Vibe Check Book Club with Matthew Desmond
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Fair maidens. Oh. Fair maidens. Just trying it out. Just trying it out. Interesting. Dames, damsels, ladies. We're in distress. We are in distress. I'm Sam Sanders. I'm Saeed Jones. And I'm Zach Stafford. And you're listening to Vibe Check. Well, we are so excited about this week's episode in particular. This is our very first book club episode. Yay.

Yay! We're so proud. We're so proud. It has been a joy reading and talking about with each other, with all of you, in your emails. Poverty by America by Matthew Desmond. As you all know, if you're listening to this conversation, it's an essential book. Yeah.

It's not just a good book. It's not just an interesting book. It's those things, too. But it's essential. I think it's liberating. And so it's really been a joy doing this work about a difficult subject, you know, obviously. But doing it in community and kind of using it as an opportunity to strengthen the kind of vibe check community has been great. We are so happy that we were actually able to have a conversation with Matthew Desmond, Matt Desmond.

Desmond himself about the book, about the work. Yeah, he's like, my friends call me Matt. It was so good. Are there any thoughts you wanted to share from the comic book? You know, there were so many good tidbits in the book. And the central thesis of the book is like poverty doesn't just happen. Poverty is created and we're all a part of it.

And there's one interlude where he talks about the ways in which people who think that we care, we try to show up by questioning where our food or this comes from. So we'll know if the fish was farm raised or not. We'll know if the...

This thing in our car or our home was made sustainably, but we never think to ask how much the folks making these things got paid or if it was fair or if it was legal. And I think so much of this book is not just explaining what poverty is, but it's calling us to ask ourselves how we're a part of its creation. So those parts of the book are my favorite. Yes, I agree with you so much. And the other part that I love most about the entire book was the dignity aspect.

he gives people who are going through these experiences, the people that he was in community with, how he cared for them in both how he wrote it and how he stood next to them through everything. And I just was astonished by just the gravity of the work he did in this book. He's got a marvelous mind. I guess something that I would share, there's a twinship in this dynamic, right?

Something that's important to me is if I get to read or listen to an extended conversation or interview with an author, if they make it through that whole hour long or whatever conversation, and don't mention a single mentor, don't mention a single book by another person or colleague that I just – bad vibes. Yeah.

And I love that as you go through this conversation, Matt is constantly invoking. He's giving flowers. Yeah, giving flowers to and explain and how, you know, ideas from other people made his work better as a reader, as a writer. And again, the other side of that, the reason I say it's twinship is that you see about working on poverty as a podcast.

Abolitionist. That's the term he uses. He talks about living alongside people who live in poverty. And so you see that as well, that he really is walking the walk. Well, he's got skin in the game. Yes. And we talk about this in the chat. You know, so much of the way in which poverty is researched or covered is from a distance, from a remove. The academics over here, the poor folks are over there. Right. And they are numbers that you look at.

Matt's whole thing is, I'm going to be there with them. And it works. It's so good. So you are going to, just now, we don't want to spoil too much of it, but obviously we're very excited. And then of course, this time of year, the holidays, Thanksgiving, is a really important time, I think, to have a conversation like this. So you're going to be there

You will hear me talking one-on-one with Matt Desmond, and then Sam and Zach come along to ask some questions of their own that were very good, but also your brilliant questions. And I guess one more thing is as soon as he joined the call, I think before we started recording, Matt was like, your listeners are incredible. So we wanted to pass that level on. Thank y'all listeners. All right, here we go. ♪

Matt, thank you for taking the time to join Vibe Check. Thank you for writing both Evicted and Poverty by America. We need these books. We need these books. Let's just get into it. First of all, I got to curse you out. Because pretty early in reading this book, I realized I was highlighting and underlining so much. I was back in grad school, which is to say...

I was like, I need different colors. I need a color-coded system because so much of what you were writing had me shook that I was like, oh, okay, he's coming at me in another level. So thank you for all of that. To get us started, I wanted to quote something you say early on about poverty, because you work to define it, which is really important.

You say, poverty is often material scarcity piled on chronic pain, piled on incarceration, piled on depression, piled on addiction. On and on it goes. Poverty isn't a line. It's a tight knot of social maladies.

It is connected to every social problem we care about, crime, health, education, housing, and its persistence in American life means that millions of families are denied safety and security and dignity in one of the richest nations in the history of the world. That's the knot of the book, but I would ask you, did your definition of poverty change while you were working on Poverty by America?

I think the book forced me to articulate the stakes in a way. I feel like there's so much conversation about poverty that feels abstract. It feels technical. It feels dorm room debate. And for those of us that grew up poor, for those of us that love people that are still struggling below the line, we know that poverty is so much more than an income level. It's not being able to take your kid to the dentist. It's debt collector harassments. It's getting evicted. It's your cousin getting roughed up.

by the police. It's your other cousin doing life in a cage in his prime years, you know? And, you know, that whole thing, one problem on top of another on top of another is the weight and the stakes of poverty. And I felt that it was my job to try to get a reader to feel that stake.

at the front, and also to complicate this debate, to show that, look, drawing a poverty line at an income level, that's just the start of it. That's the oil on the water, as the poet Layla Longsoldier has written. So I wanted to try to get at that and try to represent on the page what the experience of poverty is like as a lived experience in America. And I appreciate that you do that in all of your work.

Well, let's talk about one of those examples. I think about your friend Wu as a good example of the piling on. So could you kind of talk about Wu? Because I want to get to the one billion because that was one of those examples where I had to put the book in my lap for a second because I was so shaken. Let's talk about his experience.

So Wu and I have been friends for a long time. I met Wu when I was writing Evicted. I was living in Milwaukee and moving to a rooming house. And Wu was my roommate. And he was super protective of me. He looked out for me, cooked for me. We went out on the town with each other. I got to know his family. And we stayed in touch long after the book came out.

Woo was one of the hardest working people I've ever met. You know, he worked security jobs. He'd be kind of come home, grab a snack, go back out to a second job. But these weren't the kind of jobs that, you know, the boss took down your social security number. These were paid cast jobs. And he had diabetes. He stepped on a nail at this rundown rooming house we shared. He didn't pay the infection any mind, you know, just working, working. And that infection accelerated, you know, by his diabetes. And the doctor decided to take his leg.

That decision isn't innocent of racism. You know, I learned from Linda Villarosa's book that, you know, white men with, right, under the skin, white men with diabetes are far less likely to get amputations than black men like my friend Wu. But he lost his leg and met him in the hospital. And, you know, Wu's a big guy, security guy. He's kind of a big intimidating teddy bear kind of thing. But he was just reduced, you know, kind of a shell of himself after that.

And, you know, started the process of trying to apply for disability. And so for Wu, you know, poverty is substandard housing. It's health issues. It's racism. And it's an interaction with a welfare state that often treats you very poorly.

I wonder here, as you talk about the not, like you're like, you know, housing is why, you know, he stepped on that nail, right? Like that's part of this. And then you mentioned like racism and medical treatment. That's why he lost his life. Like all of these things are accruing. You talk about welfare avoidance throughout the book, right? Because we have this idea of, you know, what there's the racist trope of the welfare queen, this idea that poor people are greedy and that's why we shouldn't help them. But you point out that actually a lot of impoverished people actually resist the

Getting you know resources that they are due and thinking of whose situation is it also because of exhaustion like you know who is you know? Like you said he was kind of losing himself kind of diminished and so you had to step in and help him Where's welfare avoidance coming from in this dynamic? I think the exhaustion point I love that point because like you shouldn't have to be superhuman in America just to make it and

You know, I remember following folks after they got evicted in Milwaukee and seeing them apply to 12 apartments, then 20, then 50, then 80, you know, and not getting any because not only are they poverty, but their eviction record, right? One landlord after another, after another say no. Just as a human experience, that level of rejection and exhaustion, that is incredibly depleting.

So there is something to that. There's something to stigma. You know, I've spent some time in welfare offices. They're a pretty bad place to be. You know, you could spend a whole day just for a 10 minute appointment. They're often dehumanizing. But the reason that a lot of folks below the poverty line aren't getting connected to programs that they need and deserve is because we've made it hard for

and complicated, just red tape. Like in California, you got to fill out 200 questions to get on food stamps. - 200? - 200. - Wow. - You know, and when's the last time you had to do that to get anything? - Right. - You know? And just like a lot of time, you know, the rich get efficiency and the poor get paperwork. And you know, in some states you gotta get photographed and fingerprinted to get on welfare, like you're a criminal.

And so we hear so much about welfare dependency. We heard about it nonstop in the pandemic. We're paying people to stay home. The data though, they show a different story. That's not the story. The story is we are leaving billions and billions of billions of dollars on the table and unused aid because we are doing a terrible job connecting families to programs that they need and deserve. And like in America, right? Like if we do one thing right, it's to market people's stuff and get them stuff.

And why can't we apply that ingenuity and technological brilliance to, you know, getting moms diapers, for example? Yeah. And let's talk about that because this is another aspect of the book that had me shook. The book is kind of like two-sided coin. On one hand, you are illuminating poverty, what it feels like.

you know, what it does to a person, how we got here. But also you're showing that like, look, America likes poverty. There's a reason we aren't marketing, you know, these resources in a better way because we're benefiting from it. So to go back to Wu, for example, he needs disability. You fortunately are able to help him fill out all of the forms and the paperwork he's denied. And then you hire a lawyer that's able to litigate the disability claim and the lawyer gets paid a bit.

And then you have a revelation. Can you talk to us about what you learned about that lawyer? So I've got a PhD, right? So I apply for disability with who, and we are turned down.

And so Wu's not shook about this at all. He's like, this is how it is. And he's like, I have to hire a lawyer. Like it's part of the process, right? It's the game. Yeah, right. He's like, of course this happened. And so lawyers working on contingency can receive up to a quarter of the back pay their clients get if they get the benefit when they were waiting for it. And so that's what happened to Wu. Wu got a back pay of about $3,400. He used it to buy a wheelchair accessible van that ran for a few years and caught on fire.

And his lawyer took him 400 bucks. So Wu never lost sleep over that. But I was just like, how common is this? And how much money that should go to folks like Wu go to attorneys? And I learned that every year over a billion dollars, billion with a B, in disability funds, in social security funds, does not go to folks struggling with disabilities, but goes to lawyers to connect those folks to a benefit. Like, wouldn't it be better just to pay public interest lawyers to

And wouldn't it be better to make sure we're connecting folks to these programs in a way that's seamless and even more than that, loving and dignifying? So is it fair to say that, I mean, that $1 billion, that is a staggering revelation. Is that an example of how we, more affluent people or more collectively the United States in general, benefits from poverty, profits from it?

Yeah. I mean, for me, this is like the nut of the book. And Toni Morrison, she said she wrote books she wanted to read. And I guess that was my story with this book. I was so tired of absolving theories of poverty, like from the left and the right, like it's always someone else's fault. There's like 38 million folks in America that can't afford basic necessities and it's not on us. That just seemed wrong to me. And so I

This is a book that really tries to get us to look at how we're connected to the problem and connected to the solution. And part of it is what you're talking about, the fact that we subsidize affluence over alleviating poverty. So if you look at everything that the government does for us, all those things,

programs like disability or food stamps to go to folks like Wu that are struggling, but also like social insurance programs, like social security that a lot of us are benefiting from or will one day, but also like tax breaks, part of the welfare state. Let's face it. Like tax breaks, increase the deficit. They put money in our pocket.

If you add all that stuff up, you know, you learn that an average family in the bottom 20% of the income distribution are poorest families. They receive about $26,000 a year from the government. But the richest, our richest families, the families in the top 20%, they receive about $35,000 a year from the government. That's almost a 40% difference. Yeah. So like, that's what our welfare state looks like. We give the most to families that need it the least. And then we like have the shamelessness

to fabricate stories about poor people's dependency on aid and shoot down proposals to reduce their hardship because they would cost too much. And that's just a lie, you know? We could do a lot more to fight poverty if we stopped, you know, doing so much to guard fortunes and redirected that money to ending poverty. So that's one of the ways that we benefit from poverty in America. I could go on if you want. There's others. At one point, you say complexity is the refuge

of the powerful, right? And I started thinking about how often that rhetorical trick is actually used, weaponized against us. You're upset about something, you're kind of like, you know, pointing out a grievous wrong, and then someone goes, oh, oh, it's way too complicated. Like you just, to step away. How did you arrive at realizing that that's a major hindrance to poverty abolition? Yeah, because my people, my tribe, academics, we traffic in that complexity. Yeah.

You know, and we like asking things like, well, what's the inflation rate that you use? You know, what measure are you using? You know, and we like really getting into the weeds. And I was reading the Affluent Society, this book by John Kenneth Galbraith, a mid-century economist. And he brings this up, you know, he was a Harvard economist and he was like, look at all the games we play. You know, poor folks need bread and we assemble a panel of experts. And I think that

We just need to cut through the abstractions and we need to cut through the complexity and just recognize that this is the richest country on the planet and we can't afford to end poverty. To do so will require some of us that have means to take less from the government. And, you know, there is complexity here.

But at the bottom, I fear that often when we like resort to complexity, we turn this problem, which for millions of Americans is literally a problem of life and death. We turn it into like a debate, you know, something that pundits can talk about instead of something that should be deeply concerning and morally urgent to all of us.

What did it feel like writing this book? Because as a reader, when I wasn't being like, damn, he's good. And oh my God, you know, like just in awe of how you were writing.

incisively connecting the dots for me. I felt deep gratitude, but also I was fucking pissed. Page by page, like Julio, who's younger brothers, can I pay you for time? I was just so angry. What did it feel like doing the research and the writing? Challenging. I think that I'm much more comfortable writing at the level of bearing witness. Like Convicted, my last book, was a work of bearing witness. Look at what this thing I saw. I saw this. And my job was to

to bring readers factually, but also emotionally into a scene.

And this book is an argument. And it really pushed me as a writer because I'm pretty good at distilling facts, kind of getting that one statistic that's really going to stick in your head out of thousands. But the book required this other thing that you're picking up on, this kind of anger, this time where you need to rise up out of the statistics, out of what we know, out of the argument and say, this is wrong. And I think that kind of part of writing is a stretch for me.

And I'm a preacher's kid. I challenged my faith tradition. I think I relied on theology there. I relied on philosophy, but I also relied on accountability. I know a lot of folks that are struggling in poverty, folks that I've related to, folks that I love, folks that are my friends. They're my readers too.

And so I think writing in a way that was accountable to them on an emotional level, you know, like on a tonal level, I felt was a place where the book had to go. I love that you bring that up. Yeah. Because I also have questions about Matt Desmond, the author. Like, what's it like talking to everyday people about poverty now? What are some of the moving reactions you've gotten, you know?

Well, one of the things I struggle with with the book is like this language of we. Who's the we? Who's we? You know? Yeah, we who? Yeah, we who? As my mom would say, you got a mouse in your pocket? Like, we who? And because I wanted a book that both called folks out, but also wrote in the language of community. Like, we are connected, as King wrote. You know, we are in this web of interconnection.

But whenever you use the we, someone's outside of that we. And sometimes the we in the book is folks below the line, but a lot of times the we in the book is folks that are quite secure in their money. And I was worried that, you know, that decision would make my readers that were struggling feel left out. And they haven't. They haven't, actually. You know, not the folks that are talking with me anyways. You know, they're often very moved and grateful for this intervention. The struggle is this continued tendency to...

to absolve ourselves of the problem, often through hopelessness.

You know, and hopelessness is really in vogue right now, I feel. And I'll get readers and they'll say, gosh, I read your book. I'm with you. I get it. But, but, you know, and it'll be like, but Congress or, you know, but my uncle is like, oh man, you should be my uncle, you know? And my response is always like, your hopelessness is pretty useless, actually. You know, it doesn't do anything. And we've got to work through it. And is that hopelessness a thing that we're just hiding behind so we don't have to confront these hard-to-choose in our own lives?

I think that's one thing that's a barrier to the reception of the book, trying to get through that and convince folks that the end of poverty is not only something to strive for, it's something that's attainable. Right.

The other facet of this that I'm interested in is what's it like talking about this book with your colleagues? Like you mentioned, you teach at Princeton. I know the kind of spaces that critical acclaim can kind of vault writers into. We end up suddenly like, why am I at this gala? What are we even doing here? But also just by nature of your area of expertise, I imagine you...

have some pretty interesting conversations with colleagues. Yeah. Yeah. I've got the best colleagues in the world and their fingerprints are all over this book. Before this book came out, I had these two big workshops. One was at Princeton with colleagues like Kyanga Yamada-Taylor and Mitch Denier and Kathy Eden. And the other was with writers like Sarah Silman and Tressie McMillan-Cottonham and Jason DePaul and

just getting their feedback and whole chapters were annihilated and added because of that. You know, they were strong, honest, pushback in the spirit of love. And so, you know, kind of, you see the finished product and I see it as like a, you know, and my name's on it, but like, you know, there's so many folks that, that held it up.

But I feel like you're asking another kind of question, which is like, has there been kind of academic pushback? Has there been debate over the book? And the answer is like, of course. Yeah, absolutely. And one of the debates that folks have settled on and focused on is this claim in the book that the poverty rate has remained really stagnant over the last 50 years. Because depending on what measure you use, you can tell a different story.

You can say the poverty rate's actually gone down a lot over the last 50 years. And I think that the paradox that the book presents is accurate.

And by a lot of different measures, poverty has been really stagnant, even as investments in ending poverty has grown. And that's the paradox, right? Because we know that things like housing assistance, food stamps, these are lifesavers for the poor. They left millions of families out of poverty, but poverty has been very persistent. And I think this is something that academics should fight about because the stakes really matter. And for me, my dog in the fight is like, what we're doing is we're spending more to stay in the same place.

You know, because we've moved from like an interventionist welfare state to like an accommodationist welfare state, we got to throw more money at the problem because we just let the markets do what the markets do. I should like throw up a PowerPoint. Now we're, now we're like an election. By all means. Just real quick though, real quick. So like, you know, if you think about the New Deal, right? You know, depression hits, Roosevelt's like, okay, how are we going to address unemployment and poverty in America? And he's like, we're going to regulate the banks.

We're going to strengthen the unions. You know, like we're going to attack the root causes of people's deprivation. And then you fast forward to the war on poverty and create society that Johnson launched in 1964. And he's like, we're going to roll out food stamps. We're going to expand social security. And then he's like, hey, can we strengthen unions? And the Senate's like, no. And then, you know, fast forward to Clinton and Clinton's like, we're going to take welfare away. We're going to make you work.

And we're going to kind of gut unions by expanding free trade, NAFTA, right? First year of the presidency. So we've moved, right, from a place where what we were doing when we were doing welfare was intervening in markets, making sure they treated folks fair. We empowered workers to a place where we're accommodating those markets and cleaning up after them. So one real quick stat, like if you look at federal spending on housing, it's increased by 16% inflation adjusted since 2000.

So you might think, oh, Matt, 16% more families are getting a benefit. Nope. You know, it's about 4.5 million families in 2000 and 4.5 million families today. What's going on? Why are we spending more and serving the same number of families? It's because rents have gone up a lot. One of the big things we do is subsidize folks' rent, which matters, but

but we just got to spend more to serve the same number. And so, sorry, you asked the question. So I would- Look, I was like, I don't know if you're taking me to church or to school, but I want to go where you're taking me now. To the blackboard. I want to go. I love it. No, no, please. I mean, so as you were saying that,

Kind of going into the book, I think one of the misconceptions I had personally, frankly, was like, Reagan ruined everything. This is all him. He's the single turning point. And you're like, well, it's actually more complicated than that. But what I want to ask you is the cruelty.

That is introduced into the welfare process. You mentioned earlier people having to be photographed and fingerprinted. The kind of like, prove that you're working. It feels like in addition to the welfare state and its policies changing over the course of the last 50 years, it also feels like a mean streak was introduced where we started just

kind of bullying people who dare to actually pull from the welfare state? Where does that come from? Why are we so mean to poor people now, officially? That's such a deep question. Yesterday, I spent all day at a rescue mission in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, interviewing homeless folks from eight in the morning until dinnertime. And one of the big things that came through my conversation with them is

This homeless shelter isn't just a homeless shelter. It's a place where they feel dignified, affirmed, loved. And I just thought, gosh, why can't our welfare state feel like this? You know, why can't when people engage with applying for food stamps, applying for housing assistance, you know, they feel, yeah, like affirmed, loved, taken care of, held. Dignified. Dignified, you know, and instead we often make them feel

stigmatized, small, low. And I think that comes from the earliest days of capitalism.

And so we start this new economic system. We're trading goods across big spaces. There's flows of money and people. This is embroiled in the American sense with slavery and enslaved workers. And big capitalism needs big government. You got to have an army. You got to have laws to protect private property. But that's a problem for capitalists because a big government could also hand out bread.

And you really need the government not to do that because that's your solution to getting folks to work in your coal mines or your cotton mills, you know, hunger. That's the motivating factor. Get them off the land, get them into the mills.

And so there was a story that started at the earliest days of capitalism where, and it was a story about dependency and laziness. Then I think there was a story that really served the capitalist project really, really well. And so from the earliest days of doing charity, we kind of did it mean. We did it in poor houses. We did it connecting to work. We often made debtors prisons, made people work off the debt or literally live out the debt in a cage.

And so I do think that, you know, part of the work isn't just talking about deepening anti-poverty programs. It's changing the story. That's what you're talking about, right? It's changing the story. And the story that I want to move toward is not only this story that's indicting a lot of us that are affluent, you know, and asking us to give more, but also calling us to do so because that would give us a better country, right?

That's a safer, freer, more vibrant country. And I think that's a country that many of us want, even those of us quite secure in our money. Absolutely. Okay, we're going to take a quick break, but don't go anywhere. We'll be right back.

This message is brought to you by McDonald's. Did you know only 7.3% of American fashion designers are black? Well, McDonald's 2024 Change Leaders Program is ready to change the face of fashion. The innovative program awards a monetary grant to five emerging black American designers and pairs each with an industry professional to help them elevate their brands. I

I know specifically and distinctly how McDonald's can support and empower not just black Gen Z, but black people. My first job was McDonald's. I learned a lot there about customer service and how to relate to people. I still love that place and go there very often. Look out for the change of fashion designers and mentors everywhere.

at events like the BET Awards and the Essence Festival of Culture. And follow the journey of the 2024 McDonald's Change Leaders on their Instagram page, We Are Golden.

Here's an HIV pill dilemma for you. Picture the scene. There's a rooftop sunset with fairy lights and you're vibing with friends. You remember you've got to take your HIV pill. Important, yes, but the fun moment is gone. Did you know there's a long-acting treatment option available? So catch the sunset and keep the party going. Visit pillfreehiv.com today to learn more. Brought to you by Veve Healthcare.

We're back, and we're jumping right back into the conversation with Matt Desmond. I wanted to ask about some of the formal changes between Evicted and Poverty by America. As you mentioned, part of the mission of Evicted was to bear witness. And so you live alongside people like Wu. You're walking with landlords and sheriffs as they're, my goodness, evicting children who've lost a parent. Personal narrative is a part of Poverty by America as well, but

But it's formally a little different. And I was just wondering if you could talk about some of the decisions you made as a writer in terms of your approach to this being a little different. Well, with Evicted, I felt like my job was to erase myself from the page. I didn't want to get in the way of the stories that I was trying to show.

and you basically only know what I saw when I told you at the end. You know, here's how I did it. This book starts with a little bit of my story. You know, I grew up in a little town in rural Arizona. Money was always tight. My family experienced some of the indignities and humiliations of poverty, including losing our home to foreclosure.

And I think that, yeah, I think it was important to start there to tell folks like, look, we're going to go down some roads and some of those are going to be roads of bear witness. Some of those are going to be roads of like historical research or economic research. But let's start where I started, which is kind of where this question started getting embedded inside of me about why so much poverty in America happened.

And I think that that was just important to set the table, so to speak, with the book. I hate writing and also talking about myself. But I felt like it needed to be done here.

There's moments of the book that are witness bearing, right? Where you meet folks like Wu or Crystal or Julio or Lakia, who's in Cleveland struggling with housing insecurity. And I think that's important, but ultimately this book was a book of expanding that aperture. Being like, look, if you want to understand the causes of poverty, you got to look beyond poor folks and poor neighborhoods. You got to look inside yourself or around your neighborhood often.

And if there's like a pull quote of the book, it's that Tommy Orange line that I quote, where he says, you know, it's like these kids are jumping out of the windows of burning buildings.

falling to their deaths, and we think the problem is that they're jumping. And when I read that, I was like, that's it. That's the poverty debate. Over 100 years, all about the jumpers. And this is going to be a book about the fire. It is actually very simple when you're willing to embrace that truth. You were such a wonderful writer, line by line. I mean, your arguments, but also just like your turns of phrase. At one point, you say that we need to understand that we are

authors of inequality. And I was like, oh my God. You mentioned your father being a pastor and that you pull from that tradition. You've invoked poets, Layla Long Soldier, our lioness of literature, Toni Morrison, Tommy Orange. Who do you read? Where did this love of the turn of phrase come from for you?

That means so much to me. I'm just like, I'm just going to take a moment. That was on tape, right? Take your moment. You earned it, man. You earned it, honey. We're recording this, right? Thank you. You know, I feel for me, there's no impact outside of craft in a way. So if we're trying to move the needle, if we're trying to address poverty, if we're trying to create this movement of poverty, abolitionism, there's got to be craft there, you know, and...

I think for me, there's been two writers that I go to over and over again, which is Baldwin and Orwell. I think Baldwin and Orwell were both writers that hated poverty, that wrote about it beautifully, but also with anger, with humor, with kind of this sardonic turn of phrase often. And I think that they were models for me and touchstones for me working on this.

I've been working on reading more poetry. I asked my wife for a year of poetry for Christmas last year. And so she asked kind of our poet or literary friends. And so I'm just working through this stack that they recommended. So I'm working on it. I'm drawn to poets that can say something really big with five words, you know, K. Ryan, like poets that are very rigorous, I guess, in their prose and their restraint. That kind of work really speaks to me.

I also just see myself in the tradition of folks that are writing for broad publics about inequality and poverty. And that's a tradition that goes to Du Bois, that goes to Jacob Reese, to Jane Addams, to Zora Neale Hurston. You can come up

to the modern day and get that through memoir, through Kiese Lehman. - I was thinking of Kiese, yeah. - Yeah, you can get it through folks like Kate Boo or Adrienne Nicola Blanc. And I think I see myself in that tradition and I learned so much from that tradition as well. - That's so beautiful. When I found out you had been awarded the MacArthur grant, I was so happy because one, I was like, yes, taste. I love it when people make good decisions.

Love that. But also, I was really excited, right? And same with people like Tressie or Kiese, because I go, ooh, because of this financial support, this thinker, this writer now has hopefully a little bit more freedom, and I'm excited to see what they'll do next. And now we have Poverty by America. Do you feel more free? Do you feel a little safer? Yeah.

I feel responsible. I guess that's my dominant feeling. And I feel responsible to this mission. And not to bring you into my therapy sessions, but I do struggle with this because I think that feeling responsibility, if you have too much of it, you kind of get a Moses complex. And if you have too little of it, you're not in the game. And I think that

Trying to find a healthy balance there has been a struggle for me, but that's kind of what I feel. You know, I feel that, you know, I want to look back when I'm done writing and see my work making a difference and moving people and moving policies. And to get from putting a book out to making change, there's like so much invisible work. Like there's so, that's like another job that I have that I often don't talk about because it's like,

It's on the phones, it's meeting with Congress, it's back to ordeal. And it's just, you know, it's all this kind of invisible work, but that's part of the responsibility too. This book tour has been really moving for me because people read Evicted, right? And, you know,

I kind of know the impact that that book had on policy, on narratives, but like the impact that I had on individuals, that's kind of harder to get to, you know? But I've been getting those signals on the road. And I had a young man at a talk the other day, he was just like zoned in during the talk. You know, when you give a reading or a talk and you got those folks that are just connected, right? So he's just connected and he just came up to me afterwards. He's like, hey man, I was working at Goldman Sachs and I read Evicted and now I run a public housing complex. Wow.

That's what he said. And it's just moving, you know, and I've met so many people on the road that are like, I was in law school, I read Evicted, now I'm a tenant's rights attorney, you know. So I think that that's been incredibly rewarding and I think is kind of fuel for me, you know, with this kind of feeling of getting out there and trying to be responsible for moving the narrative forward.

Oh, gosh, that's so beautiful. And good to hear. And good to hear. I'm glad you're good. I've heard from many people. They've been like, no, we met Matt Desmond. He's wonderful. And I was like, oh, thank goodness. Oh, thank goodness. Oh, my gosh. I'm glad you're walking the walk, too. Two more questions before I turn over to Sam and Zach with our listener questions. You say we should become...

poverty abolitionist, right? We shouldn't just be angry. We shouldn't just be sad. We need to take this as serious as defunding the police, as anti-racist work. Can you talk about some ways in which, and you've listed some examples already, but some ways in which we can become poverty abolitionist? Yes. So this is a personal and political project.

So poverty abolitionism shares with other abolitionist movements, movements against slavery or prison, for example, the belief that poverty is an abomination. You know, we don't want just to reduce it. We want to rid this nation of dollars of it. And it shares with other abolitionist movements the conviction that if I profit from someone else's pain, that's corrupting. That corrupts me. That corrupts all of us.

And so those of us who commit to this project seek to divest from poverty in our consumer choices. We shop differently. In our investment decisions, we make sure the money that's in our savings accounts is not going to beef up the profits of exploiting companies. We fight for a rebalancing of the welfare state. We support government that wants to make deeper investments in ending poverty by fair tax implementation.

We want more policies that empower low-income folks, which means we're pro-union. We're pro more choice in the housing market. We are against all forms of exploitation, even if, especially if we benefit from them. And then, and this is especially a word for the affluent whites on the call, like we oppose segregation and opportunity hoarding. And we fight to tear down our walls, right?

Now that statement feels a little abstract, I guess. So here's just like five super concrete things. One, we've got influence somewhere, flex it. If you're at a university, you got a school board, you got some power in your community, just flex your influence in solidarity with the poor. Second, shopping and investing differently takes some homework. You gotta do your homework. So you can consult organizations like B Corp,

or Union Plus. And you learn things when you look at those, like FedEx is unionized, UPS isn't, right? And there's all these decisions we make on the day-to-day, which we could make decisions on behalf of folks that are doing right by workers. If you go to London, you walk around, their shops have these stickers that say, we pay a living wage. The shop pays a living wage. I so wish that

that our shops would do that because there's a lot of stickers on our doors now, but you often have no idea what folks are getting paid, you know, working there. So,

I would like to see that. I'd like to see us talk about taxes differently and own our connection to the welfare state. And often I'd love to see many of us giving away the tax benefits we get and starting a letter campaign to our Congress representatives saying like, look, I'm a homeowner. I get the mortgage introduction. I don't need this. Wind this down for me, you know, invest in ending homelessness.

Number four, we got to show up at those zoning board meetings, you know, and stand up and be like, look, I'm not denying kids. Opportunities my kids get by living in this neighborhood. Build this thing. And then last, and certainly not least, we can join the anti-poverty movement. And there's just, there's so many amazing, inspiring groups around the country fighting poverty. And so we launched a website with this book just called endpovertyusa.org. Okay.

you can go to that website and get plugged in with groups in your state or working at the federal level. Thank you so much for that detail. Oh, so wonderful. So my last question for you, this episode is going to air around Thanksgiving because we realize that Thanksgiving and then of course the holiday season is a really challenging time for a lot of people for many reasons, but certainly regarding poverty, it's hard out here for people.

How do you protect the candle of your hope? How do you hone your hope? You've explained that hopelessness is useless, counterproductive. So for people who are just struggling, even as they're doing the learning, especially as they're doing the learning with hopelessness, what have you learned about the uses of and how to protect your hope?

Okay, so I feel like for listeners that aren't in relationship with folks below the poverty line, get in relationship. And I don't mean relationships with charity. I mean real relationships. Relationships where like they call you out, you call them out. You know, there's that accountability and a friendship and a wisdom sharing.

And I think when you get in those relationships, and particularly when you're working and striving alongside folks who are struggling but are fighting, man, those are spaces of hope. You know, in the book I wrote about this group in Minneapolis called United Renters for Justice, and I was hanging out with them for about a year and a half before COVID. A lot of undocumented folks, folks working at the airport, working overnight security, fighting a negligent landlord. And they went to the landlord and they were like, we're going to buy your buildings back from you.

which is a crazy claim. And the landlord's like, all right, there'll be $7 million. And the tenants are like, we'll be right back. Raising money. They started, you know, they started approaching land banks, philanthropy. They raised the money, but they also protested at his house, at his church, you know? So the landlord kind of got fed up and he served everyone an eviction notice and it kind of came to a head, you know, it came to a head. They're either going to be homeless or homeowners and,

And it came to a jury trial and I was hanging out with him and it was snowing outside. We were waiting for the jury to decide. And this tenant named Takara turned to me and she said, you know, it's taking the jury so long. They're asking themselves, why do these tenants want this raggedy building? And it's because people have forgotten how to dream. And when she said that to me, I felt so convicted. I was just like...

I've forgotten how to dream because I haven't spent enough time in communities with folks like this. You know, I've been focused on what can get through Congress, what can get through bipartisan support, you know, and those are important questions, but like there are folks that are just under the heel of it and fighting and pushing and they won. They won, actually. They dreamed and their dream came true and they're homeowners today and I just visited them in their Minneapolis homes that they own because of their work. And so,

I feel like hopelessness often is a reflection of us just not putting our shoulder to the wheel. And so, yeah, getting out there, I think, is a space of hope. I love, and just being with people, being with people. Yeah, yeah, and being in the game. And I think that when I read in the newspaper some story about cancer culture, the left or something, I'm just like, this sounds so removed from the anti-poverty movement. It's such a warm-hearted, open-minded,

and also just like an audaciously hopeful space. It's not naive hope, right? Like folks are up against it. Folks are, you know, but it's also a space where victories have been demonstrated and secured. I gotta tell you one more story about Minneapolis. I can't help myself. So I was hanging out with these guys and they kept giving the city council all this grief. They'd be like, yeah, they'd interrupt their meetings. They'd be like chants and songs. The city council was sympathetic to their cause.

So, you know, I asked this one guy, Andrew, one day, I was like, why do you guys do that? Like, why are you so, why do you do that? Give him a break. Yeah, give him a break. And Andrew was like, to remind them that they're moon power and not sun power.

And I was like, are you high? I was like, are you high? He was like, look, man, when people get on the dais and they get a robe on or whatever, they get a little plaque in front of them, they think the power comes from them. Like they're the sun. But the power comes from us. They're the moon. They're just reflecting the light. And we got to remind them of that now to get out. I love it. I love it.

I think being in those spaces, you can't help but be hopeful, I think, and inspired. I just feel so... I'm smiling ear to ear just thinking about that. That's so great. Well, Matthew, thank you for the work, the invisible work too, the invisible work too, but certainly in this book as well. We're going to take one more break. Stay tuned. We'll be right back with some of your questions for author Matt Desmond. Good.

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All right, we are back. And now we're going to ask Matt Desmond some of your questions. We have winnowed down the questions we got from our listeners. But I also wanted to just take one minute to ask you a question I have myself after reading your book.

One, I loved it. I think that's pretty clear. I appreciated the ways in which you made me question how I can be asking questions all day, every day about my consumption. You know, there was this interlude where you talk about how people knew to stop giving money to Home Depot after they pledged funds to anti-queer measures, but no one knows whether or not

Ace Hardware pays their workers a fair wage. It's like, oh shit. Or like, we know if our fish is harvested sustainably, we don't know how much the person who picked the fish for us got paid. Right? Like that kind of stuff. That's been eye opening. But the question that sat with me the longest after finishing the book was,

was the ways in which you did or did not follow the quote unquote rules of journalism. And you know the rules, we know the rules. You broke them. You befriended your sources, you helped them, you advocated for them, you came down explicitly on one side of a thorny issue. And just reading the book, I could hear the voices of so many old stodgy J school professors saying, "You can't do it this way.

That's not how you do capital J journalism. Were you thinking about that at all when you wrote the book? And if so, what was your calculus around that? Adhering to the rules of journalism as you did this work that was in some ways, and thankfully so, advocacy work.

Yeah, I mean, I think there's this old story in both journalism and academia that you need to have distance and that your heart needs to be closed off. In my experience, there's plenty of distance, actually. Distance is not the problem. There's plenty of folks writing and talking about this, and they don't know anyone experiencing these kind of issues. I remember being at a conference on poverty with Andrea Elliott, who wrote Invisible Child about homelessness in New York City, and

I turned to Andrea and I was just like, how many folks in this room do you think have like a number of someone that's below the poverty line in their cell phone? And so I think that you can fall in love with people and you can write about their lives openly and honestly in a way that passes serious journalistic muster. I subscribe to journalism in other ways that academics don't. Like this book was fact-checked just like Evicted was. So a team of folks fact-checked it and then a professional fact-checker fact-checked them.

And a lot of academics don't do that. I think that's a beautiful thing I've learned through journalism. And I also feel like part of the work is trying to hear out the other side, but that doesn't mean that there's false equivalences. And I think that this book uses the word exploitation and uses it a lot, which is a book. And it means that someone is benefiting from someone else's pain. And I think once you subscribe to that perspective and see it on the day-to-day, it's really hard.

to write about these things in a way that's, how should we say, watered down? In a way, the watering down of the distance can make it worse journalism. It can make it less truthful. Yeah. To follow up, and then we'll move on to the listener questions. I kept thinking about your approach to this book and comparing it to the way I see journalists covering Palestine. This is a moment that feels like, in many ways, it is calling out journalism.

for a more advocacy-based journalism. I think it's calling out for journalists to speak truth to power, to come down on the side of justice, and to help. What do you think of the lessons you learned writing this book? How might they be applied to journalists on the front lines over there, asking themselves how much they should or shouldn't get involved? That's a really tough one, you know.

But it's like you could apply that question outside the Palestinian conflict too, right? You could apply it to all these conflicts and all these morally complex issues. You know, I had the honor of writing the Capitalism essay for 1619 and one of the just weird things about the critical response to that project was how folks assumed that there was like an agenda or assumed that there wasn't just like a ton of work

put into it. It was like, so like every sentence was like five books worth of reading, you know, and just so much like deep, hard journalistic and scholarly work putting into that. And it landed in a place that made people uncomfortable. And then they use this kind of like standards as a way to critique the thing that is really bothering them, which is about their story of America. And so I think that that's part of it.

I do think that a lot of the ways that we talk about journalistic or scholarly integrity, a lot of these divisions we've accepted, like objectivity or subjective or opinion or fact base, the world is so much muddier than that, right? And I feel like we probably should think about new parameters. Yeah. Thank you.

All right, Matt. So I have one from Veronica, a listener. And Veronica writes, in the book, you talk about how loss of union power has, in part, undercut American workers. The United Auto Workers recently reached a tentative agreement to increase pay over the next four and a half years. The UAW has since said that they have Tesla, Toyota, and others in their sights. And

So our question is, do you see this agreement as an indication that the tide may be turning back toward employee organizing? No, but I see it as really encouraging. So the UAW success should be heralded success. It is objectively a success for the workers. It's incredible what they won and it's very unique. And so, you know, we are no longer an industrial society.

if all our union wins are just going to be kind of in the car plants, that's not going to cover most of our workers.

And you can think of how the Amazon labor movement got covered when they won a victory around New York City. That was a really hard-won victory. They covered one shop in America and it's still kind of embroiled in the courts. It was really limited victory. And so I feel like we shouldn't be prematurely celebratory, that we should be like, there's something happening that many more workers are dissatisfied with.

with the state of the labor market today, they should be dissatisfied, but we have a long way to go from hot labor summer to where we need to be to really enter into a new contract with the American worker.

A follow up to other models you've seen in the past that could be applied to today to make that kind of radical movement happen. Because we do have a question from Spencer, who I'm going to summarize Spencer's question, but he brings up Chris Smalls from the Amazon warehouse deal. And he offers us the poor people's campaign as a framework of understanding what America needs now. So what are your thoughts on that framework? And would it apply today as something that could really revolutionize the labor movement?

I love the Poor People's Campaign. They're one of our big highlighted groups in InPovertyUSA.org. Love the fusion politics that Reverend Barber is advocating for about big tint mass movement politics.

So love that. To get to the specific question about unionization, here's two ideas. One comes from our own past, you know, which is like, let's make sure we're holding companies accountable for violations of labor standards. And you'd be like, that's really low hanging fruit. But like, it's kind of this enforcement process.

problem that the United States has because labor law enforcement is so weak and toothless right now. A lot of companies just break, flagrantly break federal labor law because they know they're going to get away with it. So let's do more for enforcement. And let's also do more to promote worker empowerment in ways that don't require maybe unionization. So why aren't workers on corporate boards, for example?

Could we think about that? There's a group of folks that got together a few years ago and they were workers, folks from business, academics, journalists, you name it, organizers. And they put together this packet called Clean Slate for Worker Power. And it's just chock full of ideas like this that I've learned a lot from.

The second example comes from Europe where they decide, look, instead of organizing one warehouse at a time or one Starbucks location at a time, let's organize entire sectors. So it's called sectoral bargaining. And the idea is like if enough workers in a sector like food and hospitality took a vote, that could trigger the secretary of labor to start a panel made up of folks from corporate world, folks from business world, and folks from government, and they could organize

and bargain for terms that covered every single worker in that industry. This is kind of what the fight for 15 did. And this is a new labor power. So I think we need to think outside of the box. And like long story long, we have to make organizing a lot easier than it is today, instead of making it so much of an uphill battle. Can I bring up another question from a listener that

asks specifically about sectoral bargaining. - Yeah. - This comes from J.T. Sweeney in Orange County, California. And he wrote, quote, "In Chapter 8, Empower the Poor, you advocate for sectoral bargaining and you give hotel workers sector as an example. I fully agree, but a recent ballot proposal in Anaheim called Measure A, in which hotel workers sought a $25 an hour minimum wage, just lost by a huge margin."

68% to 32%, with about 30,000 people voting in the special election. The voice of OC chalked the defeat up to the $3.3 million the California Hotel and Lodging Association put into no-on-measure-A signs and ads. About half that money came from Disney.

long preamble to this question, what is the most effective way to achieve sectoral bargaining, especially when Goliath corporations like Disney can outspend workers with a mere, to them, $3.3 million in

and easily squash such ballot measures. Yeah, it's kind of unsurprising coming from the completely unprogressive state of California, like over and over again, like California has just been on the side of inequality, you know, and there's things unique to California that no other state has,

that you're just like, how do you call yourself a progressive state when you, for example, freeze property taxes at the level of the place you bought your house in 1976? And so, sorry, just my little California rant. I like it. Let it happen. Let it happen. Drag them back. Drag them. But, you know, he's right.

we're up against a lot of money. And if you look at the amount of money, just the top five corporations are spending on lobbyists versus like everything that organized labor does. It's just, there's no competition, you know, and we're just getting outspent and out lobbied. So this is where we really have to think of the connection between political power and the anti-poverty movement. Um,

And I think part of what the question's getting at is the way we do it now is insufficient and it's too hard. And so what something like sectoral bargaining would do would be to open up channels of organizing to make it much more easier and fluid and broad reaching. So even in red states like California, where...

Workers could have a chance, you know, to collectively bargain or benefit from labor law. You know, in short, like the federal government has to get back in the business of worker empowerment, which is something we've been out of the business for a long, long time. Even President Biden, who claims to be, you know, this kind of the biggest union president that we've seen in a long time, a lot of that has not translated into actual tangible policy.

Yeah. Well, and I mean, this is the larger issue, and I think what separates America's politics from the rest of the developed world.

There's too much money in it, and anyone who wants an outcome can pay enough money to get it. And until that changes, it's going to be hard to get some of these things done. Is some of the work against poverty, will that also have to be work to change the way our politics are currently done? I don't see a lot of these big things being legislated until corporations can no longer put weight on the scale through donations, right? Yeah.

Yeah, I feel like we have to hold a truism like that, but also hold on to hope. You know what I mean? So often I feel like when we get into a statement like that, it can be like, that's overwhelming. Yeah, they're just like, okay, we're up against it. We just gotta, let's settle into our own lives.

And so I still feel like we have to find ways to work around that. And I feel like the 60s are a really good model for us. In the 60s, Congress was divided. You know, Dixiecrats were aligned with Republicans to block reform. Congress was a mess. And even amongst that political obstructionism and division, polarization, we got the civil rights bills of 64, 65, and 68. We got the Great Society Bill.

And it's because folks saw that political disenfranchisement in the South and they rode buses and they took beans and they were out there, you know? And so I feel like that's a model for us for hope and for action, not for despair and inaction.

But you're right. I feel like, you know, I was in Tennessee the other day and someone said, this isn't a red state. This is a disempowered state. And I felt that that was such a powerful statement. And I think that thinking about the importance of political power with the importance of good policy really makes sense.

I love that you just said Tennessee's a disempowered state because that's where I'm from and that's how it feels being there. I love that place, but I had to leave because I felt like I had no power to really surmount some of these issues that were just nonstop there and continue to be. It's a pretty treacherous place if you are a queer person and so many other identities these days. And maybe think of Mississippi too, like when you talk about TANF funds, for example. Yeah, disempowered state.

Well, speaking of states, we have a question from another listener who wants to take us more global. And this listener writes, I'm not sure what it says about me, or maybe it is because of where I grew up or now live. This person grew up in Baltimore and lives in Oakland. But they write, it's even hard for me to imagine an America without poverty.

Is there a country you can point to that seems to be on the right track that I can look to, not as a model perfection, but as an example of what might be attainable here? I know you mentioned several countries in the book that are doing some things right. The Netherlands and the UK, considering Uber driver employees, Greece and Bulgaria's more inclusive integrated zoning laws. But is there a country in your opinion that is further along on the right path?

You're listening. Man, my goodness. They're good. They're very good. Can I come back next week? That's an incredible question. And they actually read the whole book. I noticed that. I'm getting ready for the footnotes questions after this.

Look, I mean, America is really in a disgraced class all of its own when it comes to the depth and expanse of our poverty against our riches. There is no other advanced democracy that has the level of poverty that we do and the depths of poverty that we have amidst so much money.

And so I think that the biggest myth about poverty in America is that we have to live with it, that there's nothing we can do about it, that we have to tolerate it. So part of the work for poverty abolitionism isn't just talking differently, voting differently, buying differently, but it's also imagining differently. Imagining is part of the work. And so you can go to

To Canada, you can go to Germany, you can go to South Korea. Those are countries that have half as much child poverty as we do. There are countries all over the world that are just doing a lot more for their people than we are. And the thing that makes the difference is taxes. So we collect about 25% of our GDP in taxes.

Countries like Switzerland, Sweden, the Netherlands, but even like Italy, Ireland, they're collecting between 35 and 38% of their income and taxes. And if you go to those countries, you see it. You see it on the ground, right? You see a public infrastructure that's fast. You see trains and streets that are safer. And you see workers that are more dignified and less tired and exhausted.

And so I think that, I think other countries do model away, but also you can look just in our past. Like after the war on poverty was launched, we cut the poverty in half. And so there were times in the country where the country had moral ambitions to end poverty, put its money where our mouth was and got to places. We didn't eradicate it, but we got much further than it was. So this isn't just something that happens overseas. This is something that has happened in our recent past too.

I often think of the college campus as an example of a society that sustains itself and takes care of its people. Most people have somewhere to live. They have food to eat. They can go to the clinic. They can be around other people. And everyone's kind of working towards a common goal. They can make mistakes. Exactly. So if we can do that

for our best and brightest college students. We can do it for everybody. It's actually not that hard. That's the thing. Like we do not need to outsmart this problem. Yeah. You know, I think that part of the work in writing this book is like, we don't need new ideas in a way. We need a renewed political will. And this is a book that's trying to foment that kind of political will. We know it works. In COVID, we cut child poverty by 46% in six months. Sure did. You know? And so I think that the problem wasn't like figuring out how do we do that? Right.

The problem is, why did we let that go? And so that's kind of the challenge that this book tries to answer. Yeah. I think I have one more question for you. I'm at the mountaintop. We are. This has been so delightful. We, as you can see, we have an audience and a listener base that loves to read. So I want you to recommend something for them to read now that they've finished your book.

It also can be something, Matt, that you watch or love that helps you kind of take a break from all of this. Because I was thinking, because you listed so many wonderful authors and tribe members that are doing the work. But yeah, that would be fun. Let's do a feel-good recommendation. Unsubscribe. You can do it.

Matt Desmond runs out of the studio. Oh my God, they asked me about TV? My Protestant ethic is like, what do you mean, Joy? You know, like...

Jasmine Ward has a new book out. Jasmine Ward is just such an incredibly deep talent in America. And this book is, I think, one of her more experimental, and in ways it's probably her aesthetically most ambitious novel. Is this Let Us Descend? Yeah, Let Us Descend. Okay. Mm-hmm.

And so I think that that's been, I mean, this is hard subject matter. This is a novel set in slave times, but she's such a beautiful and spiritual writer. This is a recent book I've been really loving. I think that I've been listening to a lot of Americana. I grew up in a rural part of the country. And, you know, I think that kind of bluegrass and country music was something that was part of my childhood. And then country music,

just went on this other direction and I haven't been connecting with it in years and years and years. But Americana is interesting. It's like, is a space of a lot of different voices and actually folks singing about things that are like,

Addictions to pills. Absolutely. The exploitation of the labor market. It's progressive. It's progressive. Much more so than country. Yeah. So I think that artists like Adeem the Artist, Colter Ball, these are musicians that I've been digging lately. So how about that? How did I do? I love that. That was great. That was amazing. No, it's perfect. That's amazing. And I have a rec. Have you listened to Alison Russell? She's an Americana singer. Yeah. Yeah.

She's fantastic. So good, yeah. And she's kind of having a moment. Oh my God, now I want to hear you, Sam, and Tressie talk about country music in America. That'd be an honor. That'd be an honor. Next time. I'll bring my cowboy hat. Yeah. Well, listen, on behalf of all of our listeners and from us and the team that makes this show with us at Stitcher, we can't thank you enough for this conversation. We can't thank you enough for the work that you do.

And I hope you feel all the light and love that we're sending you as you continue your work, because we believe in it and we believe in you. Thank you so much. Amen. It's been a real honor. Thank you so much. And just loving what y'all are doing. Thank you so much for having me on. It's just been a thrill. Thank you. What a delight. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you for tuning in to this week's episode of Vibe Check. If you love the show and want to support us, please make sure to follow the show on your favorite podcast listening platform and tell a friend.

Huge thank you to our producer Chantel Holder, engineer Sam Kiefer, and Marcus Holm for our theme music and sound design. Also, special thanks to our executive producers, Nora Ritchie at Stitcher, who made, I believe, this conversation with Matt Desmond. She did. Possible. Thank you, Nora. So huge. I mean, I was like, I don't know. He seems like he's really busy. Yeah. So I'm so grateful for your work, Nora. And Brandon Sharp. Also, we love you too. A man of...

Brandon Trump, we love you too. A man from Agenda Management and Production. Listeners, we say it all the time, but we mean it. Email us. We want to hear from you. Vibecheckatstitcher.com. Vibecheckatstitcher.com. Also find us on Insta at Sam Sanders, at Zach Staff, and at The Ferocity. Use the hashtag Vibecheckpod.com.

Till then, be good to yourselves and each other. Stay tuned for another episode next Wednesday. Goodbye. Bye. Happy holidays. Stitcher.

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