From Foster Care to Yale: Rob Henderson’s Story

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1:29Hello, I'm Anthony Scaramucci, And this is Open Book, where I talk to some of the brightest minds about everything surrounding the written word. That's everything. That's from authors and historians to figures in entertainment, political activists, and of course, Wall Street. Before we dive in, make sure to follow or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And don't forget to leave a review. Good or bad, I want to hear from you. I want to hear whether you're enjoying it or where we can improve. And I can take the hits. So let me know. If you don't like something, say it straight. Now let's get into it.

2:13Today I'm talking with Rob Henderson who wrote a powerful memoir about his journey from the foster care system to the Ivy League. It's a story about overcoming adversity, the importance of family stability, and how self-discipline can change a life. It's a raw, eye-opening look at class, struggle, and transformation. So let's get into it.

2:42Well, welcome to Open Book. I am your host, Anthony Scaramucci. Joining us today is an incredible author. His name is Rob Henderson, and the title of the book is Troubled. It is a memoir of foster care, family, and social class. And what a great book. I mean, it was a pleasure to read. Great to learn. I learned a lot. A lot of socioeconomic things are wrapped into that book, including your personal story. But I also know Drew Pinsky very well. Dr. Drew and I were on the Special Forces show together a few years back. And so I've been on his radio show a few times. But let's start with you. Why write the book?

3:26And then let's talk about your name. My name is Robert Kim Henderson. All three of those names are important to your life story. So let's start with you. Why write the book? And tell us who Robert Kim Henderson is. Yeah. Well, thanks, Anthony. Really great to be here. And yeah, I'm glad to hear that we have a mutual friend and Dr. Drew there. Well, I wrote this book in part to communicate to people and segments of society that maybe not understand what's going on in foster care, in working class, blue collar communities across the country. And yeah, my book can more or less be understood through the origins of my name, Robert Kim Henderson.

4:13So my first name, Robert, comes from my father, who I never met. The only information I have about him is his name from some documents from the social workers who were responsible for my case when I was in the foster care system in Los Angeles. And I was born in L.A. My middle name comes from my birth mother, Kim. It was her name. She came to the U.S. as a young woman, started studying. which is the reason why she moved to California, but then very quickly started to do drugs and make a lot of poor choices. And we were homeless for a time. We lived in a car. Eventually, we settled in this slum apartment in Westlake, which was kind of a rundown neighborhood at that point in the early 1990s.

5:02Eventually, some neighbors called the police. I was placed into the foster care system when i was three years old and uh the police officers who who who came uh along with the social workers to take me into the system they asked my mother you know where's this boy's father because you're not in a position to care for him and she said she didn't know who my father was um although a couple of years ago i did this 23andme genetic ancestry test uh just to learn about that side of my family so i knew my mom she's korean And I wondered, OK, well, I went my whole life just, you know, kind of mixed race, Asian-American, something like that.

5:38But I wanted to know, OK, well, what was that side of my family, my father's side? And the results of this 23andMe showed that I was I'm half Hispanic. So my father was Mexican. And, you know, I read those results and I thought, well, it would have been nice to know that when I was applying for college. But, you know, it ended up working out anyway. And so I spent five years in the foster system in Los Angeles, California, living in seven different homes. I describe what those experiences were like in the early chapters of the book. Very difficult. Kind of being torn from my mother and then moving to a different home every few months, different schools, different teachers, different foster siblings.

6:19One of the things that was hard, I mean, it wasn't just that I wouldn't know where I would go from where I would be living from week to week, month to month. But then sometimes I'd enter a foster home and befriend some of my foster siblings. And then I'd see them taken either to another home or returned to their family of origin. And so it was just, you know, a lot of loss in my early life. And then eventually I was adopted by this couple, married couple, It was a man and a woman and their young daughter who became my adoptive sister. She was their biological daughter. This was the Henderson family.

6:56And that's where my last name comes from. And so this was the late 90s. My adoptive family and I, we settled in this kind of dusty working class town in northern California called Red Bluff, which is a part of California that most people are not familiar with. It's about three hours north of San Francisco, kind of close to the Oregon border. It's very rural, very red. I mean, I checked the statistics for the last presidential election, and it was something like 72 % for Donald Trump in my county. It's one of the poorest counties in California, very rundown, very few adults have college degrees.

7:33So my adoptive father was a truck driver. My adoptive mother was an assistant social worker. And so for a temporary period of time, I had this intact family. But then, like so many other families in Red Bluff and so many other parts of the country, my family my parents divorced there were custody disputes and financial catastrophes and a lot of drama um you know so they separated my adoptive father stopped speaking with me and so i was raised temporarily by my adoptive mother as a single mom and at this point i was nine years old so i did what a lot of nine-year-old boys do when they're kind of unsupervised and you know raised by a single mom who's working overtime to make ends meet.

8:17And I made friends with a lot of other kind of troublemaking nine and 10 year old boys in my town. And, you know, we would drink beer and tequila and moved on to generic Vicodin and weed and, you know, go to the local gas station and see how many cold medicine pills we could take before we started to feel funny. And kind of went on from there. And there's a lot more to this, which we can get into if you like, but I'll just fast forward here and say, eventually I enlisted in the US Air Force when I was 17, right out of high school, where I barely graduated. And with some hiccups and some missteps along the way, ended up going to Yale on the GI Bill and then off to the University of Cambridge and then on from there.

9:03But the book is really... There are personal stories there about what I witnessed firsthand where I was growing up in the foster system and then in this working class town. But there's, like you mentioned before, there's some research and some statistics and survey data on what's happening with kids who grew up in these communities, what their lives look like, what families look like in these communities too. And I think that family piece was one thing that Dr. Drew, that caught his interest, you know, because he's been an advocate for families and youth for a long time and he um you know saw a lot of of uh this in his in his in his sort of personal practice and and in his show so that's the the very short version of of the story but i'm happy to sort of delve into any part of that you like well listen i appreciate you sharing you share it beautifully in the book but i have that there are three big questions i want to ask you all three before I end our show.

10:00The big three are, how do you do it, Rob? Because J.D. Vance looks like he did it. He ended up going to Yale. He grew up in a, it looked like squalor. I don't know, people, I mean, he gets hit hard now. I'm not saying it's fair to him whether the story's accurate or not. I believe that the story's funny. The story was accurate until he was running for president or vice president. Now the story is not accurate, but I'll take you at his word that the story is accurate. Your story is a beautiful story, but it's a painful story. There's tragedy in your story. And I guess where I want to go with the question is, how do you do it?

10:40How do you pull yourself? You know, look, I grew up in a blue collar neighborhood. I had two parents living in the house. We've, you know, they were dysfunctional. I was dysfunctional, but made it out of the neighborhood and rose and went to Ivy League schools and stuff. But you were further behind the eight ball than I ever could be. So how do you do it? Yeah, yeah, it's a good question. And yeah, J.D., he was very kind. He read my book. His wife, Usha, also read it. And he provided a very nice blurb for Troubled. And, you know, I have a great deal of respect and admiration for him. I read Hillbilly LG shortly after that.

11:11By the way, I do, too. I'm not a Trump fan, as you know. But I respect J.D. I think he's a very, very smart man, brilliant writer. And I think he's capturing something about America that people need to hear. You are as well. But I'm just saying that your story, his story, these are very tough stories. What's the X factor? Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's interesting point there that you brought up about poverty and squalor, because, you know, I grew up about as I was born into a situation in which I was as poor as you could be in a first world developed country. But then if you spend time in actually poor countries, you know, then you realize that things are just so much different.

11:49You know, I've spent time in in, you know, like Malaysia, for example, like parts of Southeast Asia where, you know, people literally live in wooden huts and their floors are made out of concrete. And I'm thinking to myself, well, I grew up poor, but nothing like this. You know, there's to me, this is why I mentioned early in the book that, yes, material factors are important, but there's something else going on here. There's a kind of a cultural and spiritual problem in addition to material poverty. And so, you know, what's the X factor? There's always that question, Anthony, of like like nature versus nurture.

12:19and genes and environment, is it how you're brought up? Is it role models? Is it environmental factors? Or is there something within you intrinsically? I think it was a little bit of both. One thing that I point out in the book is that I was always kind of a bright and curious kid, but I was so weighed down by those early experiences that you can have a kid who has a lot of potential, who would be academically inclined and is smart, but if they don't have the right kind of stimulation and models and people around them who are sort of cultivating that latent ability, then the kid's never really going to manifest it.

13:03And, you know, I talk in the book about how when I was in second grade, I was seven years old, I was living in my final foster home and I was doing so badly in school that the teachers and the social workers thought I might've had a learning disability. And so they sent this psychologist to the home to administer an IQ test for me and I scored below average overall and I scored way below average on the verbal section. And it wasn't because I was dumb. It was because no one taught me how to read and because I was changing schools every six months. And there was no stability around me that would allow me to actually sit down and walk through the alphabet and how to spell out words and how to comprehend a story.

13:44And so, you know, gradually over time, once I had when I had periods of stability when I was a kid, you know, shortly after the adoption, when I was raised by these two married parents for a time, my grades improved. I got third place in my school spelling bee. And then after the divorce, my grades plummeted again. And so, you know, this isn't to say that every single kid, there's a hidden genius in them waiting to burst free if we just have the right sort of material conditions and family situations and everything. All I'm saying is that if you have a kid who is smart, you still need to have those factors in place for that to shine through.

14:21Are you your own Asian tiger mom? No, I feel like you are. I feel like you like beat the hell out of yourself almost to get yourself to where you are. Tuesday on NBC, Jimmy Fallon and Bozema St. John host a highly anticipated new competition show. I hired 10 creatives from all walks of life. They will be battling it out to see who can impress the world's biggest brands. This is a huge opportunity. This is the battle for the next big idea. This is not play play. We're spending millions of dollars. I'm so excited to embark on this adventure with all of you. Make the best idea win! On brand with Jimmy Fallon.

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15:45When children express themselves with Lego Duplo, they build patience, problem-solving, and empathy. See your child learn perseverance and self-expression with everything they imagine and create. Visit lego.com slash preschool to learn more. Well, not during my childhood, in my teen years. No, but you write about it. It feels like a light went off in your teen years, and you were like, okay, I'm getting out of this. I'm going to launder myself out of this situation. I feel like a light switch switched off. I mean, switched on. Was there an epiphany? What was the moment where you said, hey, I'm moving?

16:25Yeah. Well, that was the other thing. you know, the X factor is this is another sort of environmental component here is if I had stayed in Red Bluff when I graduated from high school, the way that my friends did, you know, where I grew up, the only way you get out of that town is you either go off to college or you join the military. I barely graduated. I was not in a position to go to college, but I went to the military and that immediately transformed my environment. I wasn't around the same kinds of influences and the same kinds of peers and temptations. The military was such a suffocating structure where, you know, here are the expectations.

17:01And if you fail to meet them, here are the consequences. Very cut and dry. You do X, this is what's going to happen. Y happens. Consequences and penalties were swift and immediate. And so were the rewards. You know, you do X, Y, Z, and you get promoted. You do, you know, X, Y, Z, and you're going to get court-martialed. It's as simple as that. And so that was really helpful for me as a kind of aimless undisciplined young kid um and i think at the time i resented this you know when i was 17 18 years old shipping out for basic training in the early days i actually didn't i thought i had made a mistake initially like man this really sucks like all these rules all these you know all these people telling me what to do i had a little bit of this rebelliousness kind of lingering from high school of course but then over time i realized my life started to improve you know physically i felt better.

17:48Mentally, I felt better. I felt proud of myself. I saw the look in my adoptive mom's eyes when she would see me and she could notice that there was a change in me. My sister, you know, people around me respected me more and I carried myself in a different way. And once, you know, it was not an immediate, oh, light bulb went off. My life is better now. It was more so gradually I started to pick up on these things such that, you know, by the time I was in my early 20s, I started to realize like, oh, maybe, maybe I do have some potential. Maybe I can turn my life around and move forward and, you know, improve myself, not just with the military, with the assistance of the military, but also kind of internally.

18:30And that's one of the things I point out is that I think a lot of people believe that if you want to be successful, you need to have motivation, or if you don't have motivation, you're not going to be successful. You know, I need that motivation. But what the military taught me is that what's more important is is self-discipline. You know that I'm going to do this regardless of how I feel. I don't feel motivated. I'm going to do it anyway. And initially, that discipline was imposed from the top down from this organization, this military structure that I was in, where I had to do something regardless of how I felt.

19:07But then gradually I learned to do that on my own, cultivating this internal discipline within myself of I have all these things I want to I have to do and I don't want to knock them out, do them anyway. And you string enough days like that together and eventually your life starts to change. And so that was a big lesson for me during those years. Talk about luxury of beliefs. You coined this phrase. What are luxury beliefs? What does that mean? Well, luxury beliefs are ideas and opinions that confer status on the elite while often inflicting costs on the lower classes. And a core feature of a luxury belief is that the believer is sheltered from the consequences of his or her belief.

19:48And I came up with this idea. The idea started to take shape in my mind when I arrived at Yale. So I left for the Air Force when I was 17, did two enlistments. By the time I was 25, I had gotten myself to a position where I could study at a place like Yale on the GI Bill. And I started to hear strange opinions from elite college students and graduates and professors that I'd never heard in my life, not where I grew up, not in the military. And suddenly I'm hearing that we need to abolish prisons and legalize all hard drugs. And, you know, later it became kind of defund the police. Family and marriage are unimportant.

20:31And we need to evolve beyond, you know, these patriarchal notions of what monogamy is and all these kind of newfangled ideas. And so at that same time I was having those interactions and experiences, I was reading a lot about class and status and the history of social class in America and in other countries as well. And for me, this idea, it starts really, you can trace it back to 1899, where this sociologist and economist Thorstein Veblen wrote this book, The Theory of the Leisure Class. And Veblen pointed out in his day, the elites would exhibit their status with material possessions, with luxury goods, you know, expensive tuxedos and top hats and evening gowns and pocket watches, monocles.

21:22And they would, you know, show off these these what they were wearing as badges of of their social status. And then if you fast forward to the mid 20th century, you know, sociologists, Pierre Bourdieu and others, they pointed out that a lot of elites would convert their economic capital, their money into cultural capital or sort of expressions of their status. they would perform their status through the kinds of opinions that they had, the tastes that they had acquired. And at that point in the mid 20th century, it was like arcane and intricate knowledge about like wine and art and exotic locales, information that you would only have access to if you were educated at the right schools and had access to kind of, you know, I hate this word, but like privileged sources of information that only people with money and status could acquire.

22:12desire and so my claim is that luxury beliefs are the latest manifestation of cultural capital luxury goods or status or luxury beliefs are status symbols and so in the book I go through different beliefs and point out that a lot of these beliefs like for example defund the police there were surveys conducted in 2020 and 2021 which consistently found that the highest income Americans were the most in support of defunding the police and the lowest income Americans were least in support of it you know if you break it down by political orientation white progressives were always the most in support of defunding the police and black and hispanic americans were always the least in support of it and uh and yet that became a popular fashionable view for a time among our elites and our cultural tastemakers and who suffers you know it was poor and marginalized people the very people that these um elites claim to be wanting to help me help them and you know wanting to champion their, uh, these people and their mitigate their plight.

23:12And instead they're often making things worse. And, you know, there, we could go through different, different luxury beliefs if you like, but that's kind of the core of the idea is that, um, luxury beliefs, they, they inflict, they, they make you look good while, while hurting people who are lower down the social hierarchy. I think it's a brilliant concept and I'm going to add it to my personal Lex lexicon. we took five words out of your book and i'm going to read you the word and when i say the word i want you to come back to me with something a thought okay so if i say the word family to rob kim henderson what do you say something you think about well i think i think um stability stability yeah i mean what am i saying that uh go ahead i'm sorry go ahead well i was going to say you know if we're if we're you know a lot of people across the political spectrum they claim to care a lot about inequality and social mobility particularly on the left you hear a lot about inequality but one of the things that um melissa carney points out in her book the two-parent privilege is that the number one predictor of a child going on to graduate from college is being raised by two married parents um and so that is what comes to mind when i think of family.

24:28All right. How about I say the word class? Hmm. You know, it's complicated. It's not the same thing as money. You know, there's a there's a great book on class by Paul Fussell, where he points out, you know, class really comprises three different components, you know, money, but money is not not enough to kind of rise in social class. If you win the lottery, you don't suddenly join the upper class. You know, there's money. Then there's education. You know, were you sort of educated in the right places? And do you move in the right circles? And then finally, there's cultural capital. Do you have the right opinions?

25:12Do you know how to get by in these different communities? All right, well said. What if I say the word luxury? Luxury beliefs. You know, it's expressions of status. Okay. How about the word troubled? Yeah, I think of children and families. A lot of kids, a lot of families are in difficult circumstances. Yeah, I think of the word pain. After reading your book, if I hear the word troubled, I think of the word there's pain in the word troubled. Yeah. Initially, it was so painful that I almost wanted to give the book a different title, but I thought that that was the most honest one. So those are great.

25:55It's a great book. OK, last word. And I'm going to give you the last word. It's two words. Rob Henderson. Wow. You know, what comes to mind is transformation. You know, I went through a lot of different shifts and periods and there were a lot of reversals in my life. And I had to change myself, not not because I wanted to, but because I had to. And I think a lot of people, surprisingly, a lot of readers write to me saying that they related to the book, which I which shocks me because I thought this story was, you know, it's kind of peculiar. Most people don't know about the foster system. Most people don't, you know, they don't go to these highly selective schools and they don't have contact with this part of these different parts of our society.

26:45But people still felt, you know, everyone on some level has to change and adapt and move forward. in their lives at some point or another. Well, you're a brilliant guy. You've written a phenomenal book. The title of the book is Troubled. It's a memoir of foster care, family and social classes. So much content in here. I just want to thank you for writing the book and very grateful to have you on our show today. Thank you, Anthony. It's been an honor.