Just gorgeously written phenomena, little storytelling and profound ideas. What we need to do, not just for our gun debate, but for the future of our democracy. So thank you somy name is sally. Im a senior fellow here at aei. And i have a feeling that many of you are already fans of. Rob henderson and and i know the trajectory of his life. But if you going to go through the broad outlines and then he and my colleague Naomi Schaefer riley whos a Child Welfare expert here aei will fill in fill in the wisdom of that outline, although wisdom that you extracted a very, very challenging upbringing. Sohrab, his mother struggle with addiction and he was and she was deported back to south korea when he was three years old and he never saw her again. He spent the next four years in ten different foster homes in angeles. And at age seven, he was adopted and settled into a lower, lower class home in red bluff, california, which seems stable. And he had a for the first time but that stability was shattered two years later when those parents divorced and after that a series of poor performance in school a lot of vandalization with friends who were unfortunately often in the same position he was coming from unstable families, a lot of weed, a lot of fights, a lot of alcohol. But rob was a reader and he was curious. And during his senior year in high school, a history teacher who had been in the air force himself encouraged to enlist that saw a potential that, according to rob he had, quote yet discovered or maybe didnt even want to. So he was in the air force for eight years. He enrolled at age through the gi bill. He went to yale to study psychiatry. Psychology. Im a psychiatrist. He studied psychology and they astute social there. And it inspired his i guess your which is luxury beliefs and can talk more about that with naomi but basically i particularly recommend chapters ten and 11, which are his really trenchant of of life in an ivy league university. And everyone if there not enough books just come up and me know afterwards and we can we can order more anyway he graduated in 2018 and at 28 and then went to cambridge in england to study psychology, where he just received his ph. D. Now hes 33, and looking back, writes in his book until was 17 years old, nearly everything my life was propelling me to a life as one of americas lost boys, the young man who failed to mature, who do poorly in school, live the economic margins and become absentee fathers, or fail to form stable families of their own. How he diverge from that path and are the indispensable insights that he gleaned from his combination of intellect and temperament well, thats what were here to hear more about. And again, thank you so much for coming. Looking forward to it. Thank you. Welcome, everyone. So sally is giving everyone the timeline. And i guess i just want to start back, you know, ill put you on the couch and, ask you about your earliest memories, but particularly about your time in care. What do you think was going wrong in those families, the early families that were in and and how did that, you know, sort of looking back, what do you what do you make those that that dysfunction. Well, so my, you know, my my birth mother and i, you know, she was just not in a position to care for me due to her addiction. And i never met my father you know, i write in the book. You know, i receive this very thick document. You know, full, full of information from social and forensic psychologist and people who were involved. In my case when i was in the in los angeles and, you know, in these reports they indicate that some Police Officers and others, you know, they asked my mother, you know, where is this boys . Because youre not in a position to care for him. And she didnt even know who he was and she claimed that his name was robert, which is where i got my my first name. And it wasnt until year. So last year i took a 23 me genetic ancestry test and i went my whole life not knowing this about myself. But im half hispanic on my fathers side and thats basically all i know about that part of my family family. And then later in the foster system, you know, there was a lot of i mean, its overburdened. Its overstressed l. A. I just recently read that l. A. Might be the worst sort of foster system in the country, simply because theres this surplus of children who need homes and very few families are able to or willing to take them in. And so i and this was in the nineties. So you know if anything things have probably gotten worse. I just read this report in npr that the number of foster children or children in foster care since thousand has doubled. A lot of this is due to the Opioid Crisis and drugs and the effects of that. So in the nineties at least, you know, i still remember some of these homes having 8 to 10 kids living in them. Some of these homes i remember there would be two bunk beds in a bedroom. And so thered be four kids each room rooms or two kids on the top and two kids in the bottom. And you know, when you have that many kids around and the constant sort of turnover where kids would constantly, constantly be and going, you know, foster parents just they dont supply adequate care even in the best of circumstances when you have ten kids, you cant necessarily, you know supply as much care as each kid needs. But then in that sort of continue instability and and turnover rate, its its basically impossible. And so yeah, i just remember a lot of squalor, a lot of uncertainty a lot of just like grime and dirt and yeah, it was really, really unpleasant and tacit agreement seems to be that, you know, as long as as as the kids arent being actively abused or harmed or mistreated, that you know, the people and the social workers and the people involved will kind of look the other way because its better for a kid to be living in those circumstances than to be sleeping on the street, which is probably true. But these, you know, the system is just severely broken and i documents some of those experiences, the book. So a lot of people who go this kind of foster care experience, you know, tend think things might have been better had they stayed with their biological family. You make a point of saying never went to i mean, obviously your mother was deported and you werent really sure who your father was, but you never made a point of sort of trying to go seek out relatives in any way. Why was that and and you also make a point about the the other kids who you were in foster homes with who were sort of constantly going back and forth between biological families and their foster families. So why dont feel like you had that desire to go seek this seek out their biological family. I, i note in the book that, you know, once they became old enough for that to be a question that i could seriously contemplate, i very quickly arrived the conclusion that, you know, my birth parents clearly didnt want me their life. And so why would i want to seek them out and form a connection with those people and, you know, i write about my adoptive family after i was after i left the foster system. And a lot of the difficulties and imperfections and mistakes and catastrophes by. They chose me. And i feel and i still feel connected to them in that way as a result of that. And so, you know, i feel like that thats my family for all of the blunders, everything that i write about in the book, i feel connected to them. And i even if i were to meet my birth parents, i dont think i would feel connected in that same way. And then just to go back to that point about dysfunction of the foster system, so there was never possibility of me being reunited with my family of origin because my mother was, you know, she left the country. No one knew my father was there was no Family Member in the u. S. , at least to the knowledge of the social involved. In my case. And yet i still spent just shy of five years in the system living. So in la it was seven different foster homes in los angeles and essentially, you know, the reason i ended up in adoption system in the first place was because at some point i was required to see a. And this doctor looked through my report and recognized that oh, this kid isnt going to be reunited with his family of origin. And he recommended that i be put up for adoption as soon as possible. But someone should have recognized this earlier. Someone should have recognized this when i was three years old and immediately put me into the adoption system. But instead there was just this. I was in this sort of Holding Pattern of going to different homes all the time until someone finally took the time and actually carefully read my report. And this is just know i basically got lost in this vast bureaucratic system and this is happening to a lot of kids. So after you were adopted was the first time that you had this real father figure in your life. Can you describe sort of what was different about that . I mean, throughout the book, you make a lot of, you know, sort of the fact that when you got to yale, you know, the kids there come from two parents, families. And so for a few years of your life, you had this stable two parent family talk talk a little bit about the family, and particularly about the relationship that you had with your father then. So right after i was i was adopted. Just before my eighth birthday, i remember being very just full of joy having a family at one point. So when i was still in the final foster home, lived in my foster parents, came to or my adoptive parents came to visit me. And the Henderson Family and i called my who became the person who became my adoptive mother, henderson. And she said, oh, you know, if youre if youre with it, you can just call me mom. And i remember like, oh, you know, this is that thats how i sort of recognize that something was different about, this family and that i really was going be in a, you know, a permanent placement and. And so for a little a year, i did have this Stable Family as as working class family in this kind of dusty, blue collar town in Northern California called red bluff. My adoptive was a truck driver. My adoptive mother was an assistant social worker. She had other jobs, too. But thats the job she settled on when when i was adopted. And they paid the bills they made ends meet. We had a family, we had family dinners. It just like a the kind of family i would see on tv or in the movies of like a mom and a dad. And i had an adoptive sister who was their birth daughter, and then they. About a year later, after the adoption and my adoptive father was, you know, he was angry at my adoptive mother for leaving him. And he retaliated by cutting off contact me. And this was really, you know. It was really hard for me, you know, never knowing my birth father and then all of the foster homes and then and then losing my adoptive father and, you know, i was i was nine years old by this point. My and so my got full custody of me. We settled in this kind of gloomy duplex in town, and she was working full time and she was doing her best to pay the bills and make ends meet. But her attention was taken up by those tasks. And i kind of this latchkey kid and id get into a lot of trouble and get into mischief with my friends. You know, a lot of other kids in this neighbor mean this is this is interesting. You know, the other scholars sense that ive learned, you know, the research and the kind of changing deterioration of the family in these. So i was adopted in the late nineties and i kind of got this front row seat into whats happening in sort of working lower middle class areas of the country where. You know, i had other friends growing up in this town and they were raised by single moms. I had one friend raised by a single dad. I had one friend raised by his grandmother because his mom was on drugs and his dad was in prison. And as a very common picture now of what these look like. And so these were the friends i had. And they also had parents were distracted or busy or neglectful, and we would do all of the things sally had mentioned and vandalism and drug use. And i mean, i drink beer the first time when i was five and one of the foster homes and i started to drink tequila when i was nine and smoking weed and cigarets then on to harder drugs later. And thats not an uncommon path for a young boy. And in those circumstances. So throughout this period, youre youre in school and there assumed to be sort of good years and bad years and there years where you know your love of reading and you know your desire to succeed at this sort seems to kind of push you along. Then there are years where you kind of give up and that this is, you know, that theres no way you can win at this can you describe kind of role that schooling played in your in this period . I mean you were kind of leading these two parallel lives. You know whatever going on at home and whatever was going on at school. But in the book, you of make the point that a lot of people focus on education as the thing thats going to save you particularly. You know, struggling kids from lower classes and say that you dont think that thats necessary going to happen but it sort of seems to have worked out in some ways you so you know just what what role do you think education play in helping kids like you you know, im thankful for the direction my life and the academic that ive had, but i dont think its the end all and be all. Im you know, when i think back to the friends that i had growing up, i was the only one of my friends who did go off to college. You know, after eight years in the military and sort of figuring out how to redirect my life trajectory. But i had five friends who never went and. You know, when i think back to, you know, those years and the kinds of students, we were i dont i dont know if even if you placed them in the best environment possible that they were necessarily academically but but i but i did have two friends who went to prison. I had one friend who was shot to death. And i think that if they had been raised in different environments, different families values, different norms, that they wouldnt have been incarcerate and maybe they wouldnt have gone to college, but they probably would been incarcerated. And i think theres maybe so much we can do to sort of raise the ceiling as far as potential. But i do think a lot we can do to sort of raise the floor as far as how far down these kids drop and know my experiences. I mean, you can read about in the book all of the reversals where any time there was stability home, my grades would improve and i would academically and you know, when i was in the foster homes, i was doing very poorly. I was changing schools every 3 to 6 months. And at one point they thought that i had a learning disability because my grades were so poor. And, you know, hindsight, its kind of ridiculous to think that, you know, you have this boy whos being relocated and changing homes and schools every months and hes not doing well. And the idea, you know, the next step is to attach a label to him learning disability, his problem and not really look too deeply into the underlying condition a and then yeah, once i was adopted and had that family that i had mentioned for the first year or so, you know, my academic performance increased a lot. And then the divorce, my academic performance dropped. And so i was very responsive to how much oversight, stability and containment i had at home. But by the time i graduated school, i had a 2. 2 gpa and i was in the bottom third of my class. I was just not in a position to apply for college by that point, but this question of can education everyone you know, i one of the strongest predictors of academic achievement is coming from a two parent family. And so thats something we could focus on if we want more kids to excel and do well in school, we could look at whats going on at home. Theres a lot of focus on the schooling system and we could do to improve it. And you know, theres probably improvements that could be made. But the schools i went to werent horrible they were you know, they were public schools. They werent but they werent bad. The teachers were okay. But what was going what was the issue me was what was going on in the family and the home. And it was the same for my friends and i for them too. And so i just saw this study some i think it was an economist at harvard who found that there are roughly 25,000 kids in the country from lower to middle homes who could qualify for admission into an ivy or an ivy plus college. And, you know, i read that study and i thought thats probably. Right, a lot of these kids would be able to go, but theyre being overlooked for various reasons and are obstacles in their path. But thats only 25,000 kids. There are millions of kids in this country who, again, they wouldnt necessarily qualify for admission to, some very expensive, prestigious university. But they could still we could find ways to improve their early life circumstances and ensure that they have a safe secure, warm, loving childhood. Even if we got every single one of those kids to get fancy degrees from an elite school that necessarily make up for those are difficult early Life Experiences and. I think for a lot of people and ive spoken with other people whove had similar experiences to me and have had achieved some form of upward that you know, it doesnt make up for it. Its not a not worth the trade. That its essentially that that having a a more conventional upbringing is is more valuable than than the kinds of success and achievement that we tend to focus much on in society. And i think part of the reason why we focus much on those things is because thats what those are so people who said educational policy tend to be college who are really good at school and they dont think so much about the fortunate family that they had. I have this line in the book that ive met rich people who have to you know to to envision what it would be like to be poor to not have money. But ive never met anyone whos tried to imagine what it would be like to grow up without their family. Its so much a part of your life. Its the water you swim in, you dont even think about it. But when you dont have that. College, its just not a priority for those kids. You know, if you tell a kid whos in mired in dysfunction and deprivation and so on, you say, well, someday youre going to go to harvard. I dont think theyre going to be excited about that. I think theyre going to say, well, i wish i knew where my dad was or. I wish, you know, that, you know, my mom wasnt on drugs or i wish that i felt safer home and that someone there was an adult somewhere out there who cared about me. I wanted to. Im really interested in this point. Youre making about raising the floor instead of the ceiling and. I wonder if you could sort of talk maybe a little bit more about the the leaders, you know, and maybe this is sort of point you make a lot about kind of the elite bubble that a lot of people are living in that they assume know College Education is the best thing for everyone and that its something thats going to fix all the kids problems. Can you sort of talk more about that, that idea, this idea of raising the floor like what would that look like