Claudia Rowe (on the foster care system)
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Umbrella
4.6 • 69.9K Ratings
🗓️ 4 February 2026
⏱️ 132 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Claudia Rowe (Wards of the State: The Long Shadow of American Foster Care) is a decorated journalist, advocate, and author. Claudia joins the Armchair Expert to discuss making the shift from using long-form journalism to a book to tell a story, touching off a five-year correspondence with a confessed serial killer, and confronting why she became fixated on what causes a person to commit murder. Claudia and Dax talk about her harrowing experience writing a true-crime memoir, realizing that this trial of a teenager in foster care actually corresponded to all the reporting she’d done, and how the failures of the foster system factored into the case of Maryanne. Claudia explains collaborating with incarcerated individuals to articulate thoughts about the carceral system, how poverty can often look like neglect, and her argument for a rehabilitative system of child care.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome, welcome, welcome to armchair expert. Experts on expert. I'm Dan Shepard and I'm joined by Lily Padman. Hi. Hello. Today we have Claudia Rowe. She is an award-winning journalist and author. Her previous book, which is super interesting. We actually learned a bit about her previous book, The Spider and the Fly with her intertwinement. Yeah. Yeah, with a killer. It's that one, oof, oof, |
| 0:24.0 | oof. That is not why we invited her. She has written a book called Wards of the State, |
| 0:29.3 | the long shadow of American foster care. As anyone who listens to the show knows, we kind of |
| 0:35.0 | talk about foster care a lot. This is a real bummer of a |
| 0:37.8 | situation. And she shines a very bright light on many of its imperfections. And it's, it's a sobering |
| 0:44.4 | account of what's going on. I don't normally do this on here. In fact, I don't know that I ever have, |
| 0:49.1 | but I would love for people to share this episode. Yeah. I think this is a really important episode for people |
| 0:56.8 | to listen. There needs to be like a cultural reckoning around this situation that we're in. And you'll |
| 1:02.9 | learn all the reasons why. So please enjoy Claudia Rowe. We are supported by HubSpot. Did you know that |
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| 1:14.3 | That's like reading a book with most of the pages torn out. |
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| 1:33.5 | data that makes all the difference. Because when you know more, you grow more. And when you get a |
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| 1:45.6 | This podcast is brought to you by Squarespace, the all-in-one website platform designed to help you stand out and succeed online. |
| 1:53.6 | When we were building the Armchair Expert website, Rob actually used Squarespace to get it up and running, |
| 1:58.8 | which was a smart choice because they've got everything |
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