 Live every weekday from 2 to 5 on News Talk KCLI. As a young teenage boy, I didn't even know what autism was. How do you even spell that? A few years later, I heard that a friend's cousin's son had been diagnosed with autism. I still wasn't sure what that really meant. When I went to college, my roommate's brother had autism. When I moved to the city for work, my best friend called me and told me his son had been diagnosed with autism. We were both in shock.