Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard

Claudia Rowe (on the foster care system)

February 4, 2026

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  • Claudia Rowe's initial fixation on understanding murderers, stemming from her work on *The Spider and the Fly*, was driven by a desire to demystify scary people by finding their internal logic, which she believes makes them relatable humans rather than 'monsters.' 
  • Rowe transitioned from covering true crime to investigating the foster care system after witnessing the trial of Mary Ann, realizing the teenager's criminal case was deeply intertwined with systemic failures she had previously reported on as a journalist. 
  • The conversation highlights the devastating connection between the foster care system and the criminal justice system, noting that many foster youth age out without support, leading to high rates of homelessness and incarceration, often due to survival behaviors like running away or petty theft. 
  • Incarcerated individuals like Arthur Longworth, who experienced the foster system firsthand, can provide crucial articulation regarding how the system functions as an engine powering the carceral system. 
  • The structure of American foster care, built around impermanence and frequent changes in caregivers and advocates, is fundamentally misaligned with current knowledge of healthy human brain development. 
  • Rehabilitation, rather than mere housing, is necessary for youth in foster care, as evidenced by the dramatic positive outcomes seen in individuals like Jay when provided with stable, focused support. 
  • The most salient point discussed is that poverty often manifests as neglect within the child welfare system, and the alternative to parental struggle (removal) is statistically worse, potentially leading to incarceration. 
  • The frequency of urination is highly variable among individuals, suggesting that societal norms (like drinking six to eight times a day) may be influenced by socioeconomic factors and personal mental control ("mind over bladder") rather than strict biological necessity. 
  • The conversation highlighted the devastating long-term impact of removing children from their families, suggesting that this action often initiates a traumatic cycle that confirms negative societal expectations for the child's future, such as a high probability of entering the prison system. 

Segments

Introduction and Guest Background
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(00:00:00)
  • Key Takeaway: Claudia Rowe is the author of Wards of the State: The Long Shadow of American Foster Care, following her previous work, The Spider and the Fly, which involved corresponding with a serial killer.
  • Summary: Dax Shepard introduces journalist and author Claudia Rowe, noting her previous book involved a five-year correspondence with a serial killer. The current book, Wards of the State, focuses on the failures of the American foster care system. Shepard strongly encourages listeners to share the episode, emphasizing the need for a cultural reckoning regarding the foster care situation.
Early Life and Education
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(00:04:04)
  • Key Takeaway: Rowe grew up on the Upper West Side of New York with an academic mother and an NBC executive father, leading her to seek unconventional education at Bennington College.
  • Summary: Rowe is a New York native who moved to Seattle 22 years ago. Her parents were a literature professor and an NBC news promotion executive, creating a blend of news and literature influences in her upbringing. She attended Bennington College, a small, experimental liberal arts school in Vermont that emphasized self-created majors and operated without traditional grades.
Transition to Journalism Career
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(00:08:08)
  • Key Takeaway: Rowe sought print journalism roles to gain the structure, pacing, and deadlines she lacked in her free-form college education.
  • Summary: She initially aimed for long-form magazine writing but recognized that newspaper journalism would provide necessary disciplines like structure and deadlines. Working at the Poughkeepsie Journal and freelancing for the New York Times provided this grounding, though she found it addictive and hard to break away from.
Origin of ‘The Spider and the Fly’
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(00:09:04)
  • Key Takeaway: Rowe began investigating a string of missing women in the Hudson Valley after her then-boyfriend noted the local paper was ignoring the cases of sex workers.
  • Summary: The investigation into missing women, who were mostly slight white women supporting drug habits, led her to the scene where eight bodies were discovered in a single house. This event sparked her fixation on understanding what causes extreme violence, leading to a five-year correspondence with the confessed serial killer, which formed the basis of her first book, The Spider and the Fly.
The Serial Killer Correspondence
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(00:16:04)
  • Key Takeaway: Rowe found the term ‘monster’ frustratingly opaque, preferring to understand the forces that lead a person to commit horrific acts, which turned the project into a memoir about herself as well.
  • Summary: The correspondence with the killer was described as utterly horrifying and terrifying, as he was abusive and not charming. Rowe realized her fixation on understanding him was also a fixation on understanding herself, blending true crime investigation with memoir.
Move to Seattle and Career Shift
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(00:20:01)
  • Key Takeaway: Rowe moved to the Pacific Northwest to escape the intensity of finishing her first book, eventually taking a staff reporter job at the Seattle Post Intelligencer covering social issues.
  • Summary: After finishing The Spider and the Fly in 2017, Rowe returned to reporting, focusing on child welfare and juvenile justice at the Seattle Times after the PI folded. She left the newsroom because the daily deadlines prevented her from engaging in the long-form rhythm required for book writing.
The Genesis of ‘Wards of the State’
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(00:25:37)
  • Key Takeaway: Rowe entered the courtroom for Mary Ann’s sentencing hearing, realizing the teenager’s crime was a direct result of systemic failures within the foster care system.
  • Summary: Rowe became interested in a forensic psychologist who testified in the case of a 16-year-old girl, Mary Ann, who pleaded guilty to shooting a man. The girl received a 19-year sentence, and her history revealed a standard, traumatic path through foster care, including multiple placements and a failed adoption.
Foster Care to Prison Pipeline Statistics
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(00:29:14)
  • Key Takeaway: A significant percentage of state prison inmates (20-25%) and homeless individuals (25-30% of young adults) are foster care alumni, with one study showing 30% of youth imprisoned for violent crime within a year of leaving state care.
  • Summary: Foster youth often acquire criminal records by running from placements or through juvenile detention while still in care. Running from placements is often an attempt to find family or connection, not necessarily fleeing abuse. Furthermore, children aging out at 18 often lack diplomas and support systems, making them highly vulnerable.
Mary Ann’s Foster Care Trajectory
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(00:37:19)
  • Key Takeaway: Mary Ann’s path through the system, involving multiple placements, a failed adoption, and subsequent street life, was typical rather than an extreme aberration.
  • Summary: After entering care at age nine due to paternal abuse, Mary Ann experienced several placements, including one where the foster parent quickly relinquished care. Her adoption failed after about two years because the parents could not handle her trauma, leading her back to the streets where she eventually became involved in the incident leading to the murder charge.
Arthur Longworth’s Insight
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(00:53:48)
  • Key Takeaway: Incarcerated essayist Arthur Longworth recognized the systemic failure of foster care independently while observing fellow inmates.
  • Summary: Arthur Longworth, an articulate inmate serving time for first-degree murder, became a character in the book because he recognized the dynamic of foster care failing its wards. He observed that many inmates were former foster youth or their children, leading him to articulate the cyclical nature of the system. His essay, “How to Kill Someone,” detailed how the system can ‘soul murder’ a person by raising them to be an animal.
Foster Care System Failures
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(00:57:00)
  • Key Takeaway: The current foster care structure, despite good intentions, is structurally built around impermanence, which contradicts known needs for healthy brain development.
  • Summary: The system pumps out youth ill-equipped for adulthood, leading to high rates of homelessness and incarceration, with astronomical addiction numbers. The core issue is that the structure of foster care, characterized by constantly changing lawyers, social workers, and foster parents, promotes impermanence. This structural impermanence is not aligned with what humans need for healthy development, especially concerning attachment theory and cortisol levels.
Neglect vs. Abuse Removals
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(01:01:36)
  • Key Takeaway: The majority of children entering foster care are removed due to neglect, which often stems from poverty, rather than severe abuse.
  • Summary: Many children are removed because poverty manifests as neglect, such as dirty clothes or lack of food, prompting calls to Child Protective Services. Removing children solely due to poverty is counterproductive, as supporting families with basic needs like housing and utilities could prevent many removals. The system should prioritize family preservation services and mental health support to reduce the number of children entering care.
Rehabilitative System Overhaul
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(01:04:05)
  • Key Takeaway: Foster care must transition from a housing system focused on managing children to a rehabilitative system focused on healing trauma.
  • Summary: The current system functions as a housing service that provides beds until age 18, after which youth are released without adequate support. Many youth are managed through psychotropic drug cocktails (antipsychotics, antidepressants) that were not designed for children. The trauma of removal itself, even when necessary, requires a rehabilitative approach, not just housing and medication management.
Fiscally Responsible Investment
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(01:06:00)
  • Key Takeaway: Investing heavily in foster youth services to ensure positive outcomes is a fiscally responsible approach that saves money long-term by reducing prison and homelessness costs.
  • Summary: The current spending on foster care ($31 billion annually) yields poor results, such as 59% of youth aging out having serious criminal involvement by age 26. The proposed approach is to spend a fortune on the unluckiest children to make them the luckiest immediately, thereby saving hundreds of billions spent downstream on incarceration and homelessness. This investment is justified because the system produces exactly the results it is structured for.
Evidence of Change Potential
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(01:07:06)
  • Key Takeaway: Despite claims that some youth are beyond help, cases like Maryanne and Jay prove that targeted, therapeutic environments can lead to profound positive transformation.
  • Summary: The author rejects the notion that 18% of youth are too far gone, citing Maryanne’s positive change after being moved to a youth facility instead of adult prison. Jay, a foster youth involved in gang violence, earned a PhD after connecting with a dedicated youth advocate who provided simple route planning for school safety. These examples demonstrate that even those with severe backgrounds can achieve success when provided with the right support structure.
Kinship Care Reform
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(01:16:29)
  • Key Takeaway: Recent reforms are beginning to allow relatives (kinship care) to become licensed providers and receive state financial support, moving away from prioritizing placement with strangers.
  • Summary: There is growing recognition that placing children with known relatives or fictive kin yields better outcomes than placing them with strangers. Historically, relatives who took in children received no state funding, often bankrupting themselves. New state policies allow relatives to become licensed kinship providers without the extensive hoops required for conventional foster parents, although resistance remains based on generational family issues.
Empathy and Reciprocity
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(01:19:34)
  • Key Takeaway: The lack of early kindness and generosity from the system prevents foster youth from developing empathy, leading them to feel justified in disregarding societal rules.
  • Summary: Arthur explained that interpersonal relationships and empathy are built on reciprocity; if no kindness is shown to a child, they will not show it back. This lack of learned empathy means they feel justified in acting outside the rules of a system they perceive as unjust victims of. Empathy is learned, and if the environment provides none, the capacity for it can be lost in practice.
Hospital Experience and Coping
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(01:30:32)
  • Key Takeaway: Hospitals represent a concentration of life’s extremes—birth and death—and Dax Shepard copes with this heaviness by actively choosing to find levity and party-like reprieve.
  • Summary: Hospitals are a ‘mindfuck’ because the best and worst events (birth and death) occur simultaneously within one building. Dax’s coping mechanism involves deciding to have a ‘blast’ anywhere, viewing difficult situations like funerals as opportunities to connect with family and find fun. This approach contrasts with others who need to process the sadness of the situation in the moment, suggesting coping mechanisms are highly individual.
Water Intake and Salinity
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(01:48:13)
  • Key Takeaway: Baseline salinity counts in human populations affect how quickly individuals dehydrate, meaning some groups may require less water than others.
  • Summary: Differences in baseline salinity counts mean some people process or retain salt differently, leading to varying rates of dehydration susceptibility. Socioeconomic status may influence water intake obsession, as wealthier individuals have the bandwidth to micromanage health metrics like water consumption. One speaker notes they feel uncomfortably full after drinking the amount of water others consume, suggesting individual physiological differences in water processing.
Urination Frequency Norms
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(01:51:31)
  • Key Takeaway: The generally accepted healthy range for adult urination is six to eight times per day, though four to ten times can also be considered healthy.
  • Summary: Increased water intake, often driven by health planning, leads to more frequent urination, which can help prevent urinary tract infections (UTIs). Hospitals use the last time a patient urinated as a key marker for assessing urinary health. One speaker notes a significant increase in their daily urination frequency after consciously increasing water intake.
Maternal Stress and Sacrifice
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(01:56:16)
  • Key Takeaway: Mothers often handle immense, unseen stress, exemplified by one mother managing fighting children and low resources during a vacation.
  • Summary: One speaker recalls a childhood vacation where their mother managed two fighting siblings and lacked sufficient gas money while trying to navigate with a paper map. This experience served as a major wake-up call regarding the stress mothers endure. The segment concludes with a dedication to nurses and mothers for their difficult work.
Poverty vs. Neglect Realization
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(01:57:59)
  • Key Takeaway: The core insight from Claudia Rowe’s work is that poverty frequently appears as neglect, and removing children from struggling parents often results in a worse outcome, such as incarceration.
  • Summary: The removal of children from families, even those struggling financially, is often worse than the initial situation, as the alternative system (foster care/prison) carries severe risks. Well-intentioned interventions, like a teacher noticing a child in pajamas, can inadvertently start a cycle leading to family separation. The system risks traumatizing children, potentially causing behaviors that confirm the initial judgment of unfitness.
Kinship Care and Systemic Costs
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(02:00:50)
  • Key Takeaway: Kinship care must be the first resort for children needing removal, as the current system’s focus on treating symptoms (homelessness, prison) is fiscally irresponsible compared to preventative support.
  • Summary: For the small percentage of children who must be removed due to abuse, a great alternative placement is necessary, prioritizing kinship care. All U.S. states have adopted kinship care to some degree, with many expanding programs following the Family First Act. Treating systemic issues upriver, rather than expensive downstream consequences like the prison system, is fiscally responsible.
Tawana Brawley Case Summary
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(02:05:09)
  • Key Takeaway: The 1987 Tawana Brawley case involved a 15-year-old who alleged she was kidnapped, raped, and covered in feces and racial slurs by four white men.
  • Summary: Tawana Brawley was found in a trash bag after being missing for four days, covered in feces traced to a neighbor’s dog. The hosts noted that hearing about such savagery makes it easier to attribute criminal acts to mental illness rather than normal human capacity. Historically, mass participation in vile acts is often explained by the power of tribal affiliation.
Hogwarts and Wizard Morality
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(02:09:07)
  • Key Takeaway: The concept of good and bad wizards/houses in the Harry Potter universe reflects the reality that humans possess traits associated with both positive and negative archetypes.
  • Summary: The discussion humorously pivoted to whether Dax Shepard would be a good or bad wizard, revealing his reluctance to label himself negatively, which highlights how people react to moral categorization. While some people are proud to identify as Slytherin, the underlying principle is that good and bad exist within all houses. The hosts concluded that they are not equipped to judge each other’s wizarding morality.