Father REFUSES to Let Autism Define His Son – Emotional Interview with Leland Vittert
Episode Stats
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Summary
Leland Vittert is the host of On Balance with LelandVittert and the Chief Washington Anchor for News Nation. He is also the author of Born Lucky: A Dedicated Father, a Grateful Son and My Journey with Autism: How I Learned to Live With Autism and How I Overcame It.
Transcript
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He would take me to lunch with his friends and I'd interrupt and all of a sudden start
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I'd start asking Mr. Knowles, you know, hey, how do you book your guests?
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And how do you know when to switch subjects during your monologue?
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How do you pick what's there sitting on your desk right now?
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And that was my signal to A, stop talking, but to B, bookmark that moment.
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And then we'd go back, almost like watching a game film.
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Why'd you interrupt him to talk about his sponsors?
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I'm very excited to talk to my friend Leland Vitter.
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I'm trying to think if, you know, I've been on Leland's show a number of times.
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I'm trying to think this might be Leland's debut.
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Because Leland, you know, he's like a serious news guy.
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So he's like, he's not just one of these, you know, like fluffy commentator, influencer type.
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So I don't know that we've had him on the show, actually.
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He is the host of On Balance with Leland Vittert.
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He is the chief Washington anchor for News Nation.
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But the thing that I really want to talk to him about right now
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is that he is the author of Born Lucky, A Dedicated Father, a Grateful Son,
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Because I've known Leland at this point a pretty long time.
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And I never knew that Leland was diagnosed with autism.
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Frankly, everyone wants to claim to be autistic.
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Because I have so many friends who now, they just,
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anytime they do anything weird or like a little awkward,
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And I, and I also have had friends who legitimately are on the autism spectrum
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And I did not, how did you hide your autism for decades?
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my parents were told they needed to have me evaluated.
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They took me to one of those little medical testing centers.
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You know how scary those words are to hear that about your child.
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So, they sit there for a couple of hours with the old magazines
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The woman comes back and says, this kid's got a lot of problems.
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Behavioral issues, you know, there was no chance I could go to a birthday party
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If a kid would touch me at school, I'd turn around and slug them.
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Big sensory issues, you know, if socks were something I didn't like
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or a jacket felt weird, whatever it was, I would melt down.
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And then they gave me an IQ test, which is two halves of an IQ test equals your IQ.
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I had a 70-point spread between the two halves of my IQ test.
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And the woman said to my parents, it is very hard to understand
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what is going on inside his head, meaning my head.
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And the woman said, there's not much you can do.
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So, Born Lucky is the story of how my father adapted me to the world
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And it is hope for every parent of a kid, not just with autism, but every kid
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And it's amazing because it is the exact opposite approach that everyone is taking now.
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I mean, first of all, the fact that people who are not in any way autistic,
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but who, you know, I don't know, have all the human foibles and deficiencies that everyone has,
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they'll try to excuse it and, in fact, make the world bend to their eccentricities
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by saying, well, hey, I'm autistic, when they're not.
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The fact that you actually had a pretty severe diagnosis and your father just said,
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well, all right, kid's going to have to make it in the world.
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You know, the world ain't slowing down, so we're going to have to adapt him to the world.
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One, it's common sense that we haven't heard in a very long time.
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Well, look, dad realized from the very beginning I wasn't going to have any friends.
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So he said, in his words, maybe I can be your friend.
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He never told me about my diagnosis, never told teachers, never told therapists.
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There was never any accommodations or extra time on tests or anything like that.
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This was, if you're going to make it in the real world,
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you've got to start making it in the real world right now.
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And it was hard for a very long period of time for me to have my dad teach me at a very granular level
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the emotional and social fabric of the world and how people interacted.
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I hate to use the word normally, but dad would basically say, you know,
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if you want to interact in the world, you've got to interact the way the world does and learn that.
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You can't try to expect the world to adapt to you.
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So, you know, one of the things that's in Born Lucky is he would take me to lunch with his friends
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and I'd interrupt and all of a sudden start asking.
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If we were out with you, Michael, I'd start asking Mr. Knowles, who's always Mr. and Mrs.
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I'd start asking Mr. Knowles, you know, hey, how do you book your guests?
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And how do you know when to switch subjects during your monologue?
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How do you pick what's there sitting on your desk right now?
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And my dad would tap his watch. And that was my signal to, A, stop talking, but to, B, bookmark that moment.
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And then we'd go back, almost like watching game film, and go and replay those moments.
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All right, so when Michael was talking about his kids, why'd you interrupt him to talk about his sponsors?
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Okay, well, how could you have asked Mr. Knowles something that he would have been interested in?
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So, dad's idea here, as you pointed out, was sort of the opposite of the coddling of a child.
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Unbelievable. It's unbelievable because it's so simple, but it's how we get good at anything.
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You know, you say it's like rolling tape after a game or something.
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And so if you want to get good at football, you got to watch the tape and you got to figure out
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what went wrong. You got to figure out if you're a broadcaster, certainly that's the case.
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You watch the tape. You say, shouldn't use that word. I should have sped up here. That was a kind
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better. And yet the one area that we're told you can't do that in is in our, you know, I don't know,
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our identity, our authentic selves, our, you know, our personality, I guess. There we're told,
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let your freak flag fly and expect the world to bend to you. And so, wow. So this would have been,
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I guess it was the 90s, right, is when all of this is going down.
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Yeah. So, so, you know, I guess this is before the real wave of personal identity politics,
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like totally took over the world. Now, autism in particular is a really hot issue. And you're,
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you're hearing Bobby Kennedy talking about it. You're, you're, you know, people aren't taking
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Tylenol anymore. Apparently Tylenol causes autism. I don't know all of these. So do you have any
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thoughts on the issue itself? One, you know, it's a great question. Yeah. Do you have any insight on
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where it comes from, how to, how to treat it? Fair question. And I have absolutely no insight
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because I'm not a doctor. I'm not a scientist. I have the chemistry grades to prove it, right?
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Born Lucky is not a prescription. It's not a cure. It's not an autism book. It's a father-son love story
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to give parents the hope that my parents did not have. That said, you think about what's happened
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with autism diagnoses from one in 1,500 kids when I was diagnosed with what we now know to be autism
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and now to one in 31, three times higher for boys, even higher still in poor and minority communities.
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There's a reason for that. We don't know what it is. And boy, I think it should be the scientific
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question of our time. You know, Born Lucky is the darkest, most awful parts of my life. You know,
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the teacher in eighth grade who said in front of the entire art class,
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if my dog was as ugly as you, I would shave its ass and make it walk backwards.
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If the teachers are doing that, yeah, yeah, think about that, Michael. If the teachers are doing
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that, you know what the kids are doing. So this was as bad as it got, but my dad's quest was to try
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and work through this, right? And, you know, starting with teaching me how to have self-esteem,
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200 push-ups a day, five days a week, starting when I was six or seven years old because I wasn't going
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to be good at anything else. So all of those moments, if somehow we can prevent future generations
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from going through the hell that I did, then absolutely. Why wouldn't we want to find the
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answer to those questions? And I think it's sort of personally offensive in some ways that there are
00:12:06.080
people who'd rather score political points than find the answers to these questions because they
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sort of hate Trump more than they love whatever the future generations could hold.
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Yes. Now, okay, last question before I let you go. You said you had this really brutal diagnosis and
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all this tougher upbringing that happily really paid off, but it meant that in some ways you
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endured an even harder time than other people who were diagnosed with autism do because you didn't
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get any excuses, you didn't get any accommodations, and helped you in the long run but hurt you in
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the short run. What would possess you if you have this kind of distinguishing feature of your
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childhood, which is an autism diagnosis? What would possess you to choose to go into
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communications, the single most difficult field for someone with autism?
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Glutton of punishment, I guess. I think two things, Michael. One, you know, my dad never told me about my
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autism diagnosis, right? So this was never like, oh, by the way, here you are, and still will never
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allow me to use it as an excuse. But the second part of that was it was one of the few professions
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that just yielded to hard work, right? I wasn't going to be a scientist or a doctor because I wasn't
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good at chemistry or biology. I wasn't going to be a lawyer because I wasn't good at writing
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and had other learning disabilities. So hard work really paid off, especially early on.
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In journalism, what I thought you were going to ask is why, after not telling anybody,
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would you decide to go to, you know, therapy on national television at 43 years old?
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Oh, that's your follow-up? Well, I'll answer it for you, which is really, this has been about helping
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people. And, you know, the book's been out for about a month. It's very easy, as you know, from being
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a very accomplished author yourself, to talk about sales. What I view as the success here is the
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hundreds of emails I have gotten from parents who say, thank you for writing this. We know we're
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not alone. And you've given us hope. Not hope that our kid's going to become a news anchor, whatever
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the kid's dealing with, from nut allergies to ADHD to anxiety, whatever it is. But born lucky is hope
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and proof of the power of great parenting. And nobody's talking about that right now. Nobody is
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talking about the power and the agency that parents have to help their kids be more.
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Yes, I know. It's one of the reasons I really wanted to bring you on to talk about this book
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is, look, you look at the numbers and you say, okay, that means there are all these kids dealing
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with these problems. That also means there are that number of parents who don't know what to do,
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who are in some cases being given really bad advice, really bad information, who are seriously
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suffering. You know, when your kid is suffering, it's a much worse pain than anything you personally
00:14:49.080
are going to go through. And so I think it's a wonderful, wonderful message, a great instruction
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manual to give to them. But you mentioned, you never heard about your diagnosis growing up.
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So when I was in my twenties, my parents sort of started talking to me about, hey, by the way,
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you know, when you were a little boy, you were diagnosed with autism and if autism sort of came up or
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there was news about it or whatever, it became something we talked about. You know, you talk about
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what parents are going through, something I never knew until we interviewed my mom and dad for the
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book. You know, there were nights that my dad would put me to bed and every night he would spend a
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couple of hours with me sort of putting me back together after the bullying and the humiliation and
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the difficulties that went on at school. And he would walk down from my bedroom almost every night
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down to the living room, 10, 11 o'clock at night. I would either go to do homework or be crying myself
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to sleep or whatever. And he would sit in the living room by himself and cry for hours. And my
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mom would come out one, two o'clock in the morning and find him there. So, you know, you talked about
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the hell that parents are going through because of this. And I think the other part of this with my
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father is he never wanted me to see myself as differently. He never wanted me to be able to use
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autism as an excuse. And, you know, you sort of pointed out at the beginning of this interview,
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you never knew this. Well, I've spent 20 or 25 years, maybe, maybe longer learning and practicing
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how to hide it. You know, 30, 30 plus years really in practice, but in the real world now,
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now 20 years. And I, there's times I still slip up. You know, there was a time just a couple of
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months ago that I was playing golf with my, my father-in-law and was very rude to somebody. I'll,
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I'll save your listeners the story. But it, it was like back being an eighth group, you know,
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an eight-year-old again, I couldn't look him in the eye. I couldn't stop doing what I was doing.
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I was totally task focused on and on. And my email to him that I sent to say, I'm sorry,
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I was so rude to you. Didn't say, oh, by the way, that's my autism. Because my dad said, you know,
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my son's not going to be defined by a diagnosis, but he's not going to be able to use it as an excuse
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either. Yeah, it's amazing. It's really, it's really inspiring. I mean, the fact that basically,
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you know, you wouldn't have to tell a friend and a friend wouldn't know is like pretty crazy.
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And then the fact that in your career, you've reached the heights of broadcast journalism,
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been on TV. And so both in very personal interactions, but even millions of people
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looking at you wouldn't know. I mean, that, that is, that is an amazing inspiration to people
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who, who feel like this is the end, the end of their lives or the end of their children's lives
00:17:34.220
or something. You have to get the book is what I'm, all of that to say, you have to get the book
00:17:39.540
right now, Born Lucky, A Dedicated Father, A Grateful Son, and My Journey with Autism.
00:17:45.500
Leland, thank you for coming on the show. Appreciate it.
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Good to see you, sir. Okay. And good to see all of you. I'm Michael Knowles. This is the
00:18:06.880
On the Matt Wall show, we talk about the things that really matter, real issues that affect you,
00:18:10.740
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If you're looking for a daily dose of realism mixed with sarcasm, come check out the Matt
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