even having to check my blood.

[00:56:28] Rob Howe: And then, you know, you have a day on the fingers is so nice. And then you have a day where your site goes bad, your sensors bleeding and

[00:56:37] DJ Lipscomb: it's not, you know, won't calibrate and you're having to change everything all at once. and you're just like, this is so annoying. The back and forth I think is crazy. And I think we need to give ourselves more credit for how much work, even when we're not thinking about it. The breakthrough people recently, I think had a question or something came up on one of those streams where they were talking about like, how many decisions throughout the day are you making? Whether like passively or intentionally, what are decisions that you're making or how are they impacted by diabetes? And it's like, really every decision I make to a certain extent, somewhere in the like three or four check boxes is like, do I have juice with me? Or is this going to impact? You know what I mean? So it really is something like that we're thinking about 24 seven, 365 days a year, even with the best technology. Well said. Well said.

[00:57:25] Rob Howe: DJ man, it was great to have you on the pod. I can't believe we didn't do this sooner.

[00:57:29] DJ Lipscomb: I know. And I know we could, we could chit chat for hours, but I appreciate it.

[00:57:33] Rob Howe: We're thankfully getting ahead of schedule on the editorial calendar. You know, shout out to Ashley and Laura for keeping me on track there. But I'd love to have a specialized gaming episode because that community really is, I still think one of the best kept secrets in diabetes. And it's just been such a joy to stream. I've got my capture card now, so I just need to get off my butt and start streaming again. The last like two weeks. Oh, dude. Well, all right. Well, again, we're telling truths on this podcast. So I checked my stats the other day. I've logged 155 hours of tears of the kingdom in 2024. And I, and I still am only 47% complete with the full game. So like, there's so much work to do. I was telling Erica that she's like, Oh my God, like, are you going to finish it all? I was like, no, probably not. But a lot of little side quests to get on.

[00:58:19] DJ Lipscomb: This might be cut from the podcast, but I just need to say that. Yeah. Like I, I went from having spent like 30 to 40 hours and then like, I dove back in just like full abandoned and boy oh boy i'm so in love with that game it's a great game just just the

[00:58:35] Rob Howe: best the the best time in hyrule kingdom so yeah peace be with you on your journey through fighting the demon king lots of times to log in the depths for sure all right we'll see you next time dj okay sounds good