Father REFUSES to Let Autism Define His Son – Emotional Interview with Leland Vittert
What happens when a father refuses to let a label define his son? In this powerful interview, Michael Knowles sits down with journalist and author Leland Vittert to discuss his deeply personal and inspiring new book, Born Lucky: A Dedicated Father, A Grateful Son, and My Journey with Autism.
Leland shares the real story behind the headlines—how he and his father challenged the expectations, limitations, and assumptions placed on him after receiving the autism label. This conversation dives into family, perseverance, faith, and the transformational belief that every child is more than what the world says they are.
If you’ve ever questioned modern diagnoses, or wondered how far love and determination can take a family, this interview will move you.
Watch now and discover why Born Lucky is resonating with so many.
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He would take me to lunch with his friends and I'd interrupt and all of a sudden start asking if we were out with you, Michael, I'd start asking Mr. Knowles, you know, hey, how do you book your guests?
And how do you know when to switch subjects during your monologue?
And what do you pick?
How do you pick what's there sitting on your desk right now?
And my dad would tap his watch and that was my signal to A, stop talking, but to B, bookmark that moment.
And then we'd go back almost like watching game film.
Michael was talking about his kids.
Why'd you interrupt him to talk about his sponsors?
I don't know, Dad.
I'm very excited to talk to my friend Leland Vitter, who I'm trying to think if, you know, I've been on Leland's show a number of times and his shows a number of times.
I'm trying to think this might be Leland's debut because Leland, you know, he's like a serious news guy.
So he's like, he's not just one of these, you know, like fluffy commentator influencer type.
He's like a serious news guy.
So I don't know that we've had him on the show, actually.
He is the host of On Balance with Leland Vitter.
He is the Chief Washington anchor for News Nation.
But the thing that I really want to talk to him about right now is that he is the author of Born Lucky, A Dedicated Father, Grateful Son, and My Journey with Autism.
Because I've known Leland at this point a pretty long time.
And I never knew that Leland was diagnosed with autism.
And now autism is in the news.
Everyone, frankly, everyone wants to claim to be autistic.
That's like the new hip thing.
So Leland, thank you for coming on.
Michael, good to see you.
Yeah, I was autistic before.
It was cool.
It's amazing because I have so many friends who now they just, anytime they do anything weird or like a little awkward, they say, hey, bro, it's my autism.
Like it's like it's hip.
Like it's cool.
And I, and I also have had friends who legitimately are on the autism spectrum at different, different spots along the way, some a little more severe than others.
And I did not know, how did you hide your autism for decades?
Well, that's the born lucky story, right?
So when I was about five or six years old, my parents were told they needed to have me evaluated.
They took me to one of those little medical testing centers.
We've all been there.
You're a father, Michael.
You know how scary those words are to hear that about your child.
So they sit there for a couple of hours with the old magazines and the stale coffee.
The woman comes back and says, this kid's got a lot of problems, behavioral issues.
You know, there was no chance I could go to a birthday party or play with other kids.
If a kid would touch me at school, I'd turn around and slug them.
Big sensory issues.
You know, if socks were something I didn't like or a jacket felt weird, whatever it was, I would melt down.
And then they gave me an IQ test, which is two halves of an IQ test equals your IQ.
It's an average.
A 20-point spread is a learning disability.
I had a 70-point spread between the two halves of my IQ test.
And the woman said to my parents, it is very hard to understand what is going on inside his head, meaning my head.
And with that, my dad goes, what do I do?
And the woman said, there's not much you can do.
So Born Lucky is the story of how my father adapted me to the world rather than the world to me.
And it is hope for every parent of a kid, not just with autism, but every kid having a hard time.
That is an amazing story.
And it's amazing because it is the exact opposite approach that everyone is taking now.
I mean, first of all, the fact that people who are not in any way autistic, but who, you know, I don't know, have all the human foibles and deficiencies that everyone has, they'll try to excuse it.
And in fact, make the world bend to their eccentricities by saying, well, hey, I'm autistic when they're not.
The fact that you actually had a pretty severe diagnosis and your father just said, well, all right, kid's going to have to make it in the world.
You know, the world is slowing down.
So we're going to have to adapt him to the world.
One, it's common sense that we haven't heard in a very long time.
But two, I'm curious, how did he do it?
How did you do it?
Well, look, dad realized from the very beginning, I wasn't going to have any friends.
So he said, in his words, maybe I can be your friend.
He never told me about my diagnosis, never told teachers, never told therapists.
There was never any accommodations or extra time on tests or anything like that.
This was, if you're going to make it in the real world, you got to start making it in the real world right now.
And it was hard for a very long period of time for me to have my dad, dad, you know, teach me at a very granular level the emotional and social fabric of the world and how people interacted.
I hate to use the word normally, but dad, dad would basically say, if you want to interact in the world, you got to interact the way the world does and learn that.
You can't try to expect the world to adapt to you.
So, you know, one of the things that's in Born Lucky is he would take me to lunch with his friends and I'd interrupt and all of a sudden start asking if we were out with you, Michael, I'd start asking Mr. Knowles because there's always Mr. and Mrs. I'd start asking Mr. Knowles, you know, hey, you know, how do you book your guests?
And how do you know when to switch subjects during your monologue?
And what do you pick?
How do you pick what's there sitting on your desk right now?
And my dad would tap his watch and that was my signal to A, stop talking, but to B, bookmark that moment.
And then we'd go back almost like watching game film and go and he'd replay those moments.
All right.
So when Michael was talking about his kids, why'd you interrupt him to talk about his sponsors?
I don't know, Dad.
Okay, well, how could you have asked Mr. Knowles something that he would have been interested in?
And then we would role play that conversation.
So dad's idea here, as you pointed out, was sort of the opposite of the coddling, 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.
You know, you say it's like rolling tape after a game or something.
And so if you want to get good at football, you got to watch the tape and you got to figure out what went wrong.
You got to figure out if you're a broadcaster, certainly that's the case.
You watch the tape.
You say, shouldn't use that word.
I should have sped up here.
That was a kind of a weak story.
And over time, with any job, anything, you get a little better and better and 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, our identity, our authentic selves, our, you know, our personality, I guess.
There we're told, let your freak flag fly.
And expect the world to bend to you.
And so, wow.
So this would have been, I guess it was the 90s, right?
Is when all of this is going going down.
Late 80s, early 90s.
Yeah.
So, so, you know, I guess this is before the real wave of personal identity politics like totally took over the world.
Now, autism in particular is a really hot issue.
And you're hearing Bobby Kennedy talking about it.
People aren't taking Tylenol anymore.
Apparently, Tylenol causes autism.
I don't know.
All of these.
So do you have any thoughts on the issue itself?
One, you know, yeah.
Do you have any insight on where it comes from, how to treat it?
That's another question.
And I have absolutely no insight because I'm not a doctor.
I'm not a scientist.
I have the chemistry grades to prove it, right?
Born lucky is not a prescription.
It's not a cure.
It's not an autism book.
It's a father-son love story to give parents the hope that my parents did not have.
That said, you think about what's happened with autism diagnoses from one in 1500 kids when I was diagnosed with what we now know to be autism, now to one in 31, three times higher for boys, even higher still in poor and minority communities.
There's a reason for that.
We don't know what it is.
And boy, I think it should be the scientific question of our time.
You know, born lucky is the darkest, most awful parts of my life.
You know, the teacher in eighth grade who said in front of the entire art class, if my dog was as ugly as you, I would shave its ass and make it walk backwards.
If the teachers are doing that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Think about that, Michael.
If the teachers are doing that, you know what the kids are doing.
So this was as bad as it got.
But my dad's quest was to try and work through this, right?
And, you know, starting with teaching me how to have self-esteem, 200 push-ups a day, five days a week, starting when I was six or seven years old because I wasn't going to be good at anything else.
So all of those moments, if somehow we can prevent future generations from going through the hell that I did, then absolutely, why wouldn't we want to find the answer to those questions?
And I think it's sort of personally offensive in some ways that there are people who'd rather score political points than find the answers to these questions because they sort of hate Trump more than they love whatever the future generations could hold.
Yes.
Now, okay, last question before I let you go.
You had this really brutal diagnosis and this tougher upbringing that happily really paid off, but it meant that in some ways you endured an even harder time than other people who were diagnosed with autism do because you didn't get any excuses, you didn't get any accommodations and helped you in the long run, but hurt you in the short run.
What would possess you if you have this kind of distinguishing feature of your childhood, which is an autism diagnosis?
What would possess you to choose to go into communications, the single most difficult field for someone with autism?
Glutton of punishment, I guess.
I think two things, Michael.
One, you know, my dad never told me about my autism diagnosis, right?
So this was never like, oh, by the way, here you are.
And still, you know, will never allow me to use it as an excuse.
But the second part of that was, is it was one of the few professions that just yielded to hard work, right?
I wasn't going to be a scientist or a doctor because I wasn't good at chemistry or biology.
I wasn't going to be a lawyer because I wasn't good at writing and had other learning disabilities.
So hard work really paid off, especially early on in journalism.
What I thought you were going to ask is why after not telling anybody, would you decide to go to therapy on national television at 43 years old?
That was my follow-up.
Oh, that's your follow-up.
Well, I'll answer it for you, which is really, this has been about helping people.
And the book's been out for about a month.
It's very easy, as you know, from being a very accomplished author yourself to talk about sales.
What I view as the success here is the hundreds of emails I have gotten from parents who say, thank you for writing this.
We know we're not alone and you've given us hope, not hope that our kid's going to become a news anchor, whatever the kid's dealing with, from nut allergies to ADHD to anxiety, whatever it is.
But born lucky is hope and proof of the power of great parenting.
And nobody's talking about that right now.
Nobody is talking about the power and the agency that parents have to help their kids be more.
Yes.
No, it's one of the reasons I really wanted to bring you on to talk about this book is I look, you look at the numbers and you say, okay, that means there are all these kids dealing with these problems.
That also means that number of parents who don't know what to do, who are in some cases being giving really bad advice, really bad information, who are seriously suffering.
When your kid is suffering, that's a much worse pain than anything you personally are going to go through.
And so I think it's a wonderful, wonderful message, a great instruction manual to give to them.
But you mentioned you never heard about your diagnosis growing up.
So when did you hear about it?
So when I was in my 20s, my parents sort of started talking to me about, hey, by the way, when you were a little boy, you were diagnosed with autism.
And if autism sort of came up or there was news about it or whatever, it became something we talked about.
You know, you talk about what parents are going through.
Something I never knew until we interviewed my mom and dad for the book.
You know, there were nights that my dad would put me to bed and every night he would spend a couple of hours with me, sort of putting me back together after the bullying and the humiliation and the difficulties that went on at school.
And he would walk down from my bedroom almost every night down to the living room, 10, 11 o'clock at night.
I would either go to do homework or be crying myself to sleep or whatever.
And he would sit in the living room by himself and cry for hours.
And my mom would come out one, two o'clock in the morning and find him there.
So, you know, you talked about the hell that parents are going through because of this.
And I think the other part of this with my father is he never wanted me to see myself as differently.
He never wanted me to be able to use autism as an excuse.
And, you know, you sort of pointed out at the beginning of this interview, you never knew this.
Well, I've spent 20 or 25 years, maybe longer, learning and practicing how to hide it.
You know, 30, 30 plus years really in practice.
But in the real world, now, now 20 years.
And there's times I still slip up.
You know, there was a time just a couple of months ago that I was playing golf with my father-in-law and was very rude to somebody.
I'll save your listeners the story, but it was like back being an eighth, you know, an eight-year-old again.
I couldn't look him in the eye.
I couldn't stop doing what I was doing.
I was totally task focused on and on.
And my email to him that I sent to say, I'm sorry, I was so rude to you, didn't say, oh, by the way, that's my autism.
Because my dad said, you know, 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 either.
Yeah, it's amazing.
It's really, it's really inspiring.
I mean, the fact that basically, you know, you wouldn't have to tell a friend and a friend wouldn't know is like pretty crazy.
And then the fact that in your career, you've reached the heights of broadcast journalism, been on TV.
And so both in very personal interactions, but even millions of people looking at you wouldn't know.
I mean, that is an amazing inspiration to people who feel like this is the end of their lives or the end of their children's lives or something.
You have to get the book is what I'm all of that to say.
You have to get the book right now, Born Lucky, a Dedicated Father, a Grateful Son, and My Journey with Autism.
Leland, thank you for coming on the show.
Appreciate it.
Thanks, Michael.
Good to see you, sir.
Okay, and good to see all of you.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is the Michael Knowles Show.
We'll see you tomorrow.
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