For most of his life, John Austin has been misunderstood.
Misunderstood by his parents, who couldn’t make sense of his childhood obsession with record players, movie projectors and weird sounds.
Misunderstood by other kids, whom he’d scare off by demanding that they sit in his house and listen to Alice Cooper instead of playing sports in the yard.
His experience of growing into an adult was a series of personal rejections because there were so few people in his life who could connect with him.
But today, as he walks along South Tryon Street during the lunch hour hustle-bustle, people can’t get enough of John Austin, because of his completely unintelligible way (at first) of communicating.
John Austin can talk backwards.
And not in the order-of-words-backwards where you say “Doing you are how?” instead of “How are you doing?”
Backwards like “Gniod uoy era woh”?”
He’s created a name for himself, “Backwords Dude,” with an eponymous YouTube channel, and has captivated audiences across oceans both on TV and online with his incredible ability to take phrases and even entire songs, flip them around in his brain, and recite them backwards. His most popular video has 61,000 views.
He plugs the videos into an app that reverses sound, and the words come out completely understandable.
This skill, not only of talking backwards but of making sense of sound moving in all directions, has given him a career in professional video editing and put him on stages both local and national.
And it is this zany talent, which grew out of too much time spent alone with a broken record player as a kid (more on this later), that helped John Austin finally learn to understand himself.
Source: He grew up misunderstood. Now he talks backwards, and people finally get him. – New York Daily News