Rob Solo Episode: The AI Tool, the Trial, and the Retreat

[00:00:00] Rob Howe: Hello and welcome back to another episode of Diabetics Doing Things. It is July 24th, 2026, so summer is in full swing. I've been a little bit busy on the Diabetes Legends side. We had our clinic at Friends for Life a couple weeks ago in Orlando, which was awesome. We had over 100 kids, thanks to MiniMed for making us part of their Diabetes, the Children with Diabetes activation, now two years in a row. Really, really fun. It was cool to see some campers who were there year one also come back for year two. So I'm going to dig into a couple things today. I'm just going to share what I've been working on. I'm going to share what's new at Diabetics Doing Things. I'm going to share some of the results from the first half of the year and all the work that we did on the insulin sensitivity playbook. I'm going to tell you a little bit about my personal diabetes journey for the time being. And I'm going to unveil and demo lives. Or if you're listening to this on Spotify or Apple podcast, I guess you should check out the YouTube video. We'll put up a separate clip for it. But I'm going to debut a very special technological innovation I've been working on behind the scenes. And I'm very excited to share with you today because it represents, I think, what the future of diabetics and doing things can look like. But also like really digs into the past and really digs into how much work we've done over the past few years. And guess what? This is episode 450, 450 episodes on Diabetics Doing Things, including the Tools for Type 1 series, including all of the random episodes and all of the sort of one offs over the years. But 449, now 50 episodes on the feed. So congrats to us. We've done a lot. We've talked to people from all over the world and we're going to continue to do that. So no danger in us stopping or anything like that, but also 450 episodes, it's a lot of hours to get through. Not everybody has time or energy to do that. And I also want you guys to get the answers that you're looking for quickly and then find the episodes that really resonate with whatever particular topic you're either struggling with or you want more information on. So that's what's going to come later in this episode.

[00:02:05] Unidentified Speaker: Guys, who was MVP of the chat? Rob Howe! Rob Howe! What were you on? We need more of that.

[00:02:43] Rob Howe: like no gatekeeping, how you could get invited as a content creator or blogger or someone with diabetes, maybe with a sub stack or even like a LinkedIn channel or an Instagram or something like that to get invited as a press member or get invited as a part of a brand coverage because everybody's trying to spread their industry message there, their technological breakthrough. That's how I've been able to get interviews with people that I wouldn't necessarily have access to because I have the press credential from the ADA conference. But it's not necessarily for patients. Maybe you'll get to go to a happy hour from an organization that you like. Maybe you'll get to participate in, I know Blue Circle Health had a screening of a short film that they're doing. So there are some community things, but for the most part, it's for HCPs and for people who work in the diabetes space. The same goes for ADCES. It's less clinical, I guess, than ADA, but it's all geared towards diabetes educators. So there's more what I would say like regular style people. They are still CDCESs and they care for people with diabetes. but it's not as clinical. And it's also the last of the major US conferences. So everybody's a little bit tired, a little bit more relaxed. It's usually in a smaller city, smaller footprint and the sessions and the event exhibit hall are more relaxed, but it's still an industry conference. ATTD and EASD, those are the international conferences. There's also ATTD Asia. Both of those or all three of those really are unique because they do things a little bit differently in Europe than they do here, which is the case all across the board. But from a medtech, biopharma, pharmaceutical trade show perspective, it's a little bit different. And I'd encourage anyone who works in diabetes or wants to work in diabetes to try to find a way to experience it because it is cool. It's a little bit more like, well, we have CES here in the United States, like CES where it's consumer forward. They also have patient and HCP, but the brands do like a cool job. It's like more tech forward. And those have been some of my more, I'd say, enjoyable as an attendee type conferences over the years are the international ones. OK, I'm fresh off of Friends for Life. So that's that's the industry side. Now I'm going to go to the community side. Like there are like number one, the conference that stands alone is Friends for Life. Children with diabetes has been doing it for like 22 years now, I think. I may be getting that wrong, but it's close to that. There is no better diabetes event for adults, caregivers or children. and I'd say it's the best of all three all in one place. I also think if you are a diabetes-owned business or a diabetes creator, it is the event to go to. You can literally walk up to the people that you follow online face-to-face. You can walk up to Scott Benner from the Juicebox podcast. You can walk up to Justin from Diabettech. You can walk up and take a photo with Addie Taylor. I was next to Addie most of the day, one of the days that we were there and more people came up to her than anybody. I've been around a lot of diabetes celebrities, a lot of diabetes content creators, more people came up to her that day than any other person I've been around. So the people who resonate the most with you and are making content, they're going to be at Friends for Life. You should go meet them. Again, the networking is top tier. Why? Because there's not as much pressure. It's still as fast paced as ADA, but everybody's, there's not as many doctors there. The ones that are there are more relaxed. Everybody's at a Disney resort. You can have meetings in the hallway, at the event floor, in the booth. Everybody's having a great time. Friends for Life is the one conference I would go to if I could only go to one. And really this year, I've only really going to one. So that's the one that I chose. So they do a great job there. Thank you for the Children with Diabetes folks who've been very open and welcoming to me over the years. They included my podcast in their newsletter very early on before I definitely even deserved it and definitely before I knew more about what they were doing. So thank you to the full team over there. Okay. There's also other ones. There's regional Friends for Life conferences, which are smaller, but same idea. There's TCOYD, which is the only one I haven't been to on this. And I've been encouraged to go to it at some point. I can't make this year because we have Diabetes Legends clinics at the same time. But it's in San Diego. It's again, it's for adults only on this one. But I think it's a lot of fun, more relaxed. And some of the programming that the guys do, I need to go get on their podcast and connect with them because it's really fun. Like the stuff that they do is really creative. And a lot of people have lots of good things to say about it. So there's others connected in motion. If you like camping, if you want to go outdoors, they have their slip streams, which are all over the country and also some in Canada. And then there's also Camp Diabetes, which is coming next year from You're Just My Type, which will be in Montana and is Diabetes Camp for adults. So there's a lot of really good community events that you should go to. But if you're curious about all of that, you only get to go to one event. I would go to Friends for Life and I would do it yesterday. It's something that is truly worth experiencing. To me, my favorite part is the creativity of the brands. Like they go to ADA and they spend a lot of money on their booth, but there's very little creativity. It's very clinical because their audience is clinical. Their audience are kids who are at Disney. So the competition level for attention is very high and the brands do a really great job of really fun activations. I've got my mini med sheriff badge star from this year's mini med booth. It was a really fun experience all top to bottom. Okay, quick note, Diabetes Legends. We've got Diabetes Legends Dallas, which is coming up in two weeks, which is crazy to even say out loud. We've got a lot of good registrants already. We've got a special guest who I'm going to be announcing in the coming days. We'll have Lauren Cox and myself there as well. We're going to have a great time. It's going to be at the Star Center Multisport Complex in Flower Mound. Nope, in Farmer's Branch and Farmer's Branch. If you're from Dallas, I always get Flower Mound and Farmer's Branch twisted up. But it's in Farmer's Branch, something in the middle so that we can accommodate folks from Dallas, Fort Worth, North Dallas, South Dallas, all the way around. Come to a Diabetes Legends clinic. We're having a great time. We're talking about diabetes. And I think for me, like the thing that I continue to be kind of like a broken record about, the thing I could talk about forever is the positive downstream effects from participating in sports as a kid. It's not because I'm a jock. It's not because I'm a total mehead, even though I am those things. It's because you learn how to fail in public and not quit. You learn how to take instruction from adults who are not your parents and not your teachers. And you learn what it's like to be a team and to be accountable and to learn on the fly and to try hard and to push yourself in an environment that is safe and welcoming. And we do that at Diabetes Legends. And the thing that people come to me more often now than ever, I think, is navigating sports with diabetes. So caregivers come to me. Sometimes it's other athletes who are either adults or are in high school trying to pursue their dream of playing in college or in the professionals. And that's my role. That's my role in this life is to help athletes with diabetes navigate those challenges and also just normalize them. I was having a conversation with a parent the other day who their kid has diabetes and is having a hard time playing basketball. And they're 11 years old and their parents are considering like, well, should we stop playing? Well, let me be very clear. Nobody retires from sport at age 11. So from the start, I think we start there. Number two, diabetes is so unpredictable. I just want to normalize how difficult it is to manage diabetes and play sports or exercise. Nobody gets it all right. You saw Alexander Zverev was injecting insulin at the Wimbledon final because his sugars got too high. You know, and he had, trust me, has all the advantages necessary to manage his diabetes and a whole team behind him. And there still are those unknown days. So that's my role. We're addressing mental health as well this year at our clinics for mindful moments, talking about goal setting, talking about the power of writing things down and the power of a vision there. So very excited to continue that. Now we have Denver September 12th and then we have Orlando again. We're going to be at the Touch by Type 1 conference on September 26th. Okay, I want to talk a little bit about the insulin sensitivity playbook. We had a really awesome series of the first half of this year talking about all of the different things that go into living well with diabetes, right? I got some great feedback that you guys actually prefer when I talk to people that I know. So you like when I have my friends with diabetes on the podcast, we talk about what we're going through. It's a little bit more relatable, a little bit less like structured of a conversation. So I'm going to try to find a balance between bringing in the experts who have the research behind the things that I'm recommending, because I want to make sure that what we're doing is rooted in science and also to make sure that you guys are just getting quality information. But this is a podcast. It needs to be entertaining. So I'm going to mix in some of my friends. We'll probably have some repeat guests. You guys really liked my episode with Neil. We're going to have an episode with some of your favorite social media folks and some of my awesome friends with diabetes who I know basically just because I live with T1D. And that's a really small subset of people. And that gets me access into conversations that I wouldn't otherwise be able to have. So I'm looking forward to continuing to find ways to balance the tactical and informative parts of living well with diabetes, which are things like exercise. I loved the vinegar episode. The response to the vinegar episode was really cool. But also just lifestyle and mental health and community, which are all important parts of it. The friends with diabetes, make a friend with diabetes was in my top five things that are 10 out of 10 habits for living well with diabetes. And so I'm going to bring my friends with diabetes on the pod and we're going to talk about stuff. So more of that to come. Okay, let's shift gears. I have made something. We are in a very interesting time with technology, and I am really focused on using technology and AI like an artist. I have totally changed my entire workflow on my computer compared to how I have the entire rest of my life. I use a computer differently now in July of 2026 than I have my entire rest of my life. And so what comes from that is, well, what do I build for people with diabetes? And this is my first try at that. So what I've done is I've taken every single episode we've ever had on this podcast. I've taken all the transcripts. I've condensed them down and I've turned it into a living, breathing, diabetics doing things database of lived experience of research and science. and I've put it into this tool, which will be available on diabeticsdoingthings.com very soon. It'll be chat.diabeticsdoingthings.com. So I'm going to show you just a little bit of what that looks like. And it gives you some prompts automatically. Very simple screen, very much like a chat GPT or a Claude. And it gives you some prompts to start. Okay, we've been talking a lot about diabetes and mental health. Let's click it. So if you just click the button, it starts to pull from the archive like any references for diabetes and mental health. Now granted, we didn't give it that much information. It's just one of the token prompts. So it's going to go in and search our entire database. It's going to find clips. Okay, here we go. Mental health and diabetes. This is close to our heart. So much of the show lands on the same truth. Managing this thing 24-7, 365 takes a real toll and pretending otherwise doesn't help anyone. In episode 136, Matt Vandervecht puts it bluntly, mental health matters more than most of us give it credit for, and burnout is a natural result of a disease that never gives you a day off. If you want a softer mindfulness angle, episode 350, why you hold your breath every time you check your blood sugar with Sam Tolman sits with meditation and looking at your glucose without judgment. And then Cassidy Farnsworth echoes that in episode 331, why mental health matters in diabetes care, including a line I love about giving yourself the same grace you'd hand a friend. So what's really interesting is in this, it'll also give you these different episodes that you can go look and listen to from the archive and it'll send you specific to your search timestamps. So you can go in here. It's like this one is towards the end. So you can click the Spotify button and it'll take you right to the link or you can just listen to it directly in the chat. So same thing here with Laramie Spadden. You can also do on YouTube or Apple Podcasts, wherever you get your episodes. So this is pretty neat, especially as you get to the episodes that are newer, you have more opportunity to listen to them. So let's see here. I'm a runner with diabetes, and I want to know about prepping my runs for distance. That's a terrible question, but we'll see what it comes up with. Every episode indexed for you links you directly to it. And I think that's what's really cool is that this archive now is on demand. It can give you a playlist of episodes and timestamps that deliver you exactly what you're looking for. So like here, we've got all the way back to 2017, T1D Like Me, Track and Field with Jonathan Tijerina, Extra Long Bike Rides. We've got Eric Dutcher, T1D Chronic Superhuman. And we got Marie Diaz talking about it. So I can click here and you can look right into Spotify. So we've got Marie's voice right there on feed. So really cool. I'm excited to launch that. I will have it go live sometime after this episode is live. So that's what's coming soon on Diabetics Doing Things. Cannot wait to share it all with you guys. Okay, so let's talk about my own personal diabetes management really quick. I am in the midst of, I'm about to wrap up a 90-day clinical trial that I was on. And during that trial, I had to relinquish control of a lot of my diabetes management to people that I didn't know. My endo is doing the study, but I haven't really got to work with him directly at all. And this new technology is much more like hands-on than my current technology. Like it does a lot of the things for you. So it is a mini med pump. It is an algorithm that is not currently yet approved. and it will be coming soon, sometime in the next couple of years. And so I'm getting to do it early because I opted into clinical trials. People talk about all the time, do clinical trials if you want to experience what the future of diabetes care looks like, if you want to contribute to that. So I took that prompt and I took that brass ring and I chased it. It is difficult to relinquish control. It requires more check-ins. It requires more people in my diabetes business, like lots of questions about different things, more involvement in my care from someone else. But it has caused me to think about the future of diabetes care a little bit different while also having gratitude for my existing system. I think the MiniMed 780G system that I've worn now for over three years is amazing. It has excellent, excellent algorithms. It has excellent auto-correction boluses. It's a really, really good system. I think what frustrated me about this system is that it wasn't like dramatically better because it just can't be. But as over time, I think I'm going to see better results, both on the time and range and the A1C side. I'm almost done, so I haven't seen my final results yet, but I'm excited to document those and share those as part of my participation because I want to know what that looks like. And I think for people who are maybe not like me and are not able to manage the day-to-day load of living with diabetes from bolusing and carb counting standpoint, I think it's going to be a total, total game changer. I really am excited about it. So I'm grateful for my existing system. I think until we change insulin, like the speed that insulin can be absorbed into your body exogenously, it cannot get faster. I think like even the fastest insulins, that timeframe is still like 10 or 15 minutes to peak. So until we can get faster than that, algorithms are sort of just going to be what they are, which is challenging. But I think now, you know, with the mix of whether it's GLP-1s or SGLT-2s or other drugs that people are taking in tandem. We're seeing algorithms dial into a tighter time and range control. That's going to be good overall for people. And I'm excited to have been able to test this. There's some really cool stuff coming out that doesn't really need me. I think that was a hard thing for me at first, too, is like this system doesn't need me and I like to be needed. So really cool. Very excited for people to experience the MiniMed Flex system and all of the iterations that are still to come. Okay, what does locking in look like? For me, the last 30 days, I've been waking up earlier. I've been journaling and doing my morning pages. If you're familiar with The Artist's Way, I've been doing The Artist's Way with a group of people. I've been exercising. I've been simplifying my meals. I've been eating lower carb, which I think I just had to release the judgment on. I am really bored by like low carb and keto discussions. But, you know, I can eat a salad more often. I can choose to get my burger wrapped in lettuce. And like those things are not judgments on my character. And I still get to eat the things that I want. And it's actually been helping me a ton. So I think some of that experimentation has come from the clinical trial. But what I can tell you is like living with intention and living with accountability and living with a vision for what you want. For me, I feel more like myself than I ever have. So I would encourage you. It only takes 30 days for you to make a meaningful difference in how you're perceiving your life and the attachment that you have to the life that you want. One of the things that stood out to me at Friends for Life with every creator that I spoke with was they all believed they were capable of more. And those are the kind of people I like to surround myself with. That's the type of person that I am. It's not that I'm not grateful for where I am, but I just believe I have capacity and I can do more and have greater impact. And in order to do that, you got to lock in. So be prepared for more locked in, Rob. I'm posting more than I ever have. And I'm working on this basketball spinning, which is a lot harder than I thought it was going to be. It'll be day 11 today. But on the Diabetes Legends Clinic on August 8th, I will be spinning that ball. So be ready for that video too. It's going to be crazy. Okay, the last thing, I have been getting some interesting responses to people when I talk about a diabetes community event that I took part in this year, which was Diabetes Sangha Meditation Retreat, which was in Washington at the end of April. I have always been, at least for the time that you guys have heard me post content, I've always been curious about doing a silence retreat. I've dabbled in meditation. I did a full year of transcendental meditation. I really value the time to spend focusing on my breath. I listen to a lot of, I call them sermons, but they're just like meditation lessons. And, you know, I'm a person that really enjoys like that sort of spiritual side of sitting with myself and being curious about what's going on without judgment. I've been getting a lot of weird looks when I tell people that I went to the retreat. So I want to encourage you. First of all, Diabetes Sangha is an incredible organization. I know Sangha sounds like a little bit woo-woo. It is, but it just means like group and like family. So Diabetes Sangha was a really great event. There were a lot of people there that I got to meet and we didn't really get to talk much because the retreat was mostly silent. But the last day I got to spend with a lot of them and hearing about how diabetes has impacted other people. And, you know, some people carry a really heavy burden and it's important to be there for them, but also just kind of hear. And I have gratitude for like diabetes is not as heavy of a burden to me now as it once was. And I hope for that realization and that ability for all of you listening, but also for all the people who are feeling that it's really heavy right now. But Diabetes Sangha is incredible. And there's also been a really cool thing, a partnership via Omnipod and Calm, the Calm app. I never used Calm before. I used to use Headspace when I was doing my regular transcendental meditation practice. But Calm is a great app and they have a free resources for people with diabetes. And there's some sleep meditations on there. I haven't tried them yet, but I've told some people that I will and I'm going to dig into it. But if you're curious about meditation, if you just want to be on a Zoom call with people with diabetes who really understand the mental health side of things and are approaching that without judgment, just sitting with and being with diabetes. This is diabetics doing things, but we are not human doings, we are human beings. And I think I could not have been more positively transformed from that experience that I had at Diabetes Sangha. And I would encourage you all to, if you're able to, there's a retreat in September. They're going to do two retreats a year, I think. And you may see me at one of those in the future. I won't be at the September one, but I will be again sometime. and I just think that it's worth looking at and the looks that people give me are just like, oh, that's really interesting because I think they think of retreats as like this very like high concept and they really aren't. They're just a very welcoming space for people with diabetes who are looking for a little bit of peace and what's really interesting is how supportive they all are to each other and I felt like even though I hadn't sat with the song that much, I felt like part of the family. So I will definitely be sitting with them again and I hope that you will as well and I'm coming to the end of this. That's pretty much it. So keep subscribing. Got some cool episodes coming up. I'm very excited. Got some episodes on creativity. Got some episodes with some awesome people who I've lined up to be on the pod. And if you're listening and you want to be part of Diabetes Legends, diabeteslegends.org. We've got three remaining clinics this year, and I hope to see you and your campers there along the way. I'm Rob. This has been a Diabetics Doing Things production. See you next time.