Hello everybody I'm talking today to Dr. Rob Henderson who's a novelist and a public intellectual, a psychologist,

and author of the recent book Troubled

a memoir of Foster Care Family and Social Class

which was released in February, and we really talk about not so much his book exactly

although also that but Rob's experience growing up in the foster care system in the United States in California and what and his

transformation sequential transformations of personality and status as he moved from the foster care system,

very fragmented and chaotic childhood upbringing, into the military and then to Yale and to Cambridge and so quite an upward arc on the academic and

intellectual side and we review his book the autobiography that's laid out in this book talking about his early experiences

and concentrating as well on his developing ideas of family fragmentation and the manner

in which that fragmentation has been aided and abetted by the same elites essentially that Rob studied with at Yale and perhaps to a lesser degree at Cambridge. And so he's the originator of the notion of luxury

beliefs, right? The idea that the elite classes who are yammering constantly about privilege, have as one of the privileges

they're unwilling to discuss, the privilege of adopting ideas that are very, very harmful to dispossessed people,

especially those who are economically dispossessed.

They have these ideas of unstable family structure, for example, that when implemented in the real world are absolutely catastrophic.

And so we talk about that, too. And so join us for that.

So I just re-read your book Troubled, a memoir of Foster Care, Family and Social Class last week and I found some topics that I'd really like to zero in on, but the first thing I'd like to know is how is, when exactly was your book published and how is it doing?

It was published February 20th, so as of this conversation just a few days ago.

I think it's doing well.

It seems to be well received.

A lot of my sub-stack subscribers are leaving positive feedback on Goodreads and on Amazon and it's been reviewed in various outlets and so far I've been really pleased with how things have developed. I hit some strange obstacles on the way.

Initially, my publisher and I thought we'd do some kind of a mini book tour, maybe visit some bookstores, do some book signings, and that ended up not going through,

which was really disappointing for me, but fortunately others have stepped into the breach

...