Welcome, welcome, welcome back to the AOC podcast. I'm Johnny and I'm here with AJ and I last week you guys had an opportunity to hear my back story was quite the experience.

I was a little bit nervous. I was nervous about doing it and then I was also nervous about it.

Erring, however, the response was it's been received very well. I had a lot of fun speaking with you all about it and today we're going to dig in with a little bit of AJ's story. AJ, how do you feel about that today?

I'm feeling good. I'm excited. I have some fun stories that I haven't shared anywhere. Yeah. So I think the audience will get an interesting perspective on my background and I had a lot of fun interviewing you. So this should be good.

All right. Well, I guess we'll go ahead and kick that off. Let's keep it simple and let's keep it on a linear timeline and we'll go to Dearborn Michigan in the 80s.

You're going to paint us a picture of the house. How was going on? Let's kick it off there. AJ as a child, really. Dearborn.

My father was a single dad. So he raised me and my sister. He actually won custody. My mom unfortunately had some substance abuse issues and she was abusive to me and my sister.

So my dad lost his job. There was a lot of fighting when I was very young and me and my sister were both put in foster homes while the courts tried to figure out who deserve custody.

Obviously, unemployed father and an abusive mom. The court really wasn't looking fondly on either of them as being able to support children. So I was in a foster care for almost six months and then my dad did win custody.

And thankfully my aunt, my dad's sister, she stepped in to really play the mom role growing up and she babysat and watched me and my sister and we spent a lot of time going to visit her in the clinic.

While I was growing up, my dad was working for the city. So he had a very manual labor intensive job. And because of that, he put a lot of emphasis on me and my sister going to college and getting an education as a way out of this.

Cycle that him and his dad had been through tough labor was what his world was all about and he didn't want to see me or my sister have to go through that.

Education was very important growing up and my sister and I were really close. She's two years younger than me.

What's so interesting is I kind of got the science analytical side. She got the creative side. So as we talked about last week how you picked up a guitar and it was your outlet.

For me growing up, I picked up encyclopedias. It's one of the first gifts my dad gave me and my sister was an encyclopedia set with that set.

A bonus was a thick book with every species on the planet that had been identified. So birds, mammals, fish, everything. And that one was full color.

So the encyclopedia was tons of words, black and white, no pictures. This book was full color. So I fell in love with this book memorizing all these species growing up.

And I wanted to be a marine biologist. That was one of the very first things I wanted to do around kindergarten. And I started to have an aptitude for science.

So my dad started to tell me that I should probably think about becoming a doctor. That's a very honorable job.

And my family friends were nurses and doctors because of my ant working in the clinic. So I had very fond memories of the hospital and spending time there and getting to know all these awesome doctors and white lab coats.

And that really became my narrative through my youth was I'm going to be a doctor. I'm studying to become a doctor.

Something that was much in the same line for myself is you know I had mentioned that I had picking up musical instruments that gave me a lot of value in my household.

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