Hey everybody. I hope you enjoyed our episode earlier this week with Aaron Smith of

Kasa and Thomas. That episode really affected me. That interview really affected me and I really haven't gotten it off my mind since we did it and

produced it. To summarize Thomas was abused.

He was tied up by his mother with electrical cords.

He was one through an institutionalize system that really didn't serve or care for him and

certainly offered him no love he was adopted and in that adoption was provided him hope for the first time in his life,

he found a brother that sexually molested him. And then in defending himself by just trying to reach

out for help and speak up, he then gets taken out of his adoptive home and put back into state institutionalized care.

And weeks later, two orderly that he doesn't know anything about,

gives him $150 and drops him off on the campus at Old Miss and says,

hey, good luck and ride off.

There's just no love there. There's just no care and the fact that this kid is still trying is an amazing testament to his character and his spirit. The other thing I want you to remember is,

despite all of this, this kid made a 35 on a part of his ACT and got into college and even had a full ride to Fisk, which is in Tennessee, but he couldn't go there because

he was under the care of the state of Mississippi and so we went to old miss having been told by the state of

Mississippi that they would cover the cost above and beyond his Pell Grants and all of that and then they informed this kid who's been screwed by basically every

adult in his life that they were wrong funding wasn't, and you need to take some loans.

I just don't know what I would do if I was Thomas. I just don't, I don't know why I'd handle that. I don't know that I would

want to wake up in the morning. Yet this kid wakes up has two jobs, goes to class, makes his grades, and through his relationship with

Aaron is finding his way to be a productive adult and once do major in psychology and criminal justice to keep

the very people that abused him off the streets so no other child has to live what he

lived.

What a testament to this kid.

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