And to talk about a crisis which dovetails with your congressional run.

Yeah.

Um, exactly right.

So at the, uh, after the midterms, a whole bunch of millions of people are gonna lose their Medicaid, and it's gonna send addiction treatment back decades.

That's not me saying that, that's all the experts that I've been interviewing for the last 15 years.

And you started to see a slight decrease in overdose deaths, uh, and that's mainly because of the Medicaid expansion.

And with this, um, de-expansion, it's, you know, in, in Virginia, 3,000 people, 300,000 people alone are gonna lose their Medicaid.

Wow

What are you hearing from folks these days? Tell us about everything.

I'm feeling really good right now.

I know all the pundits and whatnot.

It's not a flippable seat.

But let me tell you what happened after I saw you last weekend.

One of my door knockers was out in, you know, Rockingham County.

It's as red as it can be.

It's kind of a perfect storm of economic conditions coming together that make your race more favorable, I think.

What are you hearing from folks these days? Tell us about everything.

Well, I'm feeling really good right now.

I know all the pundits and whatnot.

It's not a flippable seat.

But let me tell you what happened.

After I saw you last weekend, uh one of my door knockers was out in you know rockingham county yeah it's as red as it can be and uh they were actually going out to put signs up and door knock and their across the street neighbor with whom they had had this sort of funny but like you know talk across the divide thing said and they put a beth macy sign in the volunteers yard and they go we'll take one and they go what And this is a beef farmer whose family has been on that property since the Revolutionary War for 300 years.

Wow.

and what's happening with debates i know that is are you going to have a debate with ben klein i know that he's been a little squishy on this and

I mean, maybe through the Trump years, but also I'm curious about the aftermath of the publication of this book.

book.I wound up thinking after spending two years going back to my hometown for about a week a month that my family wasn't as right as I thought.

There were people much righter, much on the hard right, many more among my friends.

And [inhales] a high school reunion organizer who w- y- you know, was trying to turn me on to QAnon and said, "Now you've been red pilled.

Now you know." [sniffs] And didn't think Biden was alive when, when, um, we w- I was interviewing her during his presidency, that was an actor playing him with a face mask, and all these crazy notions.

My oldest dearest friend, who had act- is a lay minister, who had conducted my mom's funeral, is Black and doesn't think that George Floyd was murdered by Derek Chauvin, and doesn't believe in Black Lives Matter, and all sorts of other things that struck me as really shocking.

Um, I mean, that's just tip of the iceberg.

And then is that solution possible?

So this is in the late 1800s we were giving heroin to our babies?

Yeah.

So this, uh, kind of comes about, uh, as the result of Civil War war wounds and women who had lost their families.

And h- heroin is actually introduced by Bayer, uh, as a cure for morphinism, uh, which is doctors would give, um, morphine away along with, um, needles to patients and have them use them as needed.

And of course, just as then, even though then it was much, uh, a lighter, uh, dosage than, than the heroin we have certainly of now is, but people would need more and more.

And then when the Harrison Narcotics Act came along in 1914 outlawing most of the black market, uh, uses of the drug, people then went to the black market.

Um, and so that's when there became this dichotomy between legitimate white market users who were prescribed and, uh, so-called black market users.

Uh, that, that's, that's a real problem, but that drug seems to be very much part of the solution to this crisis.

Mm-hmm.

So one of the things I did when I started researching the book was I cast about for a young me, a promising poor kid, to write about, you know, the decline in upward mobility and so I profiled this young man named Silas James who was every bit as smart as me, he was also the leader of the band and I loved that because that was such an important role for him, but he was homeless for his junior and senior year.

His dad had died of an overdose, his mom had been in and out of prison on drug charges, you gotta remember we're in the second and third generations of the opioid crisis now, something I've been writing about for 10 years, and he just had so many more strikes against him than I did.

And so what he gets, not a Pell Grant but he gets a full scholarship to a community college to become a welder and...

But he doesn't have a way to get there and it ends up being an hour away from it, where he's then living at the time and so, during the course of this ten-month welding program, you watch him go through five clunker cars, four full-time jobs, he has to work full time, I didn't, you know? I had work-study jobs and so much family drama and trauma bringing him down that he just barely makes it, but he does, and he's now raising his younger siblings who got removed from his mother's care and I just don't think that's a situation I could have handled.

I think you have to be really, really special to make it in this day and age.

I- it's not well-regarded now, correct, in these areas?

Absolutely.

Mm-hmm.

So one of the things I did when I started researching the book was I cast about for a young me, a promising poor kid, to write about, you know, the decline in upward mobility, and so I profiled this young man named Silas James who was every bit as smart as me.

He was also the leader of the band, and I loved that because that was such an important role for him, but he was homeless for his junior and senior year.

His dad had died of an overdose, his mom had been in and out of prison on drug charges.

You've got to remember, we're in the second and third generations of the opioid crisis now, something I've been writing about for 10 years.

And he just had so many more strikes against him than I did.

And so he gets not a Pell Grant but he gets a full scholarship to community college to become a welder, and ...

I- it's not well-regarded now, correct? In these areas?

Tell me about, tell me about your jobs, your early jobs at newspapers and how would that experience have been different from, uh, if a student wanted to get into journalism and work at, uh, the same newspaper or, or a similar newspaper where you got your start?

Yeah.

I mean, it would be really hard.

I, I don't think in good conscience I could, uh, uh, if it was my kid, I'm not sure I'd tell them even to go into journalism today.

You have to be really, really exceptional to get a job, and most of those exceptional people came from exceptional parents.

So now you have even more national reporters whose parents went to college, you know, no economic diversity at all w- among, um, national reporting.

But what I saw was, like, my own paper, I came to Roanoke in 1989 to work at the Roanoke Times.

What's the most disappointing thing about JD Vance knowing what he should know and does know that he's not doing? And do you give him any credit for bringing, even just bringing to light any issues that other national politicians haven't?

Tell me about your town and what it was like to grow up there.

Yeah.

So it's about 11 to 12,000 people.

When I was growing up in the '70s and '80s, it was largely dominated by one factory, which was called Grimes Manufacturing, and it was a very kind of patriarchal, top-down, but for the most part, Old Man Grimes ran it roughly but well.

He, you know, scholarships for top students, paid an almost living wage, employed, you know, was the largest employer, but also did things like maneuver to keep an interstate from coming nearby 'cause that would force a raise in wages.

And so I've now been gone for 40 years, since I went to high school.

I was starting to notice just the changes, starting with the collapse of Grimes.

And the difference between what was available to you in terms of education and money, and what's available to him, and, and how that's in some ways the kind of short version of the story of what's happened in the last 40 years.

You wanna just share some of what you observed there?

Sure.

I mean, the, first of all, the numbers of kids that weren't showing up to school.

This, this of course got really bad during COVID, so we were still seeing some post-COVID stuff.

But, I mean, the n- the amount of miles she had put on her car, like, 100,000 miles in four years on her car, and just driving from one end of the county to the other and picking kids up, getting them out of bed.

You know, giving them alarm clocks.

Um, rescuing children who had been sexually abused and taking them to social services.

Uh, tell us about that conversation.