Hello and welcome to Ways to Change the World. I'm Krishnam Giri Murthy and this is the

podcast in which we talk to extraordinary people about the big ideas and their lives and

the events that have helped shape them. My guest this week, Jason Arda, is remarkable

for all sorts of reasons. He is under 14 and he's a professor at Cambridge University

which makes him extraordinary as a young black man for a star. What's even more extraordinary

about him is that when he was three, he was diagnosed with autism. He didn't speak a word

until he was 11. The experts told his mother that he would struggle with living an ordinary

life in the big wide world and yet he has achieved extraordinary amounts of things in written

books and excelled in academia. Jason, thank you very much for joining us.

Oh Krishnam, thank you so much for joining me here. So your story is really very inspiring

and you've done TED Talks about it and you speak very fluently but it was not always

like this. No, it wasn't. That's the crazy irony but I guess what I was very fortunate

to have in that period of where there was a paralysis of speech was the ability to observe

to understand the human interaction, to understand how people use dialect, verbal, nonverbal

kind of interactions to engage with people and I guess it kind of all came to a crescendo

at 11 and it all kind of made sense and it's quite ironic that having in some respects

been dumb as a child in the literal sense that as an adult now I speak to people for a living

in some way, shapeable form. And what you treated dumb? I was in the

literal sense as somebody who's dumb who is not able to speak and then there's the kind

of societal framing that we have and the kind of demonstrative use of that word which

was which your kind of categorise is not being particularly intelligent or not able and

so there's that aspect of it as well which is also challenging when people use a word

...