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Hey friends, welcome. Delighted to have you with me today. My guest has written a very, very thought-provoking book. And this covers a topic that I have discussed so many times, but he brings a perspective to bear that I think is really worth considering. His name is Matthew Desmond, and the book is Poverty by America.

So let's dive in.

I'm Sharon McMahon.

And here's where it gets interesting.

I am very excited to be chatting with Matthew Desmond today.

Thank you so much for being here.

Thanks, Sharon, for having me.

Your book was so interesting and so eye-opening,

and I learned so much about the topic of poverty in the United States. We all know it's a

problem. It's not a mystery that it exists. We all know that it is an issue. But even as somebody

who's well aware of many of the issues related to poverty,

I still had my eyes opened in so many ways reading this. And I love to start by talking about

what is uniquely American about this problem of poverty. How is poverty in the United States different than it is from

other places in the world? There's way more of it here than in other advanced democracy.

So about 30 million people in America live below the official poverty line. So if all those

folks got together and found in a country, that country would be bigger than like Australia. Just a huge number of folks. Our poverty rates are not just higher, they're much,

much higher than other rich democracies. So our child poverty rate, for example, the share of kids

...