Welcome to Why Not Me, the World Podcast, hosted by Tony Mantour.

Broadcasting from Music City, USA.

Nashville, Tennessee.

Join us as our guests tell us their stories.

Some will make your laugh, some will make you cry.

Real life people who will inspire and show that you are not alone in this world.

Hopefully you gain more awareness, acceptance,

and a better understanding for autism around the world. Hi, I'm Tony Mantour. Welcome to Why Not Me The World. Today's guest is John Brown.

He's the first responder program manager for Autism Society of America.

But above and beyond that, he's also an autistic dad. So

thanks for coming on. I'm excited to do it. I've listened to, you know, I've

been listening to some episodes, but yeah I've really enjoyed the podcast. I'm

happy to do it and I'm excited. Yeah, thanks for asking us to do it.

Oh, it's my pleasure. So if I understand it correctly, before you started working for the

Autism Society of America, you're an autism dad. Yeah, so I have three kids. I have a 10 year old, an 8 year old, and a 4 year old. My 8 year old son,

Wyatt, he's on the spectrum. He's non-speaking, it has lots of challenges. And then before that I was a teacher as well.

I've worked as a Gen Ed teacher also in special education and was in the Air Force before that. Lots of jobs here and there between then.

Okay, so how old is your son now? Eight years old. Eight. So when was he first diagnosed?

He was diagnosed. He was diagnosed early, so he was diagnosed about two and a half. Actually, it was probably closer to two years old. We got real lucky. His mom and I, we bought his mom as a speech therapist. I was working in special education.

We started seeing signs.

Because Wyatt, he actually had words at some point

and then lost those, lost his language

...