Up next Rob Smith is Problematic, part of the Game of 360 Network.

Hello my fellow Problematics, now look, you may or may not know that I come from a pretty rough

background, an overcoming that background and continuing on made me a bootstrapper to the core.

This week I've got probably the most famous bootstrapper in America with me, a man by the name of

JD Vance, who wrote Hillbilly LG, one of the biggest books of the past decade. So dysfunction,

bootstraps and personal responsibility, this is Rob Smith's Problematic.

Again guys, you may not know that I come from a pretty rough background, I am not a victim,

I do not use this to make people feel sorry for me, but there is a lot of dysfunction in my

background and to understand the way that I see the world, you have to kind of know some of the

roots of that dysfunction. I was raised in a single parent household, single mother, dad was not

around, when I was younger, went through physical abuse, emotional abuse, sexual abuse, like all of

that other stuff that you can think of, I went through this, I talked about it in my book,

always a soldier, bullied in elementary school, I was the only black kid in my elementary school,

so I was bullied for being the only black kid, then when I got to middle school and high school,

that were nearly 100% black, I was bullied because I quote unquote, talk white, dad wasn't around,

was dealing with a lot of this stuff, I have cousins that were in and out of jail, like all of this

stuff, and for me, and I've talked about this a lot, what saved me from all of this stuff,

and what made me a bootstrapper, and what gave me sort of the discipline that I needed was the

military, right? So I come from a great deal of dysfunction, and at this point right now,

I hate dysfunction, I separate myself from it whenever I can, but I'm also very curious about

the roots of this dysfunction. Now, I told you guys, I want to bring in JD Vance to this conversation,

if you are listening to this podcast, I don't have to give you this guy's introduction,

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