Katie:

Welcome back to the Rich Girl Roundup, weekly discussion of The Money with Katie Show. I'm Katie Gatti Tassin, and on Monday mornings my executive producer Henah and I use this segment to talk through your questions, your stories, and more… right after a quick break.

Before we get into it, this week's upcoming main episode is a solo expedition of mine about how we got here and where we go next. And I am keeping that intentionally vague, so you're just going to have to tune in. Alright, onto the roundup. Henah, what is our question this week?

Henah:

This week's question came from Rich Girl Rachel. She said, “Your writing and podcast struck a chord that no other personal finance creator and most I listened to previously did not share a lot in common with an almost 27-year-old woman early in her engineering career. So go figure. I also love the direction that you've taken in the past year with examining the US economic system you've been thrown into and the rational and irrational approaches we all take to survive and even thrive in it. I could go on, but you get the picture. I love your work and—” Why did you pick this question? I wonder. “You've clearly read a lot of really impactful work this year to inform your writing and podcasts and as I gear up for the holiday season, my favorite time to cozy up with a book, I would love to know your top three books that either taught you something completely new or changed your mind on something.”

And this, I think we did a similar episode last year about the top books of the year, so it feels fitting that we're doing this again.

Katie:

Doing it again.

Henah:

So where would you like to start?

Katie:

Yes. Well first of all, I'm sure you all appreciate that I could have just taken the question and put that in here, but instead I intentionally included the five minutes of praise. So we're all going to sit with that. We're going to let it soak in. Okay, we're good.

Yes, that is very kind and when I was preparing for this, it was very hard to limit myself to three, but Henah, as you said, we did this last year. It was fun book recommendations and requests for a big book club are super popular. So I don't think y'all will mind if I go off the deep end a little bit.

Henah:

So we do have moneywithkatie.com/books where we keep a list of all the books that Katie has read for the past, I dunno, four years at this point. So if you are curious what she's read at what point in time, you can head to moneywithkatie.com/books. But I guess if you want to just the TLDR, we'll start with the top three. Is it going to be actually three is my question?

Katie:

No, it's like nine, but it's fine. Yeah, the Books page is starting to resemble like a how to for radicalization, but it's fine. Okay.

So to focus explicitly on the part of the question where she asks about books that either taught me something completely new or changed my mind, I think there were a couple of standouts, and if you are the type of listener who joins us for every episode and reads every newsletter, none of these are going to surprise you. But I did notice that my favorites and the ones that stuck with me the most were the ones that took a pretty unconventional approach or proposed what I felt like were pretty radical theories. So the first is Evicted by Matt Desmond, which came out in 2016.

Henah:

Your favorite sociologist.

Katie:

Yes. So if you want to understand the experience of poverty in the United States, this book is a must read and really I think every American of voting age should read it. Matt Desmond is my favorite sociologist, if one can have a favorite sociologist, who immersed himself in the lives of the people that he was writing about, and he tells their stories in such a clear and unflinching way that kind of has that bonus effect of really illuminating the systems that keep people stuck. So I've read a couple books about poverty, some non-fiction books, particularly ones about subjects this devastating are so dense that they're kind of hard to get through, but because of the choices that he made in the way he tells this story and the framing that he uses of these real people and their actual lives, it just reads like a novel. And I think Evicted is a masterpiece.

Henah:

You have a good point in saying that some nonfiction books are so dense that they're hard to get through or they're honestly really painful to experience. But I think in this scenario it does sound like he wasn't just observing people for a month and then writing an entire book about that. It was more like he really did experience this himself. Is that right?

Katie:

Yeah. He grew up in poverty in Arizona. His childhood home went into foreclosure when he was a young adult, and he, I think just basically saw and experienced housing insecurity firsthand and understood how that changes a person. And so when he started getting scholarships and loans and started to be, I don't know, surrounded by money, surrounded by affluence, he, I think, saw that as being so in opposition to his life up until that point that it really stuck with him and bothered him. The extent to which we tolerate pretty extreme inequality. And as far as I understand it, with the writing of Evicted, he lived in Minneapolis for a year or two, first in a trailer park and then in a rooming house in different parts of the city and became pretty good friends with the people that he was writing about. Obviously they knew they were participating in the project, it wasn't a secret, but he did become friends with them and was enmeshed really in their lives.

And so I think the picture that you get and the perception that you get then of these individuals and the way that he knits their stories, their experiences, their struggles together with the policies and the systemic failures that have put them in this place, was just a really kind of brilliant approach to this problem, because you walk away with sort of an understanding of how we've gotten here and you understand just how unjust the process of eviction is and can be and how destabilizing it can be, and how anyone who's constantly in that cycle just has such a hard time getting out of it and the sort of profits that come from it, you see who benefits from it.

And in many cases it's people that also live in those communities and becoming a landlord was how they themselves broke the cycle. But that you sort of appreciate how the only way in which people are getting out is by oppressing one another. It is really sad, but it's also extremely moving, and I think it will give people who read it who might have those commonly held misconceptions about what it's like to be poor, be in a state of chronic resource scarcity. It's like the kind of book that really changes hearts and minds, I think.

Henah:

Yeah. Well, it also strikes me as something that looks at individual experience and then peels back all the layers to say, no, here's why it's systemic, or here's the policy reasons that we got for why…

Katie:

Yeah.

Henah:

This individual person is dealing with this.

Katie:

For sure.

Henah:

Which surprise, surprise, is also the mission statement of our show, so that makes sense. Okay. Hit me with number two of your, what is it, most mind expanding books of 2024?

Katie:

Yeah. Okay. So number two is Doppelganger by Naomi Klein, which came out in 2023. So Doppelganger is actually about our political environment, but obviously these things are connected. And my reading experience of this book was actually unbelievable. I thought it was one of the most brilliant analysis of the state of our country, and within this very trippy, very original concept that I think about this book probably every other day, I still think about it all the time.

So Naomi Klein is a Canadian progressive who is probably best known for her book Shock Doctrine, which came out in 2007. It was about this concept of disaster capitalism in the way that catastrophes and other natural disasters often represent opportunities for people to get very rich. I think we experienced this firsthand during the COVID-19 pandemic and during this pandemic, Naomi Klein was constantly being conflated online with another person named Naomi Wolf. Naomi Wolf was known for her 1990s book, The Beauty Myth, but over the years kind of became a frequent contributor to Steve Bannon, the alt-right pundit, during the Pandemic. And she essentially became a conspiracy theorist. So she started out as center left liberal feminist, and then over 20 years went really deep down this rabbit hole of, honestly, the birds aren't real stuff. Really out there conspiracies.

Henah:

Very normal, very cool.

Katie:

And so Naomi Klein writes about this experience of being constantly confused with this other Naomi, and she calls it her “trip into the mirror world.” And it's kind of about this concept of diagonal politics area where these two alternate worlds have these distorted parallels. The most common example that I could probably point to is the wellness to Q Anon pipeline that people might be familiar with the crunchy to anti-vax pipeline.

Henah:

Right.

Katie:

But this book just completely blew me away. And yeah, I absolutely loved it.

Henah:

I think I was texting you about that joke about how Matt Gertz on Twitter gets tagged constantly as Matt Gaetz and well, I'll leave you with that as possibly a Doppelganger Part Two. But I've heard very, very good things about this book. Is it something that you meant to pick up from a political standpoint or you were just like, this is an interesting premise?

Katie:

Yeah, I can't even remember why. I think I had just, someone had recommended it to me last year and said it was really, really good, and I don't know what I was expecting when I went into it. But I think in retrospect now, and with the outcome of the 2024 election, it has just been a really valuable framework to use.

So this idea of areas of intersection where I've wrote about this for the episode that comes out this Wednesday, how traditionally it's been kind of a lefty thing to talk about corporate power and to talk about needing to overcome corporate power and the fact that you need labor power in order to do that. But JD Vance, the vice president who was, at the time when I was thinking about this, the vice presidential candidate with Donald Trump, he is quoted a lot talking about corporate oligarchs and how he's a very antitrust stance and he's very, I dunno, like an economic protectionist. But it's funny because sometimes when I listen to him, I'm like, you sound kind of left, dude. A lot of his takes that sit very uneasily in the business world and really are at odds with the kind of traditional conservative friendliness toward the business world and big business in corporations.

And so to me, that's another example of someone who, JD Vance is pretty far right, but he at times holds positions that you kind of feel like you're slipping through the mirror for a second and you're like, wait a second. You're anti corporate power?

Henah:

I kind of think about, and I think maybe you wrote about this at one point a couple years ago, where I feel like everyone is disillusioned with so many different parts of American society, whether it's healthcare or the economy or whatever, that each party kind of takes, or the left and the right sides, but they kind of take these roundabout ways of trying to figure out what they think is the problem and how to fix it. And so sometimes they end up at the same solution, but they have wildly different reasons that they got there, or they come up with totally opposite solutions, but they're both mad about the same problem. And so I kind of feel like that's what this book reminds me of, and I don't know, this made me want to add it to my list.

Katie:

It's so good. You should definitely read it. I would say my honorable mention for this category of sort of sociopolitical commentary and analysis would be Sisters in Hate, which is about the women of the alt-right and this kind of growing white supremacist movement online and the women that are at the forefront of it or were at the forefront of it. It's interesting because some of the women that were profiled in this book have since affected because they basically could no longer withstand the amount of misogyny that they were subjected to. So that's another interesting one, little beach read for you: Sisters In Hate.

Henah:

I'm sure everybody here thought that they were going to get a nice rom-com book to read.

Katie:

Going light this year.

Henah:

Yes.

Katie:

Well, hey, if you listen to the end, maybe I'll hit you with some fiction.

Number three for this one. I have a tie, so I'm already breaking the rules of only including three. Technically, I broke the rule 10 seconds ago when I nominated the third book as a runner up. Okay, so here's my tie. The first is Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber, which came out in 2018.

Henah:

Okay.

Katie:

Bullshit Jobs inspired an essay that I wrote a couple of months ago about decoupling work from income. Now, the wide resonance of this theory of Graeber's theory that around 40% of jobs in a modern capitalist economy are bullshit and that nothing would change if they went away tomorrow, but that they remain solely because it is more advantageous for the status quo if everybody is working all the time. And the force with which classic markets based media companies like publications like The Economist, for example, the force with which they denounced it made it a book that I think will stick with me for a long time.

His writing style is really, really fun too. He's kind of petty, which I just really enjoy that meme. That's like I'm not as mean as I could be, and people don't appreciate that enough. He's just funny. But his other book, he has a book called The Dawn of Everything that is also on my bookshelf. I haven't reached it in my stack yet, but I did just find Bullshit Jobs to be one of those books that you read it and it kind of ever so slightly just boop, tilt your axis, tilt the lens that you see the world through. And yeah, I think the fact that it was widely derided by publications The Economist is kind of proof that, okay, there's probably something here. The fact that there are some people that are really angry about this probably means that there is something to pay attention to.

Henah:

Yeah. I'm curious if, so the tie that you have for this section, is it related to this same topic, or is it that you really had four and you had to shoe-horn one in there?

Katie:

I think this is more of a shoe horn, if I'm being honest. It's like, I don't know. All of these books are related to one another in the grandest sense, but the tie is really just because I couldn't choose between the two.

But another one that really stuck with me this year insofar as fundamentally shifting my perspective is a book called Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World by Anand Giridharadas in 2018, which is a pretty scathing look frankly, into the world of the quote elites who believe that the magic of the for-profit motive will allow them to solve all the problems of society; all of the same problems that other societies look at and go, yeah, we should democratically reach conclusions about how to address these things in the United States. We're like, no, there's a startup that can do that. So it's definitely cynical.

The book is pretty scathing, but I don't think it's without merit. I think that a lot of the examples he uses warrant some cynicism and some anger, but he basically just exposes the hypocrisy and sort of the ethics washing that happens behind the scenes in these rooms full of very powerful, very wealthy people who are not democratically accountable to anybody but who believe that they alone should be the ones making decisions about how we make the future better. And this is the important part, ultimately benefit privately from the gains if things work, which I think that's why that's not ideal.

Henah:

Yeah, I mean, I love Anand, so I'm very happy to see or hear that he's on this year's list. So I'm curious if you feel like the other books that he's written are ones that you're now adding to your list as well, or I know you have a pretty tall TBR pile, so might have to wait.

Katie:

Yeah, I would definitely come back to him. I think he's done some really interesting, but yeah, that one was fire. I can't remember who recommended that to me.

Henah:

I think I've recommended that to you for years, but—

Katie:

Have you read it?

Henah:

I read parts of it for my work. My boss loved that book.

Katie:

Oh, okay.

Henah:

Yeah, it's a great book. And Anand, if you're listening, hit us up up. I feel like I know you really well, so I know that even those five books you just named are not going to be the top books of the year. I feel like you have more.

Katie:

Those are my top, but I do have more, so I'm going to do my more honorable mentions now.

Henah:

Okay.

Katie:

I can't help myself. So another honorable mention that I have found myself returning to a lot and reading and rereading is Thick, which is a book of essays by Tressie McMillan Cottom, on whom I have a giant intellectual crush. I always come back to her essay about beauty. It's called In The Name of Beauty, and I bet you could find just that essay somewhere online, but I think you should get the whole book and read the entire thing. It's really good.

Henah:

Yeah, she is a force. I love her very much.

Okay, so what's next? What's coming up the pike?

Katie:

Okay, so I just started Age of Acquiescence, the Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power. I had this one on my bookshelf for a while, but I had read online that it was super dry and hard to get through, so I was like, oh, I'm going to read that later. Now I'm finally getting to it. And I have to say, I think because I was expecting it to be super dry, I've been kind of pleasantly surprised. It's actually there's some good pacing. It's written by a labor journalist or labor historian, rather.

Henah:

It’s a glowing review.

Katie:

It’s by Steve Frazier. Some of these books are pretty dense. It's just a lot of legislation and a lot of theory, and they're not beach reads. But I do find it incredibly interesting, and I think that the more that I've learned, the more I enjoy them because I have reference points in order to understand how all of it fits together. But in this book, in Age of Acquiescence, this labor historian Steve Frazier compares the first and second gilded ages, and he basically says the primary difference between them is that Americans fought back during the first one, and now we're just kind of like, all right, this is just what it is. And his main theory is that the reason they fought back at the time was because Americans during the first skilled at age, at the end of the 1800s, could remember a time before capitalism.

There were people still alive who lived in a world that capitalism had not totally overtaken yet. And people that are alive today don't know any differently. So it's very hard to imagine as a different system. And that's kind of the crux of what he argues. But I've just started that one, so I don't have too much to report back yet beyond the kind of main premise.

And then I have a couple others that are on the list. So a couple listener recommended books that are in my stack still: Screaming On the Inside, which is a book about the unsustainability of American motherhood, The Exceptions, which is the story of some scientists at MIT who faced pretty astounding sexism and overcame a lot of sexism. And then Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism, which is about the way the family unit has become central to free markets ideology.

Henah:

Very light.

Katie:

I realize listing all of these out, this makes me sound like I just read really angry, cynical books, and maybe I do, but recommend. I mean, look how happy I am.

Henah:

Well, if you want some fiction reads, you can come to me. I feel like you actually did read some fiction this year. I did. So I very proud of you.

Katie:

I did, thank you. I read the popular stuff, the stuff that everyone was like—

Henah:

Sally Rooney, I know you read.

Katie:

Yep.

Henah:

Who else?

Katie:

Miranda July.

Henah:

Okay. All Fours, right.

Katie:

And Sarah Manguso, Manguso. Liars.

Henah:

Liars. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay.

Katie:

Yep. I love them. So I think it's funny when I read critiques of popular novels like that where whenever they get negative reviews, I'm like, really? I found that was delightful. But it's like, because my reference set is like, here's why organized wealth is going to crush us all. So when I read a novel every once in a while, I'm like, oh my God, this is a lovely experience.

Henah:

Well, if people are depressed from listening to these and want something uplifting, I got ideas. These are great. Thank you for sharing them. I'm sure that there's perhaps one book, maybe two, that you're really excited about next year. I wonder what it could be.

Katie:

Well, I'm excited for two books coming out next year, both of which come out on June 10th, weirdly enough. Yes. The first is Bad Company, which is by the journalist Meg Greenwell. It's her highly anticipated book about private equity. And the second is mine. Rich Girl Nation. Rich Girl Nation comes out June 10th and it has seven chapters that distill my entire financial philosophy within the context of a lot of the things that we talk about on this very show. So I'd say my most anticipated new release is Rich Girl Nation.

Henah:

I'm sure there'll be a pre-order link that we'll be spamming you with when the time comes, but I'm also very excited to read it. I'm still waiting for my arc, you guys.

Katie:

I’m still waiting. Same, in fact.

Henah:

Oh, very nice. Well, did you have anything else you wanted to add before we move to a story of feedback?

Katie:

Nope. How many books did I just give you? She asked for three. I brought…

Henah:

1, 2, 3, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9.

Katie:

Okay, cool. You got 10.

Henah:

And then two more for next year.

Katie:

Under promise, over deliver. Alright. What's our feedback?

Henah:

So this feedback came from someone who preferred to remain anonymous, but we can call them Megan, and it was in response to our long-term disability episode. So if you recall, it was an episode that we did about higher earners and an insurance that they sometimes might be missing. So we can link it in the show notes. You can go back and listen to it.

But they wrote in and they said, “I experienced nerve damage in my right hand during pregnancy and navigating the insurance claim was a nightmare. I purchased the policy at age 26 when I was a fourth year dental student and very healthy, and then I initially became disabled while 30 weeks pregnant in 2020, and I did not receive my first disability check until 2022. Principal Insurance Company denied my claim for 18 months due to insufficient evidence of disability, and the insurance company forced me into a circus of seeing every specialist under the sun and tests to prove that I was experiencing said nerve damage.

“Unfortunately, all of the tests were inconclusive. So I finally ended up seeing a female sports med specialist who experienced similar nerve damage during her own pregnancy, and this is crazy to me, was kicked out of her own surgical residency due to her inability to perform surgeries. So she empathized with my situation and fought hard to provide evidence to my insurance company that I wasn't fact experiencing this nerve pain in my right hand. And after denying my claim for 18 months, I finally received a payment that backdated to all of the months that they denied coverage.

So like Lacey [the woman that we featured in that episode], I had one coverage increase as my income increased. However, unlike Lacey, I was too frugal, undecided to decrease my coverage around age 29. My cost of living was way lower than my coverage would've paid out. So I told my agent that he was upselling me and I asked to decrease my coverage in annual premium. He advised me against decreasing coverage, but I was regrettably stubborn, and now I have a lower payout than if I had just left My coverage alone. Hindsight is 2020, but I still regret decreasing my coverage. Luckily, I have a spouse that earns a high income and provides medical benefits for our families. So my monthly payouts aren't crucial for our long-term financial costs or goals. I didn't hire a disability attorney like Lacey, but I probably should have because I said some very strong words to the insurance agents who kept denying my claim.

“I'm glad I kept appealing the denials instead of giving up, and I can't stress how important this type of insurance is. I was raising a newborn baby the entire time I was fighting with my disability insurance. Becoming a first time parent during Covid was challenging enough, let alone the hundreds of hours I spent on the phone, sending emails and attending mandatory physical therapy doctor's appointments with different specialists. I should have been able to spend a hundred percent of my time and energy bonding and caring for my baby. But I was stuck grappling with the idea that my career in dentistry was potentially over while simultaneously fighting with my disability insurance and our convoluted medical and insurance system. It's crucial that we advocate for ourselves and nobody understands your health more than you do. So you need to keep fighting even if you are facing defeat every step of the way. I naively thought I would never become disabled because I don't participate in extreme sports like skiing, skydiving, et cetera. But mine and Lacey's stories prove that we cannot take our health or our careers for granted.”

Katie:

This is not the only story by the way that we got after that episode aired. I kind of feel like I heard this same thing a couple times in the inbox afterward, which was like, this was my exact experience. I'm so happy I had this insurance. It is absolutely necessary. So just to, I guess, recap the high points of the things that Megan wishes she would've done differently or is saying, this is what you got to do: Increase your coverage as your income increases, hire that disability attorney and keep appealing the denials; do not give up.

Henah:

That's our healthcare system in a nutshell.

Katie:

So that's why you should read angry books like me.

Henah:

Well, I did just want to thank Megan. It was funny because Megan, who emailed us, like I said, this is not her real name, but she's like, I'm going to give you my pizza name, which is Megan. And I was like, oh, my pizza name is Hannah. So I understand.

Katie:

I think you're going to have to explain what a pizza name is.

Henah:

Oh, it's when people don't understand the name that you're giving them at the counter, so you give them an easier name to understand. So my brother's name is a more traditional Indian name and he says his name is Sam. So we all have these made up names. So this one…

Katie:

This is Megan's pizza name.

Henah:

Megan is her pizza name, but from one Hannah to one Megan, I understand.

Katie:

I'm like, I don't think I get my real name is a pizza name.

Henah:

Your real name is a pizza name. Do you say Katie? And then they write—

Katie:

20% of women are named Katie.

Henah:

Is that true? No, that can't be true.

Katie:

The fact that you're like, not sure if I'm kidding, it kind of proves the point.

Henah:

I was going to say there's Kathleen, which is your real name?

Katie:

I don't know Kathleen, never met her. Okay.

That is all for this week's Rich Girl Roundup. We will see you on Wednesday.