I think my personal story informed it because I you know, I got a a better taste growing up about what poverty can do to a family.

You know, we we lost our I lost my childhood home to foreclosure.

And and we had a we went through a period of incredible instability and you know, and and and in poverty, really.

And the reason I paused over that word is because another big part of my experiences was, you know, living in a mobile home park in Milwaukee and and in a rooming house and spending time with families facing eviction.

And what I saw those families endure was was nothing like I had endured.

You know, I saw a level of poverty that was much more vicious and dispiriting than what I had grown up with.

I think, you know, I think I see poverty as an abomination.

You know, and a real misery.

And I think that, you know, holding on to those experiences really does motivate.

and inform my research.

And on the research process, I mean, you know, it's kind of it's kind of drawing everything I've learned so far, you know, about about why there's so much poverty in the United States and really try to make a case about how to end it, but also try to write something different.

And I try to write a new poverty book.

And there's this line I read across in Tommy Orange's novel.

And, you know, he writes it's like these kids are jumping out of burning buildings, falling to their deaths.

And we think that the problem is that they're jumping.

And when I read that, I was like, man, that's a perfect encapsulation of the American poverty debate.

So this is a book about why there is so much poverty and the sliding of dollars and how to finally abolish it.

But it's it's a book about the fire.

He who set it and who's warming his hands by it.